Keith J. Holyoak
Department of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles
Keith Holyoak built the modern psychology of analogy. His research programme, spanning the structure-mapping tradition with Gentner, the pragmatic and computational models of analogical access and mapping, and the 1995 book Mental Leaps, established analogy as a central topic of higher cognition rather than a rhetorical flourish. A distinguished professor at UCLA, he has spent decades on the question of when reasoning from one case to another is justified, which is exactly the question the AI consciousness debate kept answering informally.
His 2026 answer with Martin Monti, What Can Analogy Tell Us About Artificial Consciousness?, makes that justification formal. The paper treats the mechanism underlying human consciousness as a soft INUS set, a collection of candidate causal factors that differ in importance and need not each be strictly necessary, and holds that analogical support for consciousness in a target depends on causal relevance weights, unknown causes, disabling differences, and alternative routes rather than on behavioural resemblance. Applied to animals, the framework grades support by shared causal machinery, from essentially complete in great apes to minimal in cephalopods. Applied to AI, it concludes that behavioural similarity gives only limited evidence because the causal correspondences remain poorly established, and that progress requires moving from behavioural resemblance to causal tests.
Holyoak does not carry a philosophical position label on this site. The framework is an evidential methodology rather than a theory of consciousness, and its stance is agnostic in exactly the sense it defines. Analogy can strengthen or weaken a consciousness claim depending on the causal work, not on the theory behind it.
Known for. The psychology of analogy and relational reasoning, Mental Leaps, co-author of the soft INUS set causal framework for consciousness evidence
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