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.
Variations on the Theme of Random Killing
On September 29, 1982, a twelve-year-old girl died in Chicago, launching a news story that would reverberate in the news media for some time. In the next couple of days, six more people died of the same cause. Careful cross-checking by police allowed them to discover the common cause: containers of Tylenol had been opened, capsules had been coated with cyanide, and the bottles had then been placed on store shelves. Announcements were made on radio and television, and police cars roamed Chicago neighborhoods, warning people through loudspeakers not to consume any Tylenol. Aside from the five bottles that caused the seven deaths, three more containing poisoned capsules turned up in the search on store shelves. As the bottles came from different factories, the hypothesis of a worker doing the tampering at the factory was discarded. The remaining possibility was that someone had tampered with the pills after they had already reached the stores. The murderer, whose identity was never discovered, must have bought bottles in several different stores, tampered with them, and then reshelved them.
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…
But let’s jump upwards from consumer goods, further broadening our vision of the possibilities of random murder. One could stand on a lonely hill with a rifle and fire on random people in the streets below. One could strap explosives around one’s waist and board a crowded bus or walk into a nightclub or a busy marketplace.
From Tylenol murders to various types of terrorist acts, we have moved upwards in abstraction, maintaining only the conceptual skeleton of random murder. Each leap upwards in abstraction corresponds to creating a wider ring of possibilities around a common core, moving gradually outwards in semantic distance from the original event. This is the quintessential human
way of imagining novelties — starting with small variants, then working one’s way outwards to more and more radical ones, the discovery of which is much less likely. As is always the case when the answer to a riddle is given, abstraction seems very simple if one displays its fruits in front of an observer’s eyes, but that impression is deceptive. If the pathway meandering through the space of categories seems like child’s play, that is an illusion. When you have to make the leaps yourself, each one presents an obstacle, and few people will get far in the endeavor. The best proof of the difficulty of this kind of progressive abstraction is its rarity.
In the end, how far did the FDA go? It did not impose any requirements on how fruits and vegetables were sold, nor on other types of buyable goods, and so today, one still finds such items on the shelves of stores exactly as they were back in the pre-Tylenol-murder days — without protection. Why did the FDA stop at the level of medicines, and not go any further? Why did it arbitrarily draw the line here?
The reason is that the type of rising-abstraction semantic pathway that we sketched out above cannot be followed at will, and cannot be taught in schools as a sure-fire creativity technique. The number of ways a given object, action, or situation can be categorized is gigantic (recall Mr. Martin’s wineglass, tadpole home, and spider holder), and the vast majority of potential categories are simply not available to the conscious mind, even to a mind actively looking for new ways to categorize something. However, there are circumstances in which a useful discovery can be the fruit of a simple-seeming upwards leap. In such cases, the seeming ease of an act of mental agility not only is esthetically pleasing but also lets one escape from mental ruts and see things in a genuinely novel fashion.
Getting Off the Beaten Track
“Why does opium make one grow sleepy?” “Oh, it’s all due to its dormitive virtue,” proudly claims the candidate physician in Molière’s play Le Malade imaginaire, convinced that he has given the perfect answer to this question.
“Thinking outside the box” — who has not heard this mantra chanted dozens of times? It purports to reveal the key mechanism of creative thought. It suggests that whenever we have a mental block, whenever we get stuck in a rut, whenever we find ourselves trapped in a box canyon, whenever we have painted ourselves into a corner, whenever we are getting nowhere fast, whenever our wheels are spinning, whenever we are “pedaling in sauerkraut”, as they say in French, why then, if we merely know this appealing sound bite, it will come to our aid like a loyal St. Bernard dog, lifting us up
out of our foggy, unproductive mindset. Like a genie in a lamp, the magic recipe of thinking outside the box will liberate us from our cul-de-sac thinking and will open up fantastic new vistas. There is even an electricians’ union whose motto is “Trained to Think Outside the Box!”, which sounds to us like a contradiction in terms (unless by “the box” they mean “the fuse box”). Or then again, as another advertising slogan put it a while back, whenever things looks hopeless, just “Think Different!” This notion that creative thinking involves avoiding the beaten path will surely not catch anyone off guard, but unfortunately it is no more insightful than stating that what makes opium induce sleep is its “dormitive virtue”. Yet it is amazing how humble are the conceptual slippages that have sparked intellectual revolutions, sometimes small, sometimes large, sometimes on a tiny level, sometimes on a global level. Indeed, creative insight depends surprisingly often on very small but subtle conceptual slippages.
