Chapter 21: Analogical Reasoning • In an analogy, we compare one thing with another. We might describe a person as being like a fox, a prickly rose, a robot, or a hurricane. Love is said to be a disease, a game, a drug, a heatwave, and “a smoke made with the fume of sighs” (Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet). Less poetically, a physicist might compare an atom to the solar system—electrons revolve around a nucleus at the centre as planets go around the sun. • In this section, we focus on the use of analogy in explanation and argument (literary theory distinguishes between metaphors, similes and allegories. They are all based on resemblances, and we treat them all as analogies here). The first point to note is that words such as similar and like have incomplete meanings. Saying that two things are similar has a concrete meaning only with respect to some standard of comparison. Pick any two objects, and they are bound to be similar in some way. A washing machine is like a
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