vision

history cannot be accurately represented by words on a page. when we study or teach history or just talk about it, or whatever, our focus is on the reading and writing and speaking of a story that we create. We can't access what it was actually like, because that would require us to be there, and if we were there, our experience would be very particular and contextual and nothing like what someone would read about the events we are experiencing, in the future. 

a couple of books I read said some interesting things about this idea. I can't remember the exact details - author, title, exact wording - so I will just paraphrase. 

one book was about scientific discovery and the other book was about writing. In the one about writing, the author made the point that, for any classic text, the complete difference in context between when the book was written and now means that, it's not enough just to say that the contemporary (to the text) audience would interpret the text differently // instead, we can say that they were effectively reading a different text. 

I actually figured out which book the one about scientific discovery was ⇨ It's What Galileo Saw: Imagining the Scientific Revolution (2014) by Lawrence Lipking. I don't have access to the full book - only the preview on Amazon - but I really like the subject of this book, so I might buy it at some stage. Using his telescope, Galileo was able to see the moon, stars and planets, and even some moons of some other planets. The fascinating concept underlying the book is that what Galileo actually saw is different from our idea of what he saw. We accept as common knowledge details about the universe such as, for example, that the moon is basically a globe just like the earth and that it has topographical features which we perceive as shadows and spots. Galileo, in many ways, began the journey of discovery that we're still on with regard to the universe. We have a mental image of the solar system that Galileo didn't have, and this book (I think) is about the mental process whereby raw data (e.g. the visual data take in by Galileo's eyes) is converted into useful information, and the way that imagination plays a part in that process. 

In Elements of Chemical Philosophy (1812), Humphry Davy says/ writes, this: 

The foundations of chemical philosophy, are observation, experiment, and analogy. By observation, facts are distinctly and minutely impressed on the mind. By analogy, similar facts are connected. By experiment, new facts are discovered; and, in the progression of knowledge, observation, guided by analogy, leads to experiment, and analogy confirmed by experiment, becomes scientific truth. 

Analogy is central to the process of scientific discovery. Analogy guides observation, and enables the connection of facts - the conversion of raw data into useful information - and leads to further experiment to confirm the analogy and that confirmation converts the analogy into scientific truth. 

To my mind (and I'm probably biased), analogy seems like a concept that is more related to creativity and imagination than it is to science. But when I look up the etymology of the word, I find that it does have a history of use in mathematics and logic. But still....if you break it down to its Greek roots, you find something interesting ⇨ ana - "upon, according to" & logos, which means ratio, word, speech, reckoning. In old medical prescriptions, the term 'ana' meant 'equal amounts of each'. So that makes sense /// analogy is about correspondence and something in a different context that is somehow similar or equal to something else. 

 Douglas R. Hofstadter has suggested that analogy is the 'life-blood' of human thought. With regard to cognition, Hofstadter writes that analogy is 'everything, or very nearly so, in my view.' (from Analogy as the Core of Cognition) 

I agree. I think analogy is central to all learning. We can only learn anything new if it relates to something we already know. If there is no link to something we already know, we can't make sense of what we're perceiving. That's why, to make sense of what he was seeing through his telescope, Galileo would have had to evoke or develop some kind of analogy - to establish a link between what he already knew and what he was seeing. 

There is a progression....any new thing we observe will correspond in some ways, but not in others, to a schema/ idea / conception in our mind. When we observe something, we comprehend it by matching it with something that we already know about. Once we are sure about that match, we can then add the differences to our existing concept - we can enrich our existing idea and make it more complex. That seems to be the kind of process that Davy was talking about.