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x the present book is the fruit of a long collaboration, and finally it has reached maturity. [JLJ - IMHO valuable insights and accessible to the common man]
p.3 each concept in our mind owes its existence to a long succession of analogies made unconsciously over many years, initially giving birth to the concept and continuing to enrich it over the course of our lifetime... The main goal of this book... is simply to give analogy its due - which is to say, to show how the human ability to make analogies lies at the root of all our concepts, and how concepts are selectively evoked by analogies. In a word, we wish to show that analogy is the fuel and fire of thinking. [JLJ - yes, but an analogy is not exactly a strategy and is not a project or a stratagem or a course of action and does not involve an internal conversation and does not necessarily build adaptive capacity through adaptive actions. Soooooo..... analogy can only be a part of thinking]
p.14 What, then, do we mean in this book by "category" and "categorization"? For us, a category is a mental structure that is created over time and that evolves, sometimes slowly and sometimes quickly, and that contains information in an organized form, allowing access to it under suitable conditions. The act of categorization is the tentative and gradated, gray-shaded linking of an entity or a situation to a prior category in one's mind.
p.14 A category pulls together many phenomena in a manner the benefits the creature in whose mind it resides. It allows invisible aspects of objects, actions, and situations to be "seen". Categorization gives one the feeling of understanding a situation one is in by providing a clear perspective on it, allowing hidden items and qualities to be detected
p.15 Categorization... helps one to draw conclusions and to guess about how a situation is likely to evolve. In short, non-stop categorization is every bit as indispensable to our survival in the world as is the nonstop beating of our hearts. Without the ceaseless pulsating heartbeat of our "categorization engine", we would understand nothing around us, could not reason in any form whatever, could not communicate with anyone else, and would have no basis on which to take any action.
p.15 If categorization is central to thinking, then what mechanism carries it out? Analogy is the answer.
p.16 the world confronts us with a never-ending series of vague and ambiguous riddles... It is by searching for strong, insight-providing analogues in our memory that we try to grasp the essences of the unfamiliar situations that we face all the time - the endless stream of curve balls that life throws at us.
p.17 analogy-making is the machinery behind the pulsating heartbeat of thought: categorization.
p.18 analogies do not happen in our minds just once a week or once a day or once an hour or even once a minute; no, analogies spring up inside our minds numerous times every second. We swim nonstop in an ocean of small, medium-sized, and large analogies, ranging from mundane trivialities to brilliant insights. [JLJ - pondering this thought is like peering inside the mind and seeing the gears turn that make it work - it is like finding a key which unlocks an infinite number of doors, it is like seeing through all walls, simultaneously, completely around the Earth, and eventually seeing one's back in whatever direction one looks - it is like... oops, I guess I overdid it.]
p.18 the retrieval of a long-buried memory by an analogy - is so central and standard in our lives that we seldom think about it or notice it at all. It is an automatic process, and virtually no one wonders why it occurs, nor how, since it is so familiar.
p.18 The triggering of memories by analogy lies so close to what seems to be the essence of being human that it is hard to imagine what mental life would be like without it.
p.19 analogy-making and categorization... each of them simply makes a connection between two mental entities in order to interpret new situations that we run into by giving us potentially useful points of view on them.
p.19 the mental acts that we carry out all the time every day - interpreting situations, judging the quality of various things, making decisions, learning new things - and all these acts are carried out by the same fundamental mechanism... underlying them all there is just one single mechanism of nonstop categorization through analogy-making, and it operates all along the continuum we've described
p.20 We claim that cognition takes place thanks to a constant flow of categorization, and that at the base of it all is found, in contrast to classification (which aims to put all things into fixed and rigid mental boxes), the phenomenon of categorization through analogy-making, which endows human thinking with its remarkable flexibility.
p.20 By connecting a freshly encountered situation to others long ago encountered, encoded, and stored in our memory, we are able to make use of our prior experiences to orient ourselves in the present. Analogy-making is the cornerstone of this faculty of our minds, allowing us to exploit the rich storehouse of wisdom rooted in our past... No thought can be formed that isn't informed by the past; or, more precisely, we think only thanks to analogies that link our present to our past. [JLJ - we can ask ourselves, "how did those previous situations, which were similar, play out in the end? Based on those results do I want/need to be in this similar situation now?"]
