Structure-Mapping vs. High-level Perception: The Mistaken Fight Over The Explanation of Analogy

There is currently a competition between two theories that propose to explain the cognitive phenomenon of analogy: Dedre Gentner’s Structure-Mapping Theory and Douglas Hofstadter’s theory of Analogy as High-level Perception. We argue that the competition between the two theories is ill-founded because they are after two different aspects of analogy: structure-mapping seeks a “horizontal” view of analogy where the phenomena is examined at the level of already existing psychological representations, and where the task is to identify what processes are common to all or most analogy function; High-level Perception, on the other hand, seeks a “vertical” view of analogy in which the goal is to explain the processes that make up the construction of representations. An integrated theory of analogy should encompass both horizontal and vertical views.