Every time you stare at a Wordle grid and think "well, if it's not there, but it could be here..." you're not guessing. You're doing analogy. The deep structural kind. The kind a French linguist spent years trying to formalize.

The Dissertation You've Never Heard Of

In 2003, Jean Charconnet published a doctoral dissertation called Analogie et logique naturelle. That's "Analogy and Natural Logic" in French. The work builds on earlier research by Jean-Blaise Grize, a Swiss logician who spent decades mapping how ordinary human reasoning actually works.

Spoiler: it's nothing like formal logic. It's pattern-matching. Comparison. Analogy.

Recently, Charconnet emailed Mark Liberman at Language Log to reference a post from that site dated September 10, 2026. Liberman published the exchange on October 1, 2026 as a guest post, filed under Philosophy of Language.

A researcher emailing a linguistics blog about analogy. Published. Categorized. HTML-formatted, even. That's the kind of thing people do when words feel important enough to do extra work for.

What This Has to Do With Word Games

Everything, possibly.

The "natural logic" in Charconnet's title is not about being logical in the chess-player sense. It's about how humans actually reason through language: not by applying rules, but by recognizing patterns and comparing them to what we already know.

When you see CRANE and your gut says "yes, strong opener," that's analogy. When you clock that -ING endings cluster in certain Scrabble positions, that's analogy. When you know QI is valid the same way you know XI is valid, without stopping to look it up, analogy again.

One possibility is that this is exactly what Grize's framework was describing all along: the pre-formal pattern engine that runs underneath all language use. Word game players just happen to push it hard.

The Part You Can Actually Use

You don't need to track down a 2003 French dissertation to apply this. Here's the practical version:

• When you're stuck, don't ask "what rule applies here?" Ask "what does this remind me of?" Natural logic, not formal logic.
• Your instincts are trainable. More words in means larger pattern library out.
• The feeling that something "looks right" is not luck. It's accumulated analogy. Trust it.

Grize mapped the territory. Charconnet refined the map. You've been using it your whole life without knowing the name.

Now you know. Use accordingly.

Source: Languagelog