Surfaces and Essences

  Oppenheimer, Frank, 275

  Oppenheimer, Robert, 275, 507

  opposite meaning: produced through biplans, 268; produced through conceptual-proximity slippage errors, 276–277

  Orwell, George, 57

  —P—

  “pacifier”, semantic components of, unheard by toddler, 86

  Pac-Man, obsession with, 303–305

  pantheons, 219–220

  paradoxes stemming from the alleged dominance of the superficial in retrieval, 341–344

  parallels between parallels, Maxwell’s love of, 502

  Paris: being Paris, 522; genericity of, to French people, 378; growth of, over centuries, 61; métro stations in, 215, 377–379; as tourist mecca versus book-writing locale, 163; of the United States, 16, 378; as venue of Marie Antoinette’s dizzy remark, 358

  parking places in San Francisco: beauty of, 296–297; surprising availability of, 327–328

  particle–antiparticle annihilation, 482

  parts hidden inside wholes, 86–93

  Pascal, Blaise, 101, 102

  past, as key to understanding the present, 20, 23

  pasta, expertise in, 243–244

  Pasteur, Louis, 300

  patent clerk, Third Class, 457, 460, 463, 470

  “pathological” functions, 392

  “Patsy is a pig”, see metaphors, “pig”

  pattern, as monolithic concept in English for which French has no single word, 81–82

  patterns in discourse space, 69–76

  patterns in multiplication tables of groups, 446–447

  “peaks” of concepts poking out above clouds, 50, 52

  Pearl Harbor, as category, 298

  pedaling in sauerkraut, 248

  pedestal, shared, as conceptual skeleton of two different word problems, 433–434

  peel, semantic halo surrounding, 126, 270–271

  people, analogically conflated, 181, 224–225, 275

  perception: context-biased nature of, 299; dependency on concepts, 171; without concepts, 172, 315

  perception of grammatical situations, 69–70

  permutations, successive, as giving rise to groups, 446

  personal celebrities, 222–223

  Peter-Defare, Evelyne, 259

  Peter miswriting the year every January, 148–150, 174

  Phædrus, 112

  Phædrus, 522–523

  Phelps, Michael, 154–155, 367

  philosophy of life, courtesy of Pac-Man, 303–305

  phonetic proximity, role of in speech errors, 265

  “phonon” as name for sound quantum, 459

  photoelectric effect: behavior predicted by Einstein, 460–463; discovered by Hertz, 460; Einstein’s predictions confirmed by Millikan, 461; merely an afterthought in Einstein’s 1905 light-quantum paper, 460, 462

  “photon” as name for light quantum, 459, 461, 462, 482

  phrase choice constrained by sentence choice, 26

  phrases: blended together, 259–265; retrieved by analogy, 93–98

  physical world, understood via naïve analogies to computer world, 402–407

  physicists: perception of equations by, 410–411; stereotype of, 451–452

  physics: naïve analogies in, 410–411; seen as deductive, axiomatic discipline, 452; seen as generalization of mechanics, 467–468

  physics problems, as perceived by novices versus experts, 342

  physics thinking/political thinking analogy, 337

  π, 302, 409, 410, 413, 444, 498

  pianist: striking one wrong key, 270–271; striking two keys at once, 263, 266

  “pig”, metaphorical use of, 228–232

  pinball-machine obsession, 301

  ping-pong, thanks to analogies, in discovery process, 500

  pinpointing of essence, see essence-spotting

  Pisa: Galileo’s use of the tower of, 492, 493; prior to its famous tower, 319, 468; with tower not yet leaning, 472: with tower starting to lean, 482

  piton-placing as metaphor for concept creation, 131

  pizza consumption, as generic bland event that does not trigger remindings of specific events, 158–159

  Planck, Max, 456–458, 460–461; disdain for Einstein’s light quanta, 460, 461, 463; likened to thirsty horse, 457; pardoning Einstein’s sins, 461; skeptical of existence of atoms, 460

  Planck’s constant h, 456, 459

  planet, as category requiring long deliberation to decide about membership in, 60, 512, 514, 528

  plans, blending of, see biplans plastic card as a key, 254

  plate, as category lacking relationships among non-parts, 518–519

  plate-throwing woman, frame blend by, 367

  Plato: of freemasonry, the, 222; objectivist vision of, 190, 522–523; warning of analogy’s slipperiness, 21

