Behavioral and Brain Sciences

Table of Contents - 2008 - Volume 31, Issue 04  

Open Peer Commentary

Relational priming is to analogy-making as one-ball juggling is to seven-ball juggling

Robert M. Frencha1

a1 LEAD-CNRS UMR 5022, University of Burgundy, 21065 Dijon, Cedex, France robert.french@u-bourgogne.fr http://www.u-bourgogne.fr/lead/people/rfrench.html

Abstract

Relational priming is argued to be a deeply inadequate model of analogy-making because of its intrinsic inability to do analogies where the base and target domains share no common attributes and the mapped relations are different. Leech et al. rely on carefully handcrafted representations to allow their model to make a complex analogy, seemingly unaware of the debate on this issue fifteen years ago. Finally, they incorrectly assume the existence of fixed, context-independent relations between objects.

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