Analogical and Logical Thinking – In the Context of Inter- or Trans-Disciplinary Communication and Real-Life Problems

Nagib Callaos, Jeremy Horne

This work investigates the commonalities and the relationships between analogical and logical importance of analogy, not being treated as a secondary or auxiliary process to logic, but as a generative foundation of cognition, communication, and knowledge creation. By integrating insights from philosophy, cognitive science, logic, science, systems theory, and interdisciplinary practice, we highlight how analogical thinking provides the creative leaps, cross-domain mappings, and heuristic inputs that seed conjectures and heuristics, while logical thinking contributes validation, rigor, and epistemological knowledge. Their recursive interaction produces hybrid modes of reasoning, integral, integrative, and integrated, that are necessary for addressing complex, real-world problems, which level of complexity requires inter-disciplinary fields, multi-disciplinary teams, and transdisciplinary communication, understood as cross-disciplinary and beyond disciplines communication. The latter is especially important in the kind of research that requires the participation of stockholders who may include lay persons.

Based on literature research, notional analysis and diagrams, and systemic reasoning, we emphasize the cybernetic loops that emerge when analogy and logic interact. These loops operate through feedback and feedforward relations, showing how analogy inspires hypotheses that logic tests, while logical structures, once established, generate new analogies, and so on. It further demonstrates that analogical reasoning, expressed through natural language, provides an indispensable medium for transdisciplinary communication, making knowledge transfer across and beyond disciplines possible.

Ultimately, we suggest that analogical and logical thinking, understood as complementary poles of cognition, form the basis of hybrid reasoning capable of tackling complex societal challenges. By reconceiving their relationship in cybernetic and systemic terms, it becomes possible to develop new methodologies that integrate creativity with rigor, emergence with structure, and novelty with validation, oriented for inter- and transdisciplinary communication, research, and practice.

This short experience-based, oriented by literature research, reflection, and reflexivity (essential in Second Order Cybernetics), we try to highlight the importance of analogical thinking, its relationship to logical thinking, and the cybernetic loops that emerge when both are connected through systemic and holistic perspectives. This whole, as it is known, is more than its parts because of its potential emergent properties and synergies. The latter is very probable because all of it is being managed by the respective neural nets, whose high level of complexity increases the potentiality and the probability of cognitive emergent properties that are essential for creativity and for continuously transforming knowledge into understanding, which is itself an emergent property.

Together, these form the basis for an integral, integrative, and integrated Hybrid Thinking. Such an approach may foster systemic-cybernetic and synergistic relationships that are essential for effective inter- and transdisciplinary communication. This, in turn, is required not only for addressing real-world problems, such as those encountered in case studies, consulting, and information systems analysis, synthesis, and deployment, but also for processes that involve: (1) integrating core academic activities, namely research, education, and their respective methodologies; and (2) generating communication across and beyond disciplinary boundaries.

In a few words, our objective is to provide an initial work in progress to explain the real and the potential cybernetical relationships schematized in figure 5.

Full Text