Geometric icons and conceptual analogies: A doublet of dynamic forms that reveal, express, and impel analogies

Abstract

Psychologists' spatial representations and conceptual analogies form a semiotic doublet by which patterns of their seminal ideas can be compared across different eras. One powerful reappearing idea is Freud's concept that two logics alternate as forms of thought. This elemental idea entails the individual's access to analogical thinking, its forms, and its effect on the person's selection of logical form. To go a recursive step back, I search out the psychologist's origin of ideas to explain analogy and the two logics. Probing the doublet illuminates the psychologist's thought forms, semiotic combinations, and choices of logical patterns. Using it to compare different theorists' concepts of the two logics and analogy reveals the continuously recursive nature of analogy and shows the durability of major ideas. Comparisons go back and forth in time and contribute to understanding the roots of ideas and to project their place and value in future models. The major premisesTo overcome the obstacles to a psychology of thought that does not lose sight of its interior state of affairs, I offer these major premises: (1) to form ideas that lead to a scientific picture of thought and mind, it is necessary to form and re-form analogies; (2) the theorist's construction of diagrammatic and geometric forms can considerably enhance scientifically productive ideas so that they accommodate all orders of thought and its representation; and (3) for the scientific objective to form ideas about the psychology of thought-qua-inner experience, it is fundamental that psychologists specify their own thinking. The question is: How does the individual psychologist find and depict generative forms?

Scientific reasoning as sense-making: Implications for qualitative inquiry.

“…The term “model” is used broadly, with models understood as organized representations of various kinds, and the reasoning associated with different forms of models may differ in kind (e.g., physical, analogical, computational). The close relation of models to metaphors underscores the importance of analogical reasoning in science, and indeed, a vast literature on the importance of analogical model-based reasoning has been offered (Fisher, 2013; Gentner, 2010; Sterrett, 2006). William James (1890) also highlighted the fundamental importance of analogy in reasoning of all kinds.…”