Comprehending by Analogy

CORE DEFINITION

A classical Chinese principle, recorded in the Commentaries on the I Ching, describing how understanding one category of things allows one to extend that understanding to related categories. The core proposition is that transfer depends on abstraction: only the relational structure, not the surface features, can be mapped onto a new domain, so the leverage comes from extracting the pattern rather than accumulating examples. The key qualification is structural equivalence, since a resemblance in vocabulary or appearance produces confident but invalid transfer. This entry consolidates several variant formulations of the same principle.