Thus we see a genuine power that comes along with providing a concept with a name: it allows speakers to spread knowledge of it around easily and quickly, and that in turn allows it to enter public discourse on many levels, and to exert influences both on individuals and on society as a whole. The effect whereby the existence of a term in a given language allows its speakers certain advantages is known as the Sapir–Whorf effect, and although the idea has occasionally been advanced in extreme forms that have lent it a bad name, the fundamental premise is perfectly clear and there can be no denying that it exists.
What is Intelligence?
These considerations about thinking and concepts lead one naturally to wonder whether human intelligence might not reside, at least in part, in the number of concepts one has and the intricacy of the network that weaves them together. After all, we human beings are formed by the culture in which we grow up, which hands us vast numbers of conceptual tools. Does it then follow that our level of intelligence is determined by the repertoire of concepts that we inherit from our culture?
Indeed, what is the nature of the elusive quality called “intelligence”? Countless theories have been proposed. A search through dictionaries, encyclopedias, textbooks, and the Web will yield dozens of definitions rather quickly, many of them overlapping considerably, although occasionally one will turn up that has very little overlap with the others. The most frequently occurring themes are (in no particular order):
•the ability to acquire and use knowledge;
•the ability to reason;
•the ability to solve problems;
•the ability to plan;
•the ability to achieve goals;
•the ability to remember important information;
•the ability to adapt to new situations;
•the ability to understand complex ideas;
•the ability to think abstractly;
•the ability to learn and apply skills;
•the ability to profit from experience;
•the ability to perceive and recognize;
•the ability to create products of value;
•the ability to attain what one seeks;
•the ability to think rationally;
•the ability to improve.
Among the many characterizations of intelligence that we ourselves have run into, although each one undeniably touches on some qualities of the phenomenon, none quite strikes the bull’s-eye. They all hover near it, but they all fail to pinpoint intelligence’s core; they don’t get to the heart of the matter, let alone hit the nail on the head. Never quite managing to put their finger on its essence, they merely skirt the crux, flirt with the nub, and miss the gist, curiously unable to zero in on the kernel of the phenomenon of intelligence.
Readers may well be anticipating what our own conception of intelligence is, but before we state it explicitly, we thought it would be of interest to quote here a provocative sentence that we uncovered about, of all things, military strategists, since the author of this sentence, in describing the quality that defines a great military leader, came up with a phrase that is very similar to the words that we would use to characterize intelligence:
What distinguishes the great commanders — Napoleon, von Moltke, Grant, Patton, Zhukov — from the more ordinary leaders is the ability to see the essence of a situation at a glance, and strike directly at the enemy’s greatest weakness.
Oddly enough, the author of this sentence is an individual identified merely as “Admiral Ghent” in a military role-playing game. The quality that Admiral Ghent most admires is the ability to pinpoint the gist of a situation in a flash — the ability to sort the wheat from the chaff, the ability to get quickly at what matters and to ignore the rest. Well, this is what we would take as our definition of intelligence.
Intelligence, to our mind, is the art of rapid and reliable gist-finding, crux-spotting, bull’s-eye-hitting, nub-striking, essence-pinpointing. It is the art of, when one is facing a new situation, swiftly and surely homing in on an insightful precedent (or family of precedents) stored in the recesses of one’s memory. That, no more and no less, is what it means to isolate the crux of a new situation. And this is nothing but the ability to find close analogues, which is to say, the ability to come up with strong and useful analogies.
Trekking High and Trekking Low on the Slopes of Mount Analogy
The final chapter of our book is devoted to showing how analogy-making of a high order has given rise over millennia to the great ideas of mathematics and physics. But of course, the majestically soaring peak of Mount Analogy is by no means the entire mountain. Up there at the top, one finds analogies of great abstraction, while on the lower slopes one finds more concrete resemblances, which, although doubtless less scenic and striking, still result from the same cognitive mechanisms, merely applied in humbler and more familiar contexts.
