The Jigsaw Puzzle as a Metaphor for Knowledge
Raymond D. Gozzi · ETC.: A Review of General Semantics · 1996
We commonly say that something is or we are puzzled by something. A can actually be a very large and indeterminate situation, which stops us dead our tracks because we don't know what to do. Sometimes I think that Nature itself is a large puzzle, which we can put together various ways, achieving different lifestyles for ourselves depending on how we solve the It is useful to have a metaphor like puzzle to describe such an indeterminate situation. Puzzles are indeed important things. They played a role many ancient myths, which involved having the protagonists figure out some riddle or before being allowed onto the next stage of their journey. And so when I was putting together a series of jigsaw puzzles, at one point my life, I took the opportunity to think about puzzles general. The jigsaw itself, the cardboard-and-paper collection of differently shaped and colored pieces, was an embodied metaphor. It embodied, physical form, a large metaphorical concept. Within limitations, it provided fruitful material for thinking about the process of solving puzzles of all kinds. You start, of course, with a large pile of randomized pieces. Thousands of them. It looks hopeless. Disorder reigns supreme. But you do have a couple of things going for you. First, there's the picture on the box - you actually know what the answer will look like, a large sense. You can get hints about the general groupings of the differently colored pieces - those blues will represent water, these blues are the sky, these buildings are brown and tan, and so on. The result will be a Mediterranean seashore scene, with boats and buildings under a blue sky. Is this an accurate metaphor for our situation when faced with puzzles life? Sometimes, yes. We often have a general sense of what is going on, what should be happening we just don't know the details. We don't know how it can be brought under control. We don't have all the pieces filled yet. In life, our fantasies, theories, ideologies are the pictures on the box. We try to put together the pieces of our lives so they will match these dreams. So an important way, solving puzzles, we work backwards from solutions. This goes counter to our expectations of moving logically, step by step, from premises to conclusions. Logically, we are supposed to work forward from premises, not backwards from solutions. But real life, as the embodied metaphor of the jigsaw puzzle, we often do not proceed logically. We have another thing going for us as we tackle our jigsaw puzzle. The boundaries of the are straight lines. We can separate out the edge pieces because they are usually the only ones with straight edges. Is this an accurate metaphor for solving puzzles life? It can be, if we assume that our conceptual boundaries are like the straight line borders of our puzzle. We understand certain concepts up to a limit. That limit is the edge of our puzzle. And so we work from the edges of our puzzle. As we do, certain outlines appear, and we search for pieces which will fit them. We work from the context, try to fill the blanks. Again, this is different from how we conceive logical problem-solving to work. We usually think of going to the heart of the matter and building upon what we already know. This might be analogous to finding a bunch of pieces which are the same color, and which obviously belong together. We put them together into a tan building, say. They are then a sub-assembly ready to be plugged in when the rest of the is ready. But the main action is working in, bit by bit, from the edges. Early the puzzle-solving process, there are lots of pieces lying around. The job is to classify them, group them together. …