The Bottleneck
Jillian and a few friends set off for a Sunday picnic. They spread their tablecloth out in a lovely glade in the middle of a forest. Everyone is enthusiastic, the weather is perfect, and a light breeze brings a refreshing coolness. The table is soon covered with delicious things to eat. But then, as the bottle of carefully selected wine is fished out of the basket, Jillian realizes she left her corkscrew at home. There’s no one in view to ask for one. All at once, it occurs to Jillian that instead of pulling the cork out, she can simply push it into the bottle! It takes a bit of work, but in the end it works perfectly.
This solution is hardly the stuff of genius, but it is nonetheless a clever idea whose origin is worth looking at. It consists in the conceptual leap from pulling the cork to pushing the cork — actions that are essentially diametric opposites. And yet, what allowed Jillian to make this directional slippage is an act of recategorization — namely, she glided from the concrete, physical idea of pulling the cork out to the more general idea of accessing the wine, or to put it more abstractly, she glided from the narrow, physical idea of pulling out what is blocking access to the broader but more goal-focused idea of gaining access to what is desired. This is clearly an act of abstraction. In this situation, pulling out is a member of the category gaining access, and the recategorization allowed Jillian to imagine other ways in which she might gain access to the beverage. Jillian’s mental move is reminiscent of that strange ambiguity, mentioned earlier, of the English verb “to grow”, which can be used to describe not only changes where something increases but also changes where something decreases. And thus Jillian escaped from her box canyon by imagining the idea of reverse pulling, which amounts to pushing.
Such a mental slippage resulted from a new encoding of the situation, seeing it in a more abstract fashion than at the outset. Jillian realized that her primary goal was not to pull the cork out of the bottle but to get some wine; with this goal clearly in mind, she could reperceive the obstacle that was between her and the wine, and so she vaguely mused to herself, “If I can somehow slide this cork, whether inwards or outwards, it will slip out of the bottleneck, and that will give me the access I seek.” The seemingly paradoxical aspect of Jillian’s picnic dilemma is that the act of abstraction, which drastically reduced the attention she was paying to certain concrete aspects of her mental representation of the situation and which was thus a cognitive impoverishment, turned out to be the key step in finding a solution.
This phenomenon is connected to the fact that one is never able, in a single moment, to think of all the properties of an object (or of an action or situation). Rather, one is usually trapped by the more specific, concrete, and salient aspects of the entity in question, for those are what most obviously distinguish one category from others. For example, seeing the challenge of opening a wine bottle as a pulling of its cork tends to make less salient the idea that the cork is pushable. However, by the act of simplifying and thus perceptually impoverishing the situation, replacing the initial category by a more abstract one, the representation of the situation is paradoxically enriched by revealing characteristics that had previously been hidden. That, in a word, is the paradox.
The apparent simplicity of this creative strategy of enriching one’s perception by engaging in an impoverishing act of abstraction does not preclude it from being a powerful mechanism. It allows one to transcend an irrelevant point of view that has led to a dead end, which is the result of an unfruitful initial categorization of the desired goal.
Boxes that Hold Us Up, and Voluminous Bodies
The just-described phenomenon of recategorization can be seen in a psychological experiment known as the “candle problem”, invented in the 1940s by the German gestalt psychologist Karl Duncker, in which subjects are given the challenge to attach a candle to the wall. Aside from the candle, they have at their disposition a full matchbook and a full box of thumbtacks. The insight that yields the solution involves emptying the thumbtack box and then using some thumbtacks to affix it to the wall, after which the candle can be placed on top of it. Since the box is filled at the start, the challenge is subtle and not too many subjects find the solution. However, it is rendered easier, though by no means trivial, if at the start the box is empty and the thumbtacks are simply lying around on a table.
The main challenge in this problem is that of categorizing the thumbtack box not merely as a container but also as a potential stand. When the thumbtacks are contained in it, the box is spontaneously and naturally pe
rceived as a thumbtack box, and that is seen as its sole identity. At a more abstract level, one can perceive it anew, as a box, whose central function remains that of containing things. To reach the solution, a still higher level of abstraction is necessary: that of perceiving this same object as a stand. Of course, at this level of abstraction, any number of objects can be so perceived, including tables, chairs, shelves, drawers, and so on. In any case, the empty thumbtack box thus recategorized can be used in a new manner.
Discoveries of great import can result from just this kind of mental slippage. For example, if the old “Eureka!” legend can be trusted, Archimedes’ discovery of the “principle of Archimedes” in hydrostatics came from just such a shift in categorization. The historical accuracy of the tale may be questionable, but in any case it epitomizes both the subtlety and the richness of adopting a more abstract viewpoint concerning an object one is looking at, even if it involves ignoring nearly everything that one normally associates with it.
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