Surfaces and Essences Read online

  SURFACES AND ESSENCES

  SURFACES AND ESSENCES

  ANALOGY AS THE FUEL AND FIRE OF THINKING

  DOUGLAS HOFSTADTER & EMMANUEL SANDER

  BASIC BOOKS

  A Member of the Perseus Books Group

  New York

  Grateful acknowledgment is hereby made to the following individuals and organizations for permission to use material that they have provided or to quote from sources for which they hold the rights. Every effort has been made to locate the copyright owners of material reproduced in this book. Omissions that are brought to our attention will be corrected in subsequent editions.

  Photograph of Mark Twain: © CORBIS

  Photograph of Edvard Grieg: © Michael Nicholson/CORBIS

  Photograph of Albert Einstein: © Philippe Halsman/Magnum Photos

  Photograph of Albert Schweitzer: © Bettmann/CORBIS

  We also most warmly thank Kellie Gutman and Tony Hoagland for their generous permission to publish their poems in this volume.

  Copyright © 2013 by Basic Books

  Published by Basic Books

  A Member of the Perseus Books Group

  Designed by Douglas Hofstadter

  Cover by Nicole Caputo and Andrea Cardenas

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, please contact Basic Books at 250 West 57th Street, New York, New York 10107.

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  Library of Congress Control Number: 2013932688

  ISBN: 978-0-465-02158-1 (e-book)

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To Francesco Bianchini

  and

  To Michaël, Tom, and Talia

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Words of Thanks

  PrologueAnalogy as the Core of Cognition

  Chapter 1The Evocation of Words

  Chapter 2The Evocation of Phrases

  Chapter 3A Vast Ocean of Invisible Analogies

  Chapter 4Abstraction and Inter-category Sliding

  Chapter 5How Analogies Manipulate Us

  Chapter 6How We Manipulate Analogies

  Chapter 7Naïve Analogies

  Chapter 8Analogies that Shook the World

  EpidialogueKaty and Anna Debate the Core of Cognition

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  WORDS OF THANKS

  A Little Background

  As we look back, fondly reliving the genesis of our book, we vividly recall the first key moment, which took place in mid-July, 1998, at an academic congress, in Sofia, Bulgaria. The occasion was the first international conference on the subject of analogy. Organized by Boicho Kokinov, Keith Holyoak, and Dedre Gentner, this memorable meeting assembled researchers from many countries, who, in an easy-going and lively atmosphere, exchanged ideas about their shared passion. Chance thus brought the two of us together for the first time in Sofia, and we found we had an instant personal rapport — a joyous bright spark that gradually developed into a long-term and very strong friendship.

  In 2001–2002, Douglas Hofstadter spent a sabbatical year in Bologna, Italy, and during that period he was invited by Jean-Pierre Dupuy to give a set of lectures on cognition at the École Polytechnique in Paris. At that time, Emmanuel Sander had just published his first book — an in-depth study of analogy-making and categorization — and at one of the lectures he proudly presented a copy of it to his new friend, who, upon reading it, was delighted to discover how deeply similar was the vision that its author and he had of what cognition is really about. And then some time passed, with a couple of brief get-togethers in Paris and Toulouse, supplemented by email exchanges and phone calls, mixing intellectual content and friendly feelings.

  In February of 2005, Doug invited Emmanuel to Bloomington for a gala birthday party he was throwing for his many friends, as he turned 60. One day during that event, he suggested to Emmanuel that he would be very happy to come to Paris for a few weeks to work with Emmanuel in translating his book into English. Emmanuel was very pleased, but shortly after Doug arrived in Paris in July, the original goal mutated into a considerably larger one — namely, that of co-authoring a book on the fundamental role of analogy in thought, approaching the topic in a non-technical manner and from many points of view, and using a large sampling of concrete examples to justify the theoretical positions. The book would hopefully be accessible to anyone interested in thinking, yet would also have the high ambition of reaching an academic audience and of putting forth a new and original stance towards cognition. This thus was the moment of our book’s conception!

  Over a three-week period in Paris, many ideas were tossed about, and the result was a forty-page document that featured snips of conversations between the two future co-authors, many notes on ideas for the book, and a very preliminary sketch of what its chapters might look like. And then, for the next four years — 2006 to 2009 — each of the authors made a month-long visit to the other one in his home town. Adding to that, Doug spent an eight-month sabbatical in Paris in 2010. During all this time, there was a constant exchange of ideas via email and via phone, allowing the book to evolve from a few cells into a viable complex organism.

