SUO: Re: Analogy
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by george, i think we've got it!
ja
John F. Sowa wrote:
>
> Jon,
>
> Slides are extremely abbreviated summaries, which are
> open to many interpretations. I frequently reuse the same
> slides because they enable me to revise my talk without the
> trouble of revising my slides.
>
> > Well, then your slide summary is just a little misleading.
> > I took Dedre's course in analogies and mental models back
> > in 1984-85. Peirce's notion of mathematical formulas and
> > logical graphs is that they are partly iconic, not, say,
> > as much as venn diagrams, though, but partly indexical,
> > and also partly symbolic. Only the iconic aspect is
> > analogical.
>
> I agree.
>
> > The trickiest part of structure-mapping,
> > which the rest of us call a "morphism", is the same
> > as with GPS -- the way NOT to climb a hill is to
> > do it in the syntactic space instead of in the
> > space of objective referents. In a similar
> > way, syntactic analogies are some of the
> > worst kind -- what you want is analogies
> > that respect the structure of objects.
>
> Indeed. Your only hope in the value of a morphism is in the
> iconicity of the structures that are being mapped. If the
> structures don't have any real similarity to the actual
> referents, you won't get anything useful out of the morphism.
>
> But if they do, then the mapping can tell you something useful.
>
> John
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