p.21 Some ancient philosophers, including Plato and Aristotle, were fervent defenders of analogy, seeing it as a fertile medium for thinking rather than as just a figure of speech.
p.23 there isn't a single thought that isn't deeply and multiply anchored in the past.
p.28 What lies behind this universality of analogy-making? In order to survive, humans rely on comparing what's happening to them now with what happened to them in the past.
p.33 at every moment, we are simultaneously faced with an indefinite number of overlapping and intermingling situations... we are faced with a seething multitude of ill-defined situations, none of which comes with a sharp frame delineating it, either spatially or temporally. Our poor besieged brain is constantly grappling with this unpredictable chaos, always trying to make sense of what surrounds it and swarms into it... And what does "to make sense of" mean? It means the automatic triggering, or unconscious evocation, of certain familiar categories, which, once retrieved from dormancy, help us to find some order in this chaos.
p.34 All these words! No experience is more familiar to us than this ceaseless barrage of words popping up in our mind extremely efficiently and without ever being invited.
p.41 The line between what is and what is not an error is less precise than one might think.
p.50 The very essence of an analogy is that it maps some mental structure onto another mental structure.
p.51 All our concepts, from the grandest to the humblest, have the same quality of being largely hidden from view but partially unpackable on request, and the unpacking process is repeatable, several layers down.
p.60 no one taught us the boundaries of categories. Our spontaneous sense for their boundaries is an outcome of what we often call "common sense", and no one teaches that in any school.
p.125-126 Intelligence, to our mind, is the art of rapid and reliable gist-finding, crux-spotting, bull's-eye-hitting, nub-striking, essence-pinpointing. It is the art of, when one is facing a new situation, swiftly and surely homing in on an insightful precedent... stored in the recesses of one's memory. That, no more and no less, is what it means to isolate the crux of a new situation. And this is nothing but the ability to find close analogies, which is to say, the ability to come up with strong and useful analogies.
p.128 We humans excel at making fluid mappings between new situations and old concepts lying dormant in our memory, although we seldom if ever focus consciously on the many thousands of such mappings that we carry out each day.
p.132 Concepts have a special property that distinguishes them from physical tools: as opposed to being just an external device, a concept becomes an integral part of the person who acquires it... what counts... is the degree to which the concepts... are internalized by a person, thus enriching their conceptual space and turning them into a thinker able to make new categorizations and analogies.
p.135 A central thesis of this book is that analogy-making defines each instant of thought, and is in fact the driving force behind all thought... Making analogies allows us to think and act in situations never before encountered, furnishes us with vast harvests of new categories, enriches those categories while ceaselessly extending them over the course of our lives, guides our understanding of future situations by registering, at appropriate levels of abstraction, what happened to us just now, and enables us to make unpredictable and powerful mental leaps.
p.136-137 Like a fish swimming in a medium of which they are unaware but that allows them to dart nimbly from one spot to another in the vast briny depths, we human beings float, without being aware of it, in a sea of tiny, medium-sized, and large analogies, running the gamut from dull to dazzling. And as is the case for fish, it's only thanks to this omnipresent, unfelt medium that we can dart nimbly from one spot to another in the vast ocean of ideas.
p.137 We rely constantly on concepts that have no name.
p.156 A crucial aspect of categorization is that it allows us, through analogies that we note, to make guesses or to draw conclusions... Without such categories, all thought would come to a crashing halt... Every act of thinking, no matter how small, relies on such analogies, and the tighter the analogy, the more unavoidable the conclusion it leads to would seem to be.
p.157 Are analogies not, indeed, irresistible and unsuppressible? ...What is the conceptually closest situation from your past, and at what level of detail?
p.187 being an expert doesn't mean just that one has acquired more categories than other people have, but also that one has organized them in such a way as to facilitate useful categorizations at different levels of abstraction, and in such a way as to allow one to glide smoothly, when under contextual pressure, from one category to another.
p.189 Our ability to categorize things in many different ways determines how adaptable we are.
p.190 Categorization pervades every facet of our existence and is never fixed... Being moved from one categorical "box" to another, often by being slid up or down the rungs of an abstraction ladder, is the inevitable fate of all objects, actions, and situations... at any moment, an entity is what its categorization says it is, and that's all.