  As all this shows, the present book is the fruit of a long collaboration, and finally it has reached maturity. Its authors have invested in it the hope that it has a message with enduring value, even if it is clearly rooted in today’s culture and style of life — in fact, it is rooted “in vibrant thought”, as we fondly recall one of our friends putting it. But we hope that, despite the spatial and temporal specificity of its origins, its key ideas are universal enough that they will withstand the passage of time.

  Ping-ponging between Languages and Cultures

  We are quite proud of the fact that our joint book is the result of a very unusual creative process. Not just written by two people, it was written in two languages at the same time. To be more specific, this book has two originals — one in French and one in English. Each is a translation of the other, or perhaps neither of them is a translation. But however you choose to look at it, the two versions of this book have equal standing. They are two highly distinct concrete incarnations of one immaterial entity — namely, this book as it exists on the ethereal plane not of words but of ideas.

  To be sure, the writing process involved countless acts of translation, but those acts took place at the very moment that the original text was being generated. Sometimes they carried ideas from English to French, and sometimes they went in the other direction, but what is key here is that these back-and-forth exchanges between the brains of the two authors were accompanied — and this is a rare thing — by back-and-forth exchanges between two languages, which led, in a convergent fashion, to many modifications of the original text, bringing it into closer alignment with its translation, and then the resulting text went once more around the bilingual, bicultural, bicerebral loop, until finally, after a good number of iterations back and forth, things reached a satisfactory equilibrium.

  And thus the two versions — the English one that you are now looking at, and its counterpart in French — have gone back and forth many times through the filters of both languages. Often we would find that a high level of clarity emerged as a result of this special dynamic, as
translation is nothing if not a merciless revealer of imprecision, vagueness, and lack of logical flow. Translation brings such defects out like a flashlight turned on in a dusty attic. A different metaphor is the sharpening of a knife, because our process of repeated exchanges became, for us, a constant act of sharpening of the ideas we were trying to express. And thus the fact that this book has two originals is not merely an amusing curiosity, but more importantly, it has been a guiding principle keeping us constantly focused on the goal of coherence and lucidity. At least we, the authors, see our book in this way, and we hope that our readers will see it as we do.

  We encourage those of our English-speaking readers who are comfortable with French to try tackling a few passages in both versions, because each specific version takes advantage of ideas, images, and turns of phrase that are deeply rooted in the culture at which it is aimed. This fact made for a particularly enjoyable and stimulating exercise for both authors, in that we were constantly being challenged to come up with an apt analogue for, say, a given idiomatic phrase or a given situation, or perhaps a given speech error, and the quest for optimal examples really kept us on our toes. For anyone who loves languages, then, a parallel perusal of the two texts should provide, in addition to plenty of new ideas (which was of course our primary aim), a special experience of savoring ideas fleshed out in two contrasting ways — in short, a bit of delicious icing on the cake.

  “Merci” to So Many!

  Two authors, two languages, two lives. While this book was being written, many people were involved with us in many diverse ways, and life predictably followed its unpredictable course. We thus have many heartfelt feelings to express.

  At the top of the list are our families, whom we cherish immeasurably. For Doug this means first of all Baofen, and for Emmanuel it means Cécile. They are our muses, amusing and amazing, loving and beloved. “À B., C. – D., E.” says it all, using initials, in French. Next come our children. To Doug, his son Danny and daughter Monica mean everything. Both are rich in humor, verve, idealism, and artistic imagination, inherited largely from their loving mother Carol, who, alas, was torn from us so many years ago. On Emmanuel’s side, there are Michaël, who is protective, intense, and impetuous, and Tom, who is sensitive, social, and solid, and Talia, who is impish, witty and creative; and there is Daniela, their devoted and loving mother. Into our families have recently come, on Doug’s side, Baofen’s son David, and on Emmanuel’s side, Cécile’s son Arthur, who grace our lives with their talents and their gentle natures.

