A Review of Mental Leaps: Analogy in Creative Thought

1954. To be sure, Ball saw the appeal of the Korea, Munich, and dominochain analogies, but in each, he also saw serious weaknesses; more important, he felt he saw deeper similarities to the situation the French had faced, which led him to his gloomy but accurate predictions of what would happen to American troops if they went in. I found this discussion enlightening, but it left me wondering, Was Ball really so great an analogist? Holyoak and Thagard tell us, “Ball had worked as a lawyer for the French government during its period of grief in Vietnam, and he never forgot that historical source” (p. 161). So wasn’t this experience in some sense the last war that Ball had been ■ Mental Leaps: Analogy in Creative Thought, Keith Holyoak and Paul Thagard, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1994, 320 pp., ISBN 0-262-08233-0.