48
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2024
48 points (94.4% liked)
Asklemmy
43822 readers
813 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
That's not a fallacy. Their's is an argument by analogy, where Y and Z case are analogous, perceived to have similar characteristics.
Your objection is that the two situations are not similar in some relevant way (need for self-defense, survival situation).
An invalid analogy, perhaps?
Since the original thing is an analogy and OP is trying to say, that one cannot be used as analogous to the other.
Well, that's an argument OP would have to make, because arguments by analogy aren't necessarily fallacious.
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.
Except that OP is implying that the analogy being used doesn't match the argument being put up.
Rereading OC, I realise that it is not really an analogy, since the same "X" is being used in both the cases. So perhaps we should be looking for something else.
The top comment explains it better.