Analogical Reasoning

Logical and analogical reasoning are sometimes viewed as mutually exclusive alternatives, but formal logic is actually a highly constrained and stylized method of using analogies. Before any subject can be formalized to the stage where logic can be applied to it, analogies must be used to derive an abstract representation from a mass of irrelevant detail. After the formalization is complete, every logical step – of deduction, induction, or abduction – involves the application of some version of analogy. This paper analyzes the relationships between logical and analogical reasoning, and describes a highly efficient analogy engine that uses conceptual graphs as the knowledge representation. The same operations used to process analogies can be combined with Peirce’s rules of inference to support an inference engine. Those operations, called the canonical formation rules for conceptual graphs, are widely used in CG systems for language understanding and scene recognition as well as analogy finding and theorem proving. The same algorithms used to optimize analogy finding can be used to speed up all the methods of reasoning based on the canonical formation rules.