[Author's Note: This is something I wrote as part of some training material on thinking conceptually. I decided it could also stand as a blog post, so here it is]
"Alice had often seen a cat without a grin
but never a grin without a cat"
- Lewis
Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
What is it to form a concept, or to
hold a concept in mind?
In Alice in Wonderland, the Cheshire
Cat talks with Alice for a while and then fades away to invisibility. The last
thing remaining before the cat disappears is its grin, prompting Alice to
remark that she has often seen a cat without a grin but never a grin without a
cat.
Note that it is not the mouth of the
cat that is last to disappear, nor its face or any other physical part of it,
but rather its grin. Carrol is playing with us here, presenting the notion of
something which disappears little by little, not strictly according to its
parts but in such a way as to leave behind something more abstract. A grin,
like a fist or a lap, is not really a physical part of something at all, but
the configuration of one or more of those parts, in this case the mouth and
possibly eyes of something, typically of a human.
On a side note, cats do not
of course smile, but the notion of the Cheshire Cat and its grin is one that
had been around in the culture for some time, variously ascribed to church
carvings, badly painted rural pub signs involving heraldic lions, or the simple
notion that Cheshire abounds in dairy products, causing the cats to have a huge grin. So the idea of
something or someone “grinning like a Cheshire cat” was one that already
existed before Carroll invented the eponymous character in
Wonderland.
What Carroll does here is invite us
to consider the Cheshire Cat as two discrete notions: that of a cat and that of
the felinely improbable grin which it wears.
Concepts are discrete. Many of the
things we think about or imagine are combinations of several distinct notions.
Since the mind is configured for maximal laziness, these concepts are almost
always amalgams of more reusable, generic stuff. A person with a smile is not
one concept but two: a person and a smile. The smiling person combines both the
characteristics of what we know of a person, and the characteristics,
implications and so on, of a smile.
Consider the following:
“I want to speak to the markets,” Leadsom smiled, with the air of
someone who imagines you can negotiate with gravity. There was absolutely
nothing to fear, she went on, smiling that smile again. Andrea Leadsom’s smile
is terrifying. It is the smile of the school careers adviser telling you flatly
that the school is looking for a night caretaker. It is a smile that is powered
by the extinguishing of your future. You can’t escape Andrea’s smile. And it’ll
certainly come for you if you try.
- Marina Hyde writing in the
Guardian, 9 July 2016
Here Hyde, writing in the Guardian
about a (hopefully soon forgotten!) leadership contender for the UK’s Conservative
Party, focuses in on the smile of the contender as a thing in itself, with
properties it owns quite distinctly from anything that might characterize
Leadsom herself. The smile is terrifying. It is powered by something. It is
inescapable. It can come for you.
Of course these are not things one
generally credits a smile on its own of being able to do. This is literary
license at its best. But that’s the point: literary arrangements like this work
because we think by means of discrete and separable concepts. Being able to say
meaningful things about something like a smile go well beyond logically
tractable notions of truth. The smile is a thing we can think about and ascribe
things to, even unlikely things.
Note also how, in line with what we
know of how something gets its meaning in the first place through the repeated
passing of signals along some neural pathway, the smile in question was able to
acquire in the writer’s (and the reader’s) mind, characteristics of the smile
of a school careers advisor. Characteristics which are invoked in the reader’s
mind, not specifically about school careers advisors alone, but by that kind
of person and situation, wearing that smile. Before, presumably, it is given
back to Leadsom, its current owner.
It is this kind of artistic
appreciation that is needed if one is able to consider, understand and use
concepts qua concepts in semantic analysis.
This is not simply about understanding how people think and communicate, although it is also that. Part of the art of conceptual thinking is being able to recognise and hold in mind as a discrete concept, something like the grin of the Cheshire Cat, the
career-destroying smile of the schools advisor, or that same smile on the face
of one of the more worrying political candidates of the age.
Two smiles, three
wearers. Let's hope that Ms Leadsom isn't grinning like a Cheshire Cat in September.
