A careful series of examples in The Way We Think demonstrates how the understanding of tiny linguistic units that are as innocuous-seeming as adjective–noun combinations — for instance, “a safe child”, “a safe beach”, and “a safe knife” — are fraught with intricate blendings of one frame into other frames. Fauconnier and Turner show that the analogies needed to produce or understand such phrases are in some ways extremely simple and in other ways very subtle. All these analogies involve counterfactual situations. For instance, the phrase “a safe beach” makes one conjure up (most likely unconsciously) a scenario of a beach where bathers are in some fashion threatened, perhaps by sharks, perhaps by a powerful undertow, and then the actual beach and the hypothetical beach are mapped onto each other in order to emphasize their difference. What could be simpler than a mapping between a beach with an undertow, and the same beach without an undertow? Such analogies seem trivial, and yet modifying the true beach into a momentarily false version of itself requires nontrivial mental operations.
Not only the adjective “safe” depends upon an unconscious blending of frames on the part of both speakers and listeners, but even the most garden-variety of color adjectives — “red”, “green”, and so on — are shown by Fauconnier and Turner to involve blends, as in such phrases as “red wine”, “red pencil”, “red fox”, “red hair”, “red light”, and so forth. More surprising yet is the fact that even an isolated noun may require an involuntary and subtle frame blend in order to make sense. For example, understanding the word “dent” necessarily involves a comparison between a norm (a pristine automobile fresh from the factory) and what we might call an “abnorm” (a car that has been deformed by an accident). Without a notion of how the car should be, and without the construction of a mapping between the norm and the “abnorm”, the concept dent would be incomprehensible.
Are Analogies Different from Blends?
In their book, through many dozens of fascinating case studies such as the ones just mentioned, Fauconnier and Turner convincingly document how rife our everyday understanding of our world is with frame blends, or, to put it in our terms, with unconsciously produced analogies between situations in which elements belonging to situation A (or rather, to A’s mental representation) may wind up being carried over into (the mental representation of) situation B, and vice versa.
An example described by Fauconnier and Turner as a blend, and by us as an analogy, is the importation of the idea of desk to computer screens. We describe this as a use of analogy, while they describe it as a conceptual blend or “blended scenario”, and they argue that, although it is based on an analogy, it is not an analogy. Their point is that there is a hybrid structure in people’s minds, some of it coming from old-fashioned physical desks, and some of it coming from people’s perception of images on screens, with the two being blended in people’s minds. We agree with this analysis. But what else is such a hybrid structure, other than an analogy? As we have shown in these past few sections, analogies are often blurry blends resulting from conflating two separate situations in one’s mind, mixing their ingredients, and in fact this is what happens in many of the analogies that we make on a daily basis, as Fauconnier and Turner show.
It’s not as if the word “analogy” were reserved for “uncontaminated” mappings. Indeed, as we said above, deciding which mappings are “contaminated” and which are “pure” becomes a subjective question, and it depends on the perspective taken on a situation. In order to bring out how and why the existence of blending is not an objective fact but a subjective opinion, we propose the following Copycat analogy challenge: “If aabc ⇒ aabd, then how should pqrr change ‘in exactly the same way’?”
One very appealing answer would be pqrr ⇒ pqss, based on the recipe “Change the rightmost ‘ letter’ to its ‘successor’ ”, where the terms “letter” and “successor” are both allowed to flex naturally in meaning, as a function of the new context. This may well seem like a perfectly “pure” answer, uncontaminated by any blend at all, and indeed gracefully fluid in its double slippage — and yet there is a rival answer that could be argued to be even “purer” — namely, pqrr ⇒ oqrr.
At first, the answer oqrr may seem completely off the wall, but if one pays attention to the curious feature of having a double letter at one end — a feature of both aabc and pqrr — and if one feels that this feature is so salient (this is where subjective judgments come in) that it cries out to be taken into account in establishing a mapping between the two worlds, then one will wind up making a mapping in which aa maps to rr, which induces a mapping of the c onto the p. In this new mapping, the concepts left and right are reversed — and then, exactly as in the xyz problem, which we so carefully analyzed above, the concepts successor and predecessor will also reverse roles (and once again, they’ll do so “on the coattails” of left and right). This very different double conceptual slippage explains the answer oqrr, which certain people will find very pure and pleasing.
This new answer casts the answer pqss in a completely different light. To some people, pqss, which at first seemed elegant and “pure and uncontaminated”, will now seem like a frame blend in which the concept of rightmost letter was rigidly imported into the pqrr world, where it is in fact an unwelcome intruder, and hence the analogy giving rise to answer pqss will seem inelegant and “impure and contaminated”. And yet there will be other people to whom the idea of paying any attention at all to the double-letter feature of both aabc and pqrr will seem like an unimportant, irrelevant, and pointless luxury, and to them the answer oqrr will merely seem like the precious self-indulgence of an over-intellectual mind. To such people, the answer pqss does not involve the rigid importation of a concept from one world to another; it simply “does exactly the same thing” in the second world, and it does so without the least trace of contamination.
