Analogical Thinking Research Articles

Analogía, un modelo alternativo Crítica al modelo estándar de solución de problemas por analogía y propuesta de un modelo alternativo

Los autores realizaron una extensión de la crítica de Hofstadter al enfoque estándar sobre el pensamiento analógico, representado por la teoría de la proyección de la estructura de Gentner y la teoría de las múltiples restricciones de Holyoak y Thagard. Basados en esta extensión, propusieron un modelo no serial de solución de problemas por analogía. Contra el enfoque estándar, el modelo postula que: (a) las personas detectan y evalúan diferencias entre elementos puestos en correspondencia antes del subproceso de generación de inferencias y las consideran para controlar este subproceso, y (b) las propiedades de un elemento para un rol (PERs) juegan un rol crucial en estas operaciones de detección y evaluación, y también en los subprocesos post-inferenciales. Un experimento mostró que: (a) las personas detectan y evalúan la relevancia de diferencias entre elementos emparejados antes de la generación de inferencias, (b) inhiben las inferencias literales ante diferencias relevantes, y (c) detienen la transferencia ante diferencias insuperables. Los resultados mostraron también que las PERs base son reactivadas en diferentes momentos del proceso transferencial. Los datos obtenidos son incompatibles con el modelo estándar, que trata la generación de inferencias como un mecanismo sintáctico y excluye los análisis semánticos contextuales del estudio del proceso analógico.

Analogical thinking: post-Enlightenment understanding in language, collaboration, and interpretation

Analogical argues that sometime around the turn of the twentieth century, a new mode of comprehension arose, supplementing received Enlightenment ideas concerning the nature of understanding and explanation. Focusing on the innovations of structural linguistics and its poststructural legacy, the individualism of Enlightenment knowledge and the collaborations of post-Enlightenment information, and practices of reading and interpretation across the arts and sciences, Analogical Thinking examines the ways in which analogical presentations of similarities respond to the experiences of twentieth-century culture.The book traces this mode of thinking in linguistics, collaborative intellectual work in the arts and sciences, and interpretations of literary and sacred texts, concluding with a reading of the concept of Enlightenment in a comparison of Descartes and Foucault. The book examines the poststructuralism of Derrida; the collaborations of information theory and modern science as opposed to the individualism of Adam Smith and others, and analogical interpretations of Yeats, Dinesen, the Bible, Dreiser, and Mailer. Its overall aim is to present an interdisciplinary examination of a particular kind of understanding that responds to the experiences of our time.Ronald Schleifer is Professor of English, University of Oklahoma. His books include Rhetoric and Death: The Language of Modernism and Postmodern Discourse Theory, Criticism and Culture; and Culture and Cognition: The Boundaries of Literary and Scientific Inquiry.

Rhetorics of Law and Ritual: A Semiotic Comparison of the Law of Talion and Sympathetic Magic

Many punishments, including the law of talion, which prescribes “an eye for an eye,” are structured by the same analogical principles of similarity and contiguity that Tylor and Frazer identified in sympathetic magic. As with magic, analogical punishments have frequently been consigned to a “primitive” past, even by such important theorists as Durkheim and Foucault. However, the appearance of analogical thinking in modern times, which Jonathan Z. Smith has shown in the case of Frazer, calls into question such evolutionist accounts. Bentham's “modern” philosophy of punishment also reveals a dependence on analogy and the convergence of punishment and magic as forms of ritual and rhetoric. Unlike evolutionist accounts, semiotics and ritual theory suggest an explanation for the wide and enduring use of analogy in rituals. Such analogies serve the rhetorical function of reinforcing and naturalizing arbitrary social laws, whether these are prescriptions of magic or laws of punishment.

