As evidence in favor of this idea, many people have pointed to what is now called the “Flynn Effect”, after James R. Flynn, a political philosopher who in the 1980s drew attention to the fact that all around the world, scores on IQ tests were slowly but steadily rising, at the rate of roughly five points every twenty years. This unexpected observation has been confirmed many times in many countries. What could possibly account for such a striking effect, if not the notion that human intelligence is in fact steadily on the rise? And what could possibly lie behind the steady drumbeat of rising global intelligence if not the constant proliferation of new concepts coming from all across the vast spectrum of different human activities?
Are we to conclude that because our culture has handed us so many rich concepts on a silver platter, it follows that a random individual today might spontaneously come out with off-the-cuff remarks whose perspicacity would astonish Albert Einstein, James Clerk Maxwell, Alexander Pushkin, or Mark Twain, not to mention Shakespeare, Galileo, Newton, Dante, Archimedes, and so many other geniuses? Without doubt, the answer is “yes”. Since people and cultures develop through the construction of new categories that sometimes are highly idiosyncratic and sometimes are shared by vast numbers of people, an individual who seems quite ordinary in today’s society might well have a great intellectual advantage in various domains over people from earlier generations, simply because human beings, rather than storing their acquired ideas or abilities in their genetic material and passing it to their progeny at birth (Lamarck’s vision of evolution was long ago discredited), store it in their personal concepts and in their shared tools and culture. Each person’s repertoire of categories is the medium through which they filter and perceive their environment, as they attempt to pinpoint the most central aspects of situations that they come into contact with. And since our conceptual repertoires today are far richer than those of earlier eras, a random person today might well be able to astonish brilliant minds of previous ages by doing nothing more than making observations that to us seem routine and lacking in originality.
Does this mean that geniuses of bygone times would do poorly on contemporary IQ tests? And if so, what would that imply concerning their actual intelligence? It’s hard to say what scores would have been obtained by historical figures on IQ tests, but the more interesting question is whether the intelligence level of geniuses from long ago has been reached and even surpassed by average people in today’s world. We believe the answer to this question is “no”, because the great gift of those exceptional individuals was that of being able to home in on what really mattered in situations that no one had ever understood before, by constructing original and important analogies that were built on whatever repertoire of categories they happened to have at their disposition. This is always a deeply rare gift, no matter in what era it arises.
Different Styles of Ascending Mount Analogy
Imagine some mountaineers who come across a very tall, sheer rock face for the first time. At the outset, only the very best climbers in the world can scale it, and even they do so only with extreme difficulty. But some of those highly talented climbers leave behind pitons in the rock face, which allow less experienced climbers to do some of the ascents. And then those climbers in turn leave behind yet more pitons, and after a few years the once-barren face is full of pitons, and now almost anyone with a modicum of experience in rock-climbing can scale what once was nearly unclimbable. It would be absurd, however, to conclude from this that today’s climbers are superior to yesterday’s. Only thanks to the great climbers who made it up without pitons or prior known routes can the average climbers of today negotiate the once-formidable cliff. The excellent climbers who blazed the first trails up the sheer face had numerous abilities, such as the skill of spotting promising routes, the intuitive sense of where it would be advantageous to place pitons, and the skill of knowing how to drive pitons into the rock so that they will remain reliable for future climbers.
We who are alive today are the beneficiaries of countless thousands of conceptual pitons that have been driven into the metaphorical cliffs of highly abstruse situations. We can easily climb up steep slopes of abstraction that would have seemed impossible a few generations ago, for we have inherited a vast set of concepts that were created by ingenious forebears and that are easy to use. And the set of concepts available to us is constantly expanding. Does all this easily accessible power, however, wind up making us smarter and more creative than our forebears?
Think of today’s electronic music keyboards, which come with a host of built-in rhythmic accompaniments for many types of music. Does having a raft of such canned accompaniments turn the instrument’s user into a deeply creative musician? Does having a slew of highly variegated typefaces at one’s fingertips make one into a great graphic designer? Do the myriad bells and whistles supplied by PowerPoint turn all users of that software into world-class presenters of complex ideas? Certainly not! Likewise, the fact that we can easily put our finger on scads of situation-essences by exploiting standard labels that have been handed to us by our culture does not mean that we could do so in a trackless, uncharted wilderness where no one has gone before.
