Abstract

The celebration of the turn of a century is called a " centennial " , and few people get to celebrate more than one of them. Even rarer is the celebration of the turn of a millennium. What should we call it? Why, a " millennial " , of course. No need for prior experience, or even a dictionary—a simple verbal analogy provides an appropriate term to mark the dawn of the third thousand-year period of the Julian calendar. Not so simple, however, are the mental operations that underlie this pervasive form of human thinking. The present volume is a kind a millennial marker in analogy research, a set of papers that collectively lay out the " state of the art " in our current scientific understanding of the mental processes involved in the use of analogy in cognition. A millennial, though it may simply be a side effect of arbitrary calendar conventions, somehow seems to call attention to the way in which the present state of humanity connects to the broad sweep of our evolutionary and cultural history. If we consider what it means to be human, certain cognitive capabilities loom large—capabilities that subserve language, art, music, invention, and science. Precisely when these capabilities arose in the course of human evolution is unclear, but it seems likely they were well-developed at least 50,000 years ago, based on archeological findings of standardized stone tools and jewelry in East Africa. About 40,000 years ago, the Cro-Magnon people in southwestern Europe created magnificent cave paintings as well as statues and musical instruments, suggesting mental capabilities comparable to our own. We have been human for quite some time already. Introduction 3 What cognitive capabilities underlie our fundamental human achievements? Although a complete answer remains elusive, one basic component is a special kind of symbolic ability—the ability to pick out patterns, to identify recurrences of these patterns despite variation in the elements that compose them, to form concepts that abstract and reify these patterns, and to express these concepts in language. Analogy, it its most general sense, is this ability to think about relational patterns. As Hofstadter (this volume) argues, analogy is a candidate to be considered the core of human cognition. Although we believe analogy is indeed a central component of human cognition, it is not quite the exclusive province of our species. Indeed, we can illustrate the basic idea of a relational …