Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (87 page)

The greatest scientists of any era venture into the wild unknown by making bold but often naïve analogies about phenomena that they do not fully understand, and almost inevitably, in making these frame-blending analogies, they inadvertently bring along irrelevant baggage that comes from their own limited knowledge. They borrow a neat little “package” of various facts about phenomena that they
do
know, taking (or mistaking) those facts for universal truths, and indeed, some of the facts in the packet will turn out later to be inapplicable to the new phenomena. And yet the best of such analogies contain so many grains of truth that they open up whole new perspectives, despite various incorrect assumptions that have been unwittingly imported from other domains. This kind of partly-insightful, partly-defective analogy-making is a hallmark of all humans, and will be discussed extensively in the next two chapters.

We might add that frame-blending is at times deliberately exploited in literature and other artistic domains for its lively and stimulating qualities. And the activity of reading a book or watching a film, play, or opera takes for granted the act of projection by each reader or viewer into the scenes, identifying with one and then another of the characters. Such mental blends are done rapidly and often without any realization on the part of the viewer, but they are what give to any dramatic work its emotional meaning, since without them the work would merely be a cold, third-person recitation of events.

We have brought up the concept of frame-blending because it is an enormously rich source of insight into many phenomena in human cognition, and under the name “conceptual integration” it has been beautifully and richly explored and described by cognitive scientists Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner and their colleagues and students. They have shown time and again that frame-blending is found throughout human thought, sometimes using marvelous examples that seem exotic, just as often using examples that are as down-to-earth as can be, but in any case demonstrating the fundamental importance of the phenomenon.

One of the examples analyzed by Fauconnier and Turner in their book
The Way We Think
is a billboard that was put out by the state of California in a campaign to combat smoking. As they describe it, the billboard featured a large photo of a macho cowboy (much like a classic Marlboro man) riding a horse and conspicuously smoking a cigarette, and at the bottom it stated, in big bold letters, “WARNING: SMOKING CAUSES IMPOTENCE.” The crucial frame-blending touch was that the cigarette was clearly bent and drooping downwards. A complex mapping was of course intended, in which the drooping cigarette would be seen as analogous to a non-erect penis, and in which the act of smoking would be seen as somehow
causing
both droops at once. It’s obvious that the drooping cigarette is a mental contamination of the scene, and that the drooping has simply been borrowed from an analogous situation (a cigarette being in some ways clearly analogous to a penis, Sigmund Freud’s famous disclaimer “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar” notwithstanding). Whether you consider it cheap or clever, there’s no doubt that this advertising maneuver constituted a frame blend
par excellence
, and that its clever ploy induced some long-time male smokers to reconsider their habit.

A careful series of examples in
The Way We Think
demonstrates how the understanding of tiny linguistic units that are as innocuous-seeming as adjective–noun combinations — for instance, “a safe child”, “a safe beach”, and “a safe knife” — are fraught with intricate blendings of one frame into other frames. Fauconnier and Turner show that the analogies needed to produce or understand such phrases are in some ways extremely simple and in other ways very subtle. All these analogies involve counterfactual situations. For instance, the phrase “a safe beach” makes one conjure up (most likely unconsciously) a scenario of a beach where bathers are in some fashion threatened, perhaps by sharks, perhaps by a powerful undertow, and then the actual beach and the hypothetical beach are mapped onto each other in order to emphasize their difference. What could be simpler than a mapping between a beach with an undertow, and the same beach without an undertow? Such analogies seem trivial, and yet modifying the true beach into a momentarily false version of itself requires nontrivial mental operations.

Not only the adjective “safe” depends upon an unconscious blending of frames on the part of both speakers and listeners, but even the most garden-variety of color adjectives — “red”, “green”, and so on — are shown by Fauconnier and Turner to involve blends, as in such phrases as “red wine”, “red pencil”, “red fox”, “red hair”,
“red light”, and so forth. More surprising yet is the fact that even an isolated noun may require an involuntary and subtle frame blend in order to make sense. For example, understanding the word “dent” necessarily involves a comparison between a norm (a pristine automobile fresh from the factory) and what we might call an “abnorm” (a car that has been deformed by an accident). Without a notion of how the car
should
be, and without the construction of a mapping between the norm and the “abnorm”, the concept
dent
would be incomprehensible.

In their book, through many dozens of fascinating case studies such as the ones just mentioned, Fauconnier and Turner convincingly document how rife our everyday understanding of our world is with frame blends, or, to put it in our terms, with unconsciously produced analogies between situations in which elements belonging to situation A (or rather, to A’s mental representation) may wind up being carried over into (the mental representation of) situation B, and vice versa.

An example described by Fauconnier and Turner as a blend, and by us as an analogy, is the importation of the idea of
desk
to computer screens. We describe this as a use of analogy, while they describe it as a conceptual blend or “blended scenario”, and they argue that, although it is
based
on an analogy, it is
not
an analogy. Their point is that there is a
hybrid
structure in people’s minds, some of it coming from old-fashioned physical desks, and some of it coming from people’s perception of images on screens, with the two being blended in people’s minds. We agree with this analysis. But what else is such a hybrid structure, other than an analogy? As we have shown in these past few sections, analogies are often blurry blends resulting from conflating two separate situations in one’s mind, mixing their ingredients, and in fact this is what happens in many of the analogies that we make on a daily basis, as Fauconnier and Turner show.

