Rhetoric , Analogies , and Induction ∗
نویسندگان
چکیده
One aspect of the art of rhetoric is the ability to change other people’s minds (opinions, beliefs) without providing them new information. Rhetoric often employs analogies between cases, and induction from cases to rules. Using analogies, one may draw the listener’s attention to similarities between cases. Induction is used to re-organize existing information in a way that highlights certain regularities. Both techniques serve to convince the listener of a likely or a desirable outcome of a given case. In this paper we offer a model of analogies and of induction, and show that finding a simple rule that generalizes known cases is a computationally hard problem. Computational complexity may explain why a person is not always aware of rules that, if asked, she would find valid.
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