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Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking

Author	Douglas R. Hofstadter, Emmanuel Sander
Language	English
Subject	Consciousness, Cognitive Science, Cognition
Publisher	Basic Books
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print (hardback)
Pages	578
ISBN	9780465018475
Preceded by	I Am a Strange Loop

Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking is a 2013 book by Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander which advances the thesis that analogy plays a starring role in all our thinking. They contend that our brains use a vast repository of analogies to categorize the constant intermingling multitude of ill-defined situations. The authors draw on results from studies in Cognitive Science as well as various linguistic examples.

Summary

Prologue - Analogy as the Core of Cognition

Hofstadter and Sander introduce the two central components of their book: analogy making and categorization. Their thesis is that all our concepts (equivalent to categories for them) owe their existence to a long succession of analogies made unconsciously over many years. The analogical thinking Hofstadter and Sander are interested in is not merely the, perhaps familiar, proportional analogies one finds on intelligence tests (E.g. East is to West as North is to South). Limiting one's view of analogies to this would suggest that analogical thinking is a highly regimented and rigid reasoning style that only works when there are a constrained number of elements, in this case, 4. Rather, analogy making is far more fluid, capable of handling cases such as "What is the Paris of the US" or "Who is the mother of punk rock." Further, analogy making isn't constrained to 'intricate machination that somehow links together far-flung domains of knowledge." Analogy making is, for example, ubiquitous in teaching among other areas. Our categories are the tools we use to interpret the world. For example, we rely on our previously established categories and reason from analogy when we enter an elevator we have never operated and infer that this elevator will behave like the other ones we have encountered in the past.

Chapter - 1 The Evocation of Words

When a word 'pops' into one's mind, that is a category successfully calling out for the mind's attention as being relevant to the current situation. In order for one to attach the label mother, for example, to some entity without thinking about it, one must be intimately familiar with that category. Hofstadter and Douglas give the following example:

One day in the park time, aged eighteen months, sees a tot playing in the sandbox and then notices a grown-up near her who is taking care of her. In a flash, Tim makes a little mental leap and thinks to himself more of less the following (although it's far from being fully verbalized): "That person is taking care of her just like my mommy takes care of me." That key moment marks the birth of the concept mommy as a generalized category with many members rather than just a singular member (Tim's mommy). On another occasion Tim, who has never met his dad, sees an adult male caring for a young child and wants to infer that this person must be that child's mommy. His inference is correct but it misfires as that is that kid's daddy. Tim's notion of mommy expands and becomes more robust after this correction and addition of the concept of daddy. One day Tim's mom's mom comes to visit and for a while he "has two mommies". Eventually, he realizes that his mother can have a mother. Tim makes an analogy without realizing that he has made one. As any concept grows in generality, it also becomes more discriminating, which means that at some point it's perfectly possible that some early members of the category might get demoted from membership while new members are being welcomes on board.

As our concepts grow, they become better able to handle non-traditional examples like surrogate mother or adoptive mother. These kinds of "edge cases" highlight the notion of concepts that Hofstadter and Sander are working with. Unlike the "classical conception" categories, that understand them to be sharply delimited by necessary and sufficient conditions, concepts and therefore categories are to be understood as being non-homogenous and have stronger and weaker members belonging to them. Concepts will sprawl out to cover conceptual space. One might appreciate that there is no one definitive way to cover conceptual space as different languages will have different approaches to describing the same situation.

Chapter 2 - The Evocation of Phrases

Just as words pop into one's mind so do phrases. Both are instances of one's mind recalling a relevant concepts, sometimes the label is a single word or it is a longer phrase. For example, someone might recognize themself to be in a "let the cat out of the bag scenario" or have a proverb spring to mend when in conversation. (Acronyms and chunking)

A mastery of a concept allows one to hit on the essence of the situation and bring to mind a salient link between concepts, that is, make a good analogy.

