Congruence principle

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Congruence principle

The congruence principle is a broad idea about making things that seem different fit together. It appears in many fields:

- Economics: fiscal equivalence—the idea that a group of buyers can be made to match exactly with a group of sellers; this is a simplified and often false model.
- Education: Bloom's Taxonomy helps align learning goals, activities, and assessments.
- Linguistics and etymology: when a linguistic feature exists in many languages, it’s more likely to persist; related concept is phono-semantic matching.
- Mathematics: Cavalieri's principle, a way to compare volumes or areas by slicing.
- Medicine: metabolism is thought to carry traces of primitive chemistry, which can inspire theories.
- Psychology: a corollary to cognitive dissonance; living with a mismatch between beliefs and behavior is unstable, a idea linked to poetic justice.
- Taxonomy: taxonomic congruence occurs if two classifications derive from the same theoretical phylogenetic tree.

See also: Equivalence principle.