Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (48 page)

And the crustacean swimming in the aquarium in the restaurant — is it more a member of the category
lobster
or more a member of the category
food
? And what about at the moment when it has just been thrown into the pot of boiling water? And what about at the moment when it arrives on a plate for a diner to consume? And what about after the diner has consumed it? And the cow that is grazing in a meadow, whose short-lived future is already clearly readable in the crystal ball of its human owners, and small pieces of whose cooked flesh will soon be served on plates — is it
a cow
or is it
future meat
? And what about when it is sitting on the plate next to a side of fries? And is the last half-cookie on the tray more a
cookie
or more a
morsel of shame
? Our point should be clear: such debates are not going to wind up yielding precise answers, because the questions make no more sense than did ancient questions about whether various familiar objects (doors, walls, lakes, mountains, the sun, the moon) were “intrinsically” masculine or feminine.

Certain cases of ambiguous identity are particularly helpful in making this point, because they show that one has no way of deciding once and for all what a given object most deeply is, or even if the very notion of
true identity
even applies at all. For example, is a concave piece of granite found on a hike and placed on a table in the hiker’s living room as a receptacle for ashes and cigarette butts more a
rock
or more an
ashtray
? Is a piece of cow skeleton found in a field and now used to keep papers from flying away more a
bone
or more a
paperweight
? Is the little four-legged piece of plastic in a dollhouse more a
table
or more a
toy
? Is the remnant of a tree in a garden on which one often spreads a cloth and eats meals more a
stump
or more a
table
?

Is the flexible dangling “snake” made of little linked rings of metal, and tugged in order to turn a lamp on and off, more a
chain
or more a
switch
? Are smoke signals more
smoke
or more
signals
? Are the waves carrying today’s news to your television set more
oscillating electric and magnetic fields
or are they more
images
? Does a dentist’s patient sit on a
chair
or lie on an
operating table
? Is a hanger that has been twisted so that it can open a locked car door a
hanger
or a
car-opening tool
? Is a paper clip that has been straightened out more a
toothpick
or a
paper clip?

Are the first few measures of a Mozart symphony as played in electronic tones on a cell phone more
Mozart
or more a mere
ringtone
? Is a receptacle held out by a beggar in order to collect money more a
hat
or more a
purse
? Is the City of the Dead in Cairo, Egypt, where vast throngs of people live in and among tombs, more a
cemetery
or more a
city
? Is a fenced field that is covered with the rusting carcasses of old automobiles and in which a farmer has put a couple of dozen cows out to graze more a
junkyard
or more a
pasture?

Is a gold-plated leaf attached with a pin to a woman’s sweater more a
leaf
or more a
brooch
? Is a bedsheet that has been hemmed at the top so it can be hung in front of a window still a
sheet
, or has it taken on the fresh new identity of
curtain
, not unlike the way a naturalized citizen of the United States has taken on a new identity? Is an umbrella fixed to a table and used to shade people from the sun still an
umbrella
, or has it metamorphosed into a
parasol
? Is a mechanical pencil that has no more lead but still has plenty of eraser still a
pencil
, or is it an
ex-pencil
, or has it been demoted to the status of
glorified eraser
? Is a set of a few dozen shipwrecked people who have lain down on the sand of a desert island to form the letters “SOS” more a
crowd
or more a
cry for help
?

Is a decorative glass pyramid more a
pyramid
, more an
artwork
, or more a
piece of glass
? Is the dark red spot that just appeared on the tablecloth some
spilled wine
, or is it a
stain
? Are the tresses of a young girl more
pigtails
or
hair
? Is the vehicle that was totaled and has now been squashed down into a dense cubic foot of metal still a
car
or is it now merely
scrap metal
? Is the device with which a hanging is carried out a
rope
or a
noose
? Is an extended third finger a
finger
or a
vulgar gesture
? Are the people sitting in the concert hall and listening to classical music an
audience
or are they
the board of directors of Crocodile Computer Company
? Are the 500 animals running in collective panic across a field a
herd of cattle
or are they a
stampede?

And finally, is the retired but still-proud Concorde that was placed on a large pedestal at the Charles de Gaulle airport so as to evoke the glory of French aviation more a member of the category
airplane
, or of the category
Concorde
, or of the category
ex-Concorde
, or of the category
statue
, or of the category
symbol
?

You can surely enrich the aforegoing list of category dilemmas with examples of your own, but more important, for our purposes, than the question “Is this object primarily an X or not?” is the following question: “Why can’t we suppress the inner voice that protests: ‘Everything you’ve said is true, I concede, but in the final analysis the damn thing really is a
glass
, isn’t it?’ ” In other words, why is there such a powerful tendency, even in the most reflective of people, to cling to the belief that any entity has a “true identity”, and why do people so valiantly resist the thought that entities are no more and no less than what one’s perspective on them makes them be? This nagging question will be taken up again in
Chapter 7
.

