Topic 3. What is analogy? Reading 1, pp. 3-33
Assumptions:
-No thought without concepts
-No concepts without analogy
Examples of concepts by analogy-making
- Band - a piece of cloth
-coloured strip on a surface
-smallish set of musicians
-a wedding ring
-a range of frequencies,
energies, prices or ages;
each of them may have (potentially) related
sub-meanings – types of wedding bands
(or chairs, shoes, dogs, teapots, the letter “A”)
- I. band, chair, teapot, letter ‘A’--- unlimited number of meanings vs.
II. prime number, DNA --- what is shared by all their members is
expressible precisely and unambiguously.
- Zeugmas = syllepsis (figures of speech, humorous effects) --- more than one meaning of a word is exploited in a sentence although the word appears only once.
-I’ll meet you in five minutes and in the garden.
-‘You are always welcome in my home’, he said in English and all sincerity.
-The bartender gave me a wink and a drink.
-The book was clothbound and unfortunately out of print.
-I go to work by car, and other times on foot. (go; Polish: jadę, idę; German: fahren, gehen. Polish: 5 grammatical genders marked on verbs in the past tense: robił, robiła, robiło, robili, robiły).
Each language has the right and the responsibility to decide where it draws distinctions in a semantic space. Resemblances between acts allow a language to describe them all by the same label (go, made) (L. Wittgenstein 1953 --- family resemblance)
People who share a common native language accept as natural and self-evident the conceptual network handed to them by their language.
Example: ‘play’
-Sylwia plays tennis, monopoly and violin.
-Sylwia gra w tenisa, monopoly ina skrzypcach.
-Mandarin: different labels for stringed instruments, wind, guitar and piano, drums.
The nature of categorization
Traditional view:
-Entities (dogs, cats, ...) --- unambiguously assigned to mental boxes (categories) (’dogs’, ‘cats’, ...)
Objective, observer-independent, reliable process
Hofstadter/Sander:
-Category – mental structure created over time that evolves and contains info in an organized way, allowing access to it.
-Categorization --- graded, gray, shaded linking of an entity (situation) to a prior category in one’s mind; gives the feeling of understanding, anticipating future events.
What analogy is not?
(1)Proportional analogies: one pair of numbers has the same ratio as another pair does
A/B = C/D 10/5 = 8/4. This is extended to words and concepts:
tomato/red = broccoli/green
sphere/circle = cube/square
Aristotle’s logical syllogism: All men are mortal
Socrates is a man
______
Socrates is mortal
Criticism: proportionality deals with quantities, analogy deals with concepts
Aristotle’s analogy - a type of formal reasoning such as deduction, induction, abduction
(2)Deep insights of genius – a cognitive activity for the chosen ones.
(3)Classification – putting things into fixed and rigid mental boxes (biology, zoology, ...). Labelled concepts: ‘dog’, ‘cat’, ‘contradiction’
What is analogy?
-The very essence of thought
-Fundamental and widespread cognitive process
-Below the conscious threshold
-An automatic process
- The triggering of memories by analogy – the essence of being human
- Zeugmas reflect the ubiquity and uniformity of categorization by analogy
(1)The asparagus tips and the potato dumplings were delicious.
(2)The asparagus tips and the after-dinner witticisms were delicious.
(3)The asparagus tips and the expression of surprise on Anna’s face were delicious.
-Non-stop categorization through analogy-making (from mundane to sophisticated ---- understanding sentences as non-zeugmatic (1) to fully zeugmatic (3). It reflects fluidity of thinking.
-Labelled and unlabelled concepts: “that time I found myself locked outside my house in bitterly freezing weather because the door slammed shut by accident.”
-It allows/predicts instant inference making – introducing new mental elements into a situation that one is facing:
- See a child crying --- the child is distressed
- See set table --- meal will be soon
- See a dog --- it may bark, bite, has a stomach
Mindversus Computer
-Distractibility of attention - Rationality
-Fatigue - Size
-Imprecision of sensory organism - Reliability
-Serious thought - Impossibility of tracing ideas
-Translation
- Our thought, though slow and vague, are reliable, relevant, insight-giving. Newborns with no past have to build categories from scratch (inborn categories?)
- Analogy works at all levels of communication
Conversation
(1)Need for a bigger military budget --- ideas --- sentences --- phrases --- words --- letters/sounds
(2)Need for a smaller military budget --- auxiliary ideas --- variation --- stock phrases --- syntactic patterns --- standardized words
(3)Bye-bye conversation at the Bayhs (gramma --- grammar)
Humans compare what’s happening to them now with what happened to them in the past --- incessant flow of analogies (e.g. ‘One should never try to catch a falling knife’ – huge, irrepressible forces against which one has no power and which would carry one off to one’s doom if one were to rush as to try to stop them)
Follow-up exercise:
Give your own examples of:
(1)Proportional analogy
(2)Insightful, ingenious analogy
(3)Classification
(4)Hofstadter/Sander’s analogy