Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (46 page)

Albert Einstein

Albert Schweitzer

If the
TGE
category keeps on growing by accepting more members, thus making more of an anonymous blur, one may start to forget who its founding members were, and at that point and for that reason, one will probably be more inclined to use the term “categorization” than the term “analogy-making”. But no matter; in both cases all that’s going on is the recognition of a correspondence between a newly-minted mental structure and an older one — in short, the construction of an analogical bridge.

We would like to consider one last case — the seemingly trivial case of the recognition of a cup as a cup. Suppose you are at a friend’s house and want to fix yourself a cup of tea. You go into the kitchen, open a couple of cupboards, and at some point you think, “Aha, here’s a cup.” Have you just made an analogy? If, like most people, you’re inclined to answer, “Obviously not — this was a
categorization
, not an analogy!”, we would understand the intuition, but we would propose another point of view. Indeed, there is an equally compelling “analogy” scenario, in which you would have just constructed inside your head a mental entity that represents the object seen in your friend’s cupboard. In this scenario, you would have created a mental link between that mental representation and a pre-existing mental structure in your head — namely, your concept named “cup”. In short, you would have created a bridge linking two

mental entities inside your head. And as we just noted, in examining the assignment of Albert Schweitzer to the
TGE
category, the response to the question “Is this an act of
analogy-making
or of
categorization
?” is once again that both labels are correct.

If you are uncomfortable with the idea that calling a cup a cup is a case of analogy-making, then try to pinpoint the crucial difference between building a bridge linking your brand-new Schweitzer-photo percept to your prior
TGE
concept and building a bridge linking your brand-new percept of a certain ceramic object in the cupboard to your prior
cup
concept. If there is any noteworthy difference between these two actions, it can only be in the difference between the concepts
TGE
and
cup.
The former is a relatively fresh new concept in which there still remain fairly clear residues of its three founding members, whereas the latter is an old concept in which there remains no such residual trace. (Who remembers the primordial cups that initiated their concept
cup
?) Apart from this distinction, the two bridges have the same nature.

The moral of this fable is that recognizing a cup’s “cupness” is no less a case of analogy-making than is recognizing a new instance of the concept
sour grapes
or of the concept
fauxthenticity.
We hope that this thesis, although it runs against the grain of most people’s intuitions, has now become familiar and resonates with
your
intuition. It is a unifying viewpoint on human thought, placing categorization and analogy-making, fused into one thing, at the center. And armed with this perspective, we now turn our gaze to what this implies about the mechanisms of thinking.

It’s 3:30 in the Parisian afternoon, and Emmanuel and Doug are taking a break to go down to the corner café Le Duc d’Enghien, where they’re planning, as usual, on having, well, a
café.
Despite the scorching temperature, Doug is in the mood for
un crème
(a coffee with cream), while Emmanuel is wavering between a Coke and
un diabolo menthe
(a mint-flavored cold drink); finally he settles on the latter. After a few minutes’ chat, the co-authors cross the street to the
pâtisserie
, where, as per their daily routine, they get some pastries. Emmanuel chooses
une tartelette aux fruits rouges
(a berry tart) and Doug goes for a popsicle; then they head back up to the office to resume their writing.

There’s little of great moment in the foregoing, except that Emmanuel’s coffee wasn’t a coffee and Doug’s pastry wasn’t a pastry. And yet no one would accuse them of lying. Even if Doug had ordered a lemon tea instead of his
crème
, it would have seemed perfectly fine to say that the co-authors had gone out for a coffee. And so, what exactly is meant by “a coffee”?

We can distinguish at least four types of context — four levels of abstraction, in this case — in which the term is understood differently and yet always with ease. First of all, there are situations where “having a coffee” means “chatting while eating or drinking something light”. In such a context, the word “coffee” is so open and abstract that it covers any type of drink, or a sandwich, or an ice cream, or for that matter nothing at all, as long as the establishment doesn’t object. We’ll call this “coffee4”.

