JOURNAL OF RESEARCH IN SCIENCE TEACHING VOL. 29, NO. 6, PP.

537-544 (1992)

Analogy, Explanation, and Education

Paul Thagard
Cognitive Science Laboratory, Princeton University, Princeton,
New Jersey 08542

Abstract
This article applies a theory of analogical thinking as satisfaction of multiple constraints
to the use of analogies in instruction. It shows how the strengths of particularly good analogies
and the weaknesses of particularly bad ones can be understood in terms of pragmatic, semantic,
and structural constraints. These constraints suggest lessons for how analogies can most effectively
be used in instruction.

Good teachers frequently use analogies to render unfamiliar matters comprehensible

to their students. How does this work? What are the cognitive processes of the teachers
and students that make such instruction possible and desirable? What kinds of analogies
are likely to be most effective in increasing students’ understanding? I shall try to
answer these questions using the theory of analogical thinking that Keith Holyoak and
I have developed. According to this theory, analogy operates in accord with a set of
semantic, structural, and pragmatic constraints. These constraints have varying importance
in the different-parts of analogical thinking: retrieving a possible source analogy to
help with a target problem, mapping the source to the target, and transferring the
relevant components from the source to the target. Our claims about the importance
of these constraints for analogy have clear implications for how teachers do and should
use analogies in providing explanations to their students. As good teachers are well
aware, there are many potential pitfalls in the use of analogies in instruction; I shall
attempt to identify the pitfalls and suggest ways of avoiding and overcoming them.

1. Components and Constraints in Analogical Thinking

Before discussing instructional analogies, I shall briefly review an approach to
analogy that has been presented at much greater length elsewhere (Holyoak & Thagard,
1989; Thagard, Holyoak, Nelson, & Gochfeld, 1990). Our approach is a synthesis of
ideas that have been proposed by researchers in cognitive psychology and artificial
intelligence, but 1 shall not attempt to summarize that rapidly expanding literature
here. (For comparisons of our views with others, see the two articles just cited.)
Holyoak and I claim that analogical thinking can best be understood in terms of
three fundamental constraints on how two analogs are put into correspondence with
0 1992 by the National Association for Research in Science Teaching
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. CCC 0022-4308/92/060537-08$04.00
538 THAGARD

each other. One constraint is pragmatic: Analogical thinking is sensitive to the purpose
for which the analogy is being used. This article is mainly concerned with analogies
whose purpose is to convey to students understanding of unfamiliar material. Students
sometimes also use analogies in solving problems, for instance, when they use examples
in textbooks to figure out how to solve new problems. That sort of problem solving
involves within-domain analogies, with students using given problems to solve quite
similar ones. In contrast, analogical explanation often involves cross-domain analogies,
as teachers struggle to impart to students understanding of a domain that is new to
them. To take one of my favorite examples of analogical explanation, Dolnick (1989,
p. 72) explains why pandas, which are very inefficient at both eating and reproducing,
have managed to survive for millions of years: “In evolution, as in television, it’s not
necessary to be good. You just have to be better than the competition.” Moving outside
the domain of biology overcomes the misapprehension that survival implies optimality.
Explanation and within-domain problem solving are not the only purposes of
analogy. Scientific discovery can be thought of as a kind of problem solving that
sometimes usefully exploits cross-domain analogies, as when Darwin used Malthus’s
notions of population increase in humans to help develop his theory of natural selection.
Analogies can also be used in arguments to try to instill a belief in someone; a weak
example of this might be the argument that as Mars is like the Earth in having canals,
it probably also has life (see Copi, 1982, for similar examples). Finally, analogies
can be used in literary contexts to evoke emotions, although literary analogies also
often function to provide explanations, as in the example of Tolstoy’s War and Peace
mentioned in the following. The use and effectiveness of analogies depends on paying
close attention to what purposes they are intended to accomplish.
But there is much more to analogy than pragmatics: our ability to use a source
analog to help understand or solve a target analog depends on there being natural
correspondences between the two analogs. These correpondences are of two kinds:
semantic, involving the two analogs using terms with related meanings, and structural,
involving the two analogs using similar configurations of objects. For example, we
can schematize the pandaltelevision analogy as follows. The panda case is the target
analog, and television is the intended source of understanding.