  Platonic concepts, hopefully precise laws of, 56, 58

  “play”, zeugmatically exploited, 10–12

  pluralization: of Bible, 220; of famous people, 221–222, 254, 297; of friends or relatives, revealed by speech errors, 224; of friends, via strong resemblance, 224; of Hitler, 335; of Jeff, 223; of Mecca, 220; of Mommy, 34–35; of Moon, 44; of Munich, 335; of Pantheon, 219–220; of Pope, 219; of September 11th, 297–298; of signature-botching, 149; of a specific wine, 244

  plurals of compound nouns, 87

  Pluto, debate over its status as planet, 60, 512, 514, 528

  poem learned by rote as member of category boat on tracks, 522

  poems in the text: “Arizona Ants” (Kellie Gutman), 160, 381; “The Fox and the Grapes” (Benserade), 112; “The Fox and the Grapes” (La Fontaine), 112; “The Gardener’s Daughter” (Tennyson), 397; “Karnak Caps”, (Kellie Gutman), 160, 381; “La cigale et la fourmi” (La Fontaine), 388; “Ode to Constraints” (James Falen), 315; “Psalm XXX” (Milton), 397; “There Is No Word” (Tony Hoagland), 133

  Poincaré, Henri, 132; on flesh of geese and of dogs, 132; letter of reference for Einstein by, 501; on mathematical thinking, 439–440, 509; sudden flash of inspiration of, 16

  pointless analogies, see analogies, purposeless

  Poirot-Delpech, Bertrand, 373

  political analogies, 17, 331–337

  Polya, George, 507

  polynomials: over finite fields, 447–448; imaginary numbers in, 448; search for general solution formula for, 445

  pool table/ideal gas explanatory analogy, 457

  Pope: of atheism, 219; pluralization of, 219; as salient entity used in caricature analogies, 320; of search engines, 220

  positron (= anti-electron), 482

  potential analogies, see semantic halos

  potential energy, 479–481

  pressures: to categorize in real time, 258, 261; in creative translation, 371, 380–382; in Einstein’s mind, 477, 480–481, 485; guiding caricature analogies, 323; inducing fluid conceptual slippages in Copycat domain, 350–351, 352, 354–357; to make equations reflect cause and effect, 407–411; pushing for creative analogies, 300–301, 355–356, 458, 477, 480–481; see also cognitive dissonance

  prime numbers: generalized to “prime groups”, 449; generalized to “prime knots”, 449; generalized to primes inside rings, 448

  primitive needs as primeval forces, 314

  “prison”, metaphorical use of, 228–229

  prison of the known, Krishnamurti’s putative 313–315

  privileged category of each entity, 190, 435

  probabilities, as hinted by strengths of analogies, 308

  problem-solving: led astray by miscategorization, 293–295; mistaken for the raison d’être of analogy-making, 283, 285

  Procrustes, bed of, 144–145, 160

  productive suffixes “-holic”, “-thon”, and “-ism”, 129

  professions, hierarchical structuring of, 242–243

  proper nouns, pluralization of, 217–223

  proportional analogies, 15–16; as gleaming jewels, 16; unhelpful in devising caricature analogies, 323–324; as unnatural view of most analog
ies, 144–145

  proportionality/analogy proportional analogy, 15

  proportionality to mass: of fictitious forces, 488; of gravitational forces, 489–491

  prototype theory versus exemplar theory of concepts, 57

  proverbs: families of, 109; as filters through which to understand situations, 101, 102; as names of categories, 100–102; non-opacity of, 106; objective reality of instances of, 110, 111, 132–133; overly general interpretations of, 107; recognized in situations, 174, 188; retrieval of, 104–105, 110; scope of, 106–109; surface versus essence of, 106–109; use of, as an act of analogy-making, 100; use of, as an act of categorization, 100

  pseudo-proverbs, 105, 106

  psychic trauma as a notion foreseen in the proverb “Once bitten, twice shy”, 104

  psychological pressures leading one to map oneself analogically onto others, 153, 154–155

