Abstract
The most prevalent sense of ‘analogy’ in cognitive science and AI literature, which I refer to as predictive analogy, is the process of inferring further similarities between two given situations based on some existing similarities. Though attempts to validate predictive analogy on logical grounds have been singularly unsuccessful, it is claimed that all the empirical evidence points to the usefulness of predictive analogy in cognition. In this article I critically analyze this claim. I argue that the classroom experiments by cognitive psychologists to demonstrate predictive analogy as a problem-solving heuristic do not really do so. Moreover, the few studies of real-world problem-solving situations definitely point away from predictive analogy. I present some examples where predictive analogy prevents one from seeing things as they are, thereby hindering cognition. Having exposed its ‘dark side’, I argue for a balanced perspective where predictive analogy is best seen as a psychological process that is as likely to be a liability as an asset to cognition.
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Indurkhya, B. (1992). Predictive analogy and cognition. In: Jantke, K.P. (eds) Analogical and Inductive Inference. AII 1992. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 642. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-56004-1_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-56004-1_15
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