Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (45 page)

When a thinking being lacks linguistic labels for the phenomena that it encounters, the sharp distinction that many people believe they see between categorization and the making (or spotting) of analogies becomes well-nigh impossible to make. A dog, not possessing linguistic labels, has instead a set of experiences with inanimate objects, animate agents, actions, and situations, and in order to survive and live comfortably in the world, it depends on its ability to see new phenomena in terms of situations that it has already been in. Thus categorization for a dog is clearly the creation of analogical bridges to prior knowledge.

The fact that every dog can reliably recognize other dogs, birds, cars, trees, balls, and leashes is hardly astonishing to us humans. But for a dog to be able to reliably distinguish places where it can “do its duty” from places where it shouldn’t is more impressive, because this category seems quite a bit subtler. Given that analogies are distributed all along a broad spectrum, ranging from very simple to very subtle, it seems reasonable to ask what degree of sophistication these nonverbal animals can attain in making analogies. To this end, we asked some of our dog-loving friends if they could recall some interesting analogies made by their pets, and in return we received a good number of fascinating anecdotes. Here we reproduce four of the stories that we found particularly striking.

One evening when my parents were keeping Char [a Labrador] for a few weeks, my mother said, “He needs a bath tomorrow.” Just before going to bed, they called Char but he didn’t come. A long search finally wound up in the basement, where Char was patiently waiting next to the big sink in which I’d always given him his baths during previous visits. Not only had he understood the word “bath”, but he’d also remembered the unusual tub we’d used in that house, as well as the place where it was located.

Fenway [a dachshund] recognizes any and all suitcases, and every time we get out some suitcases from our attic, she starts looking sad, as she’s worried we’ll leave without her (which is often the case). If she sees one of the suitcases has been packed and shut, she’ll jump onto it and lie down, hoping this will convince us to take her along. She also recognizes the small duffel bag in which she does her own traveling, and she knows what it means when we get it out of the closet — namely, that we’re all going on a trip. Every time we’ve taken Fenway to California, the moment we start packing for the return trip, she jumps right into her duffel bag, making sure we don’t leave her behind.

Fenway had just had a small growth removed surgically from one of her rear legs, and in order to do the surgery the vet had had to shave off the hair surrounding the growth. As soon as Fenway came back home, she went off in search of her little stuffed moose and started chewing away on one of its hind legs, until she had created a small patch of “bare flesh” that looked just like the bare patch on her own leg.

The first time we took Fenway to a big “dachshundfest” in a park, she spotted, far off, a white dog with long unruly curly hair, which looked very much like her pal Scruffy. In a flash she was off and running, but when she reached the other dog, the two eyed each other up and down a bit confusedly. A moment later Fenway realized this wasn’t Scruffy, upon which she flipped right around and ran straight back to us across the park.

This last anecdote shows that dogs, just like people, can make mistaken analogies, because sometimes a resemblance, even a very strong one, is misleading. A perfect stranger can have the most striking resemblance to one of our best friends, and then one can’t help wondering whether the powerful resemblance is a reflection of a deep similarity of two souls, or is only superficial. At least one can’t suppress such wonderings if one belongs to the genus
homo sapiens…

John has gone to Iceland to give a talk, and his wife Rebecca has come along. After two days of tourism, they arrive at the university, where they meet some friendly people, among whom is a young professor named Thor. John is struck by Thor’s chiseled face and he keeps asking himself, “Who does he remind me of so much? I know it’s someone I know very well!” All at once it comes to him that he’s thinking of his friend Scott in California. This makes John feel at ease with Thor, because his friendship with Scott is very strong. After the talk, John and Rebecca are taken out for dinner by Thor and colleagues, and they spend several pleasant hours together.

The next morning, John asks his wife, “Was there anyone yesterday that reminded you of someone you know?” Rebecca replies, “Thor, maybe? Is that who you mean?” “Exactly!” says John. “And what struck you about him?” “Well, I’d say he’s very charming, and he also looks like Scott in California.” John replies, “I agree. It seems that we see him with the same eyes!” Rebecca adds, “Maybe it’s the corners of his mouth when he smiles. It suggests a kind of gentleness that he shares with Scott.” “Exactly. Also their husky voices, wouldn’t you say?” “That too,” says Rebecca. John continues, “Yesterday at dinner I felt as if I knew him well, so I said some things that otherwise I would never have said. It was just like talking with an old friend, and I’m glad you’re confirming my impression. To me, the fact that we agree shows that the connection between them is something
real
, not just a personal flight of fancy.”

