October 13 to 19, 2002 on the Island of Elba, Italy

Organizer: Dr. Britta Glatzeder

In workshop 4 we focused on analogical and metaphorical thinking. Both forms of thinking have been the focus of extensive research over the past two decades and analogical thinking is often seen as the very core of human thinking.

Among our guests was Dedre Gentner, who is one of the most renowned experts on analogical tinking. She argued that the analogical ability to perceive and use purely relational similarity is the major contributor to our species’ cognitive uniqueness. While similarity as one of the great forces of mental organization holds across species, only humans experience a sophisticated form of this force, i.e. analogy.

In their talks the invited speakers presented various aspects  of analogy and described the component processes. A major issue was how these component processes lead to learning and the generation of new knowledge.

• Seana Coulson, cognitive science, University of California, San Diego;
• Dedre Gentner, psychology, Northwestern University, Evanston;
• Britta Glatzeder, philosophy, Human Science Center, University of Munich;
• George Lakoff, linguistics, University of California, Berkeley;
• Ken Mogi, robotics, Sony Computer Science Laboratory, Tokyo;
• Albrecht von Müller, philosophy, Parmenides Center;
• Srini Narayanan, computer science, University of California, Berkeley;
• Rafael Nunez, cognitive science, University of California, San Diego;
• Volker Panzer, media, Berlin;
• Ernst Pöppel, neuroscience, Institute of Medical Psychology, University of Munich; Parmenides Center;
• Rolf Pfeifer, artificial intelligence; University of Zurich;
• Tim Rohrer, cognitive science, Philosophy, Institute for Neural Computation, University of California San Diego and The Salk Institute;
• Yaxu Zhang, Department of psychology, Peking University

• Metaphor and the Space Structuring Model (Seana Coulson)
• The Analogical Mind (Dedre Gentner)
• The Cog-Hypothesis (George Lakoff)
• Embodiment, metaphor and neuroimaging: from philosophy and linguistics to ERP and fMRI measures of metaphor. (Tim Rohrer)
• The importance of being intentional. Or qualia as integral in embodiment. (Ken Mogi)
• A Computational Model of Event Structure (Srini Narayanan)
• Overview on the Embodied-Mind-Hypothesis (Rafael Nunez)
• Taxonomy of Thinking – An Embodied Approach (Rolf Pfeifer)
• On the relation of morphology, materials, and control in the emergence of cognition (Rolf Pfeifer)
• A neural model of thinking (Yaxu Zhang)