Free Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking by Douglas Hofstadter, Emmanuel Sander Page A

of the key theses of the book. We show how concepts designated by a single word are constantly having their boundaries extended by analogies. We take a careful look at the development of concepts by observing the long progression that starts with the concept of a child’s Mommy (a specific adult human) and that gradually leads to all sorts of metaphorical uses such as motherland , passing en route through such concepts as birth mother and surrogate mother. We also show that less concrete words, such as “thanks”, “much”, “to fix”, “to open”, “but”, “and” (and so on) are, no less than nouns, the names of mental categories that are the outcome of a lifelong series of analogies.
    In Chapter 2 , we study concepts having lexical labels that are longer than single words. We show that hidden behind the scenes of multi-word stock phrases, even ones as long as a proverb or a fable, there lie concepts that are very similar to those designated by isolated words. Thus a phrase such as “Achilles’ heel” is the linguistic “hat” worn by a particular category (namely, the category of serious weaknesses that may lead to someone’s undoing). Æsop’s famous fable in which a fox tries to reach some luscious-looking grapes and when he fails, he declares that he didn’t want them anyway becausethey are sour, is a linguistic embodiment of the abstract mental category of situations featuring something that is the object of someone’s ardor, but that, having turned out to be out of reach, is subsequently deprecated by the person who desired it. This abstract quality, often concisely called “sour grapes”, is potentially recognizable in thousands of situations, and this phrase could thus be used as the verbal label of any such situation, in just the same way as there are myriads of objects meriting the label “bottlecap” and myriads of actions meriting the label “retrieve”. And the same can be said of more abstract categories, some of which have to do with the act of communication taking place at the moment, and which are labeled by adverbial phrases, such as “after all”, “on the other hand”, “as a matter of fact”, “that having been said”, and so on. In other words, there are situations in our everyday interchanges that call for the label “after all”, and when such situations arise, we recognize them (almost always unconsciously) as such, and we apply that label, deftly inserting it into our real-time speech stream. The chapter concludes with a discussion of intelligence as the ability to put one’s finger on what counts in any given situation, and how the repertoire of categories that is handed to one by one’s native language and culture tailors one’s way of doing this.
    Chapter 3 deals with categories for which there is no standard linguistic label; people manufacture such categories spontaneously on their own as they deal with new situations in their complex personal worlds. Later on, such categories often give rise to “reminding episodes”, where one event recalls another from another time and place, possibly very distant. As an example, when D. noticed an old friend leaning down to pick up a bottlecap in Egypt’s renowned Karnak Temple, he was suddenly and spontaneously reminded of a time, some fifteen years earlier, when his one-year-old son was sitting near the edge of the Grand Canyon and, completely oblivious to the spectacular scenery, was intently focused on some ants and leaves on the ground. Despite all the superficial differences that can be found separating any two situations from each other, when such a reminding incident takes place, it reveals that the two situations in question share a conceptual skeleton at a deeper level, and it shows how extremely rich and subtle is our storehouse of non-lexicalized concepts. By analyzing a series of sentences containing such high-frequency phrases as “me too”, “next time”, and “like that”, we show that