  Doug expresses many thanks to his sister Laura Hofstadter, her husband Len Shar, and their two sons, Nathaniel and Jeremy, both filled with intellectual brio. Over the years, their house has been the site of innumerable “jolly evenings” marked by crack croquet competitions, wild word-wizardry, and side-splitting semantic silliness, along with the yummiest of food and the chummiest of chatting. Somewhat symmetrically, Emmanuel warmly thanks David, trusted brother and insightful colleague, David’s wife Véronique, and their daughters Hannah and Gabriela, his radiant nieces. Emmanuel also extends his deepest gratitude to his father and mother, Jean-Pierre and France Sander, for having fostered his growth, from his earliest youth, in the most generous fashion imaginable. And Doug likewise recalls with enormous thanks all the warmth and encouragement of his late parents, Robert and Nancy Hofstadter.

  Over the course of these seven-plus years, each of us has experienced the grief of losing several people with whom the bonds ran very deep. Here we wish to honor the treasured memory of Raphaël Sander, Agnès Sander, Maurice Sander, Esther Sidi, Morgan Rogulski, and Lucie Cohen, on Emmanuel’s side, and of Nancy Hofstadter, Helga Keller, Steve Larson, Valentino Braitenberg, and Paolo Bozzi, on Doug’s.

  It behooves us now to devote a paragraph or two to Paragraphe, the laboratory that, ever since this book was conceived, has been Emmanuel Sander’s intellectual home at the University of Paris VIII. Its director Imad Saleh leads, with ebullience, generosity, and vigor, a laboratory where human and scientific values exist side by side. Within Paragraphe, the research group CRAC (a French acronym for “Understanding, Reasoning, and Knowledge Acquisition”) is led jointly by Emmanuel Sander and Raphaële Miljkovitch. Emmanuel treasures his intellectual exchanges with Raphaële, and he is delighted to have used some of the plentiful harvest she has made of linguistic oddities issuing from the mouths of her two young sons. CRAC is a cooperative team whose members represent many diverse facets of developmental psychology and get along so well that many strong friendships have come to bloom within it.

  And thus a big thank-you to Jean Baratgin (whose specialty is the study of reasoning), Christelle Bosc-Miné (problem-solving), Rémi Brissiaud (educational psychology), Sandra Bruno (conceptual development), Anne-Sophie Deborde (attachment), Corinne Demarcy (problem-solving), Sabine Guéraud (understanding), Caroline Guérini (theory of mind), Frank Jamet (naïve reasoning), Hélène Labat (learning to read), Annamaria Lammel (cultural psychology), Jean-Marc Meunier (knowledge representation), Sandra Nogry (conceptual development), and Carine Royer (learning to read). Emmanuel’s doctoral students, current and former, have given much to him through their dedication and the freshness and openness of their thinking. They are a hard act to follow. In particular, we mention Valentine Chaillet, Laurence Dupuch, Sylvie Gamo, Khider Hakem, Bruno Martin, Évelyne Mengue, Lynda Taabane, and Emmanuel Trouche. We also keep in our hearts the memory of Justine Pélouard, who seemed to be headed for a wonderful scientific career, when all at once her life came to an end.

  In other teams within Paragraphe, we would like to single out Anne Bationo, Ghislaine Azemard, Claude Baltz, Françoise Decortis, Hakim Hachour, Madjid Ihadjadene, Pierre Quettier, Alexandra Saemmer, Samuel Szoniecky, and Khaldoun Zreik for rich interactions with Emmanuel on numerous occasions. Over the years, some of them have become deeply appreciated friends. Emmanuel would also like to express his gratitude to a set of colleagues outside of Paragraphe, but still in the Psychology Department, for their lively ideas and their personal warmth. Above all, he thanks Marie-Carmen Castillo and Roxane Bordes, and then Aline Frey, Alain Blanchet, Samuel Demarchi, Sophie Frigout, Corinna Kohler, Michèle Montreuil, Tobie Nathan, Michael Pichat, Jean-Luc Picq, and Frédéric Rousseau.

