REASONING BY ANALOGY
David A. Hunter · 2014
This chapter talks about reasoning by analogy. Reasoning by analogy involves drawing conclusions about some particular thing or about a certain kind of thing by comparing it to something else that is like it in relevant ways. The chapter looks at some particular applications of reasoning by analogy. It provides some examples to get a sense of just how varied and common this kind of reasoning is. Reasoning with samples involves drawing a conclusion about something on the basis of a claim about a sample of it. This kind of reasoning is extremely common and very powerful. Finally, reasoning by analogy is very useful in cases where the phenomenon we are investigating is very complex, or very large, and it is easier to reason about the phenomenon by reasoning about a model or map of it.