ANNA (all smiles): Well, Katy, I’m going to disagree with you once again, but this time I hope to boost your spirits, because you seem to hold categorization in very low esteem, and I’ll show you that such a negative attitude is unjustified.
KATY:Oh, really? That would make me happy! Please tell me how.
ANNA:To begin with, I hope you’ll agree with me that many analogies are anything but creative. In fact, I just gave you some examples — dealing with an unfamiliar staircase, doorbell, doorknob, shower, magazine, and so forth. We constantly make analogies on automatic pilot, without even noticing them, as effortlessly as we breathe. You’ll have to agree that many analogies are dull as dishwater. As this shows, categorization is far from being the gold-medal winner for blandness; analogy-making will give it a good run for its money in that department. But if I understood you rightly, it’s not in terms of dullness that you think the difference resides, but in terms of creativity.
KATY:Exactly. Your examples have shown me that analogies can be flat and uninspiring, but my point is different. It’s that analogies can be very creative, at least now and then, whereas categorization, poor thing, is never creative.
ANNA:We agree that analogies can reach the heights of creativity; in fact, I would argue that every creative act is rooted in an analogy. One gets off the beaten track by seeing that two things are “the same thing” in a situation where their sameness has not yet been seen. Good examples are given at the end of Chapter 4, such as where Archimedes sees a crown as being “the same thing” as a human body, in that both occupy volume, or where a computer’s mouse is seen as doing “the same thing” as a human hand, in that it can manipulate virtual objects that lie behind the screen. And in Chapter 8 we saw that great discoveries in mathematics and physics are rooted in analogies. The French mathematician Alain Connes declared, “The trips we take in the world of mathematics differ from trips taken in the physical world, and the main vehicle for such trips is analogy.” And the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once defined intelligence as “a moving army of metaphors”.
KATY:Yes, I’ve heard these ideas before, and in fact this is exactly what I’m trying to get you to see: analogies, being members of the cognitive aristocracy, have the potential to be creative, whereas humble categorization, bless its little heart, does not. And while we’re quoting authorities, let me quote the French writer Georges Courteline: “Whoever first compared a woman to a rose was a poet; whoever next did so was a fool.” That makes my point very well! The poet came up with a novel analogy between two entities, and this was a creative act; the other person merely took the category created by the poet and echoed the observation. It was a derivative act in which there wasn’t one single shred of creativity.
ANNA:That’s an interesting quote, but you interrupted me and didn’t let me get to my point, which is that categorization, too, has great potential for creativity; no law says it’s limited to the carrying-out of menial tasks. You quoted a mathematician talking about analogy, so now let me quote another mathematician talking about categorization. Henri Poincaré described mathematics as “the art of giving the same name to different things”. That is, it’s the art of discovering unusual and subtle new categories. And so, categorization should hold its head high; it should be proud of its ability to give rise to great novelty and high invention.
KATY:Are you joking?
ANNA:Not in the least! What makes a person, an idea, an opinion, or a remark original? Surely it’s the fact that it involves a categorization that departs from the norm! For example, we think of certain architects or movie directors or novelists or fashion designers as being original because they’ve come up with an idiosyncratic universe, which means their way of categorizing things differs from those of their contemporaries. Don’t you agree? Moreover, many opinions take the form of unconventional categorizations. Thus if I declare, “The current financial situation is a mess”, I’m putting the financial situation in the category mess. If I say “Mathematics is a game”, “Mathematics is a language”, “Mathematics is a tool”, “Mathematics is an art”, “Mathematics is a cult”, or “Mathematics is a passion”, what am I doing if not assigning mathematics to the categories of game, language, tool, art, cult, and passion? If someone declares that my ideas are a dead end, or that their very voluble chatterbox friend is a fire hose, or that video games are a scourge, or that some up-and-coming young comedian is another Woody Allen, or that 60 is the new 40, or that the new tax law is a disaster waiting to happen, or that the president’s proposal is just a band-aid, or that spell checkers are a crutch, or that a famous politician just caught in a lurid sex scandal is history, or that their other car is a bicycle, aren’t all these just various cases of categorization, some more and some less original?
KATY:Well, I’ve always thought metaphorical language could be very creative.
ANNA:To be sure! And so, if you grant that the examples I’ve just given are creative, you are also granting that categorization can be creative. All of this shows, Katy, that, unlike what the naïve prejudice suggests, not only are there scads of boring analogies, but there are also scads of creative categorizations. To sum up, then, your dichotomy between routine mental activity and creative mental activity fails to provide a criterion for distinguishing analogy-making from categorization.
Categorization is unconscious; analogy is conscious
KATY:All right, I’ll grant you your point: categorizing can involve discovery and originality, and isn’t limited to bland acts of classification. Be that as it may, one should still beware of confusing analogy-making and categorization. Indeed, thanks to our lively interchange, my ideas about why and how these two cognitive activities are so distinct are becoming much clearer, and I thank you for this gift. What I’m now clearly realizing is that categorization is by its very nature an unconscious process, whereas analogies are inevitably produced via a conscious process.