Next, there are situations in a restaurant where, after the meal, the server asks the customers, “Who’ll have a coffee?” A reply such as, “A tea for me, please” would seem perfectly in order here, and no one would think that it contradicted the question that was asked, whereas asking for a cognac, or worse yet, some more wine or another order of fries, would seem totally incongruous. In other words, there is still some abstraction involved, but it is not as great. We’ll call this “coffee
₃
”.

Then we come to a situation in a café where two regulars are greeted with the customary question, “And what might your coffees be this morning, ladies?” Here the server is expecting answers such as “A
crème
and a decaf, please”, or “Two
macchiatos
, please”, since those belong to the category explicitly mentioned. Here the word “coffee” is taken more narrowly, but despite the approach towards literality, there are still numerous ways for it to be realized (and so we’ll label this case “coffee2”).

Lastly, there’s the type of situation where someone walks into a Paris café and says,
“Un café, s’il vous plaît
”, or “A coffee, please.” Here it’s clear that it couldn’t possibly mean a tea or an ice cream (etc.); the drink being requested is a straight espresso, without cream. This is the default interpretation for the word “coffee” in Paris cafés, and that’s what we’ll mean by “coffee
₁
”. We’ve hit the rock-bottom level of abstraction in our spectrum of coffees, and so we’ll temporarily draw our exploration of “cafégories” to a close.

What has this exercise shown us? That the members of a category change with context; that we effortlessly understand the nature of the context that we are in; that a single word in a given language can denote numerous different categories; and that these categories can have different levels of abstraction.

Our first three chapters were an attempt to give an answer to the question “What is a category?” by examining various types of categories, including those covered by a single word (
Chapter 1
), those covered by a composite lexical entity (
Chapter 2
), and those that have no lexical label at all (
Chapter 3
). With this chapter, we open a new phase in our book, in which we analyze how categorization works. In particular, we will look carefully at “leaps” or “slippages” between categories (and in the interest of less repetition, we’ll use both terms).

Our goal is to reveal the fundamental importance of slippages between categories in the act of thinking, and specifically slippages that carry one up or down a vast range of abstraction. First we’ll say what we mean by “abstraction” and then we’ll show that the fate of objects and situations in this world is to be shunted around, in a manner that is both facile and unconscious, from one category to another. Just as Molière’s Monsieur Jourdain spoke prose without realizing it, so we are all experts in making leaps from one category to another without realizing it. We are all constantly practicing the art of mentally shifting objects and situations from one category to another.

To show that a good part of what we call “flexibility” and “creativity” is tied to the eminently human faculty of extending categories and making leaps between them, we’ll take a close look at a particular phenomenon that gives insight into the processes underlying the development of concepts — specifically, the linguistic phenomenon called
marking
, which is extremely widespread in language, although people seldom notice it at all; in fact, few even know it exists. The idea is that a single word of a language can designate both a narrower and a broader category, where the narrower one is wholly contained inside the broader one, as was illustrated above by the word
“coffee”. Although marking can occasionally hinder communication and lead to confusion, it is mostly a useful tool, imbuing language with greater fluidity by allowing several categories to be labeled simultaneously by a single term and by taking advantage of our mind’s natural sensitivity to context.

Next we will scrutinize a process at the core of human thought, and which we already introduced in
Chapter 1
: the development of concepts through category extension. As we saw in that chapter, when categories are born, they are tiny — often they have just one member — and then cores and halos begin to form. Categories grow by welcoming new members, which sometimes are central and other times lie way out at the fringes, at the city limits. The act of welcoming such unexpected members into the fold requires either “pushing the envelope” or else the creation of new categories. In any case, analogy is the motor that drives all such extensions. We will analyze the process at the root of this human ability to understand situations in terms of preexisting concepts, and at the same time to modify those concepts under the influence of new situations.

We will then turn to another fundamental question, closely linked to the previous one: What makes an expert? This question is important because the concept of
expertise
applies not only to a specialist’s knowledge of some narrow domain but also to an average person’s ability, developed over a lifetime, to deal with their daily environment. More specifically, we shall see that being an expert doesn’t mean just that one has acquired more categories than other people have, but also that one has organized them in such a way as to facilitate useful categorizations at different levels of abstraction, and in such a way as to allow one to glide smoothly, when under contextual pressure, from one category to another.