structure-mapping theory

A framework for analogical comparison, introduced by Dedre Gentner (1983), classifying a comparison between a base and a target domain by which kind of predicate maps across: object-attributes (one-place predicates — "yellow," "large") versus relations between objects (two-or-more-place predicates — "revolves around," "collides with"). The theory names four cells of resulting comparisons: literal similarity (both attributes and relations shared), analogy (relations shared, few attributes), abstraction, and the degenerate fourth case, mere appearance match — strong attribute overlap with no relational overlap, which the theory marks as "appealing and locally useful" but of "sharply limited" explanatory power.

Matters to this vault as a decades-old, general-cognitive-science vocabulary for a split the vault separately encounters in a narrower, mechanistic-explanation context: whether a measured surface-level match (e.g. representational geometry) licenses a claim about shared underlying structure (a mechanism). See claim-gentner-1983-mere-appearance-match-is-closest-analogue-to-mechanism-underdetermination for the specific comparison against RSA's representational-similarity underdetermination finding.

References

• claim-gentner-1983-mere-appearance-match-is-closest-analogue-to-mechanism-underdetermination
• entity-dedre-gentner
• 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