From Analogy to Explanation : Relaxing the 1 : 1 Mapping Constraint ... Very Carefully

The ability to generate explanations plays a central role in human cognition. Generating explanations requires a deep conceptual understanding of the domain in question and tremendous flexibility in the way concepts are accessed and used. Together, these requirements constitute challenging design requirements for a model of explanation. We describe our progress toward providing a such a model, based on the LISA model of analogical inference (Hummel & Holyoak, 1997, 2003). We augment LISA with a novel representation of causal relations and with an ability to flexibly combine knowledge from multiple sources in LTM. Combining knowledge from multiple sources in LTM entails relaxing the 1:1 mapping constraint, as a given structure in the explanandum will necessarily correspond to different structures across different sources. We demonstrate how the resulting model serves as a starting point for an explicit process model of explanation.

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