Thinking, Broad and Deep

摘要

What makes human thinking special? Addressing the American Psychological Association a half century ago, physicist Robert Oppenheimer made the case for the centrality of analogy: "Whether or not we talk of discovery or of invention, analogy is inevitable in human thought, because we come to new things in science with what equipment we have, which is how we have learned to think, and above all how we have learned to think about the relatedness of things" (/). In Surfaces and Essences, Douglas Hofstadter (Indiana University) and Emmanuel Sander [University of Paris (Saint-Denis)] build the case that the ability to see analogies indeed forms the core of human thinking-the way we "think about the relatedness of things."