Rebecca’s confirmation of what John noticed reminds us that a good analogy is something that one can share with others. Such a feeling of objectivity reinforces the intuitive idea that an analogy connects two entities
in the external world
— in this case, Scott (a lawyer in California) and Thor (a professor in Iceland). Certainly the conversation quoted above gives this impression, but we should remember that John’s analogy between Scott and Thor was created (or observed) by him
in Scott’s absence
, and Rebecca’s analogy was created (or observed) in the absence of
both
individuals. Rebecca was relying only on memories stored in her head, and so her link was necessarily between two
mental representations
of people, rather than between two people in front of her. However, she found it much more natural to think and say that her analogy linked the
sources
of her mental representations — namely, Scott and Thor — than to think and say that she had constructed or discovered a connection between two neural patterns inside her brain. After all, compared to “Thor reminds me of Scott”, a sentence such as “I just constructed a mental bridge between my mental representations of Thor and Scott” would sound absurdly pedantic, as well as very weird.

This shorter way of saying things (and thus of thinking) is preferred by everyone. Instead of saying that we’ve created a mental link between two mental entities, we humans prefer to project the two ends of our analogical bridge
outside
of our heads, and in this way our analogy seems to become an external bridge — a soaring metaphorical rainbow at whose ends are two entities located in places that may be very far apart, like Berkeley and Reykjavík. And when someone else confirms such a personal analogy, the appearance of objectivity suggested by the agreement in viewpoints reinforces the naïve image of an analogy as being like a rainbow high in the sky — a celestial arc leaping between objective, external entities. But if one thinks about it, one realizes that the arc linking the two entities is not a
rainbow
but, so to speak, a
brainbow.
And if it is
objective
— that is, if two or more people see the same analogy — it’s because there can be, in two different brains, two “parallel” brainbows — that is, two brainbows connecting internal representations sparked by the same external sources.

To make this abstraction more concrete, let’s take a bridge that exists in the head of each of your authors. At one end of this bridge is a mental image of Mark Twain’s face, and at the other end is a mental image of the face of Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg. It’s quite possible that “the same” bridge was independently constructed by and in numerous other heads and has lived happily in them for a long time. Indeed, we have little doubt that anyone who looks at images of these two gentlemen will rapidly construct, in their head, this “same” mental bridge, this “same” brainbow.

Mark Twain

Edvard Grieg

It is very tempting — indeed, it is indispensable for efficient interpersonal communication — to use a kind of shorthand to describe several analogous analogical bridges built in different heads in a shorthand fashion, according to which there is simply
one analogy
, an
objective
analogy, between two entities belonging to the world “out there”. Just as John and Rebecca shared an “objective” link between Thor and Scott,
so can many people share the analogy linking Twain and Grieg (or more precisely, linking their faces). Suppose that you have just created a personal “brainbow” between your images of Twain and Grieg. It is very plausible that your mental images of these two men might start to mix and blur, thus resulting, in the end, in a new mental entity that we might baptize “Twain/Grieg” — the name not of a
person
but of a
category
.

If you were now to run across some photos of Albert Einstein, you might well think, “An excellent example of the category
Twain/Grieg
!” As a result, your mental entity
Twain/Grieg
would slightly change, taking into account this third member. The outcome would be a more general category, and as such it would deserve a new label, just as when a small company grows large, it no longer belongs solely to the two people who founded it many years earlier. As a matter of fact, your category initially based on the facial resemblances of Mark Twain and Edvard Grieg (and then Albert Einstein), as it came to include more similar-looking people, could, in view of its growing generality, change its name, perhaps adopting the acronymic label “TGE”, or it could even lose its label completely.

To round out this story, let’s suppose that after building in your mind the category in which are blurred the faces of Twain, Grieg, and Einstein, you ran across a photo of the famed humanitarian doctor Albert Schweitzer. Would assigning Schweitzer to this growing mental category be
the making of an analogy
, or would it be an act of
categorization
? It would be both. What happens inside the head of a person looking at the picture of Schweitzer is
the construction of a mental bridge
linking a fresh
new
mental representation (triggered by seeing the picture of Schweitzer) with an
older
mental structure whose existence was collectively due to having seen and fused the faces of Twain, Grieg, and Einstein. Calling such a mental bridge-building operation “an act of categorization” and calling it “the making of an analogy” are equally valid choices.