Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Analogical and causal reasoning theories both seek to explainpatterns of inductive inference. Researchers have claimed thatreasoning scenarios incorporating aspects of both analogicalcomparison and causal thinking necessitate a new model of in-ductive inference (Holyoak, Lee, & Lu, 2010; Lee & Holyoak,2008). This paper takes an opposing position, arguing that fea-tures of analogical models make correct claims about infer-ence patterns found among causal analogies, including analo-gies with both generative and preventative relations. Experi-ment 1 demonstrates that analogical inferences for these kindsof causal systems can be explained by alignment of relationalstructure, including higher-order relations. Experiment 2 fur-ther demonstrates that inferences strengthened by matchinghigher-order relations are not guided by the transfer of prob-abilistic information about a cause from base to target. Weconclude that causal analogies behave like analogies in gen-eral—analogical mapping provides candidate inferences whichcan then be reasoned about in the target.