Dedre Gentner

Cognitive scientist (Bolt Beranek and Newman, later Northwestern University) whose 1983 paper "Structure-Mapping: A Theoretical Framework for Analogy" (Cognitive Science 7(2), 155-170) gave the field a formal vocabulary for distinguishing kinds of similarity by which predicates — object-attributes versus relations — carry over between a base and a target domain.

Matters to this vault as the earliest, most general source for a shape it independently rediscovered decades later in a different domain: her named category of "mere appearance match" — strong attribute overlap with no relational-structure overlap — is the closest formal analogue located so far to RSA's representational-similarity underdetermination finding in the vault's DCNN-brain thread.

References

• claim-gentner-1983-mere-appearance-match-is-closest-analogue-to-mechanism-underdetermination
• entity-structure-mapping-theory
• observation-no-literature-names-surface-match-without-mechanism-identity-spanning-minsky-and-rsa-cases
• Captures: 2026-10-29-does-philosophy-of-science-or-citation-analysis-literature