Analogical reasoning addresses the question how evidence from various phenomena can be amalgamated and made relevant for theory development and prediction. In the first part of my contribution, I review some influential accounts of analogical reasoning, both historical and contemporary, focusing in particular on Keynes, Carnap, Hesse, and more recently Bartha. In the second part, I sketch a general framework. To this purpose, a distinction between a predictive and a conceptual type of analogical reasoning is introduced. I then take up a common intuition according to which (predictive) analogical inferences hold if the differences between source and target concern only irrelevant circumstances. I attempt to make this idea more precise by addressing possible objections and in particular by specifying a notion of causal irrelevance based on difference making in homogeneous contexts.

中文翻译：

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类比的因果方法

类比推理解决了如何将来自各种现象的证据合并并使其与理论发展和预测相关的问题。在我的贡献的第一部分，我回顾了一些历史和当代的类比推理的有影响力的描述，特别关注凯恩斯、卡尔纳普、黑塞和最近的巴特。在第二部分，我勾画了一个总体框架。为此，引入了类比推理的预测类型和概念类型之间的区别。然后，如果源和目标之间的差异仅涉及不相关的情况，我将采用一种普遍的直觉，根据该直觉，（预测性）类比推论成立。