For instance, in the previous chapter, we encountered, as they were meandering on the low foothills of Mount Analogy, two-year-old Camille, who “undressed” her banana, and eight-year-old Tom, who saw his uncle’s cigarette “melting”. These juvenile strollers were unwittingly demonstrating their keen intelligence when they retrieved those analogues from their personal stock of experiences, putting their finger on the crux of the matter at hand. Camille’s idea of “undressing” her banana is quite a bright one, coming right to the point; indeed, it’s the flip side of the quip someone twenty years older might make, after dancing all night: “When I got home, I had to peel all my clothes off my body!” As for Tom’s idea of a cigarette “melting” in an ashtray, it’s the flip side of what an adult might say upon finding that ten boxes of very expensive candy they’d bought for friends had all melted: “All those luscious chocolates went up in smoke.”
When we effortlessly call something we heard a moment ago “a sound” rather than “a noise”, it is because we’ve just made a mapping between a fresh mental structure, representing the sonic event, and a prior mental structure that we’d built up as a result of thousands of prior occasions — and we unconsciously chose that dormant structure because that mapping struck our brain as the best analogy in town. It’s not as if we were ever formally taught the distinction between sounds and noises; indeed, we’d be hard pressed to explain what that elusive distinction is, but no matter: when we hear something, just one of those categories tends to be activated (i.e., to spring to mind).
It’s rather miraculous that we are all so good at unconsciously making these kinds of instant judgment calls among our many thousands of concepts, given that we were never taught formal criteria for them. What, indeed, is the difference between a hill and a mountain, or a country and a nation, or an enemy and an adversary, or a sign and a symbol, or a piece and a part, or an idea and a thought, or a shop and a store, or picking and choosing, or falling and dropping, or throwing and tossing, or putting and placing, or smiling and grinning, or big and large, or sick and ill, or pretty and lovely, or delicate and fragile, or however and nevertheless ? No one would dream of trying to teach such distinctions in school.
The ceaseless activity of making mappings between freshly minted mental structures (new percepts) and older mental structures (old concepts) — the activity of pinpointing highly relevant concepts in novel situations — constitutes the analogical fabric of thought, and the unceasing flurry of analogies that we come up with is a mirror of our intelligence. Thus when we reflexively make the fine discrimination of calling a very small object “teeny-weeny” (as opposed to “tiny”, “teeny”, “teeny-tiny”, “teensy”, and “teensy-weensy”), or when we unconsciously distinguish between cases of clutching, clasping, and clinging, or when we casually describe part of a city as a “district” (as opposed to “area”, “zone”, “region”, “spot”, “place”, or “neighborhood”), we are unwittingly displaying our great finesse at the art of rapid retrieval of apposite analogues from our enormous storehouse of experience. In truth, far from being an unthinking activity, the ar
t of super-rapid right-on retrieval is the core of thinking.
When a woman toting two bags nonchalantly saunters out of a butcher shop into the street in front of a car in which you are a passenger, the chances are virtually nil that you will exclaim, “Watch out for that biped!” or “Watch out for that female !” or “Watch out for that redhead!” or “Watch out for that customer!” or “Watch out for that carnivore!” To be sure, in different circumstances, the bag-laden damoiselle might well be perceived primarily as a biped, a female, a redhead, a primate, a shlepper, a lady, a dress-wearer, a customer, or a carnivore — but in this circumstance, she is most importantly a member of the category pedestrian. “Pedestrian” may not be the word we utter, but instantly recognizing that she is playing this role is a quintessential act of thinking.
