I Is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World

by James Geary

  Attributional similes, such as “Pancakes are like nickels,” were based on physical similarities; both are round and flat. Relational similes, such as “A roof is like a hat,” were based on functional similarity; both sit on top of something to protect it. Double similes, such as “Plant stems are like drinking straws,” were based on physical as well as functional similarities; both are long and cylindrical and both bring liquid from below to nourish a living thing.

  Gentner found that youngsters in all age groups had no problem comprehending the attributional similes. But only the older kids understood the relational and double similes. In subsequent research, Gentner has found that giving young children additional context enhances their ability to pick up on the kind of relational comparisons characteristic of more complex metaphors.

  Gentner and colleagues showed preschoolers a set of pictures316, each of which depicted animals in distinct spatial configurations. Some pictures displayed physical similarities; the animals matched but the spatial configurations did not (a black cat above a white cat, for example, and a black cat next to a white cat). Other pictures displayed relational similarities; the spatial configurations matched but the animals did not (a black cat above a white cat and a black dog above a white dog). During the experiment, researchers showed a card depicting a relational similarity to the children while giving it a made-up name: “This is a zimbo.” They then showed the children two other cards—one relational and one physical—and asked, “Which one of these is a zimbo?”

  When children were given only one example of a zimbo—say, a black cat above a white cat—they tended to opt for a physical match, saying the picture of the black cat above the white cat was the same as the picture of the black cat next to the white cat. But when given two examples of a zimbo—a black cat above a white cat and a black dog above a white dog—they tended to opt for a relational match, selecting a picture of a black bird above a white bird rather than pictures of dogs or cats. Gentner and colleagues concluded that the extra context allowed children to make comparisons, which in turn enabled them to spot novel relational concepts.

  Like the Asch and Nerlove experiments, Gentner’s results suggest that though metaphor making starts early, metaphor comprehension develops in stages, beginning with basic physical comparisons before moving on to more conceptual and psychological domains. As children’s knowledge of the world grows, so does their metaphorical range.

  The same is true for adults. Any metaphor is comprehensible only to the extent that the domains from which it is drawn are familiar.

  In the Prose Edda, for example, the answer, in kenning form, to the question “How should one refer to the sky?” is “Ymir’s skull.317” That answer only makes sense if you happen to know that Ymir was a primeval giant whose body was believed to have formed the world, his skull becoming the dome of the sky and his blood becoming the ocean. Without a set of associated commonplaces that includes Old Norse myths and legends, anyone trying to understand this metaphor would be in the same position as Tristan trying to figure out the psychological significance of “Nettles.”

  This same lack of essential context is what perplexed the crew of the Starship Enterprise when they encountered the Tamarians in the “Darmok” episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation318. The Tamarians speak a language no one has yet been able to fully decipher. The Tamarian tongue is so elusive because it is so allusive, consisting entirely of kennings from the alien race’s mythology and history.

  In Tamarian, for example, “cooperation” is expressed by the phrase “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra” because Tamarian folklore includes the tale of Darmok and Jalad, two warriors who banded together to fight a common foe on the island of Tanagra. Other Tamarian kennings include “Darmok on the ocean” for loneliness, “Shaka, when the walls fell” for failure, “The river Temarc in winter” for silence, “Sokath, his eyes open” for understanding, and “Kiteo, his eyes closed” for refusal to understand. Snorri Sturluson could not have done better.

  In comprehending metaphor, context is king. Behavioral economics pioneer Amos Tversky demonstrated how context influences our perception of similarities, and how our perception of similarities influences the way we—children and adults alike—interpret metaphors.

  Tversky presented adults with the names of four different countries and asked them to sort the countries into the pairs that were most similar. Given the set Austria, Sweden, Poland, and Hungary319, for example, subjects tended to group Austria with Sweden (two Western European countries) and Poland with Hungary (two Eastern European countries).

  But when Tversky substituted “Norway” for “Poland,” he got a different answer. Given the set Austria, Sweden, Norway and Hungary, subjects tended to group Sweden with Norway (two Nordic countries) and Austria with Hungary (two Central European countries). In psychology, this shift in context is known as framing, a process analogous to the clearing of lines on Max Black’s piece of heavily smoked glass. The context of a comparison determines which lines we focus on, and those lines in turn demarcate the boundaries of what we see.

  So the way a question is framed—which alternatives are offered, which words are chosen to describe those alternatives, and which associated commonplaces those alternatives evoke—has a powerful effect on which answers people give. Imagine the responses, for example, if Donald Leavis had been described as “the Nelson Mandela of Northern Ireland.”

  The correspondences conjured by metaphor are not fixed. They advance and recede based on context. When the frame changes, so do the associated commonplaces. Tversky therefore concluded that assessments of similarity are made on the fly, in the same way as interpretations of metaphors, an observation he demonstrated using a simile:

  A good metaphor is like a good detective story320. The solution should not be apparent in advance to maintain the reader’s interest, yet it should seem plausible after the fact to maintain coherence of the story. Consider the simile “An essay is like a fish.” At first, the statement is puzzling. An essay is not expected to be fishy, slippery, or wet. The puzzle is resolved when we recall that (like a fish) an essay has a head and a body, and it occasionally ends with a flip of the tail.

