Notes on Mental Leaps

A theory on how the mind extends knowledge. p.15

A multiconstraint theory - similarity, structure and purpose guide the formation of analogy through the stages of selection, mapping, evaluation and learning. p.17

"Scientific analogies have at least four purposes: discovery, development, evaluation and exposition." p.189

"A metaphor uses cross domain analogies. It is speaking about one thing to say something about another." p.213

"Allegories are extended metaphorical stories." p.215

"A metaphor always connects two domains in a way that goes beyond the normal category structure." p.217

Samuel Butler once said "Though analogy is often misleading, it is the least misleading thing we have." p.262

Similarity of objects, similarity of relations, similarity of relations of relations.

Why I am not writing

I feel obliged to make excuses because I have not been writing enough. I have, of course, been reading but I should be writing a little bit more. I will try.

Just finished reading "Mental Leaps" by Holyoak and Thagard. This book is all about analogy and creativity and I will be discussing the book and analogy shortly. I have also been working some more on Bayes' Theorem which I will also make an entry about. One thing that is slowing me down at this point is that I wish to embed some images and equations in these posts and I have also been trying out some different equation editors. I am trying out Open Office a little more, hopefully I can get its equation editor to work well. The Word equation editor is ok. The third party editors seem to be a bit of a pain in the butt. I have found an open source version that I may try out.

I am just going to make the diagrams in Powerpoint and try embedding them as html or I will convert them to an image and embed them that way.