Analogies Without Commonalities? Evidence of Re-representation via Relational Category Activation

Analogies between cases with matching sets of connected relational structure is well-explained by existing theory. Re-representation is posited as an important mechanism to increase the flexibility of analogical processing by allowing the alignment of non-identical predicates across compared cases. It has been proposed that certain kind of categories can be characterized in terms of the relational structure that its exemplars tend to satisfy. Such relational categories have the property that all members of the category are analogous to one another. We ask whether a process of re-representation can alter the construal of a case and bring two evidently non-analogous cases into analogical alignment if they are both seen as members of the same relational category. We examine analogies between pairs of cases where the base is a canonical example of a relational category and the target would not be considered a member of the category on its own – critically, the cases themselves share no evident relational identities or similarities. In Experiment 1, we ask whether presenting a target case as part of an analogical pairing alters its construal. In Experiment 2, the pairs are presented for judgment as potential analogies. In both studies, participants interpret the target cases differently (consistent with the relational category) as a result of processing the analogy. There are two main implications: (1) a form of re-representation is at work in which the activation of a relational category triggers an alternate construal of the target case; and (2) this suggests a path to analogical status for cases that lack relational identities or similarities if the cases can both be fit to the same relational category.