On Fri, Oct 17, 2008 at 7:09 PM, Harry Chesley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I find myself needing to more thoroughly understand reasoning by analogy. > (I've read/thought about it to a degree, but would like more.) Anyone have > any recommendation for books and/or papers on the subject? >
The classics: Hofstadter's "Fluid concepts and creative analogies.", Structure-Mapping Engine. See Peter Turney's reading list: http://apperceptual.wordpress.com/2007/12/20/readings-in-analogy-making/ There is much literature in analogy-making, playing with words, puzzles and situations. I'd like to see good analysis of why analogy makes sense, why it's expected to work and why it works when it does. Basically, analogy is a way to discover a certain kind of concepts, specified not by arrangement of properties, but by relations between the properties. Analogy establishes relational similarity, and by extension allows to perform relational classification. Classification works because our actual world supplies limited number of substantially different patterns, so you can identify a myriad of properties by recognizing only few ( http://causalityrelay.wordpress.com/2008/07/06/rules-of-thumb/ ). Perter Turney recently made an interesting point about why analogy works better than classification by collections of properties ( http://apperceptual.wordpress.com/2008/10/13/context/ ): "Context is about the relation between foreground and background. The way we use contextual information to make predictions is that we represent the relations between the foreground and the background (e.g., the relation between weather and engine temperature), instead of representing only the properties of the foreground (e.g., the engine temperature out of context). Thus reasoning with contextual information is an instance of analogical reasoning. Looking at it the other way around, relational similarity is superior to attributional similarity because the former is more robust than the latter when there is contextual variation." -- Vladimir Nesov [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://causalityrelay.wordpress.com/ ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=117534816-b15a34 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
