(50) Constraints that facilitate
analogical reasoning or other low-level means of resolving a dispute become anemic when a judge is the final expositor of the law and the law being interpreted is foundational.
"Similarity and
Analogical Reasoning: A Synthesis." En S.
In Study #2, children's
analogical reasoning theories were used to create advertising messages that communicated the health risks of smoking.
Because of the initial assumption that the target domain is similar in all respects to the source domain,
analogical reasoning can mislead in several ways.
Why does
analogical reasoning seem to produce novel ideas?
Moreover, although both of these methodologies have room for
analogical reasoning of the type Brewer endorses, the role for
analogical reasoning in these methodologies cannot be what Brewer, Sunstein, and others seek for ARIL.
As Gentner (1983) has observed, the defining characteristic of successful
analogical reasoning is the transfer of an explanatory structure from the source domain to the target domain.
Once more, this inference relies on the principle of
analogical reasoning noted above.
In other words, schooling appears to facilitate several perceptual skills (e.g., mental rotation, same-different judgements, visual-spatial reasoning, figure-ground discrimination), and conceptual skills (e.g., rule learning, free association,
analogical reasoning, multiple classification) that is required for successful performance on IQ tests.
The practical ethicist can say of most new cases, "Oh, I think I've been here before, even though it looks a bit different now." Theory may sometimes provide the valuable warnings of which I spoke above; it does so particularly when the going gets rough and
analogical reasoning reaches dead ends, that is, must seek for a justification of the entire line of
analogical reasoning.
In the past two decades, important steps have been taken towards the development of a functional-analytic model of
analogical reasoning (Barnes, Hegarty, & Smeets, 1997; Stewart, Barnes-Holmes, Roche, & Smeets, 2001, 2002) based on the experimental paradigm of equivalence relations (Sidman, 1971).
Their work is guided by two central hypotheses: the centrality of
analogical reasoning and the utility of qualitative representations.
