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

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