  “psychology does not recapitulate etymology”, 86

  public categories, 100

  “pull no stops unturned”, as quintessential lexical blend, 262–264

  pumpkins, pastries, plows, and pigs, 66

  puns under attack, caricature analogy of, 319

  “pure” versus “uncontaminated” analogies, 363–364, 366–367

  Pushkin, Alexander Sergeevich, 130, 132; constraints in poetry of, 315; of feminism, the, 222

  putting finger on a situation’s essence, see essence-spotting

  Pythagoras, as a category, 221

  —Q—

  quadratic equation: broken up into six cases, 441; formula(s) for, 438, 441

  quadrilaterals, classification of, 233–238, 255

  quality control, as explanatory analogy, 329

  quantum of energy: of electromagnetic wave, 459; of heat, 461; of sound, 461; of vibrating atom, 456–457, 461

  quartic equation: group of symmetries of its solutions, 446; strange formula for, 445

  “quatre-vingts” as translation of “four score”, 370–371

  quintic equation: search for formula for solutions of, 445–446; unsolvability via radicals proven for, 446

  quotation marks: as a convention of this book for words, 34, 110; for honorary category members, 44, 64–65; second-order, 65

  “quote unquote”, as way of indicating metaphorical usage, 64–65

  quotient groups, 448–449

  quotient skyscrapers, 448

  —R—

  Raban, Jonathan, 284

  random murder as conceptual skeleton, 248

  random resemblances constantly noticed, 284

  randomly buzzing interplanetary bumblebee, see magical angel

  rapid right-on retrieval: as the core of cognition, 127; as the essence of intelligence, 125–126; as needed for survival, 79, 83, 505–506; see also essence-spotting

  rationalization and sour grapes, 115–118

  read ⇒ write conceptual slippage, 276–277

  reading, as triggering ideas in a mind, 376–377

  ready-made sentences as categories, 98–99

  Reagan, Nancy, 358

  reality of members of abstract categories, 110, 111, 132–133

  reasoning, as opposed to analogy-making, 333; see also logic, analogic versus logic

  recategorization of situations, 73, 249–252, 327–328

  reclothing a stripped-down essence, 153

  Recorde, Robert, 408

  reduction ad absurdum technique in mathematics, 450

  redwood trees, trip to, 310–312

  refinement of categories, as reaching a limit, 83

  relationships among parts: as crucial for analogy-making, 517–518; as crucial for categorization, 518–519

  relativity, Galilean, principle of, 466–468, 485, 486, 492

  relativity, general: analogies at root of, 491–495, 499; attempts at, 490–491; experimental confirmation of, 496; goals of, 486–488; rotating disk in, 497–498

  relativity, special, 361; analogy at root of, 467–468

  remindings: as crucial for survival, 172–173; as a deep mystery of cognition, 159–166, 354; as due to analogousness, 18, 30, 336; idiosyncratic nature of, 525–526; induced by traumatic experience, 225; mediated by faces, 181–184; mediated by identical encodings, 173; mediated by many diverse cues, 171; opacity of mechanisms of, 511; revealing the existence of unsuspected categories, 168; seeming not to need explanation, 18; triggered by simple visual analogies, 169–170

  repeated addition: as crux of multiplication, 412–416; as way of solving multiplication problems, 427–429

  reporter #1/reporter #2 romantic analogy, 305–306, 308

  retrieval of memories, see remindings, triggering

  reversal: by Einstein, 474, 482–483; as potential source of humor, 280; role of, in creativity, 356–357, 363–364, 371

  rhyme, preservation of, in poetry translation, 381

  rich and poor zones of a language in conceptual space, 82–83

  Richard, Jean-François, 294–295

  Riemann, Bernhard, 498

  “right” versus “wrong”: in analogy-making, 16; in Copycat domain, 350–351, 352; see also esthetics

  Ringfinger, Renate, 464

  rings, as homes of new types of numbers, 448

  ripples, see waves

  Rips, Lance, 390

  rival analogies: in real-time competition, 260–278; in wartime decision-making, 333

