Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (50 page)

Compared to children, adults typically have a higher level of expertise with concepts such as
hump
and
bottle
, just as zoologists typically have a higher level of expertise than random adults do with concepts such as
camel.
The possession of a higher-level, more abstract concept allows experts and, more generally, experienced people to distinguish the essence of a concept from certain traits that are more contingent. Whereas Mica, at five years of age, had only a single concept of
bosse
— a lump resulting from a collision — which led him to imagine a collision as the
raison d’être
of any lump he heard about, his father, much older, had found a deeper idea in the concept of
bosse
, allowing him to distinguish numerous subcategories of the notion, as well as one generic or “umbrella” category that covered all the varieties, thus uniting disparate phenomena that share the central idea of some kind of protrusion.

To examine more deeply this process of extraction of the quintessence of a concept through the operation of marking, we’ll turn to an example of marking that has come up only rather recently in our society.

If you possess a computer, you are very likely to possess two desks: the desk that is shown on your screen, and the desk on which your computer sits. As will surprise no one, this terminological coincidence is not a coincidence. One of these types of desk — the screen-based one — is a metaphor, or an analogue, based on the other one. People who regularly use computers, which means nearly all of us today, have long since internalized the metaphor and seldom hear it as a metaphor based on something known earlier. The idea of a “desktop” on a screen is simply a dead metaphor, no longer (or very rarely) evoking any prior notion, just as the expression “table leg” is a dead metaphor that was rooted in the legs of humans (as well as the legs of animals — non-human animals, that is).

Much like the concept
hump
for Mica, the concept of a solid desk — a piece of furniture — was, for adults who grew up before the era of personal computers, a category with an old town, a downtown, and suburbs, like so many other categories. To make this vivid, we can cite a dictionary definition dating back to the pre-computer age. In particular, the following enormous and admirable vintage-1932 dictionary:

FUNK & WAGNALLS

New Standard Dictionary

[Reg. U. S. Pat. Off.]

OF THE

English Language

U
PON
O
RIGINAL
P
LANS

D
ESIGNED TO
G
IVE
,
IN
C
OMPLETE AND
A
CCURATE
S
TATEMENT
,
IN THE
L
IGHT OF THE
M
OST
R
ECENT
A
DVANCES IN
K
NOWLEDGE
,
IN THE
R
EADIEST
F
ORM FOR
P
OPULAR
U
SE
,
THE ORTHOGRAPHY
,
PRONUNCIATION
,
MEANING
,
AND ETYMOLOGY OF
A
LL THE WORDS
,
AND THE MEANING OF IDIOMATIC PHRASES
,
IN THE
S
PEECH AND
L
ITERATURE OF THE
E
NGLISH
-
S
PEAKING
P
EOPLES
, T
OGETHER WITH
P
ROPER
N
AMES OF ALL
K
INDS
,
THE
W
HOLE
A
RRANGED IN
O
NE
A
LPHABETICAL
O
RDER

P
REPARED BY

M
ORE THAN
T
HREE
H
UNDRED AND
E
IGHTY
S
PECIALISTS AND
O
THER
S
CHOLARS

defined the word “desk” as follows:

And in exactly the same year, 1932, the
Dictionnaire de l’Académie française
defined the word “bureau” (French for “desk”) as follows (the original was in French, of course):

These definitions are based on the idea of a desk as a piece of furniture. That was the “downtown area” of the vintage-1932 concept of
desk.
To be sure, even back then, there was already a good deal of conceptual urban sprawl in various directions. But back in 1932, no one could have dreamt of the kind of desk that we information addicts now spend most of our workdays working “upon”.

Let’s give the name “hard-desk” to the concept of the 1932-style piece of furniture. It has a physical existence, and it is heavy and rather awkward to move around. Today’s screen-based version of the concept — we’ll call it “soft-desk” — is immaterial, or in any case it is material only in a highly indirect fashion; it is transportable, instantly copyable, easily sharable, and fits handily on a flash drive, carryable in one’s pocket.

One might think that, although one of these categories gave birth to the other one (
hard-desk
being the “mother” of
soft-desk
), the two categories would subsequently have become fully independent of each other, and that each would have followed its own developmental pathway without regard for the other, as is often the case in nature for mother and child, and as is also often the case with words that engender other words. Take, for example, the word “brand”, a close cousin to “burned”. Originally it meant simply a flaming stick, but at some point it acquired a second meaning, generalized and abstracted from the first meaning — namely, the kind of mark made with such a stick on the hide of an animal or the skin of a criminal in order to label them forever. At a later point, this second meaning was further generalized and abstracted to the idea of a publicly recognizable symbol permanently identifying any entity, and thus eventually it took on its current overwhelmingly dominant meaning of the name of a company that manufactures goods — a far stretch indeed from a burning stick! Clearly these three very different concepts (a flaming stick; a mark on an animal; a company’s name), all associated with the noun “brand”, diverged long ago and simply went their separate ways. Of course, this etymological story is unlikely to have much to do with how these concepts are represented in the mind of a person who grows up with them.

