Forced matches occur every day in the political cartoons of newspap-
ers: a political figure is portrayed as an airplane, a boat, a fish, the Mona
Lisa; a government is a human, a bird, an oil rig; a treaty is a briefcase, a
sword, a can of worms; on and on and on. What is fascinating is how easily
we can perform the suggested mapping, and to the exact depth intended.
We don't carry the mapping out too deeply or too shallowly.
Another example of forcing one thing into the mold of another occur-
red when I chose to describe the development of my Crab Canon in terms of
meiosis. This happened in stages. First, I noticed the common conceptual
skeleton shared by the Crab Canon and the image of chromosomes joined by
a centromere; this provided the inspiration for the forced match. Then I
saw a high-level resemblance involving "growth", "stages", and "recombina-
tion". Then I simply pushed the analogy as hard as I could. Tentativity-as
in the Bongard problem-solver-played a large role: I went forwards and
backwards before finding a match which I found appealing.
A third example of conceptual mapping is provided by the Central
Dogmap. I initially noticed a high-level similarity between the discoveries of
mathematical logicians and those of molecular biologists, then pursued it
on lower levels until I found a strong analogy. To strengthen it further, I
chose a Godel-numbering which imitated the Genetic Code. This was the
lone element of forced matching in the Central Dogmap.
Forced matches, analogies, and metaphors cannot easily be separated
out. Sportscasters often use vivid imagery which is hard to pigeonhole. For
instance, in a metaphor such as "The Rams [football team] are spinning
their wheels", it is hard to say just what image you are supposed to conjure
up. Do you attach wheels to the team as a whole? Or to each player?
Probably neither one. More likely, the image of wheels spinning in mud or
snow simply flashes before you for a brief instant, and then in some
mysterious way, just the relevant part~ get lifted out and transferred to the
team's performance. How deeply are the football team and the car mapped
onto each other in the split second that you do this?
RecapLet me try to tie things together a little. I have presented a number of
related ideas connected with the creation, manipulation, and comparison
of symbols. Most of them have to do with slippage in some fashion, the idea
being that concepts are composed of some tight and some loose elements,
coming from different levels of nested contexts (frames). The loose ones
can be dislodged and replaced rather easily, which, depending on the
circumstances, can create a "subjunctive instant replay", a forced match, or
an analogy. A fusion of two symbols may result from a process in which
parts of each symbol are dislodged and other parts remain.(^672) Artificial Intelligence: Prospects