Exchanging spare parts or becoming a new person? People's attitudes toward receiving and donating organs

The present study explored the public's feelings and ideas about receiving organs, and how this influenced their attitudes toward accepting a transplant themselves. Also the willingness to donate was examined in order to provide a complementary perspective. The main aim was to identify consistent attitude patterns that would include attitudes toward both receiving and donating organs and the motives behind this. Sixty-nine individuals with varying socio-demographic background, selected from samples who had responded to a questionnaire on receiving and donating organs and tissues, were interviewed in-depth. The approach to analyse the interviews was hermeneutic. Seven typical attitude patterns emerged. By an ‘attitude pattern’ was meant a specific set of attitudes and motives, that formed a consistent picture that was logical and psychologically meaningful. In the discussion, two different conceptions of the body were focused. One of them meant that the body was easily objectified and conceived as machine-like, and did not represent the self. This machine model paved the way for the understanding that body parts needed to be replaced by spare parts. The other conception meant that a new organ would transfer the donor's qualities, i.e. influence the identity of the recipient with regard to behaviour, appearance, and personality. This belief may be explained by ‘analogy thinking’ based on our everday experience of how mixed entities take on the qualities of all components. Another explanation would be a kind of magical thinking and ‘the law of contagion’, which is often connected to oral incorporation. The consequences of these conceptions when patients are confronted with the factual situation of a transplantation, were discussed.

People's feelings and ideas about receiving transplants of different origins--questions of life and death, identity, and nature's border.

The aim of this study was to explore the public's feelings and ideas with regard to receiving transplants of different origins. Sixty-nine individuals with varying sociodemographic background, selected from samples who had responded to a questionnaire on receiving and donating organs, were interviewed in-depth. A wide variety of reactions was displayed. The feelings and ideas about receiving organs were summarized in ten categories: 1) the emergency situation; 2) the functioning of the transplant; 3) the influence of transplants on personality, behaviour, and appearance; 4) the influence of transplants on body image; 5) disgust; 6) cannibalism; 7) trespassing nature's border; 8) tradition; 9) ethical considerations; and 10) the debt of gratitude. Most individuals were willing to accept at least one organ. Animal organs were the least preferred. The hierarchy of organ preferences--with organs from a relative at the top and animal organs at the bottom was explained in terms of rational, magical, and analogy thinking. Finally, the consequences for the encounter between health care personnel and transplantation candidates were briefly discussed.

RITUAL, TEXT, AND THE FORMATION OF THE CANON: HISTORICAL TRANSITIONS OF WEN IN EARLY CHINA

The word wen X, in Xu Shen's t'tE(c. 55-c. 149) Shaowen jiezi StSF deElned as criss-cross pattern (cuohua Z),1 has been ruminatec3 upon numerous times during the last two millennia, and it is still under sophisticated deliberation wherever students of traditional Chinese culture and literature meet. This phenomenon is in itself remarkable, revealing the genuine depth of a word that in its significance is rivalled by only a few others, like dao t or qi A. Such profound words, in this respect comparable to logos or pneuma in the West, embody almost universal significance through their originally most concrete meanings, relating physical matter, human activity, and cosmological order to one another. For wen, we hear of the different patterns of Heaven, Earth, and Man, and it is wen that mediates between these three, at least in analogical thinking.2 But at the same time, even a word like wen, together with whatever meaning can be proposed for it, is not located beyond the realms of general cultural history; in its usage, it is a genuinely historical phenomenon, changing with times and therefore remaining continuously meaningful in subsequent ages and to different social orders. Wen

準備委員会企画特別講演

準備委員会企画特別講演

Oscillations and analogies: Thomas Young, MD, FRS, genius.

Thomas Young is arguably one of the greatest geniuses who ever lived, but most people have never heard of him, though he was renowned in his own era. He did important work in a large variety of scientific disciplines, but that was his downfall. Given the specialization of the present era, physicists do not appreciate how important his work in linguistics was, linguists do not appreciate the importance of his work in psychology, and so on. Despite his obscurity today, Young nicely exemplifies the traits that one finds in a genius of the first order: tendency toward analogical thinking, high intelligence, an amazing capacity for hard work, extremely wide interests, distaste for traditional dogmas, and very high self-esteem.

Can Shu Be the One Word that Serves as the Guiding Principle of Caring Actions?

