The Literary Mind.pdf

MANY SPACES 95
However, a second possible response in the social debate occurs when those
in the target reject the projection, on the claim that the two groups do not belong
to a category at all. It might be claimed, for example, that violence is central to
men but not to women and that any generic space that lumps them together does
a disservice to women and is to be rejected; that the rich are inherently dishonest
while the poor are inherently honest and that any generic space that lumps them
together does a disservice to the poor and is to be rejected; that white culture is
essentially a culture of ice and therefore cold while black culture is essentially a
culture of the sun and therefore warm and that any generic space that is proposed
as a category that applies to both of them is to be rejected; that conventional
marriage involves asymmetry between the man and the woman while samesex
marriage has no such asymmetry and so any generic space proposed to lump
them together is to be rejected. What is at issue here is of course not in the slightest
degree any particular ideological view but rather the fact that all ideological views
use parable to judge and reason. Parable is an instrument of thought and belief
and consequently of argument.
The cultural tussle over the analogical pressure of "same-sex marriage" upon
conventional category structures provides daily journalistic copy and stirs passions.
It is an example of the role played by blended spaces in our understanding
of cultural and social reality, and of our place in that reality. Blended spaces play
the identical role in the world of basic science. Consider the case of "artificial
life." If a mental space that includes biological life has as central information
"embodied, developed through biological evolution, carbon-based," and so on,
then "artificial life"—which comes from a computer lab and is not based on carbon—will
always be an analogical concept, and "artificial life" will not belong to
the category "life." It will be a provisional category extension, like "He's a real
fish." But computer viruses, for example, share abstract structure with biological
organisms. As the generic space that can be projected from biological life and
imposed on computer events grows more useful, some people may be tempted
to change their conception of the status of this information as carried in the source.
The generic space involved in the concept "artificial life" could in principle come
to constitute the central structure of the source. In that case, "artificial life" would
become a subcategory of life. At present, "artificial life" is an analogical projection
of evident utility that seems unlikely to displace conventional category connections.
But that situation could in principle change.
Blended spaces play a routine role in the development of even the most fundamental
scientific concepts. Mass and energy, once conceived as belonging to
two different categories, have been reconceived. The blended space of mass that
is simultaneously energy has become the new category: Mass is energy and energy
is mass. Similarly, the projection of spatial structure onto the conception of time
has always been profound; in our own century, the scientific role of this projec-