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Abstract:

“Any kind of working model of a process is, in a sense, an analogy ” (Craik 1943) “... analogy is like a modeling relation except that it relates two natural systems, rather than a natural system and a formal one ” (Rosen 1991) “But it can be misleading to call analogies ‘models’, because verbal models are not straightforward small scale versions of a larger object ” (Johanssen 1993) There is a very strong tendency for scientific models—or explanations—of new phenomena to be analogical. For if we seek to explain the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar, what is this but analogy? To quote Popper (1972, p. 358): From Descartes... to Maxwell, most physicists tried to explain all newly discovered relations by mechanical models; that is, they tried to reduce them to laws of push or pressure, with which we are acquainted from handling everyday physical things. This is only natural. Models are abstract simplifications of a complex reality: The more concrete (‘mechanical’) the abstraction, the simpler the model, the more likely we are to accept it according to Occam’s principle of parsimony—always provided it passes the test of satisfactorily explaining the observations. Yet analogical reasoning is far from a sound or secure route to scientific knowledge (Knorr 1981). Its appeal seems to transcend scientific theorizing and to reflect a strong operational principle of human thought itself. This is the essential argument

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