It’s not as if the word “analogy” were reserved for “uncontaminated” mappings. Indeed, as we said above, deciding which mappings are “contaminated” and which are “pure” becomes a subjective question, and it depends on the perspective taken on a situation. In order to bring out how and why the existence of blending is not an objective fact but a subjective opinion, we propose the following Copycat analogy challenge: “If
aabc ⇒ aabd
, then how should
pqrr
change ‘in exactly the same way’?”

One very appealing answer would be
pqrr ⇒ pqss
, based on the recipe “Change the rightmost ‘ letter’ to its ‘successor’ ”, where the terms “letter” and “successor” are both allowed to flex naturally in meaning, as a function of the new context. This may well seem like a perfectly “pure” answer, uncontaminated by any blend at all, and indeed gracefully fluid in its double slippage — and yet there is a rival answer that could be argued to be even “purer” — namely,
pqrr ⇒ oqrr
.

At first, the answer
oqrr
may seem completely off the wall, but if one pays attention to the curious feature of having a double letter at one end — a feature of both
aabc
and
pqrr
— and
if
one feels that this feature is so salient (this is where subjective judgments come in) that it cries out to be taken into account in establishing a mapping between the
two worlds, then one will wind up making a mapping in which
aa
maps to rr, which induces a mapping of the
c
onto the
p.
In this new mapping, the concepts
left
and
right
are reversed — and then, exactly as in the
xyz
problem, which we so carefully analyzed above, the concepts
successor
and
predecessor
will also reverse roles (and once again, they’ll do so “on the coattails” of
left
and
right
). This very different double conceptual slippage explains the answer
oqrr
, which certain people will find very pure and pleasing.

This new answer casts the answer
pqss
in a completely different light. To some people,
pqss
, which at first seemed elegant and “pure and uncontaminated”, will now seem like a frame blend in which the concept of
rightmost letter
was rigidly imported into the
pqrr
world, where it is in fact an unwelcome intruder, and hence the analogy giving rise to answer
pqss
will seem inelegant and “impure and contaminated”. And yet there will be other people to whom the idea of paying any attention at all to the double-letter feature of both
aabc
and
pqrr
will seem like an unimportant, irrelevant, and pointless luxury, and to them the answer
oqrr
will merely seem like the precious self-indulgence of an over-intellectual mind. To such people, the answer
pqss
does not involve the rigid importation of a concept from one world to another; it simply “does exactly the same thing” in the second world, and it does so without the least trace of contamination.

We thus see that frame-blending is not an objective quality of an analogy. To the contrary, the choice between slapping the label “blend” and “non-blend” on a given analogy depends on one’s esthetic preferences, which are often unconscious, and in any case are incapable of being logically or objectively proven correct or wrong. Esthetic preferences are prejudices that lie deep in the makeup of one’s way of looking at the world; they are not facts about the world itself. And so the notion that there is a sharp and clean distinction between frame-blending (“impure”) and analogy-making (“pure”) is an illusion.

In short, to us, frame blends (or “conceptual blends”, in the Fauconnier–Turner terminology) are not
exceptional
analogies but
typical
ones; indeed, they are analogies that have the interesting feature that one can point out one or more aspects of the mental bridge built between the two situations that involve a blur between entities located on both sides of the bridge. As a result, one isn’t always sure which side of the bridge one is standing on. Our next example, much in the spirit of Fauconnier and Turner’s book, shows this clearly.

Scott and his three-year-old daughter Ellie, on a visit to a natural history museum, are looking at a display of a family of antelope-like mammals called “bongos”, all of which have been taxidermically stuffed and arranged in a setting that resembles an African savanna. The bongos are standing near what looks like a shallow pond, although on closer inspection it is seen to be just a sheet of transparent plastic. A large male bongo is leaning his head down over the pond and sticking his tongue out, as if he’s just about to take a sip of water. Here we tune in on the conversation between human father and daughter:

Ellie’s unexpected reaction is most amusing. Let’s try to spell out the unconscious analogy present in her mind (and hopefully in the mind of any observer of the scene). It involves two different scenarios or, as Fauconnier and Turner would put it, “mental spaces”. One scenario is the intended
effect
of the display: despite the total immobility of everything in the scene, visitors are supposed to see animals on the savanna and to imagine them as living out their lives in a natural fashion, halfway around the globe. The other scenario is that of the museum display itself: visitors know perfectly well that they are not on a savanna in Africa but in a room in a building in an American city, and that the background scenes, showing other animals, some trees, and a mountain range in the distance, have merely been painted on the wall, and if they look carefully, they can also see that the pond is really just a sheet of plastic. But the paintings on the wall are
analogous
to a savanna scene, and the plastic sheet is
analogous
to a pond.

The bongo family, however, is at a different level. All the bongos are three-dimensional and life-sized, and thus, even when the plastic pond and the painted savanna are seen as fake, the bongos continue to be seen as real. And indeed they
are
real, or at least they are a significant step closer to reality than the other elements of the display, because these bongos were once alive. And so, even when the rest of the exhibit shatters into the falsities that it consists of, the bongos remain as somehow genuine and authentic.

Viewers will effortlessly map the artificial scene (with painted mountains, a plastic pond, stuffed bongos, and no motion whatsoever) onto a scene in Africa, and hopefully they will not allow any of the fake aspects of the artificial scene to travel across the analogical bridge and contaminate the far end of the analogy; that is to say, hopefully nothing from the museum-display side of the analogy will leak over and invade the African-savanna side. This desired way of looking at the display is often called “suspension of disbelief”. But one can imagine that despite the best efforts of the museum staff, such contamination might occur in the minds of certain visitors, especially the youngest ones.