Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (63 page)

Is it possible that analogies have the power to manipulate us, to twist us around their little fingers? Certainly; in fact, they do so in two senses of the term “manipulate”. First, analogies often arise in our minds without our even being aware of them: they
invade
us surreptitiously and seize center stage. Second, analogies
coerce
us: they force our thoughts to flow along certain channels. And thus, far from being just appealing and colorful pedagogical or rhetorical devices, analogies are wily creatures with a will of their own. They shape our interpretations of situations and determine the conclusions of arguments. Put otherwise, an analogy will not be content with merely crashing the party; having shown up, it then dictates the rest of the evening.

The word “manipulation” tends to exude negative connotations, but analogies are not always manipulative in a harmful way. Being nudged, pushed, or even forced by an analogy can of course have bad consequences, but that is the flip side of a phenomenon that is largely positive. The fact is, the interpretation of a situation is inseparable from the analogies (or categories) it evokes. Our categories are thus organs of perception; they extend our physiological senses, allowing us to “touch” the external world in a more abstract fashion. They are our means of applying the richness of our past experience to the present; without them, we would flail about helplessly in the world.

Although this chapter concentrates on how analogies manipulate us, it is a kind of microcosm of the whole book, in that it runs through analogies on all scales, ranging from unnoticed throwaway quips to monumental decisions that changed the course of history; between those extremes, it passes through categories that are awakened in everyday situations and that help us to deal with the commonplace events of our lives.

Perhaps the most inconspicuous way in which we are manipulated by our analogies is revealed by the speech errors that people commit when, to put it crudely, they get their wires crossed, as a result coming out with streams of words that are distorted and lack sense. We will show how the relentless pressure to categorize in real time is the culprit here, and we will also see that the phenomenon is not limited to language, since our actions, too, often betray the conceptual wire-crossing taking place in our heads.

Leaving the world of errors, we will then move slightly upwards in size and visibility, to consider analogies that people make despite themselves, and for no obvious reason. Such analogies arise without warning, usually lead nowhere, and nearly always are rapidly forgotten. And yet their very insignificance is, for our purposes, highly significant, as it reveals the ubiquity of analogy-making — how it is a perpetual activity of our minds even when there is no purpose behind it.

The next kind of manipulative analogy that we will look at has greater import, because it shows that a simple analogy can frame how we see situations and can shape our perceptions, our reasoning, and our decisions. The light shed on a situation by the analogical evocation of an inappropriate category can be so blinding that we are led unawares into cognitive box canyons, which can induce great confusion. To convey the importance of this phenomenon, we will show it in a number of striking situations.

When one is deeply engrossed in an activity or is powerfully struck by a very unusual event, the intense level of interest may cause a swarm of analogies to invade one’s mind uninvited, analogies that would never occur otherwise. This phenomenon reveals an Achilles’ heel of analogy-making, which is that it can lead us to absurd interpretations of situations, and thus to very poor decisions. And yet our susceptibility to making unusual analogies under the influence of our obsessions is also a source of great creative potential. To be sure, most of the similarities that we notice when under the influence of an obsession bring no great insight, but every once in a while such a connection can give rise to one of those miracles of the human mind that we call “strokes of genius”. Indeed, someone who is taken over by an obsession will see analogies to their obsession popping up everywhere, on every street corner, everywhere they turn, day and night, and each little thing that happens is potentially mappable onto some aspect of the obsession. And sometimes, though not very often, something exceptional will come out of this unstoppable drive.

Perhaps the most fascinating way in which we are manipulated by analogies, this time at a rather high level of cognition, involves analogies that make decisions for us, not only behind our backs but even, at times, over our dead bodies. This happens when we find ourselves in a situation where an analogy to a past situation is so blatant and irresistible that it simply forces itself on us, and we feel compelled to obey it. In such a circumstance, we find ourselves convinced, without rational explanation, that whatever happened
in the past
will inevitably also happen
once again
in the new situation, even if it conflicts with our desires or leads us to an irrational conclusion. When logic vies with a strong analogy, the “analogic” wins hands down.

And now we shall raise the curtain on Act I, which is devoted to micro-analogies that manipulate us on the smallest of scales, insidiously and incessantly.

In the midst of the most fluent native speech, intelligent, articulate speakers often come out with words or phrases that, if framed in print, would look very odd, and occasionally they utter sequences of words or pseudo-words that, if they were slowed down and highlighted, would make even a schoolchild snicker — and yet, since it all happens in real time and goes whizzing by far too fast for most listeners to pay attention to both its form and its content, seldom does anyone (speaker or listeners) hear anything in the least strange. But if one is deeply fascinated by language and thought, one’s ear is likely to be more open and more sensitive, and sooner or later one may begin noticing small oddities that for most people are merely parts of the bland background.

Thus it was for us, especially this book’s senior author, who for more than forty years has been passionately and meticulously collecting speech errors, and whose collection merged, some twenty-five years ago, with that of his friend David Moser. This book’s junior author joined the team more recently, and his careful observations add yet another dimension. The combined collection includes many thousands of errors of countless types, and a lengthy book could easily be devoted to it alone. In what follows, we shall have to settle for dipping into just a very small subset of it.

Theorizing about speech errors has come a long way since Sigmund Freud, but Freud’s ideas are still deeply entrenched in the popular mind. The Freudian view of speech errors is that they are
a window onto the subconscious
, revealing dark secrets hidden in the psyche of the person who blurts them out. For this reason, errors that manage to slip out despite the conscious mind’s attempt to censor them constitute a deeper, truer message than the overt, intended message. In short, a speaker’s innermost soul is inadvertently revealed by their “Freudian slips”. Today, this idea is still widespread but is not taken as seriously as it once was, and yet, if one interprets the phrase “a window onto the subconscious” in a less emotionally charged manner, it is still perfectly valid. Indeed, speech errors constitute audible traces (or visible ones, in the case of written errors) of mental processes far below the conscious level. Like animal tracks in a forest, they can be “read” by a careful observer and much can be gleaned from them.

After Freud, the field of error research came into its own in the early 1970s, with the work of the linguist Victoria Fromkin, who assembled a large corpus of errors and analyzed them as manifestations of unconscious processes. Significant extensions to Fromkin’s work were made by, among others, the psychologists Gary Dell, Donald Norman, and David Rumelhart, who developed influential computational models of error-making. The French psychologists Mario Rossi and Évelyne Peter-Defare, as well as Pierre Arnaud, have worked in the area as well.

The goal of our discussion of error-making is to show not just the diversity of errors we all make, but also, more importantly, how our errors reveal certain facets of the ceaselessly churning mental activity of categorization through analogy-making. The first few sections of our discussion will deal with what we’ll call
lexical blending
, an unconscious process that seamlessly but incoherently mixes together two or more stock lexical items, ranging all the way from long idiomatic phrases to monosyllabic words.