Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (74 page)

These fifteen “life principles” came out of a video game lacking all metaphysical pretension, a game whose sole
raison d’être
is to entertain. This shows how analogy pervades one’s thinking when one is driven by an obsession. The maxims to which T. was led by his Pac-Man addiction would not have been formulated by someone who was a relative newcomer to the domain; people with just a few minutes or hours of experience with Pac-Man would say, “The only purpose in this game is to get as high a score you can while killing the ghosts — that’s obvious!” It’s most unlikely that their reflections would go any further than that.

T.’s maxims may seem, like the other obsession-based analogies cited above, to be exaggerated and artificial, in the sense that they seem unrelated to Pac-Man. But on the other hand, his analogies are as legitimate as can be. The connections between the maxims and specific phenomena in the game are always clear as a bell; the analogies are spot-on and also they teach lessons — lessons that someone could learn from real-life experiences. The difference is that in Pac-Man these lessons are learned in a highly compressed time frame and are intensified, since even the strangest circumstances will reappear fairly regularly when one is a Pac-Man addict. During his period of Pac-Man addiction, T. lived tens of thousands of different “lives”.

It is striking that a simple video game contains enough richness to lead a player to insights about life that are essentially philosophical, all based on analogies that link the trivial “lives” of a Pac-Man entity, involving little more than eating or getting eaten, with the full complexity of human life. In this respect, the Pac-Man microworld is similar to the Copycat microworld, as we will see in the next chapter.

We now direct our attention towards another frequent type of analogy — specifically, analogies suggested by extremely salient resemblances, which perhaps are superficial and perhaps are not. That’s the key question. Although such analogies are irresistible, do they deserve to be given the time of day or not? We tackle this issue with the help of an example.

Shortly after giving a lecture, Professor F. was contacted by a reporter who worked for his university’s public relations bureau. She wanted to interview him for a university publication. They met, and as the interview progressed, F., who was not married, found her more and more attractive. He also discovered, to his chagrin, that she was married, but against his better judgment, he invited her to lunch, and she, against her better judgment, accepted. For the next two months, they met frequently for intimate conversations at lunch, always completely platonic but always sparkling. At last F. decided to see if there was any chance of passing from platonism to hedonism, but his hopes were turned down in an unambiguous though compassionate manner.

Five years later, F., still unmarried, accepted an offer from another university. No sooner had he arrived on campus than a reporter who worked for a magazine published by the university contacted him in the hopes of conducting an interview by telephone. Rather than replying to her, “Great idea — we can both save some
precious time that way!”, F. suggested that they meet in person instead. As is obvious, the analogy between the two situations, although it was based on resemblances that were quite superficial, exerted a nearly irresistible pressure on F.

We are all constantly prone to listen to inner voices that whisper to us,
“This
situation is extremely reminiscent of a situation that you were in before and that you remember clearly, and so you’re very lucky! Just make your decision on the basis of your prior experience!” Let’s consider another case of this sort.

G. once wrote a column for a well-known magazine. When he was hired, he was unaware that every issue was eventually published, in translation, in many countries around the world. One day, out of the blue, G. received a package containing various international editions of the magazine, featuring his columns in many different languages. At first he was delighted to see his ideas being spread around the world, but on carefully examining some of the European translations (he had studied a few European languages and was fascinated by them), he was deeply disappointed, as he saw that his very careful writing style had not been faithfully reproduced at all and had been replaced by a style that he found boring and flat. He felt betrayed.

Some thirty columns later, the magazine’s publisher contacted G. by phone and told him that he had just learned that the directors of the Korean counterpart of the magazine were hoping to publish a volume specially devoted to all of G.’s columns. What an honor for G.! So would G. give the go-ahead to publish this anthology? G., however, just hemmed and hawed. The publisher pressed on: “What’s the problem? This is a great opportunity!” G. then admitted that he hadn’t been pleased with the European translations of his columns, and that although he didn’t speak a word of Korean, he was worried that the same thing might… The publisher cut him off and said, “Now, now, old boy, not to worry! The Korean edition of our magazine uses only the very best translators that can be found — super-experts, extremely sophisticated. That’s a guarantee. So it’s a deal?”

What would the reader do in G.’s shoes? On the one hand, there was strong pressure coming from the magazine’s upper echelons to publish a book in Korea, which would have been good for G.’s reputation. On the other hand, there was an analogy whose relevance was not in the least clear. What possible link could the disappointing performance of a few European translators have with the performance of unknown translators in a country that was so distant geographically, linguistically, and culturally?

In the end, G. turned his publisher down. The latter had assured him that the Korean translators were as good as they come, but what did
he
know about it? It’s inconceivable that he would have said to G., “I know how painful it is for an author to be mangled by a translator. Since you didn’t like any of the European translations, your doubts about the quality of translation into Korean are highly merited.”

It’s far easier to imagine the publisher saying something like this: “Few things in the world are more different than Korean and European translators! To be sure, some European translations of our magazine have now and then left a bit to be desired, but that problem is completely localized. Korea is another ball of wax. A completely different mentality reigns over there — a far more serious one. Of course I understand
your temptation to make an analogy, but believe me, there’s simply no connection. It’s as if you were telling me you would never drive a Korean car after having test-driven only cars built in Eastern Europe. Trust in us, old boy; if we assure you that these are faithful and reliable translators, you can count on us and on them.” But G. didn’t buy this line — after all, “Once burned, twice shy”! And a week later, he received a letter telling him that his column would be terminated. His analogy had cost him dearly.