ANNA:I don’t know what would have led you to this hypothesis.
KATY:Well, let’s look at an example. If I ask you how the structure of an atom resembles the structure of the solar system, you can conjure up images of the sun and an atomic nucleus, as well as images of planets and electrons, and then in your mind you can let all of these things execute their intricate orbital dances. What could be more conscious than that? Or let me take another example. If I propose that life is like a voyage, then in your mind’s eye you’ll see someone’s birth and death as the origin and the destination of this trip, and you’ll see the person’s trials and tribulations as rough patches along the route. You might even see oases or green valleys as symbolizing the happier periods of life. All of this will take place consciously in your mind. But in stark contrast to that, whenever I categorize something, I am completely unaware of what’s going on “down below”. For instance, if I say “table” or “chair” in referring to the objects that I see around me in my bedroom, or if the noise in the neighboring apartment evokes the word “hullaballoo” in my mind, or if I can tell that the vowel in the word you just said is an “a”, I do so without having any understanding whatsoever of the mental processes that have led me to do so; it’s all opaque to me. Several times per second, categories just bubble up from nowhere, and I have no idea as to how or why they do so. You may be smiling at this thought, Anna, but how is it that I know that the word “smile” is the right one to apply to what I see on your face? This is a great mystery, in my view. I have no awareness of what is going on.
ANNA (gently smiling): There’s no doubt that one’s intuition tends to agree with this distinction that you’re proposing between analogy-making and categorization, but in my opinion, you’ve once again fallen into a trap that is simply due to the particular examples that you’ve chosen. All we need to do is choose some different examples, and I think you’ll soon agree that there are plenty of unconscious analogies as well as conscious categorizations.
KATY:I am most dubious of this. I’m not able to find any counterexample at all.
ANNA:Well, then, let’s see if I can help you. If you want some unconscious analogies, just look at Chapter 5, which is chock-full of examples. Also, that’s the central idea of Chapter 7, devoted to naïve analogies. In both chapters, so many unconscious analogies are described that I wouldn’t even know where to begin. For instance, take all the episodes described in which memories just sprang to someone’s mind out of the clear blue sky, cases where the person had no understanding of how this reminding occurred to them. Here’s the type of thing I mean. Suppose Margo slips on the sidewalk while rushing to her car in the rain and scrapes her elbow quite badly, and suppose that her telling me this one day brings to my mind a time many years earlier when I was hurrying to catch a plane and badly sprained my ankle as I recklessly dashed down a staircase. Well, all I can say about how such a reminding took place is that the two stories share a conceptual skeleton and that my hearing Margo’s story woke up my story, which for years had been gathering dust on some remote shelf of my memory. Other than that, I can say nothing about what went on in my mind. What took place here, if not the totally unconscious making of an analogy?
KATY:Your example is provocative, but I don’t agree with your conclusion, because the memory that bubbled up was a perfectly conscious one. You did indeed recall the old episode consciously, didn’t you? And so the analogy you made wasn’t all that unconscious.
ANNA:Well, yes, the retrieved memory was conscious, but the underlying process was unconscious, in just the same way as it is for categorizations. When I consciously recognize a table in a room or the vowel “a” inside a word, I am nonetheless unaware of the mental processes resulting in this categorization. Moreover, I was just about to give you some other examples of analogies that are so deeply unconscious that one doesn’t even realize one has made them, and as a result they can only be detected by careful outside observers. Among these are the notorious “naïve analogies”, described in Chapter 7. I’ll mention just three cases: division seen as sharing, multiplication seen as repeated addition, and the equals sign seen as representing a process followed by a result. All these naïve analogies lurk hidden in the mind of nearly everyone, and they can insidiously lead us to wrong conclusions of which we are entirely unaware. Psychologists, however, have succeeded in coaxing these bashful analogies out of the woodwork by designing and carrying out careful experiments.
KATY:Your point is well taken as far as analogies go, but you’re quite mistaken about categorizations. Whatever makes you think that such a basic cognitive process could be carried out in a conscious manner? The very idea makes me laugh!
ANNA:Well, you may be about to laugh on the other side of your face, because one can certainly choose to categorize various things, and at that point the act of categorization becomes completely conscious — every bit as conscious as the making of analogies that you referred to a few moments ago, such as one between an atom and the solar system, or one between a life and a trip.
KATY:Conscious categorization seems pretty unlikely to me, but I’ll be glad to listen to you defend the implausible notion!
ANNA:It’s not implausible at all! Here’s an example. Is Pluto a planet? Do you remember that quite recently an elite international committee of astronomers pondered that question, deciding in the end that Pluto was no longer a member of that category? Their careful deliberation, which involved a drawn-out, intense, and even acrimonious debate, was very clearly a conscious act of categorization.