We thus see that frame-blending is not an objective quality of an analogy. To the contrary, the choice between slapping the label “blend” and “non-blend” on a given analogy depends on one’s esthetic preferences, which are often unconscious, and in any case are incapable of being logically or objectively proven correct or wrong. Esthetic preferences are prejudices that lie deep in the makeup of one’s way of looking at the world; they are not facts about the world itself. And so the notion that there is a sharp and clean distinction between frame-blending (“impure”) and analogy-making (“pure”) is an illusion.
In short, to us, frame blends (or “conceptual blends”, in the Fauconnier–Turner terminology) are not exceptional analogies but typical ones; indeed, they are analogies that have the interesting feature that one can point out one or more aspects of the mental bridge built between the two situations that involve a blur between entities located on both sides of the bridge. As a result, one isn’t always sure which side of the bridge one is standing on. Our next example, much in the spirit of Fauconnier and Turner’s book, shows this clearly.
A Childish Frame Blend
Scott and his three-year-old daughter Ellie, on a visit to a natural history museum, are looking at a display of a family of antelope-like mammals called “bongos”, all of which have been taxidermically stuffed and arranged in a setting that resembles an African savanna. The bongos are standing near what looks like a shallow pond, although on closer inspection it is seen to be just a sheet of transparent plastic. A large male bongo is leaning his head down over the pond and sticking his tongue out, as if he’s just about to take a sip of water. Here we tune in on the conversation between human father and daughter:
Ellie: Oh, look at the poor daddy bongo… He’s so sad!
Scott: Why is he sad, Ellie?
Ellie: Because he’s very thirsty, but he can’t drink anything!
Scott: Why can’t he drink, Ellie?
Ellie: Because he’s dead!
Ellie’s unexpected reaction is most amusing. Let’s try to spell out the unconscious analogy present in her mind (and hopefully in the mind of any observer of the scene)
. It involves two different scenarios or, as Fauconnier and Turner would put it, “mental spaces”. One scenario is the intended effect of the display: despite the total immobility of everything in the scene, visitors are supposed to see animals on the savanna and to imagine them as living out their lives in a natural fashion, halfway around the globe. The other scenario is that of the museum display itself: visitors know perfectly well that they are not on a savanna in Africa but in a room in a building in an American city, and that the background scenes, showing other animals, some trees, and a mountain range in the distance, have merely been painted on the wall, and if they look carefully, they can also see that the pond is really just a sheet of plastic. But the paintings on the wall are analogous to a savanna scene, and the plastic sheet is analogous to a pond.
The bongo family, however, is at a different level. All the bongos are three-dimensional and life-sized, and thus, even when the plastic pond and the painted savanna are seen as fake, the bongos continue to be seen as real. And indeed they are real, or at least they are a significant step closer to reality than the other elements of the display, because these bongos were once alive. And so, even when the rest of the exhibit shatters into the falsities that it consists of, the bongos remain as somehow genuine and authentic.
Viewers will effortlessly map the artificial scene (with painted mountains, a plastic pond, stuffed bongos, and no motion whatsoever) onto a scene in Africa, and hopefully they will not allow any of the fake aspects of the artificial scene to travel across the analogical bridge and contaminate the far end of the analogy; that is to say, hopefully nothing from the museum-display side of the analogy will leak over and invade the African-savanna side. This desired way of looking at the display is often called “suspension of disbelief”. But one can imagine that despite the best efforts of the museum staff, such contamination might occur in the minds of certain visitors, especially the youngest ones.
And so when we hear little Ellie voice pity for the daddy bongo, we anticipate how she’ll reply when her father asks what’s keeping him from drinking. Of course she’ll say that it’s because the pond isn’t made of water — it’s a fake pond, a plastic non-pond. The poor daddy bongo! We can see it coming a mile away — Ellie will let the museum-display side of the analogy contaminate the African-savanna side.
And indeed she does, but in a way that catches us off guard, saying, “He can’t drink because he’s dead!” Now where did that idea come from? Only a moment ago she said that the daddy bongo was longing to drink. But how can he long to drink — how can he have any feelings at all — if he’s dead? If the daddy bongo is indeed dead, then Ellie shouldn’t be feeling sorry for him at all, because the whole scene is lifeless, desireless. In short, Ellie is having her cake and eating it too — for her, the daddy bongo is both alive (full of longing, and part of the African-savanna side of the analogy) and dead (insentient, and part of the museum-display side of the analogy) at the same time.
This is reminiscent of the dizzy Copycat answer xyz ⇒ dyz, where a keen insight is instantly followed by a thought so shallow that it feels like we’ve just suffered a whiplash. Such modes of thought exude such dizziness that they often will provoke laughter, and when this anecdote is told, it unfailingly does so.
Perhaps this strange, confused-seeming blending of ideas should not surprise us all that much, since children are constantly playing with all sorts of objects, pretending that they are something very different, yet knowing full well that they are not really that thing. Children live in this kind of superposition of spaces much more than adults do, and so they are used to the constant back-and-forth between two levels of interpretation of what is in front of their eyes. For a child at play, a wooden block can easily be a knight riding a horse and a wastepaper basket can easily be a castle that the knight is charging. Of course the child knows that they are really a wooden block and a wastepaper basket, and can shift into that mental space on a dime (for instance, if the wastepaper basket tips over and a few papers fall out of it and have to be put back in), but while in the pretend-and-play mode, the child has no trouble keeping that knowledge somehow compartmentalized.
