There has been, and still is, much interest in several disciplines in reasoning using analogy and similarity. Recent efforts in psychology and artificial intelligence have seen the development of general analogical reasoning mechanisms, which work on a variety of symbolic analogies from various domains. It is in the context of this work that this dissertation presents a unifying framework for analogy and similarity, which is designed to accomodate all current general theories and models of analogy. The approach places models of analogy into a unifying framework comprised of seven stages and four types of similarity. This framework allows current models to be assessed and compared, and deficiences observed. A new general model for analogy, which fits within this framework, is presented, overcoming many of the observed deficiences with other models. A computer program which embodies most of the key features of the new model is described, and the results of its application to several example analogies shown