Concepts have a special property that distinguishes them from physical tools: as opposed to being just an external device, a concept becomes an integral part of the person who acquires it. The mathematician Henri Poincaré is said to have stated, “When a dog eats the flesh of a goose, it turns into the flesh of a dog.” He was referring to how we internalize knowledge we acquire, and how it differs for that reason from mere tools, which remain separate from us, much as a piton is totally separate from a mountain climber. Merely having a library filled with books about, say, mathematics, fashion, or word origins does not make one a mathematician, a fashion designer, or an etymologist. What counts, rather, is the degree to which the concepts in those books are internalized by a person, thus enriching their conceptual space and turning them into a thinker able to make new categorizations and analogies. In contrast to the image suggested by our mountain-climbing metaphor, conceptual pitons are not just tools, but devices that enrich and transform people, allowing them to make deeper, more insightful, and more precise categorizations. These mental pitons are no longer just inert objects in an external cliff, but become parts of the person using them. They cannot be easily removed in the same way that one can take a piton out of a rock, because to remove a concept is to take away some of the person who owns it.
How would Albert Einstein contribute to contemporary physics, were he a young physicist today? What would Alexander Pushkin bring to today’s poetry? What would Shakespeare or Dante write if they were alive today? What would Henri Poincaré give to mathematics, and Sigmund Freud to cognitive science? What analogies would they discover lurking implicitly in today’s concepts? What depths could they perceive in the world around them, by using the tools of their new conceptual universe to interpret the surface appearances that they would encounter all around them?
Sailing Off into Outer Conceptual Space
In this chapter and the preceding one, we have presented an image of any particular language’s repertoire of lexical items as forming a “lexical galaxy” in conceptual space. We want, however, to convey a polyglottal image — thus, the idea that different languages overlap strongly at the center of conceptual space, and that as one drifts outwards towards the fringes (where concepts are more and more complex and thus rarer and rarer), each language’s coverage becomes not only sparser but also more idiosyncratic. The particular lexical galaxy associated with any specific language defines that language’s “genius”. And lying further out beyond each galaxy there is empty space — the sheer blackness of the untracked conceptual cosmos.
But things are not as bleak as that sounds. The fact is that a very large proportion of the concepts belonging to any person have no linguistic labels and yet are just as real as ones that have standard labels, such as “hand”, “pattern”, “green”, “dogmatic”, “twidd
le”, “sashay”, “but”, “indeed”, “living room”, “Jewish mother”, “play it by ear”, “sour grapes”, “tail wagging the dog”, “esprit d’escalier”, and “bait and switch”. This idea that so many of our concepts, often ones that we care deeply about, entirely lack names was saluted by American poet Tony Hoagland in the following poem.
There Is No Word
There isn’t a word for walking out of the grocery store
with a gallon jug of milk in a plastic sack
that should have been bagged in double layers
— so that before you are even out the door
you feel the weight of the jug dragging
the bag down, stretching the thin
plastic handles longer and longer
and you know it’s only a matter of time until
the bottom suddenly splits.
There is no single, unimpeachable word
for that vague sensation of something
moving away from you
as it exceeds its elastic capacity
— which is too bad, because that is the word
I would like to use to describe standing on the street
chatting with an old friend
as the awareness grows in me that he is
no longer a friend, but only an acquaintance,
a person with whom I never made the effort —
until this moment, when as we say goodbye
I think we share a feeling of relief,
a recognition that we have reached
the end of a pretense, though to tell the truth
what I already am thinking about
is my gratitude for language —
how it will stretch just so much and no farther;
how there are some holes it will not cover up;
how it will move, if not inside, then
around the circumference of almost anything —
how, over the years, it has given me
back all the hours and days, all the
plodding love and faith, all the
misunderstandings and secrets
I have willingly poured into it.
CHAPTER 3
A Vast Ocean of Invisible Analogies
The Rarity of the Word “Analogy” in Everyday Language
A central thesis of this book is that analogy-making defines each instant of thought, and is in fact the driving force behind all thought. Each mental category we have is the outcome of a long series of analogies that build bridges between entities (objects, actions, situations) distant from each other in both time and space. These analogies imbue the category with a halo lending it a suppleness that is crucial for the survival and well-being of the living being to whom it belongs. Making analogies allows us to think and act in situations never before encountered, furnishes us with vast harvests of new categories, enriches those categories while ceaselessly extending them over the course of our lives, guides our understanding of future situations by registering, at appropriate levels of abstraction, what happened to us just now, and enables us to make unpredictable and powerful mental leaps.
And yet, for all this, the word “analogy” is seldom heard in ordinary speech. Its rarity conveys the impression that analogies are unusual delicacies, like caviar or asparagus tips, or precious gems, like rubies or emeralds. The word “analogy” tends to come to mind only when we see someone explicitly link two entities that at first glance strike us as deeply unlike each other, and hearing the word makes us anticipate a feeling of surprise, delight, or revelation, such as when someone suggests a mental link between two entities as remote and unrelated-seeming as, say, asparagus tips and analogies.
