Topic 7. Analogy across category boundaries Reading 1, pp. 185-257
1. X is not always X
Going out for a coffee
· Coffee not coffee; pastry not pastry
· 4 types of context, 4 levels of abstraction
i. Coffee 4
‘having a coffee’ – chatting while eating and drinking something light
ii. Coffee 3
after meal: ‘Who’ll have a coffee?’ – ‘A tea for me, please’
iii. Coffee 2
Regulars at a cafe: ‘And what might your coffees for this morning be, ladies?’ – ‘A crème and a decaf, please’
iv. Coffee 1
Paris cafe: ‘Un cafe`, s'il vous plaît’ – straight espresso without cream (default interpretation)
The members of a category change with context. A single word can denote different categories (different levels of abstraction). Objects and situations → move from one category to another easily and unconsciously.
Flexibility/creativity – human faculty of extending categories and making maps between them.
2. Marking
A single word can designate both a narrower (marked) and a broader (unmarked) category. Narrower is included in broader. Several categories labelled simultaneously by a single term (based on our mind’s natural sensitivity to context). The development of concepts through category extension from one member, through cores and halos. Analogy – the motor of all such extension.
Human ability to understand situations in terms of pre-existing concepts and to modify those concepts under the influence of new situations.
3. Abstraction
Human mind has the ability to abstract to deal with the world’s vast diversity
· Natural categories: bird – sparrow
· Man-made objects: furniture – chair
· Actions: moving – walking
· Adjectives: red – scarlet
· Idiomatic phrases, proverbs
· Non-lexicalized categories
Any situation can be categorized in limitless number of different fashions. Sometimes we wish to make distinctions and sometimes we wish to see commonalities. Distinguishing things – aligning them to different categories. Our adaptability – ability to categorize things in many different ways.
Example:
glass: a glass-like object can become dishware, artifact, commodity, spider carrier, knickknack holder, and so forth. (p. 190)
[Plato’s objectivist vision – objects have one true identity; basic level categories – psychologically real, “default” categorization]
“Watch out for cars” – car: a single lexical item denotes categories of different level of abstraction. Adopting the level of abstraction of categorization to the context.
- Using the same words, different people may mean different categories: two or more lump on a camel or dromedary (‘and Papa, what do they bang into to get them?’; ‘Bottles on divers’ backs’; ‘Why do they need to drink water when they’re underwater?’)
- Possession of a higher-level more abstract concept allows experts to distinguish the essence of a concept.
a) General desk (unmarked category)
b) Hard-desk (subcategory)
c) Soft-desk (subcategory)
a) Any kind of workplace for producing documents. Abstract superordinate category. b) c) – subcategories – they allow us to find the essence of the original category by constructing a more abstract concept of ‘desk’ and to find incidental properties (material existence) and essential dimensions → shallower and deeper aspects of deskness (more central, deeper, essential vs. less central, incidental, contingent, distinctive aspects)
Abstraction – beyond a certain level is impoverishing; enriching and revealing the unity of apparently different situations.
Examples
1) Shadow
- Unmarked, generalized ‘shadow’: there is a stream/beam of stuff (medium) whose straight flow is interrupted by an obstacle resulting in a perceptible absence of the medium beyond the obstacle.
- Subcategories
Vehicular, snow, rain, World War II; metaphorical shadows: “Dr Teller was aware of the Nazi lengthening shadow”, children growing up in the shadow of their world-famous parents, people emerging only a shadow of their former self.
- Shadow: dark zone – the essence of shadowness (from abstraction)
2) Waves
In the sea, in the field, flags wave in the wind, waving to our friends, American waves of immigration, water waves of different types: ripples, tsunamis..., sound waves, light waves, radio waves, temperature waves, spin waves, gravitational waves, quantum-mechanical waves.
The abstract forms of waves are tied by analogy to the concrete waves. Theoretical physics: analogy-making across domains.
3) Sandwiches
4) Proper nouns
- Brand names – generic words: Hoover, Kleenex, Coke, Xerox, Frisbee. Decapitalized generic words from extended senses of the original word.
- Sacred categories
the Pope, Mecca, the Bible, the Koran – pluralisation of proper names (p. 220)
- Celebrities (p. 222)
the most distinguished may become a public category → canonization. Creation of a general category through the pluralisation of a proper noun. Assumption: there is an essence to each very well-known person or thing. The essence can be pinpointed and then distilled from the entity itself to a new abstract category.
- Canonization at a local level
‘Bill is her David’, ‘the Jeff of her family’
We see our friends as multi-member categories not just when we consciously decide to do so, but also subconsciously without prior intention to pluralize.
- A is momentarily confused with B. Conflating two people’s identities (i.e. seeing a person as in ‘instance’ of another person [example: Dan’s problem with his wife Ruth, who reminded him of Jeanine]
- First names and identity
5) Metaphors of X is P type
Sue is a snail, Fred is a fox, my job is a prison.
- ad hoc concept creation
(a) Patsy is a pig vs. (b) Patsy is a palace/a prawn
An ad hoc category will be created only when the original category (‘palace’) doesn’t yet have a standard abstract category based on it.
In (a), ad hoc concept does not have to be constructed on the fly. (a) is understood as a perfectly standard act of categorization – an act that places Patsy in the abstract category pig2 as opposed to concrete pig1.
- pig 2 – “dirty and sloppy”
- pig 1 – curly-tailed animal
Patsy is a false member of pig 1, but a true member of pig 2. The members of higher-level unmarked categories are not ‘less true’ members of their categories than are the members of the lower-level marked categories. They are merely members of other categories, in other contexts. Other subcategories of the abstract category pig 2 could exist. ‘Metaphorical’ meanings take on a life of their own, becoming autonomous new meanings.
- pig 1 – farm animal – unmarked
- pig 2 – people who are messy – marked
- pig 3 – very messy, sloppy animate being – marked
(Hofstadter/Sander – correction of Glucksberg and Keyser)
6) Three types of metaphorical expressions
- Standardized metaphorical expressions – no abstract categories necessary
Jack’s house is a dump ≈ Patsy is a pig
dump 3 – dirty, unpleasant places of all sorts
dump 2 – garbage dumps
dump 1 – messy dwellings
Walter is a wolf; Tom is a turkey; Denise is a dodo; Belle is a bitch
There exists in the listener’s mind a non-animal category that shares the same lexical label as the animal categories.
- An abstract category, pre-existing in people’s minds has to be used to understand the sentence
This damn word processor is a pig!
Liz’s car; the pope of popsicles; I need to buy some Kleenex
- No abstract category pre-exists and it must be constructed to secure understanding
Bill is a bridge; Steve is a stone; Patsy is a palace
Creating new, ad hoc categories based on some new-found essence of the respective concepts
a.-c. No matter whether the category is abstract or concrete, pre-existing or invented on the fly, the understanding of metaphorical statements depends on applying a category to a situation.
Follow-up exercise V
Give your own examples of three types of metaphorical statements
7) Examples of achieving expertise in different domains:
- Mathematics, dogs, food, drink,....
- Enriching one’s personal repertoire of categories, establishing different levels of abstraction, finding inter relations of categories (new perspectives on a domain). Domains – categories and interconnections among them (distinctions and associations; genus – broader, species – narrower, levels of abstraction.