What, then, was the bedrock set of beliefs on which G. thought it reasonable to ground his analogy? Was it sensible to leap from the quality of a German translator to the quality of a translator in an extremely distant language? And what about the fact that it wasn’t a question of just
one
low-quality European translation, but
four
? And how to take into account the differing levels of G.’s knowledge of those four tongues?

At what point is it sensible to extrapolate to an unknown world an event that took place in a known world, and on the basis of what kinds of knowledge and what kinds of prior experiences? If a translation into a given language is of low quality, why should a translation into another language, done by another person, also be of low quality? Does one earn the right to make such an extrapolation if there have already been
twenty
abject translation failures in twenty different languages spread out over all the different continents? Or does one earn the right to make such a leap long before that moment? What does it all depend on, in the end? On the distance between the countries involved? On their cultural distance? On the relatedness of the languages? Does one need to have a deep knowledge of all the languages concerned? Or is it enough to have seen problematic translations into just one or two languages, whatever they might be?

In each of the two foregoing anecdotes, someone presumes that what once took place in one situation has a good chance of taking place again in a new situation that brought the older one to mind. Thus the professor who, five years earlier, fell head over heels for a university public-relations writer who called him up for an interview cannot suppress the tingling feeling, when he’s contacted by a public-relations writer at his brand-new university, that there is a pretty decent chance that he’ll find
her
to be just his type as well. And the magazine columnist who was disappointed by the translations of his columns into a few languages that he can read can’t help but suspect that the translations into languages of which he can’t read a word will be just as flawed.

These anecdotes are cases of
induction
, a form of thought in which one extrapolates to new situations certain observations that one made in one or more prior situations. Such an extrapolation can extend to a sizable category (for example, presuming that all Dutch people are smart after having met a few who are smart, or guessing that Paul is always late on the basis of a couple of late arrivals), or it can be limited to just one other case, or a handful of other cases (for example, presuming that the almond flan, soon to be wheeled in, will of course be delicious — after all, the chiles rellenos were terrifically tasty! — or leaping to the conclusion that Jack and Susan must be just as blond as is their strikingly blond brother). Induction has no claim to logical validity, in the sense
that no rigorous rule of reasoning allows a person to arrive at an inductive conclusion with absolute certainty. No known law compels all female university public-relations writers to be heart-throbs for a certain male professor, nor is there any universal principle entailing that all the translators employed by a certain magazine must share an identical level of mediocrity. To be sure, there are powerful, compelling analogies that link the situations in these scenarios, but that doesn’t make the conclusions that these analogies suggest anything close to certain.

Of course, the fact that a given conclusion is not derivable through watertight logical reasoning doesn’t mean that the conclusion has to be false; far from it! It’s perfectly possible that the Korean translation will be miserable, and that the professor will be smitten beyond belief when he meets the public-relations writer in his new university. In short, the
likelihood
of a conclusion should not be confused with its logical
validity.
And indeed, what usually matters in everyday life is how likely something is rather than how logically deducible it is. The professor isn’t looking for an ironclad
proof
that he will fall in love with a woman he hasn’t yet met; he merely wants to know if the chances are decent that she will appeal to him. And what matters for the columnist is the high probability that the Korean translations will leave much to be desired. Neither of these people cares a hoot about whether their conclusions can be reached by following strict logical reasoning. What matters overwhelmingly to them is simply the question of likelihoods. Moreover, the conclusions reached by these two individuals have very different levels of probability. Whereas the romantic hopes of the starry-eyed professor can strike one as pretty unlikely, the fears of the skeptical columnist may seem somewhat more realistic. And perhaps each of these individuals, in making an “illogical” analogical extrapolation, accurately intuited its likelihood of being right.

To live one’s life in this world, one has to trust one’s own judgments about what is and what isn’t likely, far more than worrying about fine points of logical validity. If, on some grade-A gray day, you suddenly decided to reject every inductive conclusion you reached simply because it wasn’t the result of an ironclad form of reasoning, then your thinking would have to grind to a halt, because every thought that anyone has, no matter how tiny it is, no matter how spontaneous or mindless it might seem, is an outcome of this kind of mental activity that has no logical validity.

If A. were to ask Z. a question as innocuous as “How are your fries?”, then Z., in order to be strictly logical, would have to reply, “Well, the six I’ve partaken of so far were most savory, but since I haven’t tasted any of the others on my plate, I have no basis for commenting on how they are.” In some theoretical sense, Z.’s answer may be defensible, but anyone sane would find it grotesquely pedantic. A sensible person would reply, without even thinking twice, “They’re delicious!”, because such a person would unhesitatingly extrapolate outwards — from the titillating twinges of their taste buds triggered by their initial nibblings all the way to the whole plateful. The analogy between the already-savored fries and their yet-to-be-ingested cousins would seem too compelling to allow any other answer even the slightest chance of coming to mind.

Numerous psychology experiments have identified various factors that contribute to the apparent validity of such generalizations, which is to say, to the feeling that such
analogy-based extrapolations are
credible.
For example, the
greater the number of previously observed cases
is, the more secure people tend to feel in concluding that the same outcome will take place in a fresh new case. Thus, the more fries one has tasted from one’s plate, the more secure one will feel in guessing that the entire plateful of fries is good.