Can Shu Be the One Word that Serves as the Guiding Principle of Caring Actions? Sin Yee Chan In this essay, I aim to explicate the meaning of the Confucian concept of shu (reciprocity) and to show how it can be applied in the ethics of care, as described by some feminist theorists.1Shu is explained as "what one does not want, one does not do to others" (Analects 15:23).2 Confucius refers to it as the one word that can serve as the guiding principle of conduct throughout life (Analects 15:23). And Confucius' disciple Tseng Tzu describes shu, together with the virtue of loyalty (chung), as the one thread that runs through Confucius' doctrine (Analects 4:15).3 I believe that shu also sheds interesting light on one significant issue in the ethics of care: when caring for another person, should we go by her perspective or ours in deciding what to do on her behalf?4 The question poses a dilemma. On the one hand, if we go by our own perspective, we may be acting paternalistically without giving due regard to the autonomy of the cared-for. On the other hand, if we blindly follow the perspective of the cared-for, we may not really be benefiting the cared-for. Furthermore, it could be argued, we would sacrifice our autonomy and be reduced to mere tools, as we would no longer be guided by our best judgment of what should be done. Shu can help us on this question. For shu, as I shall show, implies the affirmation of both the perspective of the caring agent and that of the cared-for, but assigns a priority to the former. This essay has two goals. The first and main goal is to provide a philosophical analysis of the meaning of shu. Specifically, I aim to defend and further develop Herbert Fingarette's insightful interpretation of shu as identifying with another person while remaining her critic.5 I shall base my analysis on the text of the Analects. The second goal is to show how shu can offer a viable solution to the question posed above. However, my work in this regard is programmatic and meant primarily to point to a promising direction for further exploration. The Meaning of Shu Shu: Positive and Negative Analogical Thinking The concept of shu in the Analects refers to a method of moral thinking. More specifically, shu is a kind of analogical thinking: taking oneself as a measure when one decides how one should treat others. However, it is not very clear whether shu refers only to negative analogical thinking, that is, thinking about what one should not do to others when one takes oneself as a measure for them, or whether it also includes [End Page 507] positive analogical thinking, that is, thinking about what one should do to others when one takes oneself as a measure for them.6 What is obvious, nevertheless, is that Confucius assigns equivalent roles to negative and positive analogical thinking. Both are used to explicate the Confucian ideal virtue of jen (benevolence): [No. 1.] Confucius said, ". . . A man of jen (benevolence), wishing to establish himself, also establishes others, and wishing to be prominent himself, also helps others to be prominent. To be able to draw upon what is close as an analogy is called the method of jen (benevolence)." (Analects 6:28) [No. 2.] Chung-kung asked about jen (benevolence). Confucius said, "When you go abroad, behave to everyone as if you were receiving a big guest. . . . What you do not want, do not do to others." (Analects 12:2) Since the discussions I offer in this essay hinge only on Confucian analogical thinking, but not on whether it is positively or negatively formulated, and given that positive and negative analogical thinking, philosophically speaking, express the same basic ideas, for the sake of simplicity I will use the term shu to cover both types of analogical thinking. Shu: Reversibility or Projection of One's Preference onto Others? Shu is also concerned with reversibility: one will do to others only what one would be willing to accept oneself if the positions were reversed. The...

Visual Analogy: Consciousness as the Art of Connecting (review)

Visual Analogy is an important book, as much for the problems it raises as for the arguments it elaborates. Stafford persuasively argues that our culture's success in analytically and imaginatively articulating differences leaves us severely impoverished in our ability to wield a "representational taxonomy recognizing the existence of degrees of likeness" (32). She offers a suggestive analysis of the two basic structures of analogy--one proportional, the other participatory. But I find her less persuasive on the corollary claim that if we are to negotiate degrees of likeness in [End Page 514] experience we have to restore the centrality of analogical thinking, which entails also foregrounding the powers involved in vision. Her effort to produce a theory of analogy makes clear what analogy cannot do and demonstrates to me the need to turn elsewhere for theoretical frameworks that can modulate between the tasks of establishing differences and of negotiating them.