Target
TI Pandas are poor at eating and reproducing.
T2 There have been few organisms (before humans!) that compete with pandas.
T3 Pandas have survived.
T4 T2 explains why T3 is true despite TI.

Source
SI Television programs are poor at informing and entertaining.
S2 There have been few better television programs to compete with them.
S3 Poor television programs continue.
S4 S2 explains why S3 is true despite S1.

As is often the case with cross-domain analogies, not all components can be paired
on the basis of semantic similarity: Pandas are not in general much like television,
even in black and white. But there are two respects in which the target and source are
semantically similar: Both involve competition and survival (continuing).
 ANALOGY, EXPLANATION, AND EDUCATION 539

Equally important to the effectiveness of this analogy is the structural correspondences

between them. At the propositional level, the similarity between S4 and T4 shows
that the overall structure of the analogs is the same. If we break T2 and S2 down
further then correspondences at a lower level become evident:

Target
T2a Pandas live in areas of China.
T2b Other organisms live in China.
T2c The other organisms are no better than pandas in competing for food and
territory.
Source
R2a Television programs occur in the TV industry.
R2b Other television programs are devised.
R2c The other television programs are no better than the dominant ones in the
competition to be shown.

Obviously, there are serious disanalogies between the source and target, because
the competition, the competitors, and the locations are so different, but the point is
made nevertheless.
Ideally, therefore, a source analog should have great semantic Similarity, structural
correspondence, and pragmatic relevance to the target. In the articles already cited,
my colleagues and I describe computer programs that model the simultaneous satisfaction
of the different constraints using connectionist networks. The constrains differ in
importance in different stages of analogy. Psychological experiments and computational
simulations suggest that for retrieving a potential source from memory the most important
constraint is semantic similarity (Thagard et al., 1990). In contrast, if students do not
have to recall the analog, but are presented with both the source and target and merely
have to determine the mapping between them, then structural correspondence is the
most important constraint. The multiple-constraint theory of Holyoak and Thagard
(1989) differs from the structure-mapping theory of Gentner (1983, 1989), however,
in maintaining that semantic and pragmatic constraints play a role in analogical mapping
in addition to structural ones. Finally, when the stage of transfer is reached, what
matters is whether the source analog can actually be used to understand or solve the
target, so that pragmatic matters dominate. Let us now see how attention to semantic,
structural, and pragmatic matters can improve use of analogies in education.

2. Lessons for Using Analogies in Instruction

The panddtelevision analogy is far from perfect, but strikes me as very effective.
In contrast, consider the Worst Analogy Ever Made, used in an advertisement for
Merit cigarettes that appeared in Psychology Today and other magazines in the summer
of 1989. The analogy is so terrible that charity requires the assumption that the badness
itself was intended to draw attention to the ad. I quote:

“Enriched Flavorm” explained: It’s sort of like the Theory of Relativity. With
relativity, it’s like this: If you go fast enough, time slows down. With Enriched
FlavorTM,it’s like this: The taste stays just as rich as you like even though the tar
goes down. What could be simpler?
540 THAGARD

