Mapping with Fi-Sci: Why and How Fictionality Illuminates Science

Mapping with Fi-Sci: Why and How Fictionality Illuminates Science Rhona Trauvitch (bio) It is a trite saying that “analogies cannot be pushed too far,” yet they may be justifiably used to describe things for which our language has no words. Werner Heisenberg, The Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory In Surfaces and Essences (2013), Douglas R. Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander contend that thought is a function of analogy.1 They explain that we automatically categorize every concept we come across—indeed must do so to interact with the world—and analogy is the mechanism that carries out this categorization. “In order to survive,” Hofstadter and Sander write, “humans rely upon comparing what’s happening to them now with what happened to them in the past. They exploit the similarity of past experiences to new situations” (28, original emphasis). The cognitive approach to analogy2 was pioneered in 1980 by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, whose overarching claim is that “[o]ur ordinary conceptual system […] is fundamentally metaphorical in nature” (3). As Karen Sullivan puts it, “metaphor is a cognitive process that allows one domain of experience, the target domain, to be reasoned about in terms of another, the source domain” (1). But how do we reason about objects that do not seem to fit into any category, objects that defy comparison to anything familiar? The interface [End Page 59] between the human mind and its surroundings, what David Herman calls “person-environment interactions” (ix, original emphasis), can be parsed into four perceptual groups: (i) readily observable objects, such as trees, that can be understood in terms of human-scale biology; (ii) objects indiscernible without technical assistance, such as the underground fungal network that sustains these trees, that are considered in terms of non-human-scale biology; (iii) tiny objects, such as the subatomic particles that make up this network and indeed all matter, whose nature is incomprehensible and whose behavior is studied in the realm of quantum physics; (iv) and large objects, such as black holes that can swallow our planet of trees whole and that dilate spacetime, whose nature is incomprehensible and whose behavior is studied using the theory of relativity. Quantum and cosmic objects are incomprehensible because they stand in contrast to our embodied, everyday experience; human cognition precludes an accurate conceptualization of them. And yet, despite the difficulties of reasoning about some objects in group (ii), and all objects in groups (iii) and (iv), they are not entirely out of conceptual reach—and not just because they can be communicated in terms of mathematics. While the mind is challenged by the indiscernible and will never visualize the incomprehensible, there is a mode that brings us close enough that we can familiarize confounding science without the need for fluency in math, a mode that can concretize the indiscernible and the incomprehensible for whoever is an audience of science, from students at any stage to the community at large. In this essay I argue that the instrument that makes this possible is fiction. Access to confounding objects turns on the same mechanism that grants access to all concepts: analogy. The crucial difference is that when it comes to groups (iii) and (iv) and even some objects in group (ii), a productive and sometimes the only source domain is fiction. To approach confounding objects, we must reason about them by drawing on our cognitive faculty for invention. I turn to the Hofstadter-Sander model of conceptualization—that is, category extension (34–39)—in order to identify and explore the essential role of fiction in cognition. Without the facility for invention that makes fiction possible, our minds would not be able to reach groups (iii) and (iv), categories populated with incomprehensible objects. I therefore augment the model to account for the effect that fiction has on our encounters with curious scientific phenomena. [End Page 60] The claim that fiction can bring to light forms that would remain hidden without it ascribes to fiction a remarkable power. Where does this power come from? I answer this question with a rhetorical approach to fictionality, which “entails assuming that [fictionality] is a means to an end” (Nielsen et al. 63). The rhetorical approach...