  The members of Doug’s research group FARG (“Fluid Analogies Research Group”), early on in Ann Arbor but mostly in Bloomington have, over three decades, shed much light on the richness of that elusive mental phenomenon called “analogy-making”. We are thinking of Marsha Meredith (who developed the computer model Seek-Whence), Melanie Mitchell (Copycat), Robert French (Tabletop), Gary McGraw (Letter Spirit), John Rehling (Letter Spirit), James Marshall (Metacat), Harry Foundalis (Phaeaco), Francisco Lara-Dammer (George), Abhijit Mahabal (SeqSee), and Eric Nichols (Musicat). Standing on their shoulders and following in their footsteps are Matthew Hurley, Ben Kovitz, William York, and David Bender. Others who have brought ideas and insights to FARG over the years include Daniel Defays (Numbo), Alex Linhares (Capyblanca), David Moser (errors and humor), Donald Byrd, Gray Clossman, Steve Larson, Hamid Ekbia, David Chalmers, Wang Pei, Peter Suber, Yan Yong, Liu Haoming, Christoph Weidemann, Roy Leban, Liane Gabora, and Damien Sullivan.

  Beyond FARG, Doug’s life has been vitally enriched by so many good friends and sparkling colleagues in so many lands. Let’s start with France, where, among the names that come to mind, are François Vannucci, Jacqueline Henry, Serge Haroche, Daniel Kiechle, Daniel Bougnoux, André Markowicz, Jacques Pitrat, Paul Bourgine, François Récanati, Gilles Cohen, Gilles Esposito-Farèse, Alain Zalmanski, Françoise Strobbe, Jean-Pierre Strobbe, Martine Lemonnier, Anne Bourguignon, Hubert Ceram, Karine Ceram, Liana Gourdjia, Marc Coppey, Geoff Staines, Silvia Busilacchi, Michelle Brûlé, and Denis Malbos. Turning to Italy, where he has always been so warmly received, he is reminded of Benedetto Scimemi, Luisa Scimemi, Giuseppe Trautteur, Pingo Longo, Giovanni Sambin, Alberto Parmeggiani, Francesco Bianchini, Maurizio Matteuzzi, Alex Passi, Sabrina Ardizzoni, Ach
ille Varzi, Oliviero Stock, Enrico Predazzi, Cristina Peroni, Maurizio Codogno, Enrico Laeng, Paola Turina, Patrizio Frosini, Ozalp Babaoglu, Irene Enriques, Pietro Perconti, Andrea Padova, and la famiglia Genco.

  But we shouldn’t omit his friends and colleagues on the North American continent! Doug thus takes great pleasure in saluting (and in a fairly arbitrary order) : Scott Buresh, Greg Huber, Karen Silverstein, Kellie Gutman, Richard Gutman, Caroline Strobbe, Grant Goodrich, Peter Rimbey, Scott Kim, Peter Jones, Steve Jones, Brian Jones, Iranee Zarb, Francis Zarb, David Policansky, Charles Brenner, Inga Karliner, Jon Thaler, Larry Tesler, Colleen Barton, Pentti Kanerva, Eric Hamburg, Michael Goldhaber, Rob Goldstone, Katy Börner, Rich Shiffrin, Jim Sherman, Colin Allen, John Kruschke, Mike Dunn, Breon Mitchell, Dan Friedman, George Springer, Mike Gasser, David Hertz, Willis Barnstone, Sumie Jones, Betsy Stirratt, Marc Hofstadter, Daniel Dennett, John Holland, Bob Axelrod, Dick Nisbett, Ken DeWoskin, Bill Cavnar, Gilles Fauconnier, Mark Turner, Lera Boroditsky, Mark Johnson, Bubal Wolf, Joe Becker, Donald Norman, Bernard Greenberg, Johnny Wink, Jay Curlin, Joseph Sevene, Anton Kuerti, Bill Frucht, Glen Worthey, Marilyn Stone, Jim Falen, Eve Falen, James Plath, Christopher Heinrich, Karen Bentley, Ann Trail, Sue Wunder, Julie Teague, Phoebe Wakhungu, Clark Kimberling, John Rigden, Leon Lederman, Jerry Fisher, Steve Chu, Peter Michelson, Bill Little, Paul Csonka, Sidney Nagel, Don Lichtenberg, Philip Taylor, Simone Brutlag, Doug Brutlag, Sandy Myers, Kristen Motz, and last but not least, Ollie (truly a golden retriever). Further afield, scattered hither and yon around the globe, are Francisco Claro, Peter Smith, Robert Boeninger, Cyril Erb, John Ellis, Alexander Rauh, Marina Eskina, Marek Karliner, Hakan Toker, and Michel Moutschen. To all of the above, Doug tips a deeply thankful hat.