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Analogy as the fuel and fire of thinking
Pulitzer-Prize winning author Douglas Hofstadter and French psychologist Emmanuel Sander have put forward a simple yet profoundly complex thesis: Analogy is the basis for all human thought
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Pulitzer-Prize winning author Douglas Hofstadter and French psychologist Emmanuel Sander have put forward a simple yet profoundly complex thesis: Analogy is the basis for all human thought.
In their book, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking, the two develop the idea that without concepts there can be no thought and without analogies there can be no concepts.
The two scholars say that each concept in our mind owes its existence to a long succession of analogies cultivated unconsciously over many years, which initially give birth to the concept and continue to enrich it over the course of our lifetime.
In every moment, concepts are selectively triggered by analogies that our brain constantly make, in an effort to make sense of the new and fill in the dark spots of the familiar.
The writers have approached the topic in a way that's accessible to the layman. They rely on an extensive sampling of real life examples to illustrate the salient points of their thesis. Though understandable for all, they still have the higher ambition of formulating a new and original stance toward cognition for consideration by an academic audience.
The main goal of the book, they stated, was simply to give analogy its due and show that the human ability to make analogies lies at the roof of all our conceptual thinking.
Surfaces and Essences comprises a prologue, eight chapters and an epilogue in the form of a dialogue between characters.
The first three chapters constitute their attempt to provide an account of what categories and analogies are. Chapter four deals with how in our interaction with world around us, we constantly and fluently move about in our repertoire of categories without the slightest awareness of doing so.
Chapter five and six are devoted to the role of analogy in very ordinary, everyday situations, and analogies that manipulate us and analogies that we ourselves manipulate.
Chapter seven and eight deal with analogy in scientific thinking, from the basic 'naive analogies' used by nonspecialists, to the extreme other end of the spectrum in which a series of snowballing analogies are involved in great discoveries made by insightful scientists.
