Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (27 page)
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Authors: Douglas Hofstadter,Emmanuel Sander
Lucy, aged three, has just built a fence with her wooden blocks on the living-room floor. Jim, a family friend, accidentally bumps into her fence as he crosses the room and knocks over a couple of blocks with his foot. Lucy bursts into tears. A few minutes later, Jim is crossing the living room again, and as he approaches the same area, he conspicuously veers away from Lucy’s fence and blurts out, “Once bitten, twice shy.”
Now everyone will grant that Jim has come out with an
analogy
: he has implicitly mapped what just transpired in the living room onto a mythical situation in which an anonymous person, having been bitten one time by one dog (or some other animal), makes extra-sure never to go anywhere near any dog ever again. Obviously, the person is Jim, and the traumatizing bite is (
i.e.
, maps onto) Lucy’s tears after the toppling of a block or two. The avoidance of all dogs henceforth maps onto Jim’s pointed gesture of going far out of his way in order not to knock anything down the second time. What maps onto the fear of the bitten person? Clearly it’s a more abstract concern than that of being hurt by a dog’s teeth — it’s the empathetic desire not to see Lucy in tears again.
Voilà
— there’s the analogy, spelled out in full.
And yet we can just as easily characterize Jim’s quoting of the proverb as an act of
categorization
, because he sees what has just transpired as a member of the public category
Once bitten, twice shy.
In quoting these four words, Jim has declared that this event belongs to that standard category. The very existence of the proverb in the mental lexicon of an English-speaking person amounts to the existence of such a category in their mind, and the triggering of the proverb by a particular situation reveals that at least for them (and hopefully for others), the situation is a member of that category. No less than public-category labels like “chair”, “gentleman”, “pacifier”, “spill the beans”, “go up in smoke”, and “take matters into one’s own hands”, proverbs and sayings are the public labels of public categories — categories that most adult speakers know and share.
The act of recognizing in a given situation a case of a familiar proverb can cast new light on the situation. It provides a fresh, abstract, and non-obvious viewpoint, going well beyond the situation’s superficial details. Since proverbs are the labels of rather subtle and complicated categories, slapping a proverb onto a situation is a way of bringing out aspects that otherwise might remain hidden. The use of a proverb as a label is a way of making sense — albeit perhaps a biased type of sense — of what one is seeing. Applying a proverb to a freshly-encountered situation results in a kind of insight that comes from filtering what one sees through the lens of the proverb, rather than from a purely logical analysis. In summary, a proverb is a convenient, concise label for a vast set of highly different situations — past, present, future, hypothetical — that are all linked to each other by analogy.
The experience-based (rather than purely logical) character of proverbs means that different people will see different proverbs (and hence will take different perspectives) in a given situation. For example, in France they say “L’habit ne fait pas le moine” (“Clothes do not make a monk”), while in England they say “Clothes make the man.” Indeed, as Blaise Pascal once observed, “A truth becomes a falsity once it crosses the Pyrenees” (and probably he should have added “or the Channel”). As they say, “One man’s meat is another man’s poison”, and this is certainly the case for proverbs. Thus, the sad tale of a nonconformist youth who was exiled and went on to become a famous poet but could never return home again (it could be the story of Dante) might be perceived by person A as teaching the important life lesson “To thine own self be true”, while person B might see the selfsame story as exemplifying the wisdom of “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.” A’s selected proverb thus casts the story of the banished poet as a generic lesson that one should blithely ignore the masses and fearlessly step over the line in the sand, while B’s selected proverb casts the same story as a lesson that one should respectfully follow the majority and cautiously toe the line.
The preceding examples are not in the least exceptional; there are enough pairs of mutually contradictory proverbs to make one’s head spin:
Strike while the iron is hot… | but then again, | Look before you leap. |
Good things come in small packages… | but then again, | The bigger, the better. |
Nothing ventured, nothing gained… | but then again, | Better safe than sorry. |
Two’s company, three’s a crowd… | but then again, | The more, the merrier. |
Half a loaf is better than none… | but then again, | Do it well or not at all. |
Absence makes the heart grow fonder… | but then again, | Out of sight, out of mind. |
A penny saved is a penny earned… | but then again, | Money is the root of all evil. |
Many hands make light work… | but then again, | Too many cooks spoil the broth. |
Opposites attract… | but then again, | Birds of a feather flock together. |
Don’t judge a book by its cover… | but then again, | Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. |
The pen is mightier than the sword… | but then again, | Actions speak louder than words. |
It’s never too late to learn… | but then again, | You can’t teach an old dog new tricks. |
He who hesitates is lost… | but then again, | Fools rush in where angels fear to tread. |
Practice makes perfect… | but then again, | All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. |
We are tempted to add to this list one bilingual example — namely,
Pierre qui roule n’amasse pas mousse…
but then again,
A rolling stone gathers no moss
.