What we just said about brands does not, however, hold for desks, for
hard-desk
and
soft-desk
have clearly retained their deskness, which means that they are both work spaces. Indeed, any time we want to prepare or edit some document, it would be perfectly reasonable to consider which of the two types of desk might be preferable. If we want to write a handwritten letter with a pen and paper, well then,
hard-desk
will be our choice; if we want to produce a professional-looking printed document, then
soft-desk
will prevail. But interestingly enough, in many contexts, we can talk about “the desk” without it being relevant whether we mean
hard-desk
or
soft-desk.
Thus,
hard-desk
and
soft-desk
are subcategories of
general-desk
, which could be defined as any kind of
workspace, whether physical or virtual, for producing documents. Often all one needs to know is that the speaker is referring to a
general-desk
, and we don’t need to know which of the two subcategories — hard or soft — the speaker has in mind, just as when someone says they’ve had “a coffee”, we get the picture without knowing if it was a
café crème
, a
cappuccino
, or an
espresso.
Likewise, we can perfectly understand a sentence such as “I bought a car today” without needing to know what color the bought car was. Understanding is a mental action that can get along just fine without a great many details. If someone says “my desk is cluttered” or “I spent the whole afternoon organizing my desk”, we can understand this perfectly without having any idea if it was a
hard-desk
or a
soft-desk
.

So today, there are three distinct categories lurking in the word “desk” — just as the word “person” can mean a male, a female, or a person of unspecified sex. In this sense, the word “desk” exemplifies a special variety of marking, in which the abstract superordinate category (
general-desk
) shares a name — namely, “desk” — with its two subcategories
hard-desk
and
soft-desk.
Thus once we have two “rival” categories of
desk
, this allows us to put our finger on the essence of the original category by constructing a more abstract concept of
desk
.

Much as acquiring a second language allows one to understand the nature of one’s native language more clearly, the emergence of computer-age desks has helped us gain a newer and deeper understanding of our old category
desk.
The advent of home computers changed the venerable old concept of
desk
, making it no longer associated with one indivisible concept. The emergence of three new types of desks —
hard-desk, soft-desk
, and
general-desk
— has allowed us to perceive more clearly an essence, hidden up till then, of the original old category. Indeed, the creation of the superordinate category
general-desk
allows us to distinguish between the core property of desks (namely, that they are workspaces) and more superficial properties that, at one time, before the days of home computers, were inseparably linked to material existence and its features, such as how much something weighs, how much stuff is piled up on it, and the shapes and sizes of drawers. In those days, no one had yet imagined that a desk could be a ghostly, immaterial entity. Heaviness, paper-coveredness, and pull-out drawers seemed to be necessary aspects of deskness, but later these aspects were seen to be incidental and not pertinent to a desk’s status as a
workspace.
Just as we all eventually transcend the naïve idea that a lump must be the result of someone bumping into something, so the recent development of a variety of notions of
desk
has allowed us to transcend a matter-oriented naïveté about desks, and now we have no trouble imagining desks that weigh essentially nothing, involve no piles of papers, and have no drawers.

For the category
desk
, much as for the categories
lump, bottle, man, animal, car
, and so on, the addition of a new level of abstraction showed us some dimensions that were essential about the concept, and some that were dispensable or optional. Without the construction of such an extra level, everyone would have continued to think that the deeper properties were necessarily accompanied by the shallower ones. Moreover, no one would have even thought of trying to make a distinction between shallower and deeper aspects of
deskness.
However, the creation of a fresh new level of abstraction,
corresponding to an unmarked (more general) sense of a word, brings out from behind the scenes the difference between a concept’s more central and less central aspects — the latter being those aspects that help us to distinguish among subcategories (for example, between lumps caused by banging and lumps having other origins, or between material
hard-desks
and ethereal
soft-desks
).

Pinpointing, in a given context, the incidental or contingent aspects of a concept, as opposed to its deeper, more essential aspects, constitutes an important intellectual step for an individual. On a higher level — on a social and cultural level — the emergence of the concept
desk
in its newer and more abstract sense is analogous to the emergence of the general concept of
lump
within an individual mind.

As we showed in
Chapter 2
, in the case of proverbs, a concept starts to be impoverished rather than enriched when it is abstracted beyond a certain level — namely, that level at which its essence starts to be lost, even if we don’t have any precise criteria telling us where that begins to happen. But despite this risk, abstraction can be enriching: a gradual series of refinements can indeed reveal a unity among a set of situations that at first glance seem entirely different, and, thanks to our faculty of analogy-making, we soon come to see these situations as belonging to a single category, and to feel every bit as comfortable with the new category as we once felt with the old one. This kind of push towards ever-higher levels of abstraction can go remarkably far without adulterating the essence of a category, as we shall now see in short case studies of three familiar categories — namely,
shadow, wave
, and
sandwich.

Everyone grows up intimately familiar with shadows. In fact, we are constantly shadowed by our shadows — at least when it’s light. Early on in life we learn what causes them: shafts of sunlight are blocked by opaque objects from reaching the ground or a wall. Even so, even when we’re all grown up, some shadows still strike us as surprising or curious or even strange. For instance, there is something mesmerizing about watching the shadow of the airplane in which one is flying as it comes in for a landing. At first it is just a tiny dark spot far below us on the ground, racing across fields, roads, forests, and rivers, and then it grows and grows and starts to look like an airplane, and in the last few seconds before the landing, it almost feels as if it is rushing up to join its mate; the moment of landing feels like the joyous reunion of a pair of long-separated twins.