Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (60 page)

But the world of pasta can be broken down in many ways, not just in the stereotypical fashion featuring many species underneath a single top-level genus. There are varieties that one can easily make at home, and ones that are better left to the professionals. There is fresh pasta and there is dry pasta. And most of all, there are various natural subclasses determined by shape, which profoundly affect the uses of various types of pasta in cooking, and which are, in fact, the primary reason for all the diversity that exists. Thus the smaller noodles, such as
anchellini
(“mini-hips”) and
primaverine
(“springtime noodles”), are intended mostly for soups, and then there are types with rather fanciful shapes, such as
cocciolette
(“potlets”),
dischi
(“disks”), and
fusilli
(“little spindles”), intended for use with salads and vegetables. The long ribbons and string-like shapes, such as
linguine
(“tonguelets”),
tagliatelle
(“little slices”) and
spaghetti
(“stringlets”), harmonize well with sauces. In particular,
caserecce
(“homemade noodles”) and
conchigliette
(“little shells”) go best with meat sauces, while others, such as
cappelletti
(“hatlets”) and
ravioli
, are intended to be stuffed with tasty fillings. Every cook who delights in using pasta will have a well-developed mental network of pastas and connections linking them, revealing an unconscious structuring of mental categories.

A good plate of pasta merits a good wine, and in the world of wines, the range of categories seems to be inexhaustible. Rank beginners will make only the
red/white
distinction, while those who are slightly more in the know will refer to the type of vine (
cabernet sauvignon
or
merlot
, for example) and to the source country (France, Italy, Chile, Australia, the United States) or region (Bordeaux, Bourgogne, Napa Valley); however, expertise in wines involves going far beyond these kinds of facts. It can lead to distinguishing a particular vintage of a particular year of a particular grower of a particular
sous-appellation
of a particular
appellation
of a particular country — for example, a Château Beaucastel Hommage à Jacques Perrin 1998 belongs to the
sous-appellation
called
Châteauneuf du Pape
within the
appellation
known as
Côtes du Rhône
, and it comes from the prestigious vineyard
Domaine Beaucastel
.

Does
Château Beaucastel Hommage à Jacques Perrin 1998
constitute a typical category for a true wine connoisseur? Absolutely. It has many characteristics that people will use to describe it, such as its color, its bouquet, its taste, how it ages, its market value, the dishes it goes best with, the ideal temperature it should be served at, places where one can obtain it, ratings it has received from professional tasters, and so forth. The few thousand bottles actually produced of this exquisite elixir constitute the
extension
of this category — its concrete members. Of course, despite the seeming precision of this description, there are all sorts of hidden blurs at the fringes, as there are for any category: a counterfeit bottle, an unlabeled bottle, a half-consumed bottle, a poorly conserved bottle, a bottle that has been boiled or dried out, an empty bottle, a few drops spattered on a tablecloth after a glass was poured, and so forth. And no less than any other proper noun, this category lends itself to pluralization, as is illustrated by the grower of Château Beaucastel who proudly declares, “You should taste the new
Jacques Perrin 1998
that I produced here in my vineyard in 2005.”

To give an idea of the richness of categories in this arena, we point out some of the categories that necessarily inhabit the mind of a wine lover who states, “In 1996, Dominique Laurent did a great job with
Gevrey-Chambertin Premier Cru Les Cazetiers”
, and which are unlikely to exist in the mind of a more modest wine lover who says, “I prefer French wines to Spanish wines.” In the former case, not only are the high-level categories
wine
and
French wine
implicitly referred to, but moreover it is taken for granted that the listener is familiar with several yet narrower categories — namely,
bourgogne, Gevrey-Chambertin, Gevrey-Chambertin Premier Cru
(since most members of the category
Gevrey-Chambertin
do not come from the first harvest), and even
Gevrey-Chambertin Premier Cru Les Cazetiers
(since there are quite a few other types of
Gevrey-Chambertin
Premier Cru
aside from those called “Les
Cazetiers”).
To pin the wine down fully, our hypothetical commentator can be both precise and concise, saying,
“Gevrey-Chambertin Premier Cru Les Cazetiers Dominique Laurent
from 1996”, thereby distinguishing it from other growers who have produced related wines and from other years in which close cousins were produced. Such a fine-grained call is a clear sign of high expertise.

In any normal domain of expertise, even the most knowledgeable of specialists can’t come close to knowing everything about the domain. The breadth of knowledge that one would need to assimilate in order to be an expert in every nook and cranny is so vast that setting oneself such a goal makes no sense. And of course the idea of being an expert “in every nook and cranny” is in itself problematical, since when one uses a magnifying glass, every domain shatters into yet further subdomains. And yet we don’t expect experts to throw up their hands and say “I don’t know” whenever they are asked a tricky question in their domain. This is because true experts have knowledge not just about many specific cases in their domain, but also, through analogical links, a set of expectations about cases that are far less familiar to them. Thus in the domain of wine, we might imagine asking an expert, “What you do you think of the
Château Vinus 1995
?” Our expert might start right up and give all sorts of details learned either firsthand, through tasting, or second-hand, through conversations or reading. In this case the game is very simple, since the category relied on is precisely
Château Vinus 1995.
On the other hand, our expert may know nothing specific about
Château Vinus 1995
, and might therefore reply, “I don’t know”, which would be a perfectly truthful answer, and yet hardly useful at all, and also hardly reflective of what we think expertise is.