In language, one sees category membership shifting in a striking fashion thanks to the phenomenon of
marking
, which allows an entity to shift its category membership without changing its lexical label, but simply by changing the level of abstraction that applies to that label. Marking is the phenomenon whereby a word is used sometimes as the name of a general category and other times as the name of a subcategory of the general one. When such a word is used in its broader sense, it is said to have its
unmarked
meaning, while the narrower sense is the
marked
meaning. Marking is worth careful scrutiny, for above and beyond being an intriguing aspect of language, it is the linguistic trace of a mechanism that goes well beyond words, and on which our cognitive system depends totally: the mechanism of conceptual growth.

The Declaration of Independence famously states, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…” We cannot be exactly sure what the men who drafted this noble-sounding document meant by the term “all men” or by the capitalized term “Men”, since they did not extend the right to vote to women, much less to slaves of either sex, but we will charitably assume that “men” was meant to cover not just males but females as well. Accordingly, we assume that the category they had in mind was
man
₂
. If one takes the word “men” in the (unmarked) sense of
man2
, then women are indeed
men
(of a specific sort) — an idea that we still hear echoed in many contexts, even today.

If Man descends from the apes, does it not follow that Woman does as well? The first man on the moon might conceivably have been a woman. If one hears the cry “man overboard”, one isn’t intended to draw any conclusions as to the sex of the unfortunate individual. The phrase “man’s inhumanity to man” presumably includes man’s inhumanity to woman as well as woman’s inhumanity to man, and last but not least, woman’s inhumanity to woman. Although we would probably tend to assume that the richest man in the world, the chairman of the board, a first baseman, a garbage man, a snowman, and a college freshman are all members of the male sex, it could nonetheless happen, at least in principle, that any or all of them could be females. And as for Aristotle, who famously declared “All men are mortal”, well, he couldn’t possibly have denied the truth of the statement “Madonna is mortal”, because, after all, the latter would flow by ironclad syllogistic reasoning from his premise taken together with the self-evident truth “Madonna is a man.”

In other situations, however, things are quite the reverse, which is to say, there are clear-cut cases where the word “man” (or its plural, “men”) unambiguously
excludes
all females. This is the
marked
case of the word, and we will call this category “man
₁
”. Thus, for instance, when one speaks of the “men’s baseball team” one is pretty sure that there are no women on it. When someone speaks of the men’s rest room or the men’s clothing section, one understands that these are not intended for females. And of
course there are countless cases where the words “man” and “woman” are used in a single sentence in parallel positions, which means that they are being contrasted, so one understands that the “man” being referred to has to be a
male
man, not a
female
man. For example, “a woman and a man are staring at each other silently”, or “a crowd made up of 500 men and 500 women”. If someone heard the word “men” in the latter sentence in its unmarked (inclusive) interpretation, whereby
women are men
, it would be a very strange way of stating that there were, in fact, no males present at all. (Imagine someone saying, “There are 500 mammals and 500 cows standing in that field.” At first you would think that there must be 1000 beasts altogether, but then you realize that the 500 mammals coincide with the 500 cows.)

Although these last examples may strike you as being so weird that you would never expect anyone to come out with anything like them, we have in fact heard sentences quite like them in ordinary conversations. For instance, a French friend of ours who was teaching a course said to us (in French and utter seriousness), “In my class there are thirty-four
étudiants
, but only seven of them are
étudiants.”
In her sentence, the word “étudiant” changed horses midstream, so to speak, for in the first clause it meant “students” in a generic sense, while in the second clause, just a few words later, it meant “male students” (a female student being an
étudiante
, although she is of course also an
étudiant
). When we laughed at this, our friend at first defended her sentence as perfectly logical, reasonable, unstrained, and unfunny, but after a couple of moments of thought, she too was starting to be quite amused by her offhanded remark. An analogous example in English might be if someone were to say, “There were thirty-four actors at the party last night, but actually, only seven of them were actors” (meaning that twenty-seven of the actors were female). After all, the Screen Actors’ Guild certainly includes both males and females.

Marking can sometimes create genuine ambiguities. For instance, if the order for a group of people in a café is “Three coffees, a macchiato, a double espresso, and a cappuccino”, two conflicting interpretations exist, depending on how the term “coffees” is understood. If the server takes it from an inclusive or unmarked point of view (“coffee” standing for the concept
coffee
₂
), then the terms “macchiato”, “double espresso”, and “cappuccino” serve an explanatory role, in which case it’s clear that only three beverages have been ordered
in toto.
Contrariwise, from the marked point of view (where “coffee” means
coffee
₁
), this is an order for three “default” coffees (that is, American-style coffees, not fancy Italian-style ones) plus three Italian-style drinks. You can try this out on your own and check whether the phrase is indeed heard differently by different people.

The ambiguity inherent in marking can be cleverly exploited. Thus, here is a very short horror story: “The last man on earth was being held in a tiny little hut. All at once there was a knock at the door.” The reader shudders, imagining the dire fate that is about to be doled out to the last surviving specimen of the human race, but then relief comes in the next sentence: “It was the last woman on earth.”

As this example shows, marking sometimes leads to ambiguities that few people notice but that, once pointed out, can make us smile. Here are some more examples: