Analogy-Making as Perception

by Melanie Mitchell . MIT Press , 1993. ISBN 0-262-13289-3.

The psychologist William James observed in 1890 that "a native talent for perceiving analogies is...the leading fact in genius of every order." The centrality and ubiquity of analogy in creative thought has been noted again and again by scientists, artists, and writers, and the understanding and modeling of analogical thought has emerged as one of the most important challenges for cognitive science. In this book, Melanie Mitchell describes Copycat, a computer model of analogy-making, developed by Douglas Hofstadter and herself. This work is based on the premise that analogy-making is fundamentally a high-level perceptual process, in which perception, interacting with concepts, gives rise to "conceptual slippages" which allow an analogy to be made. Copycat is a model of this complex, subconscious interaction between perception and concepts that underlies the creation of analogies.

In Copycat, both concepts and high-level perception are emergent phenomena, arising from large numbers of low-level, parallel, non-deterministic activities. In the spectrum of cognitive-modeling approaches, Copycat occupies a unique intermediate position between symbolic and connectionist systems, a position that is at present the most useful one for understanding the fluidity of concepts and high-level perception.

On one level, the work described here is about analogy-making, but on another level it is about cognition in general, exploring such issues as the nature of concepts and perception, and the way in which highly flexible concepts emerge from a lower-level "subcognitive" substrate.

This book is aimed at cognitive scientists, psychologists, philosophers, and artificial-intelligence researchers interested in cognitive modeling, perception, concepts, analogy, and creativity.

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