Rhetoric and Analogies

• Authors: Enriqueta Aragonès.
• BSE Working Paper: 110190 | September 15
• Keywords: information , rhetoric , analogies , similarities , complexity
• JEL codes: D7, D8
• information
• rhetoric
• analogies
• similarities
• complexity

The art of rhetoric may be defined as changing other people’s minds (opinions, beliefs) without providing them new information. One technique heavily used by rhetoric employs analogies. Using analogies, one may draw the listener’s attention to similarities between cases and to re-organize existing information in a way that highlights certain regularities. In this paper we offer two models of analogies, discuss their theoretical equivalence, and show that finding good analogies is a computationally hard problem.