p.239 categorization involves being able to make distinctions... categorization also involves making associations.
p.242 we all build up our knowledge by constructing categories, linking them together, and structuring them by abstraction.
p.246 down-to-earth categories allow one to be precise, while highly abstract categories allow one to be deep - and precision and depth are the two most crucial keys to expertise.
p.290 Calling categories "blinders" is an admission that our categorization mechanisms, which help us navigate fluidly through many a lofty realm of abstraction, can on occasion mislead us, via insufficiently flexible insights.
p.313 We are constantly confronted with the new and the unfamiliar, and we deal with it through the help of myriads of analogies... our categories, selectively activated by our momentary concerns and our momentary obsessions, filter our perception of our surroundings and control our thoughts. In fact, it is the known that manipulates us at all times and in all ways. We depend intimately on the known, on both very small and very large scales.
p.313-314 we are all shackled by the blinders of our categories; indeed, they follow us like shadows, acting as indispensable collaborators of our sensory organs and as inseparable partners in our perceptions. In this sense, analogies manipulate us and control us shamelessly, boldly inserting themselves left and right between us and what surrounds us, and even between ourselves and our selves. Analogy pervades our thoughts from top to bottom, controlling every aspect of our interactions with the world... Stripped of all past experiences, a human being would be incapable of seeing, distinguishing, or understanding anything at all.
p.315 [James Falen]
There are magic links and chains
Forged to loose our rigid brains.
Structures, srtictures, though they bind,
Strangely liberate the mind.
p.315 Yes, analogies manipulate us, and yes, we are enchained by them. This is a fact that we simply must recognize.
p.330 Humans automatically try on their own to extract a conceptual skeleton from any concrete situation - that's how they understand
p.331 The idea is simple: the only way we have of making decisions, whether they are small or large, is through analogy - that is, by making analogies with a spectrum of previous experiences... that have been brought to mind by the pressing decision.
p.337 surface-level features are the key to memory retrieval.
p.342 Novices pay attention mostly to superficial aspects, simply because to them, those are the most salient qualities.
p.343 the features people tend to notice in any domain are as deep as their perception allows, which is a function of the set of categories they have evolved over their lifetime. It's for this reason that the deepest clues available are what guides a person who is searching for analogies between fresh situations and ones in memory.
p.344 We are all pretty much experts in what surrounds us, and that's a lucky thing, since it's exactly the kind of expertise that comes in handiest in life.
p.344 For someone to be a seasoned driver means precisely that what matters for driving pops right out to them effortlessly.
p.344-345 The royal road to the depths of a thing, to its core, to its essence, is precisely what lies at its surface. The surface gives us clues - deep clues - as to what is hidden inside, affording glimpses of the depths at the core.
p.345 Our physiological senses react to surfaces, and our brain uses this input to activate certain categories, which gives us clues to the gist, the crux, the core, the essence of what we are dealing with... surface and essence should, ideally, be closely related... There are all sorts of ways of being deceived by appearances... in most cases the connection between surface and depth is not misleading... In most situations, the surface-level cues that we pick up quickly furnish a reliable guide to the situation's essence. This is why we survive and even manage quite well in the world.
p.346 Stereotypes... are in fact crucial to our survival. They tend to simplify things greatly... a stereotype is a category that, thanks to easily perceived surface-level features, gives us access to a "shallow" kind of depth that has a decent chance of being correct, although the frequency of exceptions is large enough to warrant further refinement of the category.
p.346 The reason analogy is so extremely efficient is that appearances are indeed great indicators of essences. This is why reliance on surfaces is not a poor strategy in life. It's just that in selecting which of a situation's innumerable surface-level features to rely on as clues, one has to do one's best at separating the wheat from the chaff... Experts see things that are hidden to novices. They perceive clues that novices either do not see at all or else take for irrelevant, and these surface-level cues give them access to deep perceptions. And thus surfaces become more and more imbued with depth.
p.347 In the real world, we can't possibly take everything into account all the way down to its most microscopic details, and so we necessarily must ignore almost everything about every situation that we encounter, and that means we unconsciously make a highly selective encoding of it when we store it in memory. We have to strip everything that we experience down to a caricature of itself.
