The Analogical Mind: Perspectives from Cognitive Science (review)

This book grew out of a 1998 summer workshop at the New Bulgarian University in Sofia, Bulgaria called ‘Advances in Analogy Research: Integration of Theory and Data from the Cognitive, Computational, and Neural Sciences’. While the contributors come from a variety of disciplines, they share an interest in a common approach to cognitive studies.

The book consists of an introduction by the volume editors, followed by thirteen chapters divided into three sections: ‘Computational and theoretical approaches’, ‘Arenas of analogical thought’, and ‘Developmental approaches’. An epilogue concludes the volume.

The introduction provides a brief history of the development of the study of analogy within cognitive science, a very brief statement of the current framework for analogy studies, and an outline of the remainder of the book’s contents.

Section 1 consists of four chapters based on actual running computational models of analogical thinking. These include: ‘Exploring analogy in the large’ (23–50) by Kenneth D. Forbus; ‘Integrating meaning and reasoning in analogy making: The AMBR model’ (54–124) by Boicho N. Kokinov and Alexander A. Petrov; ‘The STAR-2 model for mapping hierarchically structured analogs’ (125–60) by William H. Wilson, Graeme S. Halford, Brett Gray, and Steven Phillips; and ‘Toward an understanding of analogy within a biological symbol system’ (161–95) by Keith J. Holyoak and John E. Hummel.

Section 2 contains seven chapters, which deal with the role analogy plays within a variety of complex cognitive processes or tasks. The first three deal especially with analogical processes in language. The chapters in Section 2 include: ‘Metaphor is like analogy’ (199–254) by Dedre Gentner, Brian Bowdle, Phillip Wolff, and Consuelo Boronet; ‘Conceptual blending and analogy’ (255–86) by Gilles Fauconnier; ‘Setting limits on analogy: Why conceptual combination is not structural alignment’ (287–312) by Mark T. Keane and Fintan Costello; ‘The analogical paradox: Why analogy is so easy in naturalistic settings yet so difficult in the psychological laboratory’ (313–34) by Kevin Dunbar; ‘Emotional analogies and analogical inference’ (335–62) by Paul Thagard and Cameron Shelley; ‘Analogy and analogical comparison in choice’ (363–400) by Arthur B. Markman and C. Page Moreau; and ‘Semantic alignments in mathematical word problems’ (401–33) by Miriam Basok.

The last section contains two chapters: ‘Analogical reasoning in children’ (437–70) by Usha Goswami, and ‘Can an ape reason analogically? Comprehension and production of analogical problems by Sarah, a chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes)’ (471–97) by David L. Oden, Roger K. R. Thompson, and David Premack.

The epilogue is written by Douglas Hofstadter, who claims in a supposedly unorthodox view that, rather than being a ‘blip in the broad blue sky’, analogy is actually ‘the very blue that fills the whole sky of cognition—analogy is everything, or very nearly so, in my view’ (499). The essays in the book go a long way toward making this claim the standard view of cognitive science.