Mental Leaps: Analogy in Creative Thought

(Paperback)

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Analogy - recalling familiar past situations to deal wtih novel ones - can provide invaluable creative insights, but it can also lead to dangerous errors. In "Mental Leaps" two leading cognitive scientists show how analogy works and how it can be used most effectively. Keith Holyoak and Paul Thagard provide a unified, comprehensive account of the diverse operations and applications of analogy, including problem solving, decision making, explanation and communication. They present their own theory of analogy, considering its implications for cognitive science in general, and survey examples from many other domains.

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At once a contribution to the continuing scholarly debate on the nature of analogy and an accessible interdisciplinary overview for the general reader of this central process of thinking and communication.David Lorimer, Times Higher Education Supplement

Author Bio

Keith J. Holyoak, Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles, is a psychologist and poet. He is the coauthor or editor of a number of books on cognitive psychology and has published three volumes of poetry. Paul Thagard is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Waterloo, Ontario. He is the author of The Cognitive Science of Science (MIT Press, 2012) and many other books.