Methods Experts Use to Evaluate an Analogy Relation

Abstract

In this chapter and Chapter 17, I will present some evidence from expert protocols, which seems to fit the above hypothesis: experts do at times refer to names of features that correspond in the source and the target. But I will also present evidence for other processes that can be involved in validity evaluation that tend not to be discussed in the literature. In this chapter, I discuss one of these: analogical bridging. Several examples of analogical bridging will be presented from expert solutions to different problems, followed by two examples from the history of science. We shall see that bridging analogies can be quite imaginative: as in Chapter 2, we are confronted here with evidence that experts are not just followers of simple algorithms. Rather they are capable of inventing new forms and representations that can lead to novel and imaginative solutions.