  Psychologist Sam Glucksberg carried out a variation on Tversky’s experiment, in which frame flipping is clearly evident. He presented adults with a set of four objects—paintings, billboards, pimples, and warts321—and asked them to pair off those that were most similar. Most people grouped paintings with billboards and pimples with warts, an obvious enough choice. After all, paintings and billboards are both visual displays, while pimples and warts are both dermatological blemishes.

  But then Glucksberg tilted the frame, substituting “statues” for “pimples.” Given this new set—paintings, billboards, statues, and warts—most people grouped paintings with statues and billboards with warts. Paintings and statues are both forms of visual art, while warts and billboards are both blemishes—the former on a person’s body, the latter on the landscape. As a result of the substitution, a fresh network of associated commonplaces emerged. The new frame produced a new metaphorical meaning. “The same pair of objects322 can be viewed as similar or different depending on the choice of a frame of reference,” Tversky observed.

  In metaphor, framing is the name of the game and our ability to swiftly swap frames increases with age. Take John Donne’s famous line:

  No man is an island323.

  This statement is one of those surprisingly common metaphors that are also literally true. It is, of course, blindingly obvious that no individual human being is a land mass surrounded on all sides by water. But seen through a different frame, these words take on an entirely different set of associated commonplaces. Like the “prison guard = rock” comparison, however, you have to have the relevant emotional experience and psychological knowledge before those associations fall into place.

  This is one of the marvels of metaphor. Fresh, successful metaphors do not depend on conventional pre-existing associations.
Instead, they highlight novel, unexpected similarities not particularly characteristic of either the source or the target—at least until the metaphor itself points them out.

  Cognitive psychologists Roger Tourangeau and Lance Rips cite a beautiful example from the poem “90 North” by Randall Jarrell:

  Like a bear to its floe, / I clambered to bed.324

  On the surface, a bed and an ice floe don’t share many common features. One is cold, the other warm; one is hard, the other soft; one is typically found floating in the Arctic, the other is not. Yet, consider the simile for a moment and hidden similarities emerge.

  The act of a bear climbing onto an ice floe is similar to the act of a person climbing into a bed. Both ice floes and beds are pale, flat, smooth, and white. The novelty of these associations—the fact that two such unlike things nevertheless share such striking similarities—makes this simile startling and beautiful. The best metaphors transform as they transfer.

  In quizzing study participants about their favorite metaphors, Tourangeau and Rips found that people overwhelmingly prefer metaphors based on these kinds of emergent rather than obvious associations. Tourangeau and Rips asked a group of adults to rate a collection of metaphors on their aptness and comprehensibility. All the metaphors were simple X = Y statements involving animals. In this particular collection, “The eagle is a lion among birds325” was rated as the best and most comprehensible metaphor, while “The gorilla is a troop transport among land mammals” was rated as the worst and least comprehensible.

  For “The eagle is a lion among birds” metaphor, the researchers also asked participants to list the properties they associated with the source (lion) and the target (eagle), just as in the Donald Leavis experiment. For lions, the most popular associations were: they live in Africa; they are cats; they are gold in color, large and strong; and they are predators. For eagles, the most popular associations were: they are endangered; they have feathers; they fly; and they are large and predatory.

  The aptness of this metaphor, like the aptness of the ice floe–bed simile, depends on a small number of shared associations, and these associations are typically not the first things that spring to mind when considering either the source or the target in isolation. As Max Black put it, “It would be more illuminating326 . . . to say that the metaphor creates the similarity than to say that it formulates some similarity antecedently existing.”

  So the next time you admonish a rambunctious seven-year-old with the wise words “Look before you leap,” don’t be surprised if all that greets you is a blank stare. The wisdom of those words won’t sink in until she has taken a few falls for herself. Similarly, a despondent teenager recovering from his first unrequited love affair won’t find “There are plenty of fish in the sea” very helpful, at least not until he hooks up with someone else he likes even better. We see the world darkly, through Black’s piece of heavily smoked glass. It takes time and lots of real-life encounters before children are able to clear new lines of sight.

  The world is full of stinging nettles that grow back as fast as we can cut them down. “Experience is a good school,” the German poet Heinrich Heine once quipped. “But the fees are high.”

  Metaphor and Science

  The Earth Is Like a Rice Pudding

  C. S. Lewis—scholar, critic, Christian apologist—was an astute student of metaphor. In his 1939 essay “Bluspels and Flalansferes,” he described a thought experiment in which the world had four dimensions instead of the three we can perceive. A four-dimensional world seems inconceivable, but he likened the task of imagining it to explaining to Flatlanders—a race of people who only know two dimensions: back and front, and left and right—that the world is round.

