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A theory of analogy must describe how the meaning of an analogy is derived from the meanings of its parts. In the structure‐mapping theory, the interpretation rules are characterized as implicit rules for mapping knowledge about a base domain into a target domain. Two important features of the theory are (a) the rules depend only on syntactic properties of the knowledge representation, and not on the specific content of the domains; and (b) the theoretical framework allows analogies to be distinguished cleanly from literal similarity statements, applications of abstractions, and other kinds of comparisons. Two mapping principles are described: (a) Relations between objects, rather than attributes of objects, are mapped from base to target; and (b) The particular relations mapped are determined by systematicity, as defined by the existence of higher‐order relations.

Analogy and similarity are often assumed to be distinct psychological processes. In contrast to this position, the authors suggest that both similarity and analogy involve a process of structural alignment and mapping, that is, that similarity is like analogy. In this article, the authors first describe the structure-mapping process as it has b+"en worked outfor analogy. Then, this view is extended to similarity, where it is used to generate newpredictions. Finally, the authors explore broader implications of structural alignmentfor psychological processing.nalogy and similarity are central in cognitive processing . They are often viewed as quite sepaate: Analogy is a clever, sophisticated process used in creative discovery, whereas similarity is a brute perceptual process that we share with the entire animal kingdom. This view of similarity has important implications for the way we model human thinking, because similarity is demonstrably important across many areas of cognition. We store experiences in categories largely on the basis of their similarity to a category representation or to stored exemplars (Smith & Medin, 1981). In transfer; new problems are solved using procedures taken from prior similar problems

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A central question in metaphor research is how metaphors establish mappings between concepts from different domains. The authors propose an evolutionary path based on structure-mapping theory. This hypothesis--the career of metaphor--postulates a shift in mode of mapping from comparison to categorization as metaphors are conventionalized. Moreover, as demonstrated by 3 experiments, this processing shift is reflected in the very language that people use to make figurative assertions. The career of metaphor hypothesis offers a unified theoretical framework that can resolve the debate between comparison and categorization models of metaphor. This account further suggests that whether metaphors are processed directly or indirectly, and whether they operate at the level of individual concepts or entire conceptual domains, will depend both on their degree of conventionality and on their linguistic form.