Analogies are pervasive in thought. I was under the impression that cognitive scientists basically agree that a large portion of our thought is analogical, and that we would be completely lost without our capacity for analogy? But perhaps I’ve only been exposed to a narrow subsection of cognitive science, and there are many other cognitive scientists who disagree? Dunno.
But anyway I find it useful to think of analogy in terms of hierarchical modeling. Suppose you have a bunch of categories, but you don’t see any relation between them. So maybe you know the categories “dog” and “sheep” and so on, and you understand both what typical dogs and sheep look like, and how a random dog or sheep is likely to vary from its category’s prototype. But then suppose you learn a new category, such as “goat”. If you keep categories totally separate in your mind, then when you first see a goat, you won’t relate it to anything you already know. And so you’ll have to see a whole bunch of goats before you get the idea of what goats are like in general. But if you have some notion of categories being similar to one another, then when you see your first goat, you can think to yourself “oh, this looks kind of like a sheep, so I expect the category of goats to look kind of like the category of sheep”. That is, after seeing one goat and observing that it has four legs, you can predict that pretty much all goats also have four legs. That’s because you know that number-of-legs is a property that doesn’t vary much in the category “sheep”, and you expect the category “goat” to be similar to the category “sheep”. (Source: go read this paper, it is glorious.)
Anyway I basically think of analogy as a way of doing hierarchical modeling. You’re trying to understand some situation X, and you identify some other situation Y, and then you can draw conclusions about X based on your knowledge of Y and on the similarities between the two situations. So yes, analogy is an imprecise reasoning mechanism that occasionally makes errors. But that’s because analogy is part of the general class of inductive reasoning techniques.
Perhaps a better title would have been “The Correct System-II Use of Analogy”, or “The Correct Use of Analogy in Intellectual Debate.” What you’re saying is true about day-to-day/on-the-fly thinking, but written argument requires a higher standard.
Analogies are pervasive in thought. I was under the impression that cognitive scientists basically agree that a large portion of our thought is analogical, and that we would be completely lost without our capacity for analogy? But perhaps I’ve only been exposed to a narrow subsection of cognitive science, and there are many other cognitive scientists who disagree? Dunno.
But anyway I find it useful to think of analogy in terms of hierarchical modeling. Suppose you have a bunch of categories, but you don’t see any relation between them. So maybe you know the categories “dog” and “sheep” and so on, and you understand both what typical dogs and sheep look like, and how a random dog or sheep is likely to vary from its category’s prototype. But then suppose you learn a new category, such as “goat”. If you keep categories totally separate in your mind, then when you first see a goat, you won’t relate it to anything you already know. And so you’ll have to see a whole bunch of goats before you get the idea of what goats are like in general. But if you have some notion of categories being similar to one another, then when you see your first goat, you can think to yourself “oh, this looks kind of like a sheep, so I expect the category of goats to look kind of like the category of sheep”. That is, after seeing one goat and observing that it has four legs, you can predict that pretty much all goats also have four legs. That’s because you know that number-of-legs is a property that doesn’t vary much in the category “sheep”, and you expect the category “goat” to be similar to the category “sheep”. (Source: go read this paper, it is glorious.)
Anyway I basically think of analogy as a way of doing hierarchical modeling. You’re trying to understand some situation X, and you identify some other situation Y, and then you can draw conclusions about X based on your knowledge of Y and on the similarities between the two situations. So yes, analogy is an imprecise reasoning mechanism that occasionally makes errors. But that’s because analogy is part of the general class of inductive reasoning techniques.
Perhaps a better title would have been “The Correct System-II Use of Analogy”, or “The Correct Use of Analogy in Intellectual Debate.” What you’re saying is true about day-to-day/on-the-fly thinking, but written argument requires a higher standard.