I Am a Strange Loop

Let’s try another example, just a tiny bit more daring. There’s a batch of cookies on a plate at a party and I pick one up, take a bite, and remark to my children, “This is delicious!” Immediately, my kids take one each. Why? Because they wanted to taste something delicious. Yes, but how did they jump from my statement about my cookie to a conclusion about other cookies on the plate? The obvious answer is that the cookies are all “the same” in some sense. Unlike the pieces of cake, though, the cookies are not all parts of one single physical object, and thus they are ever so slightly “more different” from one another than are the pieces of cake — but they were made by the same person from the same ingredients using the same equipment. These cookies come from a single batch — they belong to the same category. In all relevant aspects, we see them as interchangeable. To be sure, each one is unique, but in the senses that count for human cookie consumption, they are almost certain to be equivalent. Therefore if I say about a particular one, “My, this is delicious!”, my statement’s meaning implicitly jumps across to any other of them, by the force of analogy. Now, to be sure, it’s a rather trivial analogy to jump from one cookie to another when they all come from the same plate, but it’s nonetheless an analogy, and it allows my specific statement “This is delicious!” to be taken as a general statement about all the cookies at once.

You may find these examples too childish for words. The first one involves an “analogy” between several slices of the same cake, and the second one an “analogy” between several cookies on the same plate. Are these banalities even worthy of the label “analogy”? To me there is no doubt about it; indeed, it is out of a dense fabric of a myriad of invisible, throwaway analogies no grander than these that the vast majority of our rich mental life is built. Yet we take such throwaway analogies so much for granted that we tend to think that the word “analogy” must denote something far more exalted. But one of my life’s most recurrent theme songs is that we should have great respect for what seem like the most mundane of analogies, for when they are examined, they often can be seen to have sprung from, and to reveal, the deepest roots of human cognition.

Exploiting the Analogies in Everyday Situations

As we’ve just seen, a remark made with the aim of talking about situation A can also implicitly apply to situation B, even if there was no intention of talking about B, and B was never mentioned at all. All it takes is that there be an easy analogy — an unforced mapping that reveals both situations to have essentially the same central structure or conceptual core — and then the extra meaning is there to be read, whether one chooses to read it or not. In short, a statement about one situation can be heard as if it were about an analogous — or, to use a slightly technical term, isomorphic — situation. An isomorphism is just a formalized and strict analogy — one in which the network of parallelisms between two situations has been spelled out explicitly and precisely — and I’ll use the term freely below.

When an analogy between situations A and B is glaringly obvious (no matter how simple it is), we sometimes will exploit it to talk “accidentally on purpose” about situation B by pretending to be talking only about situation A. “Hey there, Andy — take your muddy boots off when you come into the house!” Such a sentence, when shouted at one’s five-year-old son who is tramping in the front door with his equally mud-oozing friend Bill, is obviously addressed just as much to Bill as to Andy, via a very simple, very apparent analogy (a boy-to-boy leap, if you will, much like the earlier cookie-to-cookie leap). Hinting by analogy allows us to get our message across politely but effectively. Of course we have to be pretty sure that the person at whom we’re beaming our implicit message (Bill, here) is likely to be aware of the A/B analogy, for otherwise our clever and diplomatic ploy will all have been for naught.

Onward and upward in our chain of examples. People in romantic situations make use of such devices all the time. One evening, at a passionate moment during a tender clinch, Xerxes queries of his sweetie pie Yolanda, “Do I have bad breath?” He genuinely wants to know the answer, which is quite thoughtful of him, but at the same time his question is loaded (whether he intends it to be or not) with a second level of meaning, one not quite so thoughtful: “You have bad breath!” Yolanda answers his question but of course she also picks up on its potential alternative meaning in a flash. In fact, she suspects that Xerxes’ real intent was to tell her about her breath, not to find out about his own — he was just being diplomatic.