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kilobug comments on The Correct Use of Analogy - Less Wrong
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For those interested, Douglas Hofstadter (of the famous Gödel, Escher, Bach) wrote recently a book called Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking which develops the thesis that analogy is the core and fuel of thinking, and does it quite brilliantly.
I'm only half-way through the book yet, but so far I liked it very much, the first part on language for example develops somewhat similar ideas, but with a quite different viewpoint, than the "Humans Guide to Words" Sequence on Less Wrong, and both complement each other well.
I'm also reading this book, and I'm actually finding it profoundly unimpressive. Basically it's a 500-page collection of examples, with very little theoretical content. The worst thing, though, is that its hypothesis seems to fundamentally undermine itself. Hofstadter and Sander claim that concepts and analogy are the same phenomenon. But they also say that concepts are very flexible, non-rigid things, and that we expand and contract their boundaries whenever it's convenient for reasoning, and that we do this by making analogies between the original concept (or its instances) and some new concept (or its instances). And I agree with that. But that means that it's essentially meaningless to claim that "concepts and analogy are the same thing". We can draw an analogy between the phenomenon we typically call "categorization" and the phenomenon we typically call "analogy", and I think it's very useful to do so. But deciding whether they're the same phenomenon is just a question of how fine-grained you want your categories to be, and that will depend on the specific reasoning task you're engaged in. So I'm just massively frustrated with the authors for not acknowledging the meaninglessness of their thesis. If they just said "it's useful to think of analogy and categorization as instances of a single phenomenon" then I'd totally agree. But they don't. They say that analogy and categorization are literally the same thing. Arggggghhhh.
(<i>Metaphors We Live By</i>, on the other hand, is one of my favorite books in the universe. It changed my life and I highly recommend it. (Edit: ok that sounds kind of exaggeraty. It changed my life because I study language and it gave me a totally different way of thinking about language.))
Similar: Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. A good antidote to much analytical philosophy, even while oversimplifying many of their targets.
Also by Lakoff, Where Mathematics Comes From as a case study of the way we use analogies (metaphors, rather) in a complex domain. The underlying power of analogical reasoning seems to lie in its ability to map from "far" to "near" domains and thinking styles. Since "near"-style thinking has distinctive properties, this ends up being quite useful.
If you're interested in the actual software implementations of his ideas, I'd also highly recommend Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies, as a review of some very interesting technical projects. The program 'Copycat' (and iterations such as Metacat ) is particularly noteworthy.