Noted cognitive scientist asserts that analogy is (almost) the whole enchilada

Douglas Hofstadter of Indiana University gave a Presidential Lecture in the Humanities and Arts. During the second Presidential Lecture of the academic year, Douglas Hofstadter, professor of computer and cognitive science at Indiana University, argued for the central place of analogy in cognition while using a bumper crop of analogies. Analogy is the "motor of the car of thought" and "the interstate freeway of cognition," said Hofstadter in a talk titled "Analogy as the Core of Cognition." Hofstadter, director of the Fluid Analogies Research Group (FARG) at the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition at IU, has written on topics including artificial intelligence and poetry translation and is the author of the popular and Pulitzer Prize-winning Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1979). Far from being a subset associated with problem solving--a tiny "Delaware on the map of cognition"--or a special variety of reasoning, analogy is the main event, Hofstadter asserted during an evening lecture Feb. 6 and during a discussion the following afternoon at the Humanities Center.