The authors propose that analogical reasoning may be achieved without conscious or explicit deliberation. The argument would be strengthened by more convincingly demonstrating instances of analogy that do not require explicit deliberation. Recent findings demonstrate that deliberative or explicit strategies are not necessary for flexible expression under novel circumstances (Greene et al. 2001) to include analogical transfer (Gross & Greene 2007). This issue is particularly critical because the existence of relational priming poses a serious challenge to the widely held notion (...) that flexible expression of learned relations requires deliberative processes. (shrink)

: Psychological explanations of philosophical intuitions can help us assess their evidentiary value, and our warrant for accepting them. To explain and assess conceptual or classificatory intuitions about specific situations, some philosophers have suggested explanations which invoke heuristic rules proposed by cognitive psychologists. The present paper extends this approach of intuition assessment by heuristics-based explanation, in two ways: It motivates the proposal of a new heuristic, and shows that this metaphor heuristic helps explain important but neglected intuitions: general factual intuitions (...) which have been highly influential in the philosophies of mind and perception but neglected in on-going debates in the epistemology of philosophy. To do so, the paper integrates results from three philosophically pertinent but hitherto largely unconnected strands of psychological research: research on intuitive judgement, analogy and metaphor, and memory-based processing, respectively. The paper shows that the heuristics-based explanation thus obtained satisfies the key requirements cognitive psychologists impose on such explanations, that it can explain the philosophical intuitions targeted, and that this explanation supports normative assessment of the intuitions' evidentiary value: It reveals whether particular intuitions are due to proper exercise of cognitive competencies or constitute cognitive illusions. (shrink)

Leech et al.'s model proposes representing relations as primed transformations rather than as structured representations (explicit representations of relations and their roles dynamically bound to fillers). However, this renders the model unable to explain several developmental trends (including relational integration and all changes not attributable to growth in relational knowledge). We suggest looking to an alternative computational model that learns structured representations from examples.

Despite its strengths, Leech et al.'s model fails to address the important benefits that derive from self-explanation and task feedback in analogical reasoning development. These components encourage explicit, self-reflective processes that do not necessarily link to knowledge accretion. We wonder, therefore, what mechanisms can be included within a connectionist framework to model self-reflective involvement and its beneficial consequences.