Apples and Ideas

"If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange apples, then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas."

This quote, commonly attributed to George Bernard Shaw, though probably not from him , highlights one of the lovely things about ideas. They behave differently from physical things. They're not exclusive; they're additive and abundant.

Ideas Don't Behave the Same as Apples

Though we talk about intellectual property, ideas don't behave like property in the usual sense. One of the simplest ways to see the difference between ideas and objects is to look at what happens when we share them.

I can give you an idea, and we both have the idea, but if I give you my apple, then I no longer have one. This also makes ideas very hard to take back once they are out. Ideas are harder to control than objects.

Because ideas are abstract—they don't exist in a physical form—we use conceptual metaphor to talk and reason about them. What follows are some of my favourite examples of how we think about ideas, drawn primarily from Philosophy in the Flesh and the very readable Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson.

The Ideas Are Objects Metaphor

Metaphors are how we talk about abstract concepts, like an idea. And the Ideas Are Objects metaphor is one of the most common ways we understand them. This means that a lot of how we talk about apples and ideas overlap.

So I can:

give you an idea (or an apple), and maybe you'll
grasp it, or perhaps it might
go over your head

Ideas can be:

solid or weak
shared or hoarded
fragile or bulletproof
cheap or gold

Thinking Is Object Manipulation

Because you can examine objects and manipulate them, we have the metaphor Thinking Is Object Manipulation.

When you think about an idea, you might:

play with it
toss it around
see if it sticks
share it with others
try to break it

When you communicate with someone, you exchange ideas.

you can give an idea
get an idea across

Together with the Mind Is a Body metaphor (mental exercise), a teacher might try to:

put an idea into students' minds
fill them up during the term
see how much they've retained

And I've certainly employed cramming before a test.

Because Understanding Is Grasping—having an idea under control—when you don't understand something, it might:

be slippery
resist definition—has no shape
be beyond your grasp

As Thinking Is Object Manipulation, you can work on an idea:

reshape it
craft it
fashion it
analyse it by taking it apart
deconstruct it

Together with Knowing Is Seeing, we can:

Turn an idea over to see both sides of it
hold it up to scrutiny
shine a light on it
put it under the microscope

Ideas Are Food and Acquiring Ideas Is Eating

Another fun and common metaphor for ideas is rather more like apples. If the Mind Is a Body, then we need to feed it healthy, nutritious food. I like to think readers of Sketchplanations have an insatiable curiosity. In much of our reasoning, then, ideas are a special kind of object—they are our food for thought.

Unhelpful ideas are unhealthy, and helpful ideas are healthy, so they might be:

raw
fresh
half-baked
sweet

Or an idea might be:

rotten
disgusting or unsavory
unpalatable
hard to digest

Or they might:

smell fishy
leave a bad taste in your mouth

Or perhaps they need to be:

put on the back burner
chewed on for a while
sugar-coated

Significant ideas are:

meaty
something to chew on
let stew for a while

So What Are Ideas Really Like?

So, given all this talk about Ideas As Objects, it's easy to assume that ideas should behave like them. But before they take on a physical form — say, as a building or product — they don't behave the same as objects.

Hopefully, this sketch conveys this idea to you while keeping it with me, too.

I think a more suitable conceptualisation is the magical powers of software with its infinite copy/paste. As software becomes more of our daily experience, we might gradually adopt more accurate metaphors for how ideas actually behave.

These are not the only metaphors we use across languages for understanding and reasoning about ideas and thinking, Ideas Are Locations, and Thinking Is Moving in particular ("I don't follow you"). There are many. Do check out Metaphors We Live By if you're curious for more (or Philosophy in the Flesh if you really want to get stuck in).

Thanks to Franc M for suggesting this one.