When we explain certain things / phenomena / processes etc. with analogy – does this imply there is a common principle including logic, idea etc. behind that can explain different things?
Can we explain anything with analogy or something are unique that can’t be explain with analogy?
Dear Han Fung.
Your question is related to analogy and analogical reasoning, namely if we can explain anything with analogy or something is unique that can’t be explained with analogy. As far as I know, there several types of logical reasoning and to get conclusions while reasoning. Induction, deduction, abduction, and analogy are four cases in point.The existence of several types of logical reasoning means that we cannot explain anything through analogical reasoning. As your question has to do with analogy, I dispense with providing you with a working definition of induction, deduction and abduction. Your certainly know this.
A working definition of analogy is to say that analogy is a comparison between two or several things that are different in nature. An analogy often explains a complex subject with one that is simpler or more familiar. For example, when a teacher describes one's heart as a pump s/he is employing an analogy. An analogy is also at stake when we say, for example, that a home is to man as a hole is to a rabbit. I would say that conclusions by analogy are based on the principle of similarity (see Markovic's answer), but also in the principle of comparison.
In the domain of psychological testing, the relatively well-known Raven's progressive matrices are solved through analogy, as can be seen in the attached file that I got from the NET. As you can see, in the first row there appear three geometric different figures. This is also the case of the second row. In the third row, there appear only two geometric figures followed by a ?. At the bottom there appear four geometric figures. For one to solve the problem expressed by the existence of a ?, one has to choose among those four figures the one that takes into account the rationale existing in the first two rows mentioned above.
I hope that I got you questions and that this helps.
Best regards, Orlando
Analogy is a very interesting area indeed.
When we are faced with something unfamiliar, we attempt to understand it by relating it to something familiar : This notion is nicely captured in the following article (I used to read sometime ago) -
Gregan-Paxton, J., & John, D. R. (1997). Consumer learning by analogy: A model of internal knowledge transfer. Journal of Consumer Research, 24(3), 266-284.
Best wishes!
Philadelphia, PA
Dear Fung,
I would say that analogy is a very creative way of approaching something unfamiliar. As was pointed out above, we make an analogy to something more familiar--in effect, we attempt to map a familiar pattern of concepts onto the unfamiliar terrain.
But a perfect mapping will be rare--and less creative. It is just the fact that the analogy tends to breakdown in particular areas which forces the attempt to adjust the conceptual pattern, in some fashion or other, so that it better fits the new domain. There are bound to be alternative possible adjustments and these alternatives may enter into a kind of intellectual comparison and competition.
Things can surely be comparatively similar or dissimilar, more or less similar or dissimilar, so I would tend to the assumption that the supposedly unique is simply at the extreme of what is comparatively dissimilar to things in our prior experience.
H.G. Callaway
There is quite an interesting theory from Douglas Hofstadter on analogy as the core of cognition.
Analogy, like induction, is a principle of economy. The best analogy between two cases is the one which minimizes the amount of information necessary for the derivation of the source from the target (1). Its most fundamental measure is the computational complexity theory.
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