Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (92 page)

On the other hand, sometimes everything happens in just a fraction of a second, as is the case for caricature analogies that people just blurt out. Although these, too, are conscious analogies dreamt up for a specific purpose, they are often less finely crafted
than the ones just described, because the person who comes out with a caricature analogy often has no idea of how they came up with that particular one, as opposed to many others that might have worked just as well. And then there is the swirling sea of unconscious analogies constantly churning below the surface of our minds, forming and unforming without cease, pushing our thoughts “hither and skither” at all moments — and yet we are blithely unaware of them. These are the manipulating analogies that we discussed in
Chapter 5
. Together, then, these two chapters have painted a picture of a continuum stretching between thoughts that we push around and thoughts that push us around, but no matter where one looks along this continuum, one finds the process of analogy-making as the operative principle.

Although we have called some analogies “manipulated” or “carefully crafted”, we could still try to look beneath their surface to find their hidden sources. And as we’ve seen throughout this chapter, consciously crafted analogies owe their existence to spontaneous unconscious analogical links. This means that even when you think it’s you who are pulling the strings, the fact is that you are merely a puppet of whose strings you are unaware. You feel that you are deliberately creating an analogy to advance a certain point of view, but actually it’s the other way around: your point of view comes from a myriad of hidden analogies that have given you a certain perspective on things.

Thus, the baseball announcer who spontaneously said, “Trying to get a hit off of Sandy Koufax is like trying to drink coffee with a fork” came up with this colorful image because unconsciously he was seeing one thing (a bat) coming very close to but slipping right by another thing (a ball), and this hidden abstract conceptual skeleton then gave rise to an analogical bridge linking the actual situation (swinging at a fastball and missing it) to an imaginary humorous situation (coffee slipping off the tines of a fork). In short, though we may tell ourselves that we are royally pushing analogies around from the heights of our conscious thrones, the truth is otherwise: we are really at the mercy of our own seething myriads of unconscious analogies, much as a powerful ruler is really responding to the collective will of their people, because if they were regularly going against their people, they would soon be dethroned. And thus the powerful “leader” is unmasked and revealed to be merely a very perceptive follower.

The age difference between Timothy and Janet is about the same as between Janet and Professor Alexander, but despite these large gaps, the same cognitive phenomenon is at work in the young child, the young adult, and the older adult. All three were taken in by tempting analogies, which, just like the categorical blinders discussed in
Chapter 5
, led them into error. In the cognitive-psychology literature, one finds all sorts of terms for this phenomenon, including “preconceived notion”, “spontaneous reasoning”, “naïve reasoning”, “naïve theory”, “naïve conception”, “tacit model”, “conceptual metaphor”, “misconception”, and “alternative conception”. Although these terms are not all interchangeable, they do have in common one key thing, and we will call that core notion “naïve analogy”.

The idea is that an unfamiliar concept (such as
shaving cream, titmouse
, or
email address
, in the three anecdotes) is apprehended plausibly, although inaccurately, through a natural-seeming analogy with a prior piece of knowledge (here, knowledge about hot liquids, mice, and postal addresses). Such analogies allow a person to make at least some sense of the new situation by likening it to something familiar, and yet it is all done in a spontaneous, unconscious, automatic way, without the person’s least awareness of making an analogy.

This stands in stark contrast to the standard image of analogy-making as a process of deliberate construction of mappings between situations. Naïve analogies lead directly to conclusions without there being any consideration of other options, and without any uncertainties or doubts arising. Thus the shaving cream is taken for granted as a dissolving substance by Timothy, the hungry titmice as a type of tree-borne rodent by Janet, and the email address as a place-specific address by Professor Alexander. The presence of these analogies is never felt explicitly, however.

Just like other acts of categorization, naïve analogies lead one to a perfectly reasonable (and thus self-consistent) interpretation of a situation, but they unconsciously assume that one is dealing with a typical member of the selected category. However, the situation may well involve an atypical member or even a non-member of the chosen category, in which case the conclusions reached will be irrelevant and useless. Thus if an email address were a postal address (the most familiar type of address to Professor Alexander), then the question he asked would have been totally reasonable, because the colleague was indeed going far away. Similarly, if a titmouse were indeed a very small rodent, then it would have been reasonable to be surprised by an image of such animals scampering about on tree branches, and Janet’s confusion at this image would have been perfectly comprehensible.

