As I work on Natural Information Architecture, I’m sharing notes and quotes from my sources of inspiration and provocation. As always, your questions and suggestions are welcome.
In Surfaces and Essences, Hofstadter and Sander claim that analogy is the core of all thinking, analogies are categories, and categories are mental models that evolve.
Without concepts there can be no thought, and without analogies there can be no concepts. (3)
The tendency to think of concepts in overly simple terms is reinforced by dictionaries. (3)
Ordinary words don’t have just two or three but an unlimited number of meanings. (5)
The spontaneous categorizations that are continually made by and in our brains, and that are deeply influenced by the language we are speaking but also by our era, our culture, and our current frame of mind, are quite different from the standard image, according to which categorization is the placing of various entities surrounding us into preexistent and sharply-defined mental categories, somewhat as one sorts items of clothing into different drawers. (13)
The act of categorization often feels perfectly definite and absolute to the categorizer. (14)
The idea that category membership always comes in shades of gray rather than in just black and white runs strongly against ancient cultural conventions, and is therefore disorienting and even disturbing; accordingly it gets swept under the rug most of the time. (14)
[Categorization] allows invisible aspects of objects, actions, and situations to be “seen” [and] future events to be anticipated. (14)
The triggering of memories by analogy lies so close to what seems to be the essence of being human. (18)
It is misleading to insist on a clear-cut distinction between analogy-making and categorization, since each of them simply makes a connection between two mental entities in order to interpret new situations that we run into by giving us potentially useful points of view on them. (19)
We think only thanks to analogies that link our present to our past. (20)
This buildup of concepts over time does not in any way establish a strict and rigid hierarchy. (54)
Until quite recently, philosophers believed that the physical world was divided into natural categories — that is, that each and every thing, by its very nature, belonged eternally to an objective category. (54)
Context has a great influence on categorization. (58)
The way we carve the world up with words and phrases seems to us the right way to view the universe — and yet it is a cliche that each language slices up the world in its own idiosyncratic manner. (77)
Categories vastly outnumber words. (85)
Many categories have verbal labels that consist of a string of words. (85)
Categories are mental entities that do not always possess linguistic labels. (85)
Since proverbs are the labels of rather subtle and complicated categories [e.g., sour grapes], slapping a proverb onto a situation is a way of bringing out aspects that otherwise might remain hidden. (101)
Intelligence, to our mind, is the art of rapid and reliable gist-finding, crux-spotting, bull’s-eye hitting, nub-striking, [and] essence-pinpointing. (125)
Each person’s repertoire of categories is the medium through which they filter and perceive their environment, as they attempt to pinpoint the most central aspects of situations. (130)
Remindings that take place at a deep level are often dependent on emotional aspects of the two episodes they link together. (171)
Any domain, no matter how limited it might seem from afar, can be refined forever, not only horizontally (the number of categories) but also vertically (the levels of abstraction). (242)
It is amazing how humble are the conceptual slippages [recategorization, abstraction] that have sparked intellectual revolutions (e.g., Archimedes, Einstein). (251)
The key move is making the appropriate upward leap in the space of categories. (256)
Analogies coerce us; they force our thoughts to flow along certain channels. (257)
The interpretation of a situation is inseparable from the analogies (or categories) it evokes. (257)
Speech errors [or “conceptual slippages” afford] a rich window onto the mind [e.g., we’ll pull no stops unturned to get him to come here]. (259)
To be considered opposites, two concepts must share a great deal. For example, big and small are opposite sizes; likewise, light and dark are opposite degrees of brightness. The fact of inhabiting opposite ends of a spectrum is what makes these pairs of concepts be located very near each other, and it gives rise to the possibility of slippage between them. (276)
All five senses help us to build bridges between the sensory world and that of emotion and ideas. (287)
A poor categorization can make a simple problem difficult, if not unsolvable. (293)
The only way we have of making decisions, whether they are small or large, is through analogy. (331)
Novices have not built up the deeper categories of the domain, hence they don’t perceive them. (341)
Categories constructed by experts in a given domain are very different from those constructed by novices. (342)
Book Notes
Surfaces and Essences dances on the shoulders of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Eleanor Rosch, and George Lakoff (family resemblances, prototype theory, exemplars, centrality).
A category grows from singular (there’s Mom) to plural (we all have moms) to complex (surrogate mom, Mother Nature) due to experience and insight. When we learn a new concept, we restructure our mental models (e.g., when Galileo changed Moon to moons).
An expert draws upon a rich mix of categories-analogies and sees what’s invisible to the novice. Since “essences are revealed by surfaces,” an expert can read the river.
Strange Connections
When I was five years old, our teacher (in England) taught us set theory. She used hoops of many colors to create Venn diagrams on the classroom floor. While our focus was on mathematics, I expect these lessons reified our existing cognitive and cultural biases to conceive of categorization as placing things in their natural boxes.
In reflecting upon Surfaces and Essences, it strikes me that, with respect to how the brain works, it’s fair and freeing to re-frame boxes as arrows and categories as connections.
Like facets, categories are connections tilts the playing field from one right way to infinite ways to organize the same information. Or, to toss out a strange connection, un-natural information architecture is the fuel and fire of creative thinking.