But Ellie’s remark goes way beyond the usual shifting-on-a-dime that children standardly do; somehow it violates all expectations. It is as if the child playing with the wooden block and wastepaper basket were to say, “The knight is sad, because he wants to jump up on top of the castle, but he can’t!” If we were to ask the child why not, we would expect an explanation of this sort: “He can’t jump up there because he knows the castle has no roof and he’ll fall inside it and be trapped forever in it!” That reply would gracefully blend the wastepaper basket’s actual shape and intended function with the play world, where it is a castle. But the child throws us by saying, “He’s sad because his horse can’t jump at all — it’s just a stupid piece of wood, and anyway, it’s only the size of my hand! It could never jump to the roof of a castle!”
Frame Blends Are Analogies; Analogies Are Often Frame Blends
In this book, aside from the examples given above in the Copycat microworld, we have discussed many everyday analogies that, if one goes back and examines them, are easily seen to be frame blends. For example, recall the story in which a person pointed to the seat across the aisle in a train and remarked, “The chatterbox on the trip down was sitting right there!” Two frames were being conflated and blended, thanks to an analogy between two trains traveling on different days. More precisely, the directly visible seat in the current train was being mentally inserted into a different train that had been traveling in the opposite direction on a different day. In the interest of efficient communication, truth was being efficiently conveyed through a strategy mixing falsity, analogy, and blending.
Another frame blend occurred in Chapter 4, where we compared an eclipse of the moon, which involves sun, earth, and moon, to an analogous situation with a flashlight, an orange, and a ping-pong ball. What made this a frame blend was when we added the idea of ants on the orange watching the whole event in the “sky”. It became even more of a blend when we suggested blowing the scene up by a factor of a hundred million. The resulting image of a gigantic flashlight in outer space, which is pointing at a colossal orange (the earth’s size) floating in the void, on whose rind are standing stupendously large ants (a hundred times taller than Everest) staring out into space and watching with awe a huge, darkened ping-pong ball, is a quintessential frame blend.
Another frame blend we discussed was how one decides whether one wants to take a job that has been offered, by mapping oneself onto a friend who has a similar job or who works in a similar place. In the analogy one makes, one inevitably blends some aspects of oneself into one’s model of the friend, or some aspects of the friend into one’s model of oneself, thus producing a hybrid imaginary individual, neither fish nor fowl.
As we pointed out earlier, frame-blending is not by any means always a “contaminated” or “defective” way of thinking. Hypothetical individuals — mental blends between real people — are in fact common in everyday analogies. For example, we described Mark, who was reading a newspaper article about the swimming competitions at the Beijing Olympics, comparing himself to Michael Phelps, and wondering what he would have done in Phelps’s shoes (or lack thereof) — mixing himself into the 2008 Olympic games, feeling the water of the pool and the excitement of the competition, adjusting his age and athletic abilities in order to make the imaginary insertion work. In coming up with this analogy, Mark thus created an intricate mental blend of himself and Phelps.
For a more complex example of an analogy that blends frames, consider the case of a woman who, flaring up at her husband for an insensitive remark, picks up a plate, then puts it down, and says, “If I’d been my mother, I would have thrown it at you!” The implicit analogy links the current fight to numerous fights that the wife witnessed, as a child, between her parents. She is envisioning her mother in this room (but much younger than she actually is), married to thi
s man (or to a blend of him and her father) and who actually throws the plate. On the other hand, all the pent-up fury stemmed from the fight that just took place, so the hypothetical plate-thrower is as much the woman herself as it is her mother. The natural and inviting analogy between the two marriages, including their contrasts, is being exploited by the wife in order to shed new light on their current fight. By momentarily blending herself with her mother and envisioning this version of herself actually throwing the plate, and then by telling her husband about this scenario, the wife has at least managed to let off a bit of steam.
The Dream of Mechanical Translation
The act of carrying a book from the culture in which it was conceived to another culture cannot help but involve a large number of frame blends. Suppose one is translating a novel written in America into Chinese. Not only will all the people in it wind up fluently speaking a language that they don’t know, but all the concepts denoted by the words in the story have grown in different “gardens” in the minds of Chinese readers. We need only to think of what happens to such concepts as city, bicycle, house, store, rice, river, mountain, poem, writing, word, eyes, hair, and so forth, when they are transported (through literal translation) from the American culture to the Chinese culture. The central members of each of these categories, making up its “old town”, are clearly very different in China and in America. The upshot is that Chinese readers of the novel will automatically and unconsciously bring in certain Chinese preconceptions when they read the novel in Chinese. The places and the events they imagine will subtly blend America (where the events take place) and China (where the concepts grew). And the same thing happens, of course, in any act of translation between any two languages, because some parts of the original work remain constant while other parts are necessarily subject to distortion.
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