This analogy seems to violate every constraint. The purpose of the advertisement is
presumably to get people to buy Merit cigarettes by making them understand the
surprising relation between having both “enriched flavor” and low tar. Accomplishing
such purposes always requires that the source analog be more familiar than the target,
whereas even the trivialized implication of relativity theory used here is likely to be
less familiar to the readers than are flavor and tar, so the purpose of the analogy is
unlikely to be accomplished. Even for readers who know a little about relativity, the
analogy is defective, because the semantic and structural correspondences are so weak.
There is no semantic similarity between flavor and relativity, time and smoking, going
fast and rich taste, or time slowing and tar going down. Moreover, the structure of
the analogs is different. Going fast causes time to slow down, whereas taste staying
rich happens despite tar going down.
Good teachers are well aware of the pragmatic importance of using analogies to
matters that are familiar to their students. In science education, chemistry teachers
seem to be particularly fond of making analogies to the everyday lives of students, as
in the regular feature of the Journal of Chemical Education on “Applications and
Analogies.” For example, the chemical bonds that hold atoms together can be compared
to the rope that holds two people together in a tug of war (see Thagard, Cohen, &
Holyoak, 1989, for discussion of this and other chemical analogies). Physics teachers,
in contrast, seem more inclined to explain physical phenomena in terms of other
physical phenomena, for example heat flow in terms of water flow. Both strategies
have strengths and weaknesses: Comparisons to aspects of student’s everyday lives
have the advantage that at least the students know the source analogs, but they carry
the risk of being not very semantically and structurally similar to the target. Thus in
analogical explanation there can be a tension between the pragmatic constraint and
the other two. The teacher wants to help the student use what they already know to
understand something new, but the old and the new might not actually be that closely
related to each other.
In teaching history, it can be valuable to compare historical events to similar ones
that the students already know about, but students’ ignorance can obviously short-
circuit the explanation. Comparing Hitler’s failed invasion of Russia during the Second
World War to Napeoleon’s failed invasion of Russia in 1812 might seem illuminating,
but not to someone who knows nothing of Napoleon. Tolstoy’s brilliant description
of Napeoleon’s invasion often makes use of cross-domain analogies, for example,
comparing the marauding French Army to a herd of cattle trampling underfoot the
fodder that might have saved it from starvation (Tolstoy, 1982, p. 1192).
The semantic and structural constraints imply the importance of having the teacher
make clear the correspondences in the analogy. In the analogy between chemical
bonding and tug of war, there is at least some given semantic similarity to work with,
because bonding and holding together are related. Where there is no semantic similarity
evident, as with atoms and people, the teacher must be careful to point out what entities
and concepts in the source correspond to what entities and concepts in the target.
Structural correpondences are also important at the propositional level, because the
causal relations that appear in the analogs may be crucial to the explanation. In the
chemical bond case, the competition of the atoms for electrons is what keeps them
together, just as the competition for the rope keeps the people together. For the students
to see the correspondences, the chunks of material presented to them must not be too
large or too little. If the two analogs are presented too cryptically, the correspondences
 ANALOGY, EXPLANATION, AND EDUCATION 54 1

may not be apparent; but if too much is said, the correspondences may be buried in
irrelevant detail.
Not all explanations have internal causal relations. Thagard et al. (1989) distinguished
two kind of analogical explanations, why-answering ones that use similar causal relations
to tell why something happens in the target, and clurifiing ones, where the point of
the analogy is merely to display systematic correspondences. For example, one might
explain the British parliamentary system to an American by comparing the Prime
Minister to the President, Parliament to Congress, the House of Lords to the Senate,
and the House of Commons to the House of Representatives. The analogy is imperfect,
because the British Prime Minister is a member of parliament while the American
President is not a member of Congress, but the analogy serves to get someone ignorant
about the British system started. For the analogy to work, it is obviously necessary
that the two analogs each be clearly described, as well as the correspondences between
them. But causal relations, so central in many other analogies, are not important for
this political analogy.
Because teachers usually present two analogs directly, it might seem that the most
important process in instructional analogies is mapping, making structural Correspondence
the most important constraint. But a good analogy may be useful for students’ later
understanding that requires them to remember the analog, and the sort of semantic
cues that play a major role in analog retrieval may be important for subsequent usability.
Retrieval of the source analogy by the students may be different from retrieval by a
teacher who has a more detailed knowledge base and conceptual system.
In sum, teachers should take pains to use analogies to matters already familiar to
the students and should make clear the semantic and structural correspondences between
the analogs that are important for providing the desired explanation. Even then, however,
problems can arise, and I shall now consider some ways of overcoming them.

