Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (37 page)

If Paul hadn’t said “I’m going to pay for my beer” but something very general, such as, “I intend momentarily to take such actions as are necessary in order to cancel my debt toward a certain purveyor of consumable goods and services that responded favorably to a request that I initiated”, then Tom’s reply “Me too” would have been literally correct. However, Paul didn’t utter any such thing; no one ever says anything like that in everyday life. Speaking in legalese would not be helpful at all, because to communicate smoothly, we all make small analogies and we know that others will understand them despite their imprecision and sloppiness. By contrast, a complex and “precise” legalistic remark such as we just put into Paul’s mouth, although it might seem very general and applicable to many circumstances, is very hard to understand.

It may seem to you that Tom and Paul are merely solving a proportional analogy puzzle — namely,
“paying for a beer
:
Paul’s world
::
X
:
Tom’s world
”. And that’s true, in a sense, since it’s possible to force any analogy into the classical schema “A :
B
::
C
:
D
”, as long as one sees
B
and
D
as two large situations taken as wholes, and
A
and
C
as small aspects or constituents of the “worlds”
B
and
D.
The analogy would of course be the fact that A’s role inside world
B
is “the same as” C’s role inside world
D
.

Take the conversation between Paul and Tom, for example. What, in fact, are
Paul’s world
and
Tom’s world
? Neither notion is in the least well-defined. Both men were in a bar, in a hotel, attending a meeting, in the same city, in the same state, and so forth. How many of these common attributes would be relevant to Tom’s me-too? On a smaller scale, the fact that Paul generously helped himself to the peanuts that Tom ordered somewhat blurs the boundaries between their separate worlds inside the bar. And on a much larger scale, what we are calling “Tom’s world” might or might not include his airplane ticket, the title of his talk at the conference, the broken airconditioner in his hotel room, the glitch in the lapel microphone when he started to give his talk, the stool he was sitting on in the hotel bar, and so forth. In a nutshell, the boundaries of the situations designated by the simple-seeming phrases “Paul’s world” and “Tom’s world” in the proportional analogy just cited are neither sharp nor explicit.

It’s not our intention to mystify the cognitive process that took place inside Tom’s head, but it strikes us as unhelpful to pretend that one can formalize the situation by using a symbolic notation that carries connotations of mathematical precision. All analogies can be cast after the fact as proportional analogies, but only in very few cases is such a formulation at all natural. The proportional notation is but a set of hints that ignore all the psychological complexity that we just described; this lack of psychological relevance undermines the interest of casting analogies in proportional form.

A dogmatic insistence on the uniformity and “proportionality” of all analogies recalls the legend of the Greek demigod Procrustes, a mythical giant who grabbed all innocent passers-by and forced them to lie down on his bed. Then, depending on the sizes of their bodies, he would either violently stretch them until their body had grown to be as long as the bed, or else he would chop their feet off in order to keep their body from sticking out beyond either end of the bed. In this way, Procrustes always reached his goal of making each “guest” fit the Procrustean bed perfectly, but at quite a sacrifice.

Sometimes one feels like saying “me too” to indicate empathy or agreement, or to convey the sense that one sees the world through the same eyes; other times one says it simply not to be impolite. Thus the phrase “me too” can come bubbling up to one’s lips even before one has a clear idea of what one means by it. For instance, store clerks in airports have a habit of saying, “Have a nice flight” to passengers on the way to their planes, and in return they quite often hear, “You too!” Much the same thing happens to servers in restaurants who say “Enjoy your meal!”

Sometimes a me-too is ambiguous. Thus, if a friend says, “I’d like it if you could come over for dinner one of these days”, and you reply “Me too”, are you looking forward to going to your friend’s house or do you hope your friend will come to your place? It can mean both things at once, in fact, and we may not even be conscious of what we really mean by such a statement. If we are, then we may realize that for the other person there is a potential ambiguity, and we may feel obliged to be more specific for purposes of crystal-clarity.

We’ll now present a series of examples in which the slippages between categories are unlikely to be noticed, yet some of them involve an impressive amount of mental fluidity, since in every case, conceptual slippages take place in the passage from the first person’s frame of reference to the second person’s frame of reference, and what slips and what remains fixed is subtle and depends on many unspoken factors.

In the first example, A and B could be standing next to each other, or hundreds of miles apart, talking by phone, but it’s always
the
moon that both see — not one moon each. In the second, by contrast, there are different heads and different headaches.

In the first example, we can imagine F being a man (in which case he was of course never a little girl). It’s also possible, though unlikely, that F had some other animal, perhaps a cat or even a less common pet. In the second, it’s clear that H had a crush on G. The mental slippage here effortlessly flips the direction of Cupid’s arrow.

In the first example, one understands that I and J had an argument, and that each is telling the other one that they are sorry for their own behavior. In the second, by contrast, K feels that a recent accident constitutes an excuse for having committed some peccadillo, and L simply agrees with K that this is a reasonable point of view.

In the first example, we understand that both M and N are men and that both of them were negligent toward their respective wives this past year. Thus, “my wife” shifts in meaning from “M’s wife” to “N’s wife” when the speaker changes. On the other hand, in the second example, we can safely infer that both men arrived together in P’s car (rather than each of them driving up in the other one’s car!), and so P’s remark means, “We
both
left our presents for your wife in my car. How can we be so dumb?”

