nucleation

LIT-1810: Structure-Mapping: A Theoretical Framework for Analogy

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Properties5
StatusActive — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1349) from a scan of the published article on the author's Northwestern lab pages; worth reading as the founding statement that analogy maps relations rather than attributes and that higher-order relations select which relations go across, which is what a single-relation alignment such as Gromov–Wasserstein leaves out.
Version2
Tagscognition, compositionality
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-1349 — Gentner — Structure-mapping
Cited as “source” byTHEORY-1154 — People interpreting an analogy carry relations from base to target and drop the attributes of objects, and among the relations they prefer those bound into a system by higher-order relations, such as causal or mathematical constraints, over isolated ones (structure-mapping and its systematicity principle)

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Gentner, D. (1983). Structure-mapping: A theoretical framework for analogy. Cognitive Science, 7(2), 155–170.

Read in full in NOTE-1349.

Why this is here

A6 read GW alignment as a numerical form of structure-mapping’s first principle, and used structure-mapping to say what GW leaves out: two systems can share pairwise distances and realize different kinds of relation, and higher-order relational systems are what analogy keeps. It bears on CLAIM-113 and CLAIM-135.

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