The Creature on the Sidewalk

Friends and Readers,

For many years I was an educational consultant, working with teachers on curriculum and classroom issues and with students on academic problems.

My favorite moments were the Ah-hah! experiences, when a student (or sometimes a teacher) struggling with understanding some concept would suddenly have the light break through the clouds.

What seemed incomprehensibly complicated a moment before suddenly became simple, or what seemed to be a problem a moment before suddenly became a solution.

Over the years I found I could often see these moments coming, and sometimes I would even offer a spoiler alert.

“You,” I would say, “are about to have an Ah-hah!”

I loved witnessing those moments of revelation, during which a client’s world would change, and they would suddenly see something in an entirely new light.

I was thinking about this today, and it reminded me of an Ah-hah! experience I had while writing my doctoral dissertation in philosophy.

I had chosen to write about models and model theory in religious and scientific language.

You’ve run into these kinds of models constantly, though you may not have used the term “model” itself.

For example, if I were to ask you why it is that we see the lightning before hearing the thunderclap, you might respond that “light waves travel faster than sound waves.”

The term “waves” that shows up twice in that sentence is a scientific model—a way of understanding light and sound through an analogy between light, sound, and water waves.

The same model applies to “radio waves.”

And, if you happen to remember your high school physics, you’ll recall the “billiard ball model” of gases.

If you have a background in any Christian denomination you have run into all sorts of models.

There are models of the trinity based on water, ice, and steam—or based on fathers, sons, and their mutual love.

There are substitution, sacrifice, and ransom models of salvation (among others).

So I dived into the whole question of models and how they worked.

One question that kept surfacing in my research was whether models were metaphors or literal language.

Philosopher after philosopher had tackled this question without achieving much agreement.

Metaphors, they all agreed, were basically analogical. When I say “my love is a red, red rose” I don’t mean that literally—I mean it analogically.

The problem was that scientists, for example, (and theologians, as well) seemed to take their models quite literally, even though it was quite obvious that they were rooted in analogy.

Scientists really believed that radio waves, light waves, and sound waves existed, out there in the real world.

Some theologians really believed that the Holy Spirit was God the father’s love for God the son.

I struggled with this problem for a very long time, researching everything I could get my hands on, formulating one theory after another only to discard them all.

And then one day I noticed something.

Most of the philosophers who wrote about this problem spent their time defining metaphor very carefully, but said very little about literal language.

It was very common for them to say something like, “we all know what literal language is, but what is metaphor?” and then go on to discuss metaphor for the rest of their essay without bothering about literal language again.

Noticing that led me to start researching literal language. And that led me to a surprise.

Literal language is itself entirely analogical.

So the difference between literal and metaphorical language can’t be analogy.

This was the beginning of a big “Ah-hah!” for me. One that says something important about the whole nature of life, not just science and theology, but our social lives, our politics—everything.

Just yesterday I was taking my morning walk and saw a cat, some distance ahead, lying in the middle of the sidewalk.

As I approached, it adjusted its position a tiny bit, but it didn’t run off, the way I’ve come to expect strange cats to do.

And, as I got closer, I realized that it was really quite large for a cat.

I began to wonder if this was a sick raccoon, or some other kind of animal, and to think about how to walk around it in order to stay entirely clear.

I finally reached it, and had a little Ah-hah!

It was just a black plastic bag, stuck there and moving ever so slightly in the breeze.

The interesting thing about that experience was that I didn’t first see a plastic bag, and then misinterpret it as a cat.

I literally saw a cat.

And the way I saw that cat was exactly the same way we all see anything—by drawing an analogy: in this case an analogy between what I could see of that shape on the sidewalk and all my previous cat-experiences.

As I got closer, I realized that the analogy didn’t fit perfectly, and began to see a more dangerous animal—substituting an analogy between that dark thing moving in a life-like (another analogy) way and my experiences of the raccoons which visit my garden at night.

Then I literally saw something like a raccoon.

Finally, when that analogy broke down, I literally saw a plastic bag.

Each of those nouns—cat, raccoon, plastic bag—was the name of an analogy, and each of them was literal language.

What I literally mean by the word cat is the analogy between all of the cats I have ever experienced. When I say, “That is a cat.” I mean that it is like all the other cats I have known.

So what about metaphor?

The difference between literal language and metaphor turns out to be a matter of intent.

When I say my love is a red, red, rose, you know from the context that I don’t intend for you to permanently classify her as a plant—to try to perceive her through your “rose” analogy in its entirety, but rather to simply apply one particular part of your rose analogy—beauty—to her. I don’t even mean to imply that she is ‘red.’

When I say that room is a pigsty, you know perfectly well that I’m not saying you will find actual pigs in it.

In that sense, metaphor is actually less analogical than literal language. It asks us to apply the analogy involved less completely and less seriously.

So, four things.

First, the way we perceive is by choosing an analogy for the current experience. Most of the time this is automatic and reliable. Only occasionally do we mistake a plastic bag for a raccoon.

But even when we choose the correct analogy, we still need an analogy to properly perceive anything.

Secondly, those models are literal language—analogies which are used to interpret, say, light phenomena, just as “cat” is an analogy by which I interpret cat phenomena.

Thirdly, our analogies are not always based only on our own, direct, experience.

Humans live in communities, and many of our analogies are formed in part or whole by what our community has told us.

This gives each of us a much wider and more complex range of analogies to make use of, but it also has its drawbacks.

If our community is mistaken about something—negative things about certain kinds of people, for example—we are likely to actually perceive those people unfairly when we do meet them.

Or make unfair assumptions about them at a distance.

And this kind of thing can distort our reality.

Finally, I learned from all of this where most of those Ah-hah! experiences come from.

They happen when someone finds the proper analogy to clarify their situation.