KATY:Now, now, Anna — Pluto’s astronomical status is just a question of scientific fact, not one of mental processes. We’re talking about the act of thinking, and let’s not lose sight of that!
ANNA:But my dear Katy, scientists are thinkers par excellence! However, if this example strikes you as being too connected with science, then consider a legal trial in which the goal is to decide whether an accused person is guilty or innocent. Isn’t the essence of such situations an extremely deliberate attempt to decide which label — “guilty” or “innocent” — to apply to the defendant? I hope you would agree that guilty and innocent are categories.
KATY:I admit that if you were to ask me to name a category, I would be more likely to think of a noun like “hammer” than an adjective like “guilty”, but you’re right: guilty and innocent are just as clearly members of the category category as is hammer.
ANNA:Your observation is spot-on, and I’ll follow it up by giving a few more examples of conscious categorization. If a friend asks me whether a mutual acquaintance is honest or reliable or generous, I will start trying to recall various instances of their behavior and then I’ll consciously use these carefully gathered recollections as the basis for making a category assignment. More generally, any time we have a doubt about what something really is (and this happens quite often), we start engaging our mind consciously in trying to figure out what category to assign it to. For example, if someone asks me if a certain painting is impressionistic, or if a certain film is a horror movie, or if a certain song is punk rock, or if a certain joke is Jewish, my thoughts on the topic are bound to be conscious attempts to figure out what category seems to best match the item in question. Do you see what I mean?
Categorization is automatic; analogy is voluntary
KATY:You are a skillful debating partner, Anna, and I will concede this point to you, but I am far from down and out! What you have made me realize just now is that the question is not so much one of conscious awareness, but one of control. It’s just that I was a bit sloppy in formulating my ideas. The distinction I should have been focusing on was that of automatic versus voluntary, because categorization strikes me as being an automatic, involuntary process, while the crafting of an analogy is a process that one undertakes deliberately and intentionally. What I mean by this is that I have no way to prevent categorization from taking place, whereas I can certainly decide whether or not I wish to make an analogy. I’m the captain at the helm! I can choose to make an analogy, or I can choose not to pursue such a goal.
ANNA:I don’t see what you mean.
KATY:Well, let me give you an example. If I tell you not to think about a table, you can’t help disobeying me — the mere utterance of the word “table” makes you envision one! The process is automatic and irrepressible, and you can do nothing about it. Similarly, the categories that all the things around me belong to just jump to my mind unbidden, and luckily so, since without this automatic recognition process, I would be lost and disoriented, unable to make sense of my constantly changing environment. My categories are my guides to the world, and I can’t prevent them from being triggered. On the other hand, I can easily reconsider the analogy between the solar system and an atom and may well conclude that it is misleading, just as I can choose to dismiss the “domino” analogy for the Vietnam war. In such cases I weigh the pros against the cons, and I thereby decide whether or not to accept a given analogy, whether or not to prefer a different one. So you see, whereas I’m at the mercy of my categorizations, which just bubble up from who knows where, I’m in full control of all my analogies. I’m their boss!
ANNA:Or so you claim! In truth, though, there are equal numbers of automatic, irrepressible analogies. And speaking of things that “just bubble up”, think of how memories of analogous experiences from long ago just bubble up unbidden when strange things happen to us. Or think of all the analogies described in Chapters 5 and 7 of this book. I’m incapable of separating division from sharing in my mind, much as I’m incapable of separating dishonesty from dirtiness. And why do you think no one today would name their baby “Adolf”? It’s because of the irrepressible analogy everyone would make with Hitler, of course. No matter how cute Baby Adolf might be, everyone’s feelings about him would be contaminated by their feelings about the German dictator. This is because an analogy imposes a point of view on us, often without our being aware of it, let alone desiring it.
KATY:There you are certainly right. And this reminds me of the wedding that my fiancé and I recently attended toget
her. As we watched the ceremony, I couldn’t help but imagine him and me getting married. Each step of the way, I was seeing myself in the bride’s shoes; the irrepressibility of such imagery made me chuckle inside. And I’m sure it was the same for my fiancé, even though neither of us breathed a word of it to the other. That thought was the elephant in the room!
ANNA:It seems to me that you have clearly understood the category irrepressible analogy. And there are a myriad other examples of this category — so many that one wonders if they aren’t the rule rather than the exception. Once again, we come back to the fact that thought is all about using familiar notions to orient oneself in novel situations. Any story one hears will trigger memories, every conversation is built out of analogies following on the heels of other analogies, every perception involves analogies, and all these analogies come to us without our constructing them deliberately. If something very unusual happens to us (such as just barely missing an airplane), it will bring to mind some other unusual event that shares something deep with it. If something extremely commonplace happens to us (such as eating a pizza), it is interpreted by mapping it onto a mental structure that grew over years, as dozens, hundreds, or thousands of analogous events were superposed on each other. In either case, though, the mapping is an analogy. Without all these analogies churning unconsciously and irrepressibly in our heads and guiding us at all times, we would be completely unable to interact with our environment.
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