If a politician were to compare Saddam Hussein to Adolf Hitler, everyone would call this act an analogy (not necessarily an excellent one), especially if a number of connections were explicitly pointed out, such as the way the two leaders seized power, the way they governed, or their invasions of bordering countries. The category analogy would light up in an instant if a physicist were to suggest that the molecules in a gas are constantly bashing into each other like a myriad of billiard balls banging against each other on an enormous pool table, or if a biologist were to describe the way that two strands of DNA can come apart and then rejoin each other as being like a zipper on a jacket. And if a journalist described a fan who hovered around a movie star as a satellite in orbit around a planet, labeling this an “analogy” would seem very natural.
All the above are fine analogies, but they reinforce the prejudice that analogies must always be spicy, picturesque, and unexpected, like those in the sampler below:
z… a
d… w
a… z+1
abc… xyz
abd… wyz
wing… fin
song… drug
to die… to part
sexism… racism
division… sharing
God… Santa Claus
to be born… to arrive
an animal heart… a pump
the atom… the Solar system
giving birth… running a marathon
creating a work of art… giving birth
leukemia… ivy creeping all over a house
an upside-down wineglass… the Eiffel Tower
global warming… the warming in a greenhouse
a moon orbiting a planet… a planet orbiting a star
a suicide bomber… a wasp that perishes when it stings
an animal circulatory system… a national highway system
immune system protecting a body… army protecting a country
a concept growing inside a brain… a metropolis spreading in a valley
an insect hovering around a streetlight… a moon in orbit around a planet
a chain reaction… dogs barking making other dogs in the neighborhood bark
the next-to-last letter of the roman alphabet… the second letter of the roman alphabet
humans surrounded by analogies they don’t notice… fish surrounded by water they don’t feel
Each of these one-liners is at least a bit provocative, thus matching the stereotype of analogies, but in truth, most analogies are unprovocative, yet are analogies no less.
The Swarm of Resemblances Buzzing in our Heads
The last line of our sampler puts it clearly. Like fish swimming in a medium of which they are unaware but that allows them to dart nimbly from one spot to another in the vast briny depths, we human beings float, without being aware of it, in a sea of tiny, medium-sized, and large analogies, running the gamut from dull to dazzling. And as is the case for fish, it’s only thanks to this omnipresent, unfelt medium that we can dart nimbly from one spot to another in the vast ocean of ideas.
In this chapter, we will concentrate on analogies that, unlike the stereotype, lack spice and do not grab attention, but are different from those dealt with in the preceding chapters. In those chapters, we showed how simple words and common expressions — lexical items — are constantly jumping to our consciousness thanks to “little” analogies that are found unconsciously and ultra-rapidly. These “analogettes” constitute the most basic and crucial acts of categorization in our lives. Their raison d’être is to allow us to relate instantly and easily to the most standard situations that we face, and also to allow us to talk with others about them. However, the analogies that spring up at every moment in our heads are not limited to those that slap linguistic labels on things.
When we go beyond the activation of categories having pre-existent verbal labels, we enter the realm of non-lexicalized categories. By this we don’t mean that it is impossible to describe such categories using words — in general, this can be done perfectly well, and that’s a blessing, since otherwise we would be unable to discuss such categories in this chapter! All we mean is that there is no previously existing label, whether it be a single word or a phrase, that bubbles up from memory. There is a lexical gap, in short, like the vividly painted verbal vacuum in Tony Hoagland’s poem. No
w if people had to rely on a special alternative set of cognitive mechanisms every time they ran up against a lexical gap, then the centrality of categorization’s role in cognition would be cast in grave doubt. However, the existence of non-lexicalized categories reinforces our thesis that categorization through analogy-making is the universal fabric of cognition.
Categories that We Construct on the Fly and Juggle with
We rely constantly on concepts that have no name. Words and concepts are two different things; indeed, linguists classically distinguish between a linguistic label and the thing to which the label refers. This distinction overlaps the distinction made by psychologists between the mental lexicon (our storehouse of labels) and semantic memory (our storehouse of concepts). If one were to fail to make this distinction, then there would be no meaning to a phrase such as “the meaning of a word”. The distinction between a label and a category is crucial, and hopefully is clear. Although many situations trigger concepts designated by standard words or phrases, we also face many situations for which we have no ready verbal label. However, this doesn’t mean that such situations are less categorizable than ones for which a standard word or phrase exists.
Every day, without reflection, we construct a fair number of fresh new concepts, most of which we wind up never thinking about again because they are applicable only in a specific, one-of-a-kind context. The psychologist Lawrence Barsalou launched the study of such categories, which arise when one suddenly finds oneself driven to attain some unfamiliar new goal. He gave them the name of “ad-hoc” categories (meaning “spontaneous” or “improvised”) because they are created on the fly in the service of the new goal. For instance, the category possible Christmas presents for one’s twelve-year-old is an ad-hoc category that might count among its members such items as a backpack, a compact disk, a pair of running shoes, a video game, a trip to an amusement park, a dinner in a favorite restaurant, a flight in a balloon, and so forth, despite the fact that, without knowledge of this special connection among them, the items in this list might seem to have nothing in common.
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