Towards a Computational Model of Analogical Arguments
Amy Bohan, Mark T. Keane · 2004
In everyday disputes, and especially political disputes, people often use analogical arguments to support their views. For example, many of the arguments about the War in Iraq were regularly bolstered by analogical comparisons to WWII and Vietnam. Though logic and philosophy has always viewed analogical argumentation as suspect, analogical thinking has recently been studied and modelled extensively in cognitive science (see e.g., (1), (2), (3), (4), (5)). In this paper, we assess whether computational models of analogy can be safely applied to analogical argumentation. For various reasons, we conclude that they cannot because they are too powerful.