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Analogies Out of the Blue: When History Seems to Retell Itself

Lelyn D. Saner,Christian D. Schunn

Published 2020 in Proceedings of the Twenty First Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society

ABSTRACT

To explain the origins of new scientific ideas, historians and philosophers of science point to examples where scientists appear to have drawn analogies between their scientific domain and some very different domain. By contrast, research from the psychology lab suggests that those kinds of analogies are very difficult to obtain in even the simplest situations. To resolve this potential conflict, we examine the analogies that occur in psychology lab group and formal colloquium settings. This approach can be viewed as a crosssectional approximation of an historical analysis. We find that as the setting moves further away from the original discovery, the way different types of analogies appear to be used changes. In particular, analogies between very different domains are never used in reasoning in the lab group, whereas they are frequently used in reasoning in formal colloquium presentations. Yet, we find that analogy between very similar domains remains an important source of new ideas and a method for solving problems in scientific settings.

PUBLICATION RECORD

  • Publication year

    2020

  • Venue

    Proceedings of the Twenty First Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society

  • Publication date

    2020-12-22

  • Fields of study

    History, Computer Science, Psychology

  • Identifiers
    DOI 10.4324/9781410603494-113
  • External record

    Open on Semantic Scholar

  • Source metadata

    Semantic Scholar

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