Much the same could be said about rapidly spotting, in highly diverse situations, the telltale signature of the protean concept mess. Here we give a handful of typical members of the category (and we urge readers to come up with others):
•a spoiled child’s bedroom, with toys strewn all over the place;
•a toolshed in which no one has set foot in decades;
•a plate of spaghetti accidentally dropped onto a white rug;
•a shoe with chewing gum stuck in the grooves on its sole;
•a china shop after a bull has been let loose for a half hour in it;
•books replaced at random on a shelf by someone who has just dusted the shelf;
•a complex algebraic expression that doesn’t yield at all to attempts to simplify it;
•a musical manuscript covered with crossouts and revisions everywhere;
•the discovery of a pile of important bills that one had forgotten to pay;
•having hired a close friend’s son who turns out to be totally incompetent;
•commitments made to two colleagues to meet them at exactly the same time;
•losing one’s passport the day before one has to set off on an international trip;
•the decades-long strife in the Middle East;
•a romantic triangle.
No courses are needed by any speaker of English to learn the many subtleties of this concept; in fact, for a school to offer such a course sounds like an utter absurdity. Every adult will understand these cases of mess-ness without expending any effort.
We humans excel at making fluid mappings between new situations and old concepts lying dormant in our memory, although we seldom if ever focus consciously on the many thousands of such mappings that we carry out each day. Just as consummate dancers are constantly demonstrating their virtuosity at making rapid-fire maneuvers in physical space, so consummate speakers of a language are constantly demonstrating their virtuosity at making rapid-fire maneuvers in conceptual space, where a “maneuver” consists in darting into just the appropriate nook in one’s vast stock of experiences and from it delicately plucking a highly apposite memory, overlapping in a deep and important way with the situation at hand.
Does Having More Concepts Mean One is Smarter?
If intelligence truly comes down to the ability to pinpoint the essence of situations, then it would seem that the larger and the more fine-grained the repertoire of concepts one has at one’s disposal, the more intelligent one will be. After all, each of us grows up in some culture, and that culture provides its members with a myriad of useful conceptual tools. Thus it might seem that one’s intelligence will be determined by the set of conceptual tools one inherits from one’s culture. The question then becomes whether someone who grows up in a culture that is endowed with more conceptual tools will be more intelligent — that is, more capable of rapidly putting their finger on the nubs of situations they face — than someone whose culture is lacking such concepts.
We who live in today’s highly technological, intensely commercial, advertising-drenched world are awash in a lush semantic sea rife with untold thousands of concepts that people of, say, two centuries ago lacked totally, and those tools pervade, and help to determine, our moment-to-moment thoughts. Consider, for instance, the following picturesque phrase that we encountered not long ago:
an ego the size of a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon
To understand this phrase, one has to be familiar with Sigmund Freud’s notion of an ego, with the notion of department stores, with the notion of Thanksgiving as well as the idea of vast long parades that march down large boulevards in big cities on holidays. In addition, one needs to know something about the gas called “helium” — at least the fact that a balloon filled with it will rise into the air. And lastly, one has to be familiar with the specific cartoon-character-inspired lighter-than-air balloons that are regularly featured in the Macy’s Parade each year, and with how huge they loom above the massive crowds that line the wide avenues of Manhattan each Thanksgiving Day.
