Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (8 page)

Indeed, the central thesis of our book — a simple yet nonstandard idea — is that the spotting of analogies pervades every moment of our thought, thus constituting thought’s core. To put it more explicitly, analogies do not happen in our minds just once a week or once a day or once an hour or even once a minute; no, analogies spring up inside our minds numerous times every second. We swim nonstop in an ocean of small, medium-sized, and large analogies, ranging from mundane trivialities to brilliant insights. In this book, we will show how the simplest and plainest of words and phrases that we come out with in conversations (or in writing) come from rapidly, unconsciously made analogies. This incessant mental sparkling, lying somewhere below the conscious threshold, gives rise to our most basic, humdrum, low-level acts of categorization, whose purpose is to allow us to understand the situations that we encounter (or at least their most primordial elements), and to let us communicate with others about them.

A substantial fraction of the myriads of analogies constantly being born and quickly dying in our heads are made in order to allow us to find the standard words that name mundane objects and activities, but by no means all of them are dedicated to that purpose. Many are created to try to make sense of situations that we face on a much larger scale. To pinpoint, in the form of a single previously known concept, the essence of a complex situation that has just cropped up for the first time involves a much more penetrating and global understanding of a situation than one gets from simply smacking labels on its many familiar constituents. And yet this far deeper process — the retrieval of a long-buried memory by an analogy — is so central and standard in our lives that we seldom think about it or notice it at all. It is an automatic process, and virtually no one wonders why it occurs, nor how, since it is so familiar. If asked “How come that particular memory popped to your mind right after I told you what happened to me?”, a typical person might reply, with a bemused tone at being asked such a silly question, “Well, what I remembered
is very much like
what you told me.
That’s
why I remembered it! How could it have been any other way?” It’s as if they had been asked, “Why did you fall down?” and answered, “Because I tripped!” In other words, having X, which is in some sense very similar to Y, come to mind when Y occurs and seizes our attention seems as natural and inevitable as falling down when one is tripped — there is no mystery, hence there seems to be no need whatsoever for any explanation!

The triggering of memories by analogy lies so close to what seems to be the essence of being human that it is hard to imagine what mental life would be like without it. Asking why one idea triggers another similar one would be like asking why a stone falls if one lets go of it three feet above the ground. The phenomenon of gravity is so familiar and obvious to us, striking us as so normal and so inevitable, that no one, aside from a tiny minority of physicists obsessed with explaining what others take for granted, even sees that there is anything to ask about. For most non-physicists, it’s hard to see why gravity needs an explanation — and the same holds for the triggering of memories by analogy. And yet, how many scientific discoveries can hold a candle to general relativity, Albert Einstein’s wildly unexpected revelation of what gravity actually is?

The idea that we will here defend is that a certain mental phenomenon subsumes all the aforementioned stereotypes of categorization and analogy, but is much broader than any of them are, taken in isolation. To give a foretaste of this crucial idea, we turn once again to the theme of zeugmas, because these linguistic oddities have a great deal to do with categorization through analogy. Indeed, zeugmas provide a rich wellspring of examples running the full gamut from the most mundane to the most inspired of analogies; in their own small way, then, zeugmas perfectly reflect the ubiquity and uniformity of the mechanism of categorization by analogy.

Suppose you heard someone say, “The asparagus tips and the potato dumplings were delicious.” Your ever-ready zeugma detector wouldn’t register a thing, because it would seem self-evident that, in this context,
asparagus tips
and
potato dumplings
simply belong to one and the same very standard category (namely, that of
scrumptious edibles).
But it would feel rather different if someone were to say, “The asparagus tips and the after-dinner witticisms were delicious”, because here one senses that the adjective “delicious” has been used in two quite different senses, and so the needle on one’s zeugma detector would move a bit, and as a result you would feel that a slight analogical link had been suggested between the asparagus tips and the postprandial quips. Then again, were you to hear “The asparagus tips and the expression of surprise on Anna’s face were delicious”, your zeugma detector would register a yet higher reading, meaning that the semantic distance (or interconceptual stretch) was yet greater; this would lead you to see and feel an analogy between the asparagus tips and a certain friend’s facial expression, rather than merely thinking that they both belong to the commonplace category of
delicious things
.

In brief, it is misleading to insist on a clear-cut distinction between analogy-making and categorization, since each of them simply makes a connection between two mental entities in order to interpret new situations that we run into by giving us potentially useful points of view on them. As we will show, these mental acts cover a spectrum running from the humblest recognition of an object to the grandest contributions of the human mind. Thus analogy-making, far from being merely an occasional mental sport, is the very lifeblood of cognition, permeating it at all levels, ranging all the way from mundane perceptions (“That is a table”) to subtle artistic insights and abstract scientific discoveries (such as general relativity). Between these extremes lie the mental acts that we carry out all the time every day — interpreting situations, judging the quality of various things, making decisions, learning new things — and all these acts are carried out by the same fundamental mechanism.

All of these phenomena seem quite different, but underlying them all there is just one single mechanism of nonstop categorization through analogy-making, and it operates all along the continuum we’ve described, which stretches from very mundane to very sophisticated acts of categorization. And it’s this unified mechanism that allows us to understand sentences that run the gamut of zeugmaticity, from complete nonzeugmas (requiring only mundane categorization mediated by very basic analogy
making) to extreme zeugmas (requiring unusually flexible categorization mediated by much more sophisticated analogy-making).