  rock-climbing as metaphor for creative thinking, 131

  rock music, category in the mind of a classical-music lover, 241

  role reversal in Grand Canyon episode, 163, 165

  Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 90, 275

  roots of polynomials, see solutions of polynomials

  rope, speaking of, in the house of the hanged, 104, 311

  Rosch, Eleanor, 55, 345, 436

  Rossi, Mario, 259

  rotating disk/non-Euclidean geometry analogy, 498

  rotations of a cube, as number-like entities, 446–447; see also groups

  royalty statement triggering analogies, 153–154

  Ruffini, Paolo, 446

  rule of thumb separating analogy-making and categorization, 515

  Rumelhart, David, 259

  Russian language, 9–10, 12, 368; Anna’s dream in, 504; “but” in, 74

  Ruth, Babe: of bank robbers, the, 222; 1927 Yankees minus, 468

  Ruth, Dan’s image of, contaminated by Jeanine, 225

  Rutherford, Ernest, 143

  —S—

  sabbatical year, zooming in on details of, 50

  Sagan, Françoise, obituary of, as translation challenge, 373–377

  salience: of any feature as subjective, 363–364; of deep features to experts, 342–344

  salient features dominate in memory retrieval, 342

  salsa: debugging of technique in, 403–404; the pope of, 219

  salt/sugar confusion as categorization error, 102, 527

  Sander, Emmanuel: as error collector, 259; explaining humps and bottles to his son, 198–200; falling momentarily for categories = boxes, 436; making analogy between co-author’s two blue station wagons, 283; as one-time Pac-Maniac, 303–305; smiling with joy at finally finishing book :), 575; taking coffee break, 185, 317; transculturated to San Francisco, 327–328

  Sander, Mica, 40, 198–200, 295

  Sander, Talia, 17, 39, 40, 43

  Sander, Tom, 40, 126, 233–234, 236

  Sandwich, Earl of, the fourth, 214

  sandwiches: “A–B–A” form of, 215–216; abstraction of, 214–216; of appointments, 216; blurry boundaries of category, 214–216; bread role in, 214–216; edible, 214, 216; horizontality of, 215; meat role in, 214–216; in Paris métro, 215; in physics, 215–216; of rhymes; 215; sexual, 215; symmetry, as unclear criterion in, 215–216; transistors as, 215; walking, 214–215

  sandwichology, burning questions of, 215–216

  San Francisco, parking in, 296–297, 327–328

  Santa Clara Valley, metamorphosis of, 397

  Sapir–Whorf effec
t, 123–124; cultural version of, 128–131

  Saturn’s rings, waves in the medium of, 213

  savanna, 71, 364–366

  Schank, Roger, 104, 173

  schemas: as another name for categories, 336; office visit as an example of, 336–337; versus concrete concepts, 336–337

  Schrödinger, Erwin, 453

  Schweitzer, Albert, face of, 183–184

  science-fiction story as core of a category, 524–526

  scientific discoveries: boldness of analogies in, 360–361; mediated by seeing two phenomena as bagels from the same batch, 310

  Scott/Thor facial resemblance as an analogy, 181–182

  search engines, limited to surface, 115

  search, virtual, frame-blended with physical search, 402, 405

  secret agent in tunnel category, 167–168

  self-monitoring by speakers, 72–73

  Selvinsky, Il’ya L’vovich, poem by, 9–10

  semantic approximations, 39–43, 270–278

  semantic halos: errors caused by, 270–278; as sources of latent analogies, 271, 273

  semantic memory, 137

  semantic space/nebula analogy, 119–120

  semantic space, zones in, 10, 78–81, 83–84, 118–124, 132; see also conceptual spaces

  senses, physiological, and analogy-making, 286–288

  sentence choice constrained by idea choice, 26

  sentences: blended together, 268–269; ready-made, 98–99

  September 11th: as category, 297; imposing itself on perceptions of events, 31, 297–298; pluralization of, 297–298

  sexist default assumption, 293

  sexist language and marking, 193–195

  shadow: due to absence of light, 204–206; due to absence of mysterious particles, 208; due to absence of rain, 205, 207; due to absence of snow, 205–206; due to absence of vehicles, 207; due to absence of young males, 208; gradual abstraction of, 204–209; in late afternoon, 205; of Nazism, 208

  Shakespeare, William, 130, 132; of advertising, the, 222

  shallow depth, 346

  shallower and deeper aspects of concepts, 203–204

  shallow features, experts’ blindness to, 343–344

  sharing: contrasted with measuring, 420–426; as key concept in division, 419–426; marked sense of, 419; as necessarily reducing, 419

  shells in a conceptual space, 81

  shoes: of Albert Einstein, 455; left versus right, 427

  showers, used by analogy, 23, 507, 509

  sibling, concept of in various languages, 77

  silver platters, analogies handed to the reader on, 160, 170