this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2024
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I disagree. I don't think it's good enough for someone to just state that Y and Z (for any values of Y and Z) are sufficiently equivalent without anything to back it up, and then expect anyone who disagrees to carry the burden of proof. Occam's razor would say to use the simpler null hypothesis that Y and Z are distinct, and the burden of proof is on the one who claims equivalence.
Otherwise you could win any argument by assuming the conclusion based on an unfalsifiable hypothesis.
I mean, I agree, but that's the rhetorical purpose of an argument by analogy: you can smuggle in a lot of problematic assumptions through an analogy that would be extremely suspect if you were to make the same argument deductively or inductively. You see these arguments all the time in politics
Are you claiming that the purpose of an analogy is to smuggle in problematic assumptions, and so if one analogy is fallacious, they all are?
Yeah no, I disagree. A sufficiently formed analogy serves as a "mapping" or logical "reduction" from one problem space to another. If a party understands how to solve a problem in one problem space, and agrees on the mapping to a different problem space, now they also know how to solve the problem in the new space.
However, if you propose a fallacious mapping, then your argument is now also fallacious. It would be no different from proposing a solution to a math equation with an error in the work. Your solution could still possibly be a correct one just by chance, but you have not successfully shown a valid path to the solution. That's the definition of a fallacy.
Yo dawg, I heard you like analogies.
Ah, damn, that's fair.
I didn't mean to claim that. But, that is definitely one of the common uses in politics.
I agree with what you said, though, about the mapping.