Re: lower levels??
Let's use an example analogy:
"Life is like a box of chocolates; you never know what yer gonna get"
bluestblue wrote:They defend that the "coherence" of an analogy depends on structural consistency, semantic similarity and purpose.
The coherence of an analogy is a measure of how much sense it makes and how easy it is to understand. I think the above example is coherent because because everyone is familiar with opening a box of chocolates and perusing the different varieties.
Quote: Structural consistency is maximal when the analogy is an isomorphism, although lower levels are admitted.
Structural consistency of an analogy refers to the basic organization of the analogy. Being an isomorphism in this case would mean that each part of the analogy represents a part of the thing the analogy is attempting to explain, and vice versa.
The structure of the above analogy is very simple. There is just one structural element: a box of chocolates. There is just one structural element in what it refers to: life. Therefore there is a 1 to 1 mapping, it's "isomorphic."
Quote:Similarity demands that the mapping connects similar elements and relations of source and target, at any level of abstraction. It is maximal when there are identical relations and when connected elements have many identical attributes.
This part is referring to the mapping between structural elements defined above. It says that these elements must share semantic similarities. The word semantic refers to "meaning" of a word.
In our examples, this would mean: are there similarities between "life" and "a box of chocolates"? Yes, there is 1 similarity, which the quote points out just so you don't miss it. Your fate has many possible paths, just as a box of chocolates has many types of chocolate in it. The assumption is that you're only given one chocolate which you're given at random, or that you get all the chocolates but it was filled from a random pool.
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