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

lurking behind any such phrase, no matter how casual and simple it may seem, there is a non-verbalized category, sometimes simple and sometimes subtle, based on an implicit perception of sameness, which is to say, based on an analogy.
    Chapter 4 deals with the way in which, in our interactions with the world around us, we constantly and fluently move about in our repertoire of categories, and yet nearly always without the least awareness of doing so. The chapter focuses particularly on inter-category leaps that involve shifts between levels of abstraction. The flexibility of human cognition relies profoundly on our ability to move up or down the ladder of abstraction, for the simple reason that sometimes it is crucial to make fine distinctions but other times it is crucial to ignore differences and to blur things together in order to find commonalities. For instance, while one is dining, one will take care to distinguish between one’s own glass and that of one’s neighbor, but afterwards, when one is placingthem in the dishwasher, that distinction will be irrelevant. As another example, parents will try to assure that their children get involved in “activities”, whether this means acting in plays, doing judo, or playing a musical instrument. Activity for my child is a highly abstract category. The most humble of our acts conceals choices of abstraction that are hard for us to recognize accurately, because such acts are central to cognition. We have a very hard time “seeing” our cognitive activity because it is the medium in which we swim. The attempt to put our finger on what counts in any given situation leads us at times to making connections between situations that are enormously different on their surface and at other times to distinguishing between situations that on first glance seem nearly identical. Our constant jockeying back and forth among our categories runs the gamut from the most routine behaviors to the most creative ones.
    Chapter 5 is devoted to the role of analogy in very ordinary, everyday situations. It deals with analogies that, because they are essentially invisible, manipulate us. We are unaware of being taken over by an analogical interpretation of a situation. In this sense, the invisible analogy manipulates us because it has simply imposed itself on us, willy-nilly. And it manipulates us also in another sense — namely, it foists new ideas on us, pushing us around. Unsatisfied with being merely an agent that enriches our comprehension of a situation we are facing, the analogy rushes in and structures our entire view of the situation, trying to make us align the newly encountered situation with the familiar old one. For instance, when a small private plane crashed into a building in Manhattan on October 11, 2006, the analogy with the events of September 11, 2001 was irrepressible, leading instantly to speculations of terrorism, even though the building was not seriously damaged; the Dow Jones average even took a noticeable nosedive for a short while. And thus analogies just jump in uninvitedly, thinking and making decisions for us, without our being aware of what is going on.
    In Chapter 6 , by contrast, we deal with analogies that, in some sense, we ourselves manipulate — analogies that we freshly and deliberately construct when we run into a situation that arouses our interest, sometimes in order to explain it to ourselves or to others, sometimes to argue for our own point of view. This is especially the case for what we have dubbed caricature analogies. These are analogies that one dreams up on the spur of the moment in order to convince someone else of an idea in which one believes. They transpose a situation into a new domain while exaggerating it. For instance, a scientist seeking a job abroad wrote to a colleague: “I love my native land, but trying to get research done here is like trying to play soccer with a bowling ball!” Also discussed in this chapter is the way in which