Oddly enough, even if dictionaries compiled in Britain tend to agree with the French-language interpretation of this international proverb (namely, that by constantly moving about one never acquires any deep roots or anything of value), we have informally observed that most Americans hear this proverb in the opposite fashion. That is, they consider the gathering of moss to be an obviously bad thing to happen to a person (or a stone), and so from their point of view, the proverb exhorts people to stay constantly on the move in order to avoid acquiring a nasty crust. The irony is that although the English and French proverbs say the same thing on a word-by-word level, their interpretations are often quite opposite, and for Americans the meaning tends to be roughly, “Keep on rolling so you won’t stagnate.” Pascal might have said, “A truth becomes a falsity once it crosses the Atlantic.”
But back to the main list… The fact that each line features a pair of proverbs that assert contradictory things shows that what counts is not a proverb’s truth, but its ability to cast light on a situation, allowing it to be seen as more than simply a recitation of events.
Don’t judge a book by its cover
and
Where there’s smoke, there’s fire
are categories that help one to highlight, on the one hand, the importance of not being distracted by cheap attention-getting tricks and of looking below the surface of things, and on the other hand, the importance of not ignoring what’s right in front of one’s eyes and of paying attention to salient clues. These two opposite stances, embodied in short and familiar phrases, can, if they form part of one’s lexicon, be used to pin pithy labels on, and thus concisely categorize, novel situations that are very complex, thereby implicitly conveying entire attitudes about them.
The categories denoted by proverbs are not statements any more than other categories are statements. Thus the category
Don’t judge a book by its cover
is not, despite its surface appearance, a statement (indeed, one shouldn’t judge a book by its cover!) — no more than the category
table
or
bird
is a statement. It is a point of view that can be adopted on various situations. Just as the category
bird
is a platform for making inferences (if something is a bird, probably it flies, sings, has feathers, lives in a nest…) rather than a statement, so saying “Don’t judge a book by its cover” is a sign of recognition that one is in a situation where prudence is called for in judgment, and where one should make sure to look well below the surface and to use one’s critical faculties. And it’s important to remember that this categorization of a situation, just like others, can be an inappropriate one. Just as one can assume that a small glass container filled with fine white grains contains salt rather than sugar, soon discovering one’s mistake, so one can sometimes categorize a situation as belonging to the category
Don’t judge a book by its cover
, only to realize later that this was an ill-advised judgment. In some cases, books
are
in fact perfectly represented and appropriately judged by their covers, and in some life situations, making a snap judgment based solely on surface-level cues can in fact be crucial. A person who intones “Don’t judge a book by its
cover” has not necessarily put their finger on the crux of the situation that they have so labeled. It may well be a
Where there’s smoke, there’s fire
situation instead.
Obviously, “Once bitten, twice shy” goes way beyond the idea that someone who has suffered a dog (or snake) bite will henceforth steer clear of all dogs (or snakes) at all times. Although the proverb is ostensibly about animal-bite victims, it is really about any number of other situations whose details are completely unforeseeable. What counts is that those other situations should share a conceptual skeleton with the microevent conjured up by the four words in the proverb. Thus, we could easily see any of the following situations as meriting the label:
After marrying, A. had two children, and then her marriage started falling apart. She found out that her husband had been cheating on her and lying to her for years. It ended up in a very painful divorce. Ever since then, A. has been suspicious of all men, no matter how gentle and kind they are.
B. and C. are from China and live in San Francisco. One day, their son was the victim of racial taunts from a classmate in his public school. The next day, his parents pulled him out of that school and enrolled him in a very expensive private school.
While walking down a steep staircase, D. slipped and fell down several stairs. Although his fall had no serious effects, when he got back to his feet, he was trembling, because he knew he could easily have broken several bones. For the next two days, everywhere he walked, D. took exceeding care. While going up and down his stairs at home he went at a snail’s pace, and the mere idea of riding his bicycle struck him as the height of insanity.
After her apartment was burglarized, E., who till then had paid no attention to safety matters, all at once bought a fancy burglar alarm as well as the most expensive safety locks, and she promptly installed the locks on all her doors and windows, including her basement windows, which were so small that for anyone to break in through them would have been well-nigh inconceivable.
F.’s cell phone was stolen in broad daylight by a mugger in the middle of the street in a somewhat dangerous part of town. Ever since then, whenever he uses his cell phone, F. is constantly on the highest level of alert, looking all around himself with great nervousness, even when he is in swanky hotels or ritzy restaurants.
As this shows, “Once bitten, twice shy” conveys the idea that when some event leads to negative consequences, some people develop a hypersensitive avoidance strategy, even at the price of missing out on potentially excellent opportunities, in order not to re-encounter any situation that is even vaguely reminiscent of the triggering one, no matter how little risk it would seem to pose objectively. More succinctly, in the wake
of a painful event, people tend to be skittish about events that remind them, however superficially, of the original event.