  The Flatlanders think they live on an edgeless plane extending infinitely in all directions. They have no concept of, much less words for, height and depth. So how can anyone get across to them the idea of up and down? “As these Flatlanders are to you327, so you might be to a creature who intuited four dimensions,” Lewis wrote. Thanks to this analogy, what before was impossible to conceive—a four-dimensional world—acquires some semblance of meaning.

  Over time, Lewis suggested, the analogy of “the Flatlanders’ sphere” would become part of the culture, a kind of intellectual shorthand for the idea of a four-dimensional world. As time went on, “the Flatlanders’ sphere” would be abbreviated to, say, Flalansfere and the term’s connection to the original analogy would gradually be forgotten. The word “Flalansfere” would then become an extinct metaphor, the etymology of which was irretrievably lost.

  Flalansfere “had an air of mystery from the first328,” Lewis mused. “Before the end I shall probably be building temples to it, and exhorting my countrymen to fight and die for the Flalansfere. But the Flalansfere, when once we have forgotten the metaphor, is only a noise.”

  Lewis’s brief history of the Flalansfere is more or less how metaphors actually evolve, as evidenced through etymology itself and as demonstrated by Sam Glucksberg, the psychologist who performed the metaphorical Stroop test and adapted Amos Tversky’s frame-flipping experiment.

  Glucksberg put groups of people in a room and asked them to talk to one another about a collection of novel geometric shapes that did not have conventional names. Participants were free to describe the forms in any way they wished. They overwhelmingly chose to describe the shapes through analogies, and they very quickly compressed their analogies into metaphors.

  One shape, for instance, consisted of two triangles placed one above the other. The triangle on top was inverted, with an arc curving down from it on both sides. This form was often described along the lines of “an hourglass with legs on each side329.” Once the form had been several times thus described, participants progressively shortened the description to the fewest possible words—from “hourglass with the legs” to “hourglass-shaped thing” to simply “hourglass.” Thus was a metaphor born.

  Name that shape: “hourglass” or “two triangles placed one above the other with the top one inverted, with an arc curving down on both sides”? Courtesy of Sam Glucksberg.

  The point of Lewis’s thought experiment, and of Glucksberg’s actual experiment, is that the unknown can only be made known through metaphor and analogy. “When we pass beyond pointing to individual sensible objects330, when we begin to think of causes, relations, of mental states or acts, we become incurably metaphorical,” Lewis wrote. “We apprehend none of these things except through metaphor.”

  The analogical form of metaphor is especially useful when scientists communicate new discoveries. The history of science is, in fact, the history of good analogies. In 1665, Robert Hooke published Micrographia, his observations through a primitive microscope of everything from fly’s eyes to pieces of cork. He was the first to observe that plants consisted of formations of small compartments, which Hooke called “cells331” because of their resemblance to the rooms in which monks lived in monasteries.

  French mathematician Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Fourier expressed his discovery of the “greenhouse effect”332 by comparing the atmosphere to a huge glass dome that trapped heat, thereby increasing the surface temperature of the earth, a metaphor that has lost much of its explanatory power, as the research of Cultural Logic has shown. German physicist Max Planck, a gifted pianist and cellist, conceived quantum theory in part by imagining electron orbits as the vibrating strings of a musical instrument333.

  Even string theory, which attempts to encompass matter and the fundamental forces of gravity, electromagnetism, and weak and strong interactions into a single framework, likens the universe to a lattice of eleven-dimensional oscillating strings. Try explaining that to the Flatlanders.

  In response to a questionnaire about his working methods, Albert Einstein described the nature of analogical thinking with an analogy of his own:

  The words or the language334, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The physical entities which seem to serve a
s elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be “voluntarily” reproduced and combined . . . this combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought.

  For Einstein, “combinatory play” was the essence of creative thought. It is also the essence of analogy, the process whereby a network of known relations is playfully combined with a network of postulated or newly discovered relations so that the former informs the latter. Analogical thinking makes unmapped terrain a little less wild by comparing it to what has already been tamed.

  What philosopher Suzanne K. Langer wrote of metaphor is true of analogy, too: “Language, in its literal capacity335, is a stiff and conventional medium, unadapted to the expression of genuinely new ideas, which usually have to break in upon the mind through some great and bewildering metaphor.”

  The analogical imperative is captured nicely in one of the tales of Hui Tzu, a philosopher who lived in China during the fourth century B.C.E. Hui Tzu was a kind of Chinese Zeno, famous for philosophical non sequiturs and paradoxes336, such as “I set off for Yueh [a state in southern China] today and came there yesterday” and “The sun at noon is the sun setting; the thing born is the thing dying.”

  Hui Tzu was famous for his eloquence. When people asked for explanations of natural phenomena like wind, rain, and thunder, Hui Tzu is said to have “responded without hesitation337, answered without thinking, and explained all the myriad things . . . without rest, going on without stopping, still thought it too little, and then added some marvel to it.”

  One story about Hui Tzu in particular, related by the ancient Chinese sage Mencius, suggests he would have felt right at home in C. S. Lewis’s Flalansfere: