analogiche

Analogiche is a term found in Italian-language scholarship to refer to the study and application of analogical reasoning across disciplines. It denotes a family of practices and theoretical notions that derive new inferences by transferring relational structure from a familiar domain to a less understood one. The word combines analogia, meaning analogy, with a plural suffix, signaling a collection of related methods rather than a single doctrine.

In philosophy, cognitive science, linguistics, and artificial intelligence, analogiche describes how people and systems infer properties, categories, or causal relations by identifying corresponding roles or relations between domains. In linguistics, for example, it encompasses processes of semantic extension and metaphor that rely on mapping of relational structure. In AI and cognitive modeling, analogiche informs approaches such as case-based reasoning and other methods that reuse known relational patterns to solve new problems.

Practically, analysts of analogiche study how mappings are formed, evaluated, and transferred, paying attention to the limits of analogy, the role of background knowledge, and the conditions under which an analogy is productive rather than misleading. Common demonstrations involve transferring the form of a well-understood system to illuminate a novel domain, while preserving the structural relations rather than the literal content.

Limitations and criticisms emphasize that analogical mappings can be disanalogous, leading to incorrect conclusions if crucial differences are ignored. Proponents argue that careful articulation of the mapping and explicit note of boundary conditions can enhance understanding and problem-solving across fields.

See also: analogy, analogy-based reasoning, metaphor, cognitive science, case-based reasoning.