If one keeps one’s eyes peeled, one can discover collections uniting some rather bizarre bedfellows on signs that list prohibited activities and entities in public places. For example, in Palmer Square in Princeton, New Jersey, a sign declares, “No skateboarding, rollerblading, bicycle stunts, horseplay, littering”; in a park in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, one is warned: “No bike riding, pigeon feeding, dogs”; and on a beach near Bloomington, Indiana, “No glass, pets, or alcohol”.
It’s possible to enumerate all sorts of ad-hoc categories, such as those in the following hopefully provocative list (which includes a number of cases suggested by Lawrence Barsalou himself):
Items to save when one’s house is burning down; people one would like to drop in on when visiting one’s home town; people to inform when one’s father dies; foods that are compatible with one’s diet; things one can pack into a small suitcase; shoes that won’t hurt one’s blistered foot; items to pack for a picnic; objects one might stand on to change a lightbulb; things one could use to put under a table leg to make it stop wobbling; places in someone’s apartment where one can lay down one’s handbag; restaurants to which one might invite a vegan friend; clothes to wear to a “seventies” theme party; people to ask for advice about a good moving company; potential sellers of gypsy jazz guitars; activities to engage in on a camping trip; tourist activities on a trip to Beijing; relatively uncrowded spots to sunbathe in on Memorial Day weekend.
(We might add that the list itself is an excellent example of an ad-hoc category!) Any of the categories in this list could have become suddenly relevant or even important to anyone at some point in their life or even on multiple occasions; it all depends on what one is trying to do. The existence of ad-hoc categories reinforces this book’s thesis that categorization, through analogy-making, lies at the core of thought. Indeed, this phenomenon shows that whenever one is pursuing some goal (trying to escape from a burning house while grabbing the most important items, organizing a picnic, changing a lightbulb, planning one’s vacation, choosing one’s evening attire, and so forth), the lack of appropriate pre-existing categories in one’s mind is compensated for by the spontaneous creation of a new category.
And the category created on the fly is by no means a luxury, because there will be no chance of attaining one’s goal without it. For example, take the case of the earlier-mentioned category possible Christmas presents for one’s twelve-year-old. For the parent who conceives this goal, the brand-new category becomes a powerful filter through which the environment is perceived. As is the case for any category, this one will become ever more refined in the mind of its creator as time passes and more and more interactions take place with the environment.
Some Other Non-lexicalized but Stable Categories
This is far from being the end of the story, for in our heads, there are a vast number of other categories, just as non-lexicalized as ad-hoc categories but more durable, and of which we are generally unaware in daily life. They are not among the categories covered by the genius of one’s native language (though some might be lexicalized by certain languages), but they exist in the minds of many people and can be appropriately activated when the proper situation arises. And it’s quite possible for such categories to emerge out of ad-hoc categories that one has used many times. For example, ad-hoc categories such as activities typical of camping trips, objects that could be useful for a picnic, objects that can comfortably be carried around in a small suitcase are categories that have a tendency to become very stable in the minds of those people who are fans of camping, of picnics, or of traveling. More generally, and just as in the case of lexicalized categories, this kind of category can be evoked to help one confront a new situation — that is, to understand it, to think about it, and to make decisions about it. Such categories could be listed with no limit in sight, but the sampler that follows at least gets the basic idea across:
People who were once household names but who’ve been largely forgotten, and about whom, when one reads they have just died, one thinks, “Oh, hadn’t so-and-so died long ago?”; things one could swipe from a friend’s house without feeling in the least guilty (e.g., a paper clip or a rubber band); the “cousin” category of things that one could borrow from a friend’s house without asking permission, intending to return them very soon (e.g., a pen or a pair of scissors); the last item in the bowl (e.g., the poor little cherry tomato that everybody is eyeing but that nobody dares to take); people who, when they take the train, always want to have a seat facing forward; items that are in themselves cheap but whose auxiliary items are devilishly expensive (printers, certain kinds of coffee machines, cell phones, razors with replaceable blades); one’s former romantic partners with whom one is still friends; people whom one might have married; the children one might have had with such potential mates; the clothes one wears when one is feeling thin; items in one’s house that have been passed down from generation to generation; dishes that taste better reheated than when originally fixed; friends whom one thinks of as family members; those very old friends with whom one no longer has the least thing in common; friends’ children whom one watched as they grew from babyhood, and who are now all grown up; once brand-new technologies that have been rendered obsolete by recent advances (e.g., floppy disks, photographic film, audio cassettes, tape recorders, fax machines, etc.); our great personal plans that have not yet been carried out; the things one almost never remembers to purchase when one goes to the grocery store (salt, flour, toothpaste, shaving cream, etc.); people who made a major career switch in mid-life; main courses that one can eat with one’s fingers without being frowned at (French fries, chicken drumsticks, slices of pizza); rich people who live in a very modest fashion; people who have the same first and last names as a celebrity; people whose last names are also common first names; occasions where someone says to you “I’ll be right back” and then takes ages…
Does each of these categories exist in everyone’s mind? There’s little reason to think so. The fact that none of them has a standard lexical name is a cue that they don’t crop up very often in real life, and for that reason, it seems unlikely that these categories would be universal. On the other hand, it is probable that most people have come across, at least fleetingly, a number of these categories, although perhaps without being consciously aware of doing so.
