From: cbcox-AT-rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu (Carrol Cox)
Subject: O.K. Let's talk about "analogy."
Date: Fri, 5 Jul 1996 17:16:45 -0500 (CDT)


    This is not a reply to anyone, nor is it even a considered position
on analogy; it is rather just thinking to myself on screen, and if
you read it, I am not addressing "you"; you are merely reading over
my shoulder as I speculate.

    First let's "get rid of" one kind of analogy, a sort of expanded
simile, that is I think irrelevant to any of the debates about it
on this list.

Robert Burns:
        O my Luve's lie a red, red rose,
           That's newly sprung in June;
        O My Luve's like the melodie
          That's sweetly play'd in tune.

        As fair art thou, my bonie lass,
          So deep in luve am I;
        And I will luve thee still, my dear,
          Till a' the seas gang dry. . . .

Burns is *not* saying that his "luve" is either "like" a rose *or*
has the internal structure of a rose. In fact there is no comparison
of rose and luve at all. The rose belongs to the general category of
great things. So do well-played melodies. So does his love. Do these
8 lines are not about roses or loves or melodies at all: they are
about the state of mind of the singer. Most poems of this sort are
very bad. Burns is one of the relatively few masters of the genre.
(Actually, as always, the thing is more complicated, but will do for
a consideration of the various forms of analogy and their cognitive
function.)

    Now let's get a bit closer to the bone, with (historically) the
most important kind of analogy (in "science," in philosophy, in
theology, and in medieval, renaissance, and early modern literature),
_Aristotelian_ metaphor:

            The ship plows the sea.

(Cognoscenti will recognize that I'm leaning of some of Hugh Kenner's
work here.) This does *not* (from an Aristotelian viewpoing) that
a ship is a plow or that the ocean is a cornfield. In fact, it
compares six things: ship/plow; ground/water surface; ACT OF
SAILING / ACT OF PLOWING.

    There is an *Act* (and an act is a form in the terminology of
the medieval scholastics). In fact the metaphor (the analogy) has
revealed or discoverd a FORM (a metaphysical reality) which is
neither plowing nor sailing but a "deeper" and "realer" substantial
form of which plowing and sailing are merely specific instances. And
the genus is more important than the species; this form or act, which
has no name other than the metaphor which catches it, is more
important than the two species, sailing and plowing. (This logical
and metaphysical use of "genus" and "species" is a millenium or
so older than the biological uses.)

    Now note: the metaphor/Analogy does not merely "illustrate" or
make clear something the speaker already knows; it DISCOVERS a reality
which before was unknown and would have remained unknown but for the
recognition that abstracted the greater Act (Form, Res). Moreover,
"we" have taken the first step in a mounting pyramid of analogies
which will lead us to God and the necessity of Revelation (with a
one-chapter pause on the shallowness of any metaphysician who has
not spent long days contemplating the angels.) (See Jacques Maritain,
--gee--I for get the title and my copy of it is in my office on campus.)

    It is essential, this is a mode (in fact THE mode) of discovering
new knowledge. The content of knowledge must be reality, and reality
is unchanging. Also: Nothing is in the mind that is not first in
the senses. Now if I were to say that as my own statement, Rahul
would tear his hair and scream, wondering how in the hell, for example,ple
quarks can be "in the senses." But both Aristotle and St. Thomas
were fully convinced of this. One needs to know the form (given by
the analogy of sailing and plowing), so one can climb to ever higher
and higher, more and more real, forms, up to the Divine Act itself,
but one must begin with an act of abstraction from a particular
plowing and a particular sailing (in the senses) in order by an
act of intellect to arrive at that Form (Act, Reality, Genus)
which gives reality to the particular plowing, just as that
particular plowing gives existence to the Form (which gives the
act of plowing its [unchanging core] of reality). Dante's _Comedy_
is an immense structure of such analogies:
        Her joy like to her beauty was (Paradise, Canto II)
Beauty itself must be abstracted from the visible appearance, and then
that level of abstraction (that higher form) may give existence to
the higher level (her joy) which itself, with several hundred or
thousand other clustering short and long analogies) let's the mind
grasp, for a moment, the beatific vision itself. (Before flipping
Dante off root and branch, take a look at the end of the Preface
to the First German Edition of Capital I, where the great man
says, "the maxim of the great Florentine is mine: Segui il tuo
corso, e lasci dir le genti."

    Anyhow (having glibly summarized 2000 years of philosophy from
Plato to Duns Scotus) that is what analogy used to be. And one of
the great tasks begun by Descartes and Milton and Cromwell and Newton and
Rousseau was to wash that mode of knowing down the toilet. And my first
reason to be suspicious of analogy in an argument is that one can never
know when an analogy is retaining a whiff or more of Thomistic Aristo-
telian analogy. (Robert Burns, the plowman poet was also greatly
learned, and when he wrote Red, Red Rose, he might just have been
(even self-consciously) throwing another spadeful of dirt on the
corpse of scholasticism.) (I include

    I include Cromwell and Milton in the list above because the core
of Charles I's defense (or refusal to defend himself) at his trial for
treason rested in part on such analogies of visible act's (the king's)
to divine acts.

    Now analogy, in the last few centuries, has had two other modes
at least: persuasive and explanatory. The latter is clear enough. You
know something. I know you know it (I trust your knowledge), but I
don't understand it, so you compare it to something I do know. There
is no disagreement involved, and no new knowledge is being unearthed.
Textbooks and manuals of various kinds, as well as travel books, etc.
make great use of this form of analogy. Proper and unexciting, having
no political, philosophical, or scientific reverberations. (I'm
ignoring those here, the post-als, who as in Sokal's hoax deny the
existence of knowledge to be explained.)

    Persuasive analogy. Here, I think, the ground may get a bit
bloody. (And in part, I think, because much persuasive analogy is
a disguised and sloppy form of Thomistic analogy--disguised from
the user as well as the reader or listener.) I will very tentatively
suggest one possible legitimate use of persuasive analogy. We are
debating "P," and the debate begins to turn to the very *possibility*
of P--not whether it is true or does exist, but whether it is even in
principle POSSIBLE for it to exist. I, defending P in this context,
give an analogy to something "like" P in some other context.
1
    This, I think, would actually be *explanatory analogy* USED
for persuasive purposes. All I wish to do is to get you to CONSIDER
P as possible, so I try to show you what it would "feel like" to
consider P as possible by thinking of the admitted possibility of
P'. But the analogy has no demonstrative or heuristic force; I
have not actually made the truth of P more probable, but simply
gotten you to give more consideration (not analogical) to the
possible truth of P.

    Then there is a very special kind of heuristic analogy. A
researcher is attempting to explain a phenomenon in Field Q. He
pores over his material. Then he reads a book in Field R--that
book happens to be sheer nonsense in its own field (I am thinking
of Malthus as the propounder of nonsense in Field R) and more or
less suddenly the researcher (I am of course thinking of Darwin)
says, perhaps it's like that in Field Q. The analogy is completely
false; it has no cognitive content whatever; it is a myth. But
the same proposition which is nonsense in Field R is, when translated,
a stupendous discovery in Field Q: as long as subsequent researchers
expanding the field don't take it too seriously, because if the
analogy is seriously taken as of cognitive power, it will produce
nonsense in both fields.
    So? Can we define a type of analogy that has real cognitive value?
I don't think so, but it is worthwhile exploring further.
    Carrol














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