Gentner's (1983) structure-mapping theory names 'mere appearance match' — the closest formal analogue to mechanism-underdetermination's surface/relational split

structure-mappinganalogygentnermere-appearance-matchrepresentational-similaritymechanism-underdeterminationphilosophy-of-science

Gentner's structure-mapping theory of analogy classifies a comparison between a base and a target domain by which predicates map across: object-attributes (one-place predicates — "yellow," "large") versus relations between objects (two-or-more-place predicates — "revolves around," "collides with"). A literal similarity match shares both kinds; an analogy shares relations with few or no shared attributes. The theory names a fourth, degenerate cell explicitly: strong attribute overlap with no relational overlap — e.g. "A sunflower looks like the sun" — is "considered a mere appearance match. Unlike the comparisons considered so far, these matches do not involve relational mappings. Although they can be appealing and locally useful, their explanatory power is sharply limited."

This is a real, decades-old, Tier-1-sourceable name for the shape the vault separately finds in RSA's representational-similarity underdetermination finding: a DCNN-brain comparison that matches on representational geometry (an attribute/output-level overlap) without licensing a claim about shared relational or causal structure (the mechanism). Gentner's own stated stakes — "their explanatory power is sharply limited" — echo, from a different field four decades earlier, Grujicic's narrower point that DCNNs are not "how-actually" mechanism schemas of object recognition (claim-grujicic-frames-dcnn-critique-on-3m-not-marr-levels).

What this does not establish: Gentner's framework compares two systems (a base and a target domain), which fits the RSA/DCNN-brain case directly but does not naturally describe a single historical text being re-labeled with a later-coined term — see observation-no-literature-names-surface-match-without-mechanism-identity-spanning-minsky-and-rsa-cases for why this vocabulary covers only one side of a broader proposed unification.