ABSTRACT
In this chapter we begin by introducing a notion of analogy-making that is considerably broader than the normal construal of this term. We argue that analogy-making, thus defined, is one of the most fundamental and powerful capacities in our cognitive arsenal. We claim that the standard separation of the representation-building and mapping phases cannot ultimately succeed as a strategy for modeling analogy-making. In short, the context-specific representations that we use in short-term memory-and
that computers will someday use in their short-term memories-must arise from a continual, dynamic interaction between high-level knowledge-based processes and low-level, largely unconscious associative memory processes. We further suggest that this interactive process must be mediated by context-dependent computational temperature, a means by which the system dynamically monitors its own activity, ultimately allowing it to settle on the appropriate representations for a given context.