3. Overcoming Impediments to Effective Use of Analogical Explanations

Even if the teacher tries to use analogies to matters familiar to the students, failures
can arise because the students’ knowledge is not in fact organized the way the teacher
thinks it is. Good teaching requires a model of the students, what they think and what
they care about. When I taught logic in Michigan, I found that examples concerning
automobiles and rock stars worked well. In contrast, a friend of mine picked his
examples from international affairs, about which the students knew and cared little.
How can one find out what students know prior to being shocked by their exams?
One useful strategy is to have students generate analogies themselves. Often, if
the students have little knowledge of the domain of instruction, their proposed analogs
might be very bad, but pointing out the misunderstandings can be a useful way of
correcting their misconceptions. By doing a sort of “analogy therapy” the students can
be led toward more effective analogies, and the bad analogies may even help to serve
as a bridge toward much more illuminating ones. For example, consider what people
might take as analogous to analogy. Someone once suggested to me that analogy is
like using a figure in a geometry proof. Certainly there are correspondences between
the figure and the general geometrical proposition one is trying to prove, but this case
is importantly different from analogical mapping, where you have two cases to put in
correspondence. In geometrical proof, the figure is basically an instantiation of the
542 THAGARD

geometrical situation, not an analog involving systematic comparisons. Distinguishing

analogizing from exemplifying helps, I hope, to increase understanding of analogy.
By far the greatest danger with using analogies to familiar matters is that students
can be misled by disanalogous features of the source and target. Many people, for
example, think that thermostats are like valves and so suppose that setting the temperature
at maximum will make their house heat faster than simply setting it the level they
want to reach. Politicians discuss governmental finances as if they were the same as
those of ordinary people, when “living within our means” is very different in the two
cases.
I see two ways of overcoming the effects of disanalogies in analogical explanations.
The first is explicitly to point out to students the places where the analogy breaks
down, as in my example of the U.S. President not being elected to Congress. The
more complicated strategy is to use multiple analogs, comparing the target to sources
with different characteristics. The idea of the earth’s molten core might best be conveyed
by comparing the earth to an egg which has a yolk, but further comparison with a
peach might prevent the student from thinking that the earth has a hard shell. Ways
of using multiple analogies in instruction have been discussed by Burstein (1986) and
by Spiro et al. (1989).’ Spiro et al. provide a catalog of kinds of misconceptions that
can be induced by faulty analogies.
Related to the problem of disanalogies is the problem of worn-out analogies
interfering with the acquisition of new ones. For example, beginning physics students
are taught the Bohr model of the atom by analogy to the solar system, but the model
of orbits that is acquired gets in the way of later acquisition of quantum-mechanical
notions. Thus, teaching a new model may require the kind of analogy therapy that I
suggested for student-provided analogs, pointing out the defects in old analogies.
Another problem that can arise is that students might think of other analogies and
alternative explanations. Then it is necessary to guide students in the evaluation of
the different explanatory hypotheses, perhaps using principles of explanatory coherence
(Thagard 1989, 1992).

4. Conclusion
If analogy has all theses pitfalls, why use it? Maybe teachers should try to get by
with simply presenting the basic material to the students without analogizing (Halasz
& Moran, 1982). I am reminded of the remark that democracy is the worst system of
government, except for all the others. Similarly, analogy is often indispensable for
providing students with the beginnings of understanding in a strange domain. Even
advanced students may profit from well-chosen analogies, just as scientists such as
Darwin and Maxwell successfully exploited analogies in developing their important
theories. Analogical explanation will continue to be an important part of educational
practice, and I hope that attention to pragmatic, semantic, and structural constraints
will promote improved use of instructional analogies.

’Other works concerning analogy and education include Bransford, Franks, Vye, and Sherwood
(1989); Brown (1989); Clement (1988); Ross (1989); Rumelhart and Norman (1981); Schank (1986).
 ANALOGY, EXPLANATION, AND EDUCATION 543

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the Puerto Rico Resource Center for Science and Engineering for inviting
me to give a workshop on analogy and science education in April, 1989. Many of the ideas in
this article were inspired by participants of the workshop, particularly Manuel Gomez and
Josefina Arce de Sanabia. This research was supported by a contract from the Basic Research
Office of the Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences.

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Manuscript accepted June 3, 1991.