When R says, “Me too”, it’s obviously not because R once dropped Q’s wedding ring into the garbage. R is speaking of R’s own wedding ring. Even if R is not now
married, and even if R was married not just one time but several times in the past, the noun phrase “my wedding ring” is understood as meaning “the ring that I wore during a certain period to signify that I was then married”. As for “the wastebasket”, it certainly doesn’t mean The Wastebasket (as if there were only one single wastebasket in the entire world, like The Moon before Galileo’s act of pluralization); in fact, R’s “wastebasket” could have been a garbage disposal, a sandy beach, a bowl of soup, a lake, a drain, a mailbox — who knows what! So many diverse scenarios could be seen as matching Q’s story. And if, perchance, the memory that came rushing up from one’s subconscious was of one’s teen-aged niece accidentally dropping a piece of costume jewelry from a chairlift into a bank of powder snow below her, perhaps one wouldn’t actually pronounce the words “Me too”, but such an act of conscious censorship doesn’t prevent the memory from having bubbled up, and it doesn’t mean that one wasn’t at least
tempted
to say “Me too”. Even in that extreme case, we’re still dealing with a
me-too
situation, albeit a marginal member of the category.

One Thursday afternoon, while Edward was waiting to pick up his son from school, he was talking with Stephanie, the mother of one of his son’s friends. Stephanie spontaneously said to him, “I think your wife is very pretty — she has a gorgeous face.” Edward instantly put his mind in gear, trying to find a worthy reply to this compliment bestowed upon his wife. As he wanted to keep it in the same vein, he found himself in search of a me-too. But what me-too could it be?

The first idea that came to mind was based on the category
mate
: “Since Stephanie just complimented
my
mate, maybe I ought to do the same for hers.” However, the idea of telling Stephanie that her husband was very handsome made Edward somewhat uncomfortable. Appreciating the faces of other men was not something that came naturally to him, and furthermore, the general way that women have of savoring other women’s attractiveness seemed to him very different from the way a man might react to another man’s good looks. And on top of all that, such a me-too would have an artificial, nearly mechanical quality, because it would be so formulaic, copying in such a direct fashion the original remark, that its sincerity would instantly be cast in doubt, no matter how genuine the feeling behind it might be. It would simply seem that whenever Edward received any sort of compliment, he felt instantly obliged to send another one back, parrot-like. Such a character weakness is not something one wants to convey to other people. And so, having weighed all these factors in his mind in an eyeblink, Edward suppressed his first tendency to say, “Me too — I think your husband is very handsome; his face is extremely attractive.”

Next, Edward thought of a me-too that was based not on the category
mate
but on the category
female member of the couple.
“Since Stephanie just complimented the female in
my
marriage, I could turn around and compliment the female in
her
marriage — namely, herself.” But he couldn’t bring himself to do this either, because he would have felt uncomfortable telling Stephanie that he found her very pretty; such a remark
could easily be taken the wrong way. And so he dropped the idea of saying to Stephanie, “Me too — I think that
you’re
very lovely.”

At this point, Edward realized that what troubled him about the me-too that he had just given up on was that he and Stephanie were of the opposite sex, whereas his wife and Stephanie were of the same sex. Therefore, wouldn’t the best me-too respect the fact that the admirer and the admiree belong to the same sex? In other words, if complimenting a
female
is more important than complimenting a
mate
, it might also be the case that the compliment should
come
from a female rather than from a male. This was a novel idea! It meant that he could tell Stephanie that
his wife
found her to be lovely. Although his mind was now racing to find something to say before he started to look impolite, Edward still wasn’t satisfied with this option, because it would presume to be giving the viewpoint of a third person, whereas Stephanie had voiced her
own
opinion. And so, Edward dropped the idea of telling Stephanie, “My wife admires
your
face, too, Stephanie.”

In the end, the analogy that he settled for was the most literal one possible, the most down-to-earth and the most elementary of all analogies, and yet the one that turned out to be the most charming, in his view. Stephanie had told him his wife was lovely, and so, with a smile, Edward graciously replied, “Me too! I think she’s very lovely!”

As we have seen, understanding the meaning of a me-too remark can require fluid and subtle analogical thinking, despite the surface-level banality of the remark. There are many other expressions in any language that act in pretty much the same manner, in that they involve analogies that at first seem trivial, until one looks at them more closely. We’ll now take a look at just such a remark.

Now just
what
is it that happens to Peter each January? It’s surely not the case that he bollixes up his own signature by using his maiden name instead of his married name whenever January rolls around. Quite obviously, he is referring to the phenomenon whereby one writes the old year on a document, rather than the new year.

The pronoun “that”, used so casually by Peter, has a subtle double-valuedness. Into it he squeezed both the concept of
signing a check with one’s maiden name instead of one’s married name
and also the concept of
dating a document with the old year instead of the new year
, thus killing two birds with one stone. Peter’s usage of “that” brought into existence a new abstract category in his mind, having both types of event as members. Earlier, we saw similar phenomena involving subcategories of the vast categories
there
and
here
; now
we are witnessing the spontaneous creation of a subcategory of the inconceivably vast category denoted by the pronoun “that”. This category, which includes just about everything one could imagine, has essentially zero utility without a context drastically restricting it. But the restricted version of “that” created by Peter’s comment denoted a subtle, abstract, and interesting category — a regularity in the world that appears in many different guises in addition to the two Peter was thinking of.