sas@BFLY-VAX.BBN.COM (10/30/87)
I am forwarding this without permission from the 23 October 1987 issue of Science: Robert Frost on Thinking Readers intrigured by "Causality, structure, and common sense" by M. Mitchell Waldrop (Research News, 11 Sept., p1297) may be interested in knowing that the role of analogy in reasoning has been discussed eloquently by poet Robert Frost in an essay called "Education by poetry". The following excerpts are among his most relevant comments: "I have wanted in late years to go further and further in making metaphor the whole of thinking. I find some one now and then to agree with me that all thinking, except mathematical thinking, is metaphorical, or all thinking except scientific thinking. The mathematical might be difficult for me to bring in, but the scientific is easy enough...." "What I am pointing out is that unless you are at home in the metaphor, unless you have had your proper poetical education in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere. Because you are not at ease with figurative values: you don't know the metaphor in its strength and its weakness. You don't known how far you may expect to ride it and when it may break down with you. You are not safe in sciencel; you are not safe in history...." "... All metaphor breaks down somewhere. That is the beauty of it. It is touch and go with the metaphor, and until you have lived with it long enough you don't know when it is going. You don't know how much you can get out of it and when it will cease to yield. It is a very living thing. It is as life itself...." "We still ask boys in college to think, as in the nineties, but we seldom tell them what thinking means; we seldom tell them it is just putting this and that together; it saying one thing in terms of another. To tell them is to set their feet on the first rung of a ladder the top of which sticks through the sky." Perhaps researchers in artificial intelligence who are teaching computers to reason by analogy should include in their curriculum a course in poetry. If so, I suggest they start with Frost. His poems have become an improtant feature of my own ecology courses because they contain much insight into cause and effect in nature, rather than mere appearance. Dan M. Johnson Dept of Biological Sciences East Tennessee State University Johnson City, TN 37614