On My Mind IV


Analogy is surely destiny, but a specific analogy may not be our destiny in the particular realm we occupy. So we search for better analogies, ones that allow us to discover what is really going on. Mathematical and physical models have proved productive, especially as they have been supplemented by computational and biological models. At the same time, there are ways of being in the world that demand very different analogies, not to be encompassed by mathematics and natural science.
The examples I have employed, the analogies I have described and analyzed, are practical, used all the time by technical experts. Moreover, these analogies are employed thoughtlessly, as the way the world is. Only when we are misled by the analogy, that is, our empirical experience denies the analogy we are using, do we then stop and think, and either check if our sense of the world is accurate or see the analogy for what it is, a very rough and tentative metaphor, and decide we have been misled by our thoughtless thoughtways. To be thoughtless is no sin if you can get away with it and the world delivers on your expectations. But if the convenient analog proves to have misled us, then we might return to thinking, to find a better analogy, one that will serve us well as did the misleading one, and will not mislead us in new situations.

What is really going on?, once more…
Again, I want to understand what is really going on. By “really” I mean the mechanism, the actual process, by which things happen.  There may be mathematical representations, or perhaps institutional theories, but I keep hunting for the insight that makes sense of what I am seeing.  I realize that “really” is a particularly unclear term, but it influences how I go about trying to understand something.  Moreover, if I find a good analogy, one that I have earlier mastered and understood, I am likely to feel that I am closer to what is really going on.
            To that end, I am seeking as many perspectives or models of what I am seeing, the phenomenon, that might be applicable. I hope that there is an identity in a manifold of presentation of profiles or examples or perspectives, that identity being what I might mean by “really.” In effect, there is a unity in that multiplicity.

Analytic Description
            I aim for an analytic description of the world and its phenomena. Namely, I have in mind a language and mechanism and my goal is to apply it to the phenomena at hand, and see if I can illuminate their workings. If I can provide more than one such analytic description, I expect that the descriptions will illuminate each other, and so lead to a deeper sense of what is going on.
            I may have some intuition, unformed but pregnant. I have to wait until enough examples, cases, become attached to that intuition so that in effect my ideas have condensed into an orderly mode of understanding, again much as water condenses into crystalline ice. More examples, better models, insights, whatever needs to fit their way in, and at some point (if I am fortunate) I can see an orderliness.  Not-so-helpful notions may be discarded, and even then an attempt to provide a good description may founder. It is time to go back to the laboratory and patiently experiment.
            I am analytically distant rather than intensely involved and committed.


2.Thinking for a Living

Thinking and Analogy

We are in a forest whose trees will not fall with a few timid blows. We have to take up the double-bitted axe and the cross-cut saw, and hope that our muscles are equal to them…  The notions needed to understand perceived reality may bear little resemblance to it…we are dealing with a tissue of conjectures that cannot be tackled frontally. The aesthetic tension between the immediate appeal of concrete facts and problems on the one hand, and, on the other, their function as a vehicle to express and reveal not so much universal laws as an entity of a different kind, of which these laws are the very mode of being. [i] (Robert Langlands)


When I am thinking I am seeking analogies to what is in front of me. (Seeking is the wrong term, for immediately I am thinking in terms of some analogy.) When I am theorizing, I am providing a more general description of what is in front of me. Abstractions are always, inevitably, in terms of models or examples, suitably understood. Presumably, whatever is in front of me is a case or example of something more general, actually a case or example of many such generalities, or a member of a class of examples. I know that there are many such examples pointing to the presumed generality, each pointing from a different perspective. The recurrent problem occurs when your more general notion, what informs your view of what is in front of you, gets too far ahead of your examples (and “too far” is not so clear).
            I only understand what I am doing after I have written the article or book and it is published. In time, I see just what I was up



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