Readings in Analogy-Making

Here are some links to interesting books, papers, people, and websites related to analogy-making and metaphor. If I’m missing a link that you would recommend, please leave a comment. Look here for a list of quotations about analogy-making and metaphor. There is no particular order to these lists.

The Most Important Research Problem

In a recent blog post, Daniel Lemire writes:
Hamming, the famous scientist, once suggested that researchers should focus on the most important problems in their field … What are the important problems in 2007? The ones we should all be working toward? Any ideas?
I happen to be working on the most important research problem. First, I [...]

Analogy, Ethics, Cooperation, Evolution, and the Golden Ratio

Consider an analogy of the form A:B::C:D, “A is to B as C is to D”; for example, “mason is to stone as carpenter is to wood”. This kind of analogy is often called a proportional analogy. The Greeks believed that proportional analogy is like the numerical equation A/B = C/D; for example, 1/2 = [...]

Analogy and Logic

Aristotle’s theory of syllogism (in Prior Analytics) is often cited as the origin of modern logic. He also had a theory of analogy (in Poetics), which he put to practical use in reasoning about ethics (in Nichomachean Ethics). It seems that he believed logic and analogy were both valid forms of reasoning. The majority view [...]

Unified Latent Analysis

In Latent Semantic Analysis, we use a large collection of text to build a matrix, in which the rows represent words and the columns represent chunks of text. A chunk can be a sentence, a paragraph, a document, or any sequence of words. The value in a cell in the matrix is based on the [...]