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Surfaces and Essences
Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander's 2013 book — the fullest statement of the argument that analogy-making is continuous across all cognitive levels, from mundane categorization to transformative scientific insight.
The book, co-written with French psychologist Emmanuel Sander and published in French and English simultaneously, argues for a radical thesis: analogy is not one cognitive operation among many but the core operation from which cognition is built. Every act of perception, categorization, language use, memory retrieval, and creative thought is fundamentally analogical. The 820-page work develops the argument across chapters on word choice, idiom comprehension, category formation, analogies in science, and the deep structure of mathematical thought.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The central claim is that there is no sharp distinction between 'ordinary' cognition and 'creative' cognition. Both are analogy-making; they differ only in depth and novelty. When a child recognizes a tree stump as a kind of chair, she performs the same operation Darwin performed when he recognized the structural correspondence between artificial and natural selection. The mechanisms are identical; the material on which they operate differs in how deep the structural correspondence runs.
The book develops Hofstadter's distinction