But let’s take our leave of zeugmas and return to the larger picture. We claim that cognition takes place thanks to a constant flow of categorizations, and that at the base of it all is found, in contrast to
classification
(which aims to put all things into fixed and rigid mental boxes), the phenomenon of
categorization through analogy-making
, which endows human thinking with its remarkable fluidity.

Thanks to categorization through analogy-making, we have the ability to spot similarities and to exploit these similarities in order to deal with the new and strange. By connecting a freshly encountered situation to others long ago encountered, encoded, and stored in our memory, we are able to make use of our prior experiences to orient ourselves in the present. Analogy-making is the cornerstone of this faculty of our minds, allowing us to exploit the rich storehouse of wisdom rooted in our past — not only labeled concepts such as
dog, cat, joy, resignation
, and
contradiction
, to cite just a random sample, but also unlabeled concepts such as
that time I found myself locked outside my house in bitterly freezing weather because the door slammed shut by accident.
Such concepts, be they concrete or abstract, are selectively mobilized instant by instant, and nearly always without any awareness on our part, and it is this ceaseless activity that allows us to build up mental representations of situations we are in, to have complex feelings about them, and to have run-of-the-mill as well as more exalted thoughts. No thought can be formed that isn’t informed by the past; or, more precisely, we think only thanks to analogies that link our present to our past.

A term that will be useful to us in this context is
inference.
As is traditional in psychology, we will use the term much more broadly than it is used in the field of artificial intelligence, where it is synonymous with “formal logical deduction”, as carried out by so-called “inference engines”. By contrast, what we will mean by “making an inference” is simply the introduction of some new mental element into a situation that one is facing. Basically, this means that some facet of a currently active concept is lifted out of dormancy and brought to one’s attention. Whether this new element is right or wrong is not the point, nor does it matter whether it follows logically from prior elements. For us, “inference” will simply mean the fact that some new element has been activated in our mind.

Thus if one sees a child crying, one infers that the child is distressed. If one sees someone shouting, one infers that the person is probably angry. If one sees that the table is set, then one infers that a meal may well soon be served. If one sees a door that is closed, one infers that it can be opened. If one sees a chair, one infers that one could sit on it. If one sees a dog, one has the ability to infer (though one does not necessarily do so) that it barks now and then, that it might bite someone, that it has a stomach, a heart, two lungs, and a brain — internal organs that one doesn’t strictly perceive but that category membership allows one to infer. Inferences of this sort are a crucial
contribution to thought, and they come from categorization through analogy, for we rely ceaselessly on resemblances perceived between the present situation and ones we encountered earlier. If we did not do this at all times, we would be helpless.

Thus, it is not merely for idle fun that one calls a cat-like thing that one encounters “cat”, thereby assigning it to a preexisting category in one’s memory; it is principally because doing so gives one access to a great deal of extra information, such as the likely fact that it will show pleasure by purring, that it has a propensity to chase mice, that it may well scratch when threatened, tends to land on its feet, has a very autonomous character… These kinds of things, among others, can all be inferred about an entity once it has been assigned to the category
cat
, without any of them having been directly observed about the specific entity in question. Thus our categories keep us well informed at all times, allowing us to bypass the need for direct observation. If we didn’t constantly extrapolate our knowledge into new situations — if we refrained from making inferences — then we would be conceptually blind. We would be unable to think or act, doomed to permanent uncertainty and to eternal groping in the dark. In short, in order to perceive the world around us, we depend just as much on categorization through analogy as we do on our eyes or our ears.

Some ancient philosophers, including Plato and Aristotle, were fervent defenders of analogy, seeing it as a fertile medium for thinking rather than as just a figure of speech. Nonetheless, these same thinkers felt compelled to point out its limitations. Thus Plato, using a number of analogies — among them one likening a soul to a city, in his famous work
The Republic
— warned that “likeness is a most slippery tribe”. And Aristotle, although just as great an admirer of analogies, cast aspersions on many analogies made by his predecessors. Thus we see that even for some of its strongest backers, analogy has a faintly suspicious aroma, as does its cousin, metaphor. In the minds of such doubters, these two figures of speech, when used ill-advisedly, are liable to mislead both those who utter them and those who hear them.

Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche had extremely different personalities, philosophies, and views about religion, but they were united in their unswaying belief in analogy. For Kant, analogy was the wellspring of all creativity, and Nietzsche gave a famous definition of truth as “a mobile army of metaphors”. However, analogy has certainly not had such good press universally. Indeed, it’s been a favorite pastime down through the centuries to berate analogy for its unreliability, its closeness to wild guessing, and the serious traps into which it leads anyone who depends on it. Some philosophers have had quite a field day denouncing analogy and metaphor, describing them as superficial, misleading, and useless forms of thought.

In particular, the empiricists in the seventeenth century and the positivists in the twentieth raked analogy and metaphor over the coals. The English philosophers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke are often quoted in this regard. Hobbes, in
Leviathan
, his best-known work, declares his love for clear words and his scorn for metaphors:

Hobbes leaves no doubt as to his views. Truth is light, words must be cleansed and purged of ambiguity, and metaphors are nothing but will-o’-the-wisps that would lead one to wander in a wacky world. However, if one stops to look at this passage for a moment, one is struck by a certain ironic quality — specifically, the fact that its author condemns metaphors not by using “snuffed and purged definitions” but through the repeated use of metaphors. After all, what kind of phrase is “the light of the mind”? What about “definitions that have been snuffed and purged”? And how about “wandering amongst innumerable absurdities”? What are all these phrases, if not metaphors? Does a mind really contain light? Can definitions actually be cleansed? And are metaphors in truth unpredictably flickering lights hovering above a swamp?