p.354 the secret of making good analogies involves making good but more abstract analogies - analogies between encodings, or conceptual skeletons... finding analogies between cruxes is in fact a genuine simplification.
p.381 In the end, however, the challenge was met, and all the various hoops were jumped through simultaneously.
p.382 Compromise is the name of the game whenever constraints are involved, as they are in poetry, and a certain sort of creativity is also a frequent outcome of the combination of pressures under which one finds oneself working.
p.386 The idea is that an unfamiliar concept... is apprehended plausibly, although inaccurately, through a natural-seeming analogy with a prior piece of knowledge... Such analogies allow a person to make at least some sense of the new situation by likening it to something familiar, and yet it is all done in a spontaneous, unconscious, automatic way, without the person's least awareness of making an analogy.
p.386 Just like other acts of categorization, naive analogies lead one to a perfectly reasonable (and thus self-consistent) interpretation of a situation, but they unconsciously assume that one is dealing with a typical member of the selected category. However, the situation may well involve an atypical member or even a non-member of the chosen category, in which case the conclusions reached will be irrelevant and useless.
p.387 Generally speaking, naive analogies have a certain limited domain in which they are correct, and which justifies their existence and their likelihood of survival over years or possibly even decades.
p.389 As people move into higher realms of abstraction, naive analogies, with all their strengths and weaknesses, inevitably become trusted guides... naive analogies work well in many situations, but in other situations they can lead to absurd conclusions or complete dead ends.
p.435-436 Thomas Spalding and Gregory Murphy write, "Categories let people treat new things as if they were familiar"; ...Mary Gick and Keith Holyoak state, "Analogy is what allows us to see the novel as familiar".
p.438 [Henri Poincare]
Could anyone think... that they have always marched forward, one step after another, without having any clear idea of the goal they were trying to reach? It was necessary for them to guess at the proper route to get them there, and to do so they needed a guide. This guide is primarily analogy.
p.452-499 [Einstein worship... zzzzz]
p.499 Our goal in this chapter... to show that major advances in physics are not the result of virtuoso acts acts of stand-alone mathematical deduction and formal manipulation of equations, but that, quite to the contrary, they emerge as the fruit of analogies intuited by individuals who have a gift of seeing a unity where others see only diversity, individuals who have a keenly honed instinct for spotting the deep identity of phenomena that look extremely different from each other on the surface, individuals who trust their inchoate faith in such analogical links... even if it means that extremely well-established, once rigorously worked-out ideas may possibly have to be uprooted and completely thought through anew.
p.501 [Henri Poincare, in letter of recommendation for Albert Einstein]
Mr. Einstein is one of the most original minds I have known... He is not overly attached to classical principles and, in the presence of a physics problem, he very rapidly can imagine all the possibilities. This allows him to rapidly predict new phenomena that are likely to be confirmed by experiment as soon as there are ways to check them.
... It would thus seem that this ability to "imagine all the possibilities" in a very short time lies close to the core of human creativity at its highest levels. [JLJ - more extract from Poincare's letter: "Since he seeks in all directions one must, on the contrary, expect most of the trails which he pursues to be blind alleys. But one must hope at the same time that one of the directions he has indicated may be the right one, and that is enough. This is indeed how one should proceed. The role of mathematical physics is to ask the right questions, and experiment alone can resolve them."]
p.505 Categorization is a constant necessity; analogy is a rare luxury.
p.507 I challenge you to find the borderline between acting and thinking. Mental activity lies behind every action, and the term "mental activity" is simply a fancy synonym for "thinking".
p.508 Categorization is routine; analogy is creative
p.510 Categorization is unconscious; analogy is conscious
p.513 Categorization is automatic; analogy is voluntary
p.515 Categorization favors similarities; analogy favors dissimilarities
p.517 Categorization applies to entities; analogy to relations
p.519 Categorization involves two levels of abstraction; analogy involves just one
p.522 Categorization is objective; analogy is subjective
p.527 Categorization is reliable; analogy is suspect
p.529 I must admit that I'm coming to feel that I'm less and less sure about what I thought I was sure about, alas. [JLJ - ditto]
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