Some quotations:
Chapter 4 The Development of Reasoning by analogy by Usha Goswami
From "The Development of Thinking and Reasoning" edited by Pierre Barrouillet and Caroline Gauffroy Psychology Press.
“Reasoning by analogy can be considered a core component of human cognition. Analogy is important for learning and classification, for thinking and explaining, and for reasoning and problem solving. The history of science demonstrates the role of analogy in key scientific discoveries. Indeed, many argue that reasoning by analogy is central to creative thinking (Holyoak & Thalgard, 1995). The contribution of analogical reasoning to cognition has been defined in various ways, including Holyoak and Thalgard’s concept of “mental leaps”. ...argue that even the simplest analogy involves a mental leap, as it requires seeing one thing as if it were another. The reasoner must make a ‘mental leap, between domains that may not previously have been connected. These mental leaps are often evident in famous analogies in the history of science.”
On to Keith Holyoak and Paul Thalgard 1995: “Mental Leaps: analogy in creative thought” MIT Press 1996
Chapter 1
“When we are young, before most of the familiar patterns of everyday life have been learned...Knowledge of the world awaits construction. For the child the pool of known situations is still small, and novelty is the norm; so much has to be understood with so little. But already the fundamental thought processes that guide the creation of understanding are hard at work. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say they are hard at play, since for a child (as for a scientist), understanding the world often becomes a game driven by natural curiosity.
Consider the following discussion between mother and her four-year-old son, Neil, who is considering the deep issue of what a bird might use as a chair. Neil suggested, reasonably enough it would seem, that a tree could be a bird’s chair. A bird might sit on a tree branch. His mother said that was so and added that a bird could sit on its nest as well, which is also a house. The conversation went on to other topics. But several minutes later, the child had second thoughts about what a tree is to a bird: “The tree is not the bird’s chair—it’s the bird’s backyard!”
In this conversation Neil makes a mental leap, exploring connections between two very different domains. He is trying to understand the relatively unfamiliar world of creatures of the air in terms of everyday human households. This small example conveys what we mean by reasoning by analogy, or analogical thinking. The child’s everyday world is the source analog: a known domain that the child already understands in terms of familiar patterns, such as people sitting on chairs and houses that open onto backyards. The bird’s world is the target analog—a relatively unfamiliar domain that the child is trying to understand. Analogical thinking is not “logical” in the sense of a logical deduction—there is no reason why birds and people should necessarily organize their habitats in comparable ways. Yet the analogy is certainly not haphazard. In a loose sense, there is indeed some sort of logic—call it analogic—that constrains the way the child uses analogy to try and understand the target domain by seeing it in terms of the source domain.” P.2