Chapter 3 - A Vast Ocean of Invisible Analogies

There are also non-lexicalized categories that we are not even aware of when they're being used. We construct ad-hoc categories when, for example, we are brain storming possible presents for one's twelve years old or form a list of possible places to go on vacation. We also probably have many categories we are unconscious of that we might be able to enumerate if we paid attention to them: things I would save in a fire; former romantic partners whom I am still friends with; people I've lost contact with. Most commonly when we say something like, "the exact same thing happened to me," we take ourselves to have pinpointed the essence of the scenario without ever naming it.

Chapter 4 - Abstraction and Inter-Category Sliding

Conceptual sliding is what accounts for us being able to fluidly make connections among categories. If, for example, I say "I grabbed a coffee with a friend" but they had tea we would still understand the essence of what is meant. When we tell a child to "watch out for cars" a very narrow understanding of "cars" would be very dangerous as they might be struck by a truck. The way we pinpoint a concept's essence is by abstracting away to a higher level to gain clarity on which traits are no longer salient and which remain. In the example about watching out for cars, it seems like what is salient is any object travelling at high velocities but not model/toy cars, for example.

"We all build up our knowledge by constructing categories, linking them together, and structuring them and abstracting. In general, neither novices nor experts do this consciously, but if one examines any domain at all carefully, one finds that it is filled to the brim with categories and interconnections among them, and that form a complex patter that it would astonish an outsider, who would have been tempted to see the domain in the simplest possible way." (242)

Chapter 5 - How Analogies Manipulate Us

Our mind sometimes delivers a mashup of two different phrases (e.g. she grew up in a working-collar town). What was happening "under the hood" was our mind was unconsciously deciding which category was best, most analogous. Indeed, this sort of battle of concepts vying for your mind's attention is constantly happening. These categories, that are latent in one's mind, are at the ready to spring up to one's attention when the moment calls for them. And, when a category is called upon, it determines one's perception of a situation.

"There are nearly invisible analogies that crop up in the tiniest acts of cognition and there are larger analogies that by starring us in the face, force us to take decisive forks in our lives; moreover, our categories selectively activated by out momentary concerns and our momentary obsessions, filter out perception of our surroundings and control our thoughts. In fact, it is the known that manipulates us at all time and in all ways. (313)

Chapter 6 - How We Manipulate Analogies

Analogies can be used to great success in aiding explanation. Often times, students will be taught a new concept in simpler terms by analogy to a system they are familiar with (e.g. atomic structures are like planetary orbitals.)

Analogies are also present when we are making major decisions. Though we certainly draw up lists of likely outcomes and pro/con lists, we tend to, consciously or unconsciously, use the models of what we have seen in our previous experiences to stand in for what we think is likely to happen to us if we go in that direction.

Novices tend to only focus on surface level features because that's all they can see. Experts can see through to a category's essence. (Sanskirt example)

Chapter 7 - Naive Analogies

Categorization involves taking a certain point of view, and once one has chosen a category for something in one's environment, that act tends to suppress the perception of all sorts of properties that are irrelevant to the chosen category. (427) For example, the discipline you study will give you a lens with which to see the world because it imbues you with a set of categories. You will see certain things, and therefore miss other things.

To summarize, we have shown that even in a bare-bones mathematical situation, people are very seldom able to ignore all of its superficial, concrete aspects and to home in on just its abstract formal structure. For better or for worse, people are influenced by how situations are concretely described, by their familiarity with similar situations, and by naive analogies that these situations evoke naturally. (429)

Chapter 8 - Analogies that Shook the World

Hofstadter and Sander, describe Einstein's achievements in terms of analogical thinking. The upshot is that, it was being able to make large leaps between concepts, rather than strenuous calculations that allowed him to make his breakthroughs in physics.

Epidialogue

The final section of this book is comprised of several hypothetical conversations between an interlocutor that is skeptical of the thesis argued for in the book and another that is sympathetic to it. This section serves to clarify common objections or misunderstandings one might encounter of the book's thesis.

References

Category:2013 non-fiction books Category:Science books Category:Cognitive science literature Category:Books by Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander Category:Basic Books books Category:Self