As for young Timothy’s categorization of his father’s shaving scenario, that too, was very reasonable, given his prior knowledge. For an adult, the category
shaving
presumes that there is a blade that will cut some hair and that there is a lotion whose purpose is to make the cutting easier and to reduce the blade’s chances of nicking the skin. For an adult, it’s obvious and unquestioned that what’s doing the cutting is the razor blade. But Timothy saw it quite differently. He was quite right in thinking that if the shaving cream dissolved the small hairs, then some sort of spatula might be useful in getting the shaving cream off his father’s face. Even if this interpretation might make adults smile,
there was nothing particularly childish about the thought process. No matter how wrong it might have been, it is not an iota less self-consistent than the adult’s vision of the process. One can even think of it as a rather ingenious invention, for after all, if such a marvelous hair-dissolving cream did exist, then all our razors would soon be museum pieces.

Generally speaking, naïve analogies have a certain limited domain in which they are correct, and which justifies their existence and their likelihood of survival over years or possibly even decades. This domain of validity can be narrow or broad. This is the case, for example, for children who personify animals. A grasshopper has much in common with a person: it is alive, breathes, moves about, reproduces itself, is mortal, and can be wounded; up to that point, the naïve analogy is perfectly useful. However, unlike what six-year-old children generally think, a grasshopper will not be sad if the person who is taking care of it disappears, and this illustrates one limitation (among many) of the analogy.

As for the naïve analogies at the chapter’s start, their strengths and limitations are easy to see. For example, the analogy between a postal address and an email address is valid in a number of ways: both are pieces of data that are structured hierarchically, moving from local to global information (an email address starts with something like a personal name; then comes an at-sign; then something that corresponds roughly to a street address; then a dot and finally something vaguely akin to a state name or country name), and which can be given to certain people and kept secret from others; both are associated with “boxes” where mail accumulates and can be accessed; both are subject to occasional changes; and so forth. For this reason, the analogy is shared by nearly everyone, and of course it is implicit in the shared term “address”.

But the analogy has its limitations, too. To send something electronically, the sender needs to have an email address, whereas no such thing is needed in order to send something by post. When one sends an email, usually a copy is automatically kept by the sender, in contrast to postal mailings. An electronic message arrives almost instantly, while a postal shipment may take a few days. If one moves, one gets a new postal address but one can keep one’s email address. And so forth. It is therefore understandable that it might fleetingly occur to a person to ask about the new email address of a friend who is moving to a new place (though this is far more likely to happen to a novice email user than to a seasoned one). This is where the limit of validity of the analogy becomes clear.

The naïve analogies made by Timothy and Janet are far more idiosyncratic than the one made by Professor Alexander. To figure out just how common Timothy’s naïve analogy is, one would have to make a careful study of how children understand the process of shaving. As for Janet’s confusion, it probably strikes you as rather quaint that an adult might envision a titmouse as being a very small mouse that scampers about on tree limbs, but if such naïveté makes you smile, keep in mind that we all live in glass houses, for we have all fallen into traps of the same sort from time to time, by making overly rapid and inappropriate categorizations. Let’s take a look at an example from classical popular literature.

Many readers will be familiar with Æsop’s fable “The Ant and the Grasshopper”, and some will know the seventeenth-century French poet Jean de La Fontaine’s rhyming version thereof, called “La cigale et la fourmi” (literally, “The Cicada and the Ant”), of which the opening lines run as follows (in our own translation):

The last two lines are unlikely to give most readers pause, but in them, in fact, there lurks a mistaken assumption. To bring this out into the open, let’s explore a small variant of them. Suppose La Fontaine had instead written, “It had no wherewithal for stew: / No horse or cow on which to chew”. In that case, readers would almost certainly be thrown by the incongruous image of a mere insect having failed to build up a stock of barnyard animals on which to feed. And readers would have been even more disoriented had La Fontaine written, “It had no wherewithal for stew: / No shark or whale on which to chew” or else “It had no wherewithal for stew: / No stick or stone on which to chew.” Such lines would have instantly aroused suspicion and bafflement.