Who among us has not, at some point or other, swiped a paper clip or a Post-it from a friend without asking, or a piece of paper, or perhaps a piece of chewing gum or a candy that was lying around? Clearly it would be unthinkable to swipe a friend’s pen or tie clip, let alone a pretty decorative item on the mantelpiece. And surely, now or then, you must have been annoyed at yourself when you realized that you forgot to pick up some salt or some napkins during the grocery store run you just got back from. How many of us feel perfectly fine about helping ourselves to French fries with our fingers, but wouldn’t dream of eating string beans that way? How often have you heard, “Hey, somebody’s gotta eat it, don’t let it go to waste!” in connection with the last olive in the bowl, the last slice of cheese, or the last piece of cake, which nobody dared to take for fear of looking discourteous? In some languages there is a standard phrase for this phenomenon — in Spanish, it’s “el pedazo de la vergüenza” (more often just “el de la vergüenza”), and in Italian, “il pezzo della vergogna” (both translatable as “the morsel of shame”) — but in English no such phrase seems to exist, at least as of yet.
As soon as one starts paying attention to categories of this sort, one realizes that many of them had already been created and were present in the recesses of one’s memory, ready to bubble up when needed, whereas others, though not already present, could easily be manufactured on the spot. Although such categories are usually too trifling or too esoteric to merit anointing with standard lexical labels, they nonetheless provide excellent evidence for the constant churning of categories in our minds.
Yes, There’s a There There!
We turn now
to analogies of a special type that people perceive not only effortlessly but wordlessly, and that will most likely seem so elementary and simple-minded that many readers will at first probably balk at calling them analogies at all.
A man casually tells his daughter, who happens to be accompanying him one evening as he is taking his usual commuter train home, “Yesterday some teen-age girl was sitting right there [so saying, he points to the seat across the aisle from them], and she blabbed so much on her cell phone that one couldn’t get one moment of shut-eye.”
What could be more natural than saying “sitting right there” and pointing at a specific spot? To be sure, the young woman hadn’t really been there — far from it! In fact, it would be a good exercise to list as many differences as possible between the two there’s, and then to think of a number of other circumstances in which someone might have said, “sitting right there”, and in which his daughter would have understood perfectly easily just what he meant. (For example, they might have been traveling in a bus or an airplane rather than a commuter train, or he might have pointed one seat ahead or two seats behind…) The chatty young woman had obviously not been sitting there in the strict sense of the word, but although the man was not telling his daughter the truth on a literal level, he was nonetheless telling her the truth on a different level — an analogical level — and that’s how we communicate all the time: with a minimum of effort and a maximum of very simple analogies.
This may strike you as an example of a lexicalized category — namely, the category denoted by the word “there”. But the word was accompanied by a gesture, which was crucial. The category that was retrieved in his daughter’s mind was triggered by the combination of a word and a gesture. Rather than the vast and vague concept that would be evoked by the word “There!” in the absence of any context, the man triggered in his daughter’s mind an infinitesimal subset of the full set of there’s that exist in theory — namely, just seats in a train (or perhaps a bus, a plane, a boat, etc.) that are across an aisle from where one is sitting (or across from where someone whom one knows is sitting, or was sitting, or would have been sitting, and so forth). By deploying a word–gesture combination, the man tried to indicate to his daughter the analogous spot, within the current frame of reference, to the spot where the chatterbox had been sitting. The spontaneous creation of this new concept — at once very general, since it could work in so many contexts, and also very specific, since it is so precise and so concrete — allowed the daughter to imagine very vividly the situation that her father had experienced during his train ride the other day: communication via finger-pointing analogies can be extremely efficient.
Her Hero Shows up in Her Office
In a situation that is “roughly of the same sort”, a young professor has been invited to give a talk at a prestigious research institute. To her astonishment, she sees, in the middle of the front row, an elderly professor whom she has long admired, and who she would never have dreamed would come to hear her speak. During her talk, he listens with clear interest, and at the end he asks a simple but incisive question, and even does so with a sense of humor. The lecturer is thrilled. When she returns to her own university, she meets with her graduate students in her office, and says, “It was fantastic! Professor X was sitting right there!” And so saying, she points to the empty space between two of her students, straight in front of her. And she’s quite right, because in a sense Professor X had indeed been there, even exactly there — but in another sense of course he hadn’t in the least been there. Nonetheless, the implicit analogy easily wins the competition against nitpicky logic and petty-minded precision.