A more reasonable answer from a true expert would be grounded in knowledge of more abstract categories than just the particular wines themselves. For example, our hypothetical expert, though not knowing the wine itself, may have knowledge about the Château Vinus vineyard and its winemaking operation, whose reputation is top-flight, thanks to the excellence of the soil and the skill of the head of the outfit. Furthermore, the year 1995 may be well-known to our expert for its fine
libournais
wines (those coming from the right bank of the Dordogne River, where the Château Vinus is located). Thus our expert can compensate for specific lacks of knowledge by exploiting more general facts about related wines and wineries. Perhaps the Château Vinus winery is totally unknown to our expert, but the label on the bottle says that this wine’s appellation is
Fronsac
, which has a reputation for reliability and for making high-quality and long-lasting wines. And thus, this knowledge about the
appellation
, enhanced by further knowledge about the year 1995, allows our expert to give an educated guess concerning the probable level of quality of
Château Vinus 1995
, although less certain than if it were directly known.

If our expert comes from Australia and is not particularly fond of bordelais wines and their
appellations
, then there are other avenues that may well furnish predictions concerning the Château Vinus 1995, such as the fact that 1995 was generally speaking
a good year for wines in France as a whole, and the rule of thumb that bordeaux wines from good years tend to age well (the year and the fact that it is a bordeaux are written right on the label). In other words, without knowing anything specific about the French wine in question, a wine connoisseur from halfway around the globe can still have clear opinions on it, which can surprise and impress people who are less knowledgeable.

Thus we see that in times of need, one category can stand in for another. If you have no knowledge of A, then use your knowledge of B, where B is a “cousin” to A, close to it either horizontally or vertically. Experts never have access to all categories, but a genuine expert has a dense enough mesh of categories that specific gaps at various levels can be gracefully sidestepped by the process of analogy-making, and this helps to fill in missing knowledge in any specific area of the domain.

Whenever one changes one’s categorization of some aspect of a situation, one changes one’s perspective on the situation. Experts have so many potential perspectives that even in an unfamiliar situation, they can very often find a highly pertinent one. Specific, concrete categories are precious to experts because, as they are all genuinely different from one another, they furnish the most precise insights that have been gained over a lifetime. On the other hand, general, abstract categories are also useful to experts because they summarize many cases at once, and also because they are closer to the “essence”, the “conceptual skeleton”, of concrete situations. In sum, then, down-to-earth categories allow one to be precise, while highly abstract categories allow one to be deep — and precision and depth are the two most crucial keys to expertise.

Unfortunately, there are always people inspired by such macabre deeds. Let us try to enter into the mindset of a copycat killer who wanted to follow in the footsteps of this psychopath. What would such a person do? Make a beeline for the nearest grocery store and tamper with the Tylenol bottles on its shelves? It’s a possible thought; after
all, the original killer barely scratched the surface of the national supply. However, to stick with the category of
Tylenol
would be rather naïve, since the manufacturer instantly ceased production of Tylenol capsules, made a recall of all such products on store shelves, launched a media campaign to tell people to throw away any capsules in their possession, and made an offer to exchange Tylenol capsules for Tylenol tablets for free. Making the most literal-minded copycat move is thus out of the question.

Where might such a person turn instead? To another over-the-counter medicine? Once again, making such an upwards leap in abstraction is tempting; indeed, it’s what anyone would think of at first. And indeed, some genuine would-be copycat killers actually had this precise idea. Some even tried to commit the “perfect murder” by distributing tampered bottles of medicine to stores and simultaneously planting one such bottle “innocently” in their own medicine cabinet, thus murdering their spouse and hoping it would be seen instead as a random Tylenol-style murder.

The Food and Drug Administration decided that there was no reason to suspect that would-be killers imitating the unknown Tylenol murderer would limit themselves to Tylenol itself. In fact, to the FDA officials, it seemed that any over-the-counter drug had a fair chance of being targeted for tampering by psychopaths. The Tylenol episode thus spurred the creation of a national requirement that made sealed packaging obligatory. This would make any tampering evident before the product was opened. Today, all over-the-counter medications feature such protection.

Now a would-be copycat killer, seeing that these most obvious doors had been barred by the FDA, might be discouraged, but there remain other doors to check out. A small upwards leap in abstraction will suffice: one need but shift from the category
medications
to the more abstract category of
edible products.
At this point, there is an embarrassment of riches. The job can be done by using a syringe to inject a tomato, a melon, a grapefruit, or an orange with a small dose of a lethal liquid. Any fruit or vegetable will do. And who would notice a tiny hole in the cardboard cover of a yogurt or sherbet container? Then there are drinks. It would be simple to stick a needle into a bottle of milk or juice without causing a leak. And then there are cabbages, onions, broccoli, carrots, olives, and other items in the produce racks, needing merely to be sprinkled with some kind of poisonous substance. With such thoughts, we have clearly long since left behind the down-to-earth category
Tylenol
, and have passed through two more abstract categories:
medicine
and
edible product.
Why not jump yet further upwards?

One might be able to spread a thin layer of a noxious substance onto
consumer goods
such as silverware, glasses, pots, pans, and plates; this could do in random buyers who don’t rinse things before using them. For that matter, toothpastes and rubbing creams could be tampered with in advance. One could go yet further, dreaming up ways to tamper with computer batteries so that they will catch fire after a while, thus burning the computer, any nearby papers, the room, the house, perhaps neighboring houses…