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...

Inductive learning aims at finding general rules that hold true in a database. Targeted learning seeks rules for the prediction of the value of a variable based on the values of others, as in the case of linear or non-parametric regression analysis. Non-targeted learning finds regularities...

People often wonder why economists analyze models whose assumptions are known to be false, while economists feel that they learn a great deal from such exercises. We suggest that part of the knowledge generated by academic economists is case-based rather than rule-based. That is, instead of...