摘要:his special. issue of the journal Philosophica "Analogy and mental modeling in scientific discovery" is based on a selection of the papers that were presented at the International Conference Model-Based Reasoning in Scientific Discovery (MBR'98), held at the Collegio Ghislieri, University of Pavia, Pavia, Italy, in December 1998. Over fifty papers exploring how scientific thinking uses models and explanatory reasoning to produce creative changes in theories and concepts were presented at the conference.