No one could possibly have dreamed of a phrase of this sort 200 years ago. And yet today it is a very clear, run-of-the-mill phrase that most American adults would have no trouble understanding. But this is only one tiny example. Below are listed some concepts — just a minuscule subset of the concepts that our culture abounds in — the possession of which would seem to give us a substantial leg up on people from previous generations or centuries:
Positive and negative feedback, vicious circle, self-fulfilling prophecy, famous for being famous, backlash, supply and demand, market forces, the subconscious, subliminal imagery, Freudian slip, (Edipus complex, defense mechanism, sour grapes, passive-aggressive behavior, peer pressure, racial profiling, ethnic stereotype, status symbol, zero-sum game, catch-22, gestalt, chemical bond, catalyst, photosynthesis, DNA, virus, genetic code, dominant and recessive genes, immune system, auto-immune disease, natural selection, food chain, endangered species, ecological niche, exponential growth, population explosion, contraception, noise pollution, toxic waste, crop rotation, cross-fertilization, cloning, chain reaction, chain store, chain letter, email, spam, phishing, six degrees of separation, Internet, Web-surfing, uploading and downloading, video game, viral video, virtual reality, chat room, cybersecurity, data mining, artificial intelligence, IQ, robotics, morphing, time reversal, slow motion, time-lapse photography, instant replay, zooming in and out, galaxy, black hole, atom, superconductivity, radioactivity, nuclear fission, antimatter, sound wave, wavelength, X-ray, ultrasound, magnetic-resonance imagery, laser, laser surgery, heart transplant, defibrillator, space station, weightlessness, bungee jumping, home run, switch hitter, slam-dunk, Hail Mary pass, sudden-death playoff, make an end run around someone, ultramarathon, pole dancing, speed dating, multitasking, brainstorming, namedropping, channel-surfing, soap opera, chick flick, remake, rerun, subtitles, sound bite, buzzword, musical chairs, telephone tag, the game of Telephone, upping the ante, playing chicken, bumper cars, SUVs, automatic transmission, oil change, radar trap, whiplash, backseat driver, oil spill, superglue, megachurch, placebo, politically correct language, slippery slope, pushing the envelope, stock-market crash, recycling, biodegradability, assembly line, black box, wind-chill factor, frequent-flyer miles, hub airport, fast food, soft drink, food court, VIP lounge, moving sidewalk, shuttle bus, cell-phone lot, genocide, propaganda, paparazzi, culture shock, hunger strike, generation gap, quality time, Murphy’s law, roller coaster, in-joke, outsource, downsize, upgrade, bell-shaped curve, fractal shape, breast implant, Barbie doll, trophy wife, surrogate mother, first lady, worst-case scenario, prenuptial agreement, gentrification, paradigm shift, affirmative action, gridlock, veganism, karaoke, power lunch, brown-bag lunch, blue-chip company, yellow journalism, purple prose, greenhouse effect, orange alert, red tape, white noise, gray matter, black list…
Not only does our culture provide us with such potent concepts, it also encourages us to analogically extend them both playfully and seriously, which gives rise to a snowballing of the number of concepts. Thus over the years, the concept alcoholic has given rise to many spinoff terms such as “workoholic”, “chocoholic”, “shopoholic”,
and “sexoholic”. Here we have linguistic playfulness marching hand in hand with conceptual playfulness. The ancient concept of marathon has likewise in recent times engendered countless variations on its theme, such as “dance-athon”, “juggle-athon”, “cookathon”, “jazzathon”, and so forth. In a more serious vein, the concept of racism has spawned many variations, including sexism, ageism, speciesism, and weightism, and today there are words for yet other forms of discrimination that previously had had no identity and that were therefore difficult to pick out from all the background noise.
One doesn’t need, however, to engage in the act of coining catchy new words to benefit from the great richness of concepts of this sort. One can simply use conceptual broadening in the way it has always been done since time immemorial. Thus these days one often hears such sentences as “they had to make an end run around the President”, “the two missile-rattling countries played chicken for several months”, “we’re just not on the same wavelength”, “there’s a huge gridlock in congress”, “and as for the President’s stance on tax cuts, well, that’s still a bit of a black hole…”, “there was a chain reaction crash on the freeway involving 80 cars”, “those universities are playing musical presidents”. In short, the concepts that our culture hands us are constantly being stretched outwards by analogy, increasing their reach and their power.
Given that such a list of contemporary concepts that are “in the air” could be extended for many pages, and that most adults can effortlessly apply many if not most of these abstract and insight-providing concepts to novel situations that they run across, does this mean that as culture marches forward in time, people are inevitably becoming ever more intelligent, ever more capable of rapidly pinpointing the cruxes of the situations they face, and of doing so with ever greater precision?
Surfaces and Essences Page 23