---
title: "Dedre Gentner"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "person"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "Dedre Gentner"
aliases: ["D. Gentner"]
first_seen: "2026-10-29T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
connects_to: ["structure-mapping theory","analogy","mere appearance match","representational similarity","mechanism underdetermination"]
seek_code_commit: "d40ee39"
---


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 [[claim-representational-similarity-underdetermines-mechanism|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