Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (44 page)

In a course one of us taught, a student heard the anecdote of newlywed Carol signing with her maiden name and her friend Peter who “did the same thing every January”; this reminded the student of a time four years earlier, when she had changed
jobs. In her new job, she was supposed to answer the phone and say, “Hello, this is Company X”, but in her first few weeks she would often say the name of her previous employer, upon which she felt very silly. Does the fact that this student hit on that memory mean that four years earlier, she had constructed the highly abstract category
situations in which one is trapped by a habit that one is unable to update
? It’s hard to imagine what would have driven her to create such a high abstraction; it’s unlikely that she felt that someday she would need to be an expert in the spotting of situations of that sort. One can get along quite well in life without having constructed such a narrow category. Although we can be pretty confident that this student didn’t encode her mildly embarrassing phone-answering gaffes at such a rarefied level of abstraction, her encoding nonetheless involved a fair amount of generalization, because hearing the story about Carol’s maiden-name-signing gaffe brought her own old gaffes back to her mind swiftly and effortlessly.

Among the likely aspects of her encoding were the fact that she blurted out the wrong thing, that what inadvertently came out of her mouth was a relic of her recent past, that she wasn’t in control of what she said, that she was embarrassed by her slip, and so on. And so it seems probable that her retrieval of that four-year-old memory, triggered by the anecdote of Carol’s signing error, didn’t involve just one single and concise abstract conceptual skeleton that perfectly matched both the old and the new situations, but rather, that it depended on a number of separate, abstract, and important aspects of her old job situation, each of which had contributed to how she had perceived that situation’s essence at the time it happened. In other words, rather than one single perfectly-fitting conceptual skeleton — the magic key to memory retrieval — having been created when she made her telephonic errors, a number of smaller and independent concepts were built, and hearing the story of Carol reactivated enough of those concepts to remind her of having said, inappropriately, “Hello, this is company X”. In sum, although there is always some degree of abstraction in the act of encoding, there is not always exactly
one
highly abstract conceptual skeleton shared by the triggering event and the event retrieved from memory.

For a current event to trigger the recall of a far-off event that one hasn’t thought of in many years requires strong resemblances. For the long-buried memory to be triggered by what one is currently experiencing means that each side of the connection has to “give” a little — that is, some dimensions of the way we perceive the new and the old situation have to have sufficient flexibility. Even if the encodings of the events are far from reaching the maximal level of abstraction, they will go far beyond the most literal details of the experienced situations, because such literality confines remindings to the level of the very mundane. For example, in the case of the children in the Cinque Terre who were fascinated by grasshoppers, it takes only a tiny amount of abstraction to link this situation with Danny at the Grand Canyon, since both situations involve children, insects, and famous tourist spots. One feels that the stories are so close to being carbon copies of each other that such a reminding verges on the trivial. Luckily, the human mind goes way beyond this low level of reminding in the mental leaps that it carries out among countless stored memories.

In conclusion, is there always some amount of abstraction involved in the encoding of memories? To be sure. But does being reminded by a current event of a past event always depend on the two events exactly sharing a conceptual skeleton in one’s mind? By no means.

A local chef has just finished sautéing a fresh fish caught on a small fishing boat based in a nearby village. The side dish consists of steamed vegetables grown on a local organic farm. Meanwhile, elsewhere on the same planet, a microwave oven has just heated up a frozen dinner featuring fish grown in a factory and stuffed to the gills (literally!) with bone meal, accompanied by genetically modified vegetables that were grown in chemical fertilizer laced with pesticides.

Which of these two dishes appeals more? It’s probably not too hard to choose, but unfortunately, the first is expensive to produce and certainly is not amenable to mass production, and in addition it requires people who are passionate about what they do. Today it’s nearly impossible to make a living in such an authentic, old-fashioned way. And so, is there any way to successfully combine
that which allures but is unprofitable
, on the one hand, with
that which is cheaply manufactured though unappetizing
, on the other? Well, a good strategy would seem to be that of mass-producing something that emanates downhome appeal — if this is not a contradiction in terms.

Below we list some cases where marketing trickery can give rise to a false impression that tempts customers to buy without realizing what lies beneath the surface. Naïve would-be buyers, convinced that they have hit on genuine authenticity, fall for slick mass-produced articles — a successful ploy resulting from cold calculations in the business office.

The items in this list all clearly share some quality, but that quality has no standard name. What, if anything, is the difference between them and the members of a category that does have a standard name? We would suggest that the items in this list implicitly define the boundaries of a category that is just as reasonable and intellectually appealing as any lexicalized one, such as
forgeries
, which is a category clearly related to this one but more general than it.

Our list implicitly defines a new concept whose only distinction from lexicalized categories is that it is not yet lexicalized. And so, grafting “faux” onto “authenticity”, we suggest the term “fauxthenticity”. This act of explicit labeling will help to anchor the concept in memory and will increase the likelihood of its being further extended in the future. Indeed, instances of fauxthenticity are easily found, sharing the conceptual skeleton that emerges from reading the previous examples, while also extending it in new directions.

We hope that some readers will be inspired to look around for further examples of
fauxthenticity
, as they are quite widespread, just waiting to be spotted. Much as we said about the category
bait-and-switch
toward the end of
Chapter 2
, people who have explicitly constructed the category
fauxthenticity
have a much clearer sense of the phenomenon than those who have not.

We’ve looked at a wide variety of situations in this chapter, in order to show that people constantly construct rich new abstract categories that have no labels, sparked by the perception of unconsciously perceived resemblances between situations. But what about animals less reflective than we are? Well, they do much the same, though they are limited by their mental level, which depends on the species they belong to. Take dogs, for instance. What concepts does a typical dog construct, in the course of its lifetime? Below we give a list of a number of concepts that we have observed in dogs we have personally known. (We’ve taken the liberty of using English words to express these categories.) Each of these concepts gets formed as a result of a long series of analogies made, day in and day out, over many years.