Someone might say that what the urban commuter and the young professor did was not merely “roughly of the same sort” but exactly the same. True enough — and yet, in order to see that what they did was “exactly the same thing”, one has to ignore almost all the details of the two situations in order to extract from them one single shared essence.
Here and There
Here’s yet another situation of “roughly the same sort”. Two participants at the annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society run into each other unexpectedly at a certain press’s display, and one of them exclaims, “Didn’t we run into each other right here last time?” It matters little that the event “last time” took place some five years earlier at an anthropology conference in another city on another continent, and at a rival press’s display. Even so, it was indeed “here”.
And then, returning momentarily to our meta-analogies, would it not seem that this is “exactly the same analogy” once again? In this case, the unspoken background behind the word “here” is a specific display in the publishers’ showroom at a specific meeting, but the category blurs outwards from this specific publisher and meeting to include other publishers, other rooms, other meetings, other cities, other years, and so on. The conference participant unconsciously, and perfectly reasonably, assumes that her colleague will understand the implicit context, which plays the role of the hand gesture in our previous examples. The meaning of “here” in her sentence is thus just a tiny subset of all the possible meanings of “here” that might exist in theory.
The Slippery Slope from Shallow Analogies to Deep Analogies
The following two anecdotes will help shed light on the subtleties of there situations. A music lover arrives in a great city in whose largest cemetery his favorite composer is buried. Early one morning, as a gesture of homage, he makes his way to the cemetery, but to his dismay, he finds the entrance locked. He decides to walk around the cemetery to see if there is another entry. After 45 minutes, he finds himself right back where he started, but now he happily discovers that in the meantime the main entrance has been opened, so he can make his pilgrimage. That evening, he returns to his hotel around midnight, and, to his shock, he discovers that the front door is locked, and a circuit of the building reveals that there is no other way to get in. Luckily, another client shows up just then and opens the door with a night key, letting him in as well. Tired and relieved, he goes up to his room and sits down on the bed. As he looks at the door, he notices that on it there’s a small map of the hotel showing how to escape in case of a fire. He places his finger on the map and says, “Here I am at the locked main door!” Then, sliding his finger on the map, he runs it all around the hotel, retracing in his mind the circuit he just made on foot. Right at the halfway point he smiles, for this finger-circle reminds him of his walk around the cemetery that morning. As he finishes up his circular gesture he says, “And when I’d gone all the way around the cemetery, I wound up here!” His single circle has done double duty for him.
And now we come to a middle-school science teacher, who starts out by drawing in the middle of the board a yellow circle, then adds some smaller objects rotating around it. All her students recognize this as the solar system, a topic that they just covered in class. Then she says, “Today you’ll see that this same picture works for atoms, too. And so here [so saying, she touches one of the planets and makes a large circular gesture that applies to all the planets at once] some electrons are in orbit, and there [pointing at the yellow sun-dot in the middle] is what is called the nucleus.” This orbital analogy, which uses scientific terms, might seem to be more sophisticated than the tourist’s down-to-earth analogy, but is that really the case? Both analogies merely map a large circular gesture onto a smaller one using a single diagram, after all.
Far be it from us to suggest that the act of saying “Right there!” while pointing with one’s finger would be deserving of a Nobel Prize in physics, and yet such a banal act is remarkably close to the profound analogy that links the atom and the solar system. That discovery was made collectively, around the turn of the twentieth century, by brilliant scientists, both experimentalists and theoreticians, from many countries; among them were Hantaro Nagaoka, Jean Perrin, Arthur Haas, Ernest Rutherford, John Nicholson, and Niels Bohr. The images at the heart of this analogy were extremely elusive at that time, a
nd it took remarkable intellectual daring, supported by a large number of empirical findings, to come up with such bold ideas. And yet only a few decades later, the educational system had fully integrated these once-revolutionary ideas, and it is in this sense that understanding the analogy between the solar system and the atom’s structure is not all that different from understanding analogies that we all make, day in and day out, totally off the cuff, when we say “here” or “there”.
Analogies and Banalogies: Their Utility and Their Subtlety
It’s a common thing for people to convey their understanding of a situation that someone else just described by nodding and saying, “Exactly! That’s what always happens!”, or “I’ve often seen that before”, or else “The same thing has happened to me a bunch of times.” The blandness of such comments masks their subtlety.
Above all, these kinds of frequent and banal-sounding utterances are intended to convey the idea that in spite of the novelty, uniqueness, and complexity of the situation just described, there is nonetheless in it an essence that one is familiar with, and that although no single word or phrase that one knows captures that essence, one has already lived through such an experience, either personally or vicariously. One is saying, in effect, “Of course what you just recounted was a unique, one-of-a-kind event, but even so, I’ve been there myself. I can recall a number of events sharing the exact conceptual skeleton of your story, and so I understand deeply — in fact, perfectly — what you went through.”
Surfaces and Essences Page 25