ABSTRACT
Argument by analogy is like a powerful chainsaw. Pointing out differences among the analogized items is at most the beginning of a criticism of an argument by analogy; the key is to break the analogy by explaining what makes the differences more salient than the alleged similarity. Argument by analogy is a particularly widely used tool throughout