Ambiguity and Remembrance: Individual and Collective Memory in Finland

In this article, I explore the complicated relationship between individual experience and national events, the way this relationship is narrated, and how individual memory becomes part of a collective memory. By looking at memoirs written by the descendants of Thomas Rantalainen, and focusing on personal correspondence, I show how the contents of letters written 60 years ago relate to events in Finland's history that are still being discussed today. In the narrative practices of the correspondence, the individuals themselves —through the use of a narrative We—mmerge their personal experiences with those of the community. Two themes in the letters—war and family life—illustrate how the processes of replication and analogical thinking work in bringing the past into the present. [Finland, history and analogical thinking, personal correspondence, domestic life]

Julia Margaret Cameron’s Women, Great Men and Others

mother?. --Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering In the beginning Margaret Cameron's place in the history of photography was secured by her portraits of great men. Her portraits of poets Alfred Lord Tennyson and Henry Taylor lifted her out of the domestic confines of chicken-coop studios and amateur theatricals. Her portraits of artists George Frederick Watts and William Holman Hunt allowed her penchant for soft focus, ethereal lighting and smudgy printing to be read as aesthetic gravitas rather than amateurish error. Her portraits of scientists John Herschel and Charles Darwin tempered her general reputation for kookiness and immoderate devotion to Art. Even though her great niece Virginia Woolf published a more varied selection of Cameron's images entitled Victorian Photographs of Famous Men and Fair Women in 1926, it has long seemed abundantly clear that the fair were something else--stagey, as old-fashioned as a frilly Valentine, beautiful, yes, but also more than a little embarrassing. Times have certainly changed, as have Cameron's critical fortunes. From a Victorian footnote to the history of modernism, she has become the Mother of all art photography. Her moody Madonnas, medieval damsels in distress, fleshy babies and sulky cupids are seen as the objects of another form of subjectivity, the maternality of her vision, its insistent overlaying of embracing sight and tender touch, the rebuttal to a purely optical, phallocentric gaze. The revisionist wave began with Mike Weaver, whose 1984 monograph entitled Margaret Cameron, 1815-1879 was followed by Whisper of the Muse: The Overstone Album and Other Photographs by Margaret Cameron in 1986. Weaver's sensitive reading of the strong strain of Christian piety and analogical thinking that informed Cameron's practice was accompanied by a sharp attack on those who persisted in seeing Cameron's work through the lens of her legendary eccentricity. deserve our indignation, he fumed. It is a cheap calu mny against a completely centered woman. [1] From there it seemed only a short leap to the argument that such a centered woman could produce nothing less than woman-centered art. Carol Mayor ecstatically rewrote Cameron's Madonnas as figures of female difference, proclaiming I love Cameron's fallen Madonnas. They are altered images of Mother, scratched with sexuality and printed with flesh. [2] Carol Armstrong weighed in with a more measured and nuanced but no less impassioned reading of Cameron's maternalization of photography and its processes, photography, as Armstrong would have it, under the sway of the Mother, rather than the law of the Father. [3] In 1998 Sylvia Wolf curated Margaret Cameron's Women, focusing with near exclusivity on the Victorian maidens that visited or worked for Aunt Julia at Freshwater, her estate on the Isle of Wight, and were drafted into service to play Mary Juliet or Ophelia before her camera. [4] (True, the magnificently bearded Taylor appears in a few images, but we are encouraged to see him as just another prop.) In his exhibition review Andy Grundberg declared Cameron's so arresting as to make her cast of heroic Victorian males ...seem irrelevant. [5] Armstrong, in turn, dryly lauded the photographic gynarchy produced by the feminine idiosyncrasy of Cameron's work and working methods, seeing the exhibition, to some degree, as a confirmation of her own take on Cameron. [6] Of course, not everyone is happy about these current developments. Janet Malcolm was typically judicious, suggesting that while the performative aspects of Cameron's fancy subject pictures inspired by literary themes and allegorical subjects might be more appealing to postmodernist than modernist sensibilities, something was potentially lost in the feminist narrowing of curatorial attention to the women and the (by implication, equally feminist) censorship of the comical from the repertory of Cameron anecdotes. …

10.5840/inquiryctnews1992931

Creative thinking and critical thinking are often thought of as two distinct, separate processes; however, each is a necessary component of the other. The challenge of critical thinking as creativity is to identify and transcend the nonessential criteria associated with the domain in which the critical thinking is exercised while not abandoning essential criteria. Analogical reasoning and metaphorical thinking are important to creative thinking. In the conception of critical thinking as creativity, emphasis is placed on discovering new ideas and the connections among them. Creative work often involves detachment, reflection, ambiguity, and risk. Suggestions for fostering creativity as critical thinking in school settings include having students collaborate on group projects, incorporating metaphors into the educational process, and using students' curiosity as a starting point for projects and tasks. Teachers can model the creative process themselves in addition to encouraging it in students. Professional development activities may be useful in helping teachers to develop creative thinking in themselves and insight into the creative process. (Contains 16

Reason and Individual Reasoning

The term “ljtihad” itself means to strive hard. But it has been widely usedto imply independent reasoning in the development of Islamic jurisprudence.The contemporary understanding, shared widely by formally trainedIslamic jurists, defines Ijtihad as an intellectual tool that seeks to articulateIslamic laws about issues on which the Qur’an and the Sunnah are decidedlysilent. This standard and orthodox conceptualization of Ijtihad, theoreticallylimits the role of reason to analogical thinking on mundane matters.Even though most Islamic thinkers do use reason quite judiciously inthe interpretation of revalation. The point that is often ignored in discussionsof Ijtihad, its meaning, role, scope and functions, is that the conceptualization of Ijtihad itself is the product of Ijtihad. The development of the‘usd uZ-fiqh, the principles of jurisprudence, and the systematic articulationand rank ordering of the sources of Islamic Law - Qur’an, Sunnah, ijma,Ijtihad, ‘urfand musZu& - are all products of an Ijtihad much wider inscope than its standard understanding. In a remarkably curious development,a conceptually wider process of Ijtihad has spawned a rather meektheory of Ijtihad.Taking a second look at the discussion between Imam Shafi‘i and hisinterlocutor on the Qur’anic sources of Ijtihad,’ one is amazed at how ImamShafi’i is able to build a whole theory out of a single verse. We are turningto Imam Shafi‘i because he has arguably left the most enduring andunshakeable impact on the structure of Islamic legal thinking and in particularon the theory of Ijtihad. In his response to the question, “Is Ijtihad permiadin the Qur’an?” Imam Shafi‘i derives the instrument from only oneverse of the Qur‘an and then supports it with just one other.Turn then thy face in the direction of the Sacred Mosque: whereveryou are turn your faces in that direction. (2:144) ...

Analogic Thinking in Science and Math

Analogic Thinking in Science and Math

Minority influence and optimal problem solving

An analogous thinking task was used to test Nemeth's Convergent–Divergent theory of majority and minority influence. Participants read a (base) problem and one of three solutions (one of which is considered the ‘best' solution). They then generated solutions to a second (target) problem which shared similar structural features to the first problem. Due to the similarities between problems, the solution given to the first problem can be used as an analogy in solving the second. In contrast to Nemeth's theory, when the solution to the base problem was endorsed by a numerical majority there was not an increase in analogy-transfer in solving the target problem. However, in support of Nemeth's theory, when the base solution was supported by a numerical minority then the participants were more likely to generate the ‘best' solution to the target problem regardless of which base solution they were given. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Dreaming as delirium: A response to Allan Hobson.

My response to Allan Hobson makes several points. Primarily, I argue that the coherence of any dream cannot be determined by the recall of the dream events alone. Rather, coherence must surely reside in the dreamer's felt involvement in those dream events, and this is virtually impossible to determine from a dream report. Second, in response to Hobson's claim that a purely associative thought process neglects the role of dissociation, I argue that metaphor (analogical thinking in general), in all its forms, consists of a tension between resemblance and dissociation (a shift from one domain to another) and that the function of metaphor is, precisely, to free us from the gravity of received understanding. I suggest ways in which this process operates in all speculation, including art and science. Finally, I discuss the nature of dream orientation in connection with the specimen dream that Hobson provided.

Book Review: Children's Analogical Thinking Modifiability Test

Book Review: Children's Analogical Thinking Modifiability Test

Engineering Thinking and Rhetoric

AbstractEngineers seek optimal solutions to problems. The solution criteria are of ten of several different types, and there is no formal way to find the best trade‐offs. Nevertheless, engineers make judgments and provide explanations to justify their choices. The thinking which identifies a particular solution as optimal relies on deduction and analogy. The rhetoric which explains the choice of solution uses precedents in a similar way to legal argument. Therefore the formal study of analogical thinking has a role in engineering education, and descriptive case‐based examples are important to the student, not just as illustrations, but as source analogs for problem solving.

Handbook of research on teaching literacy through the communicative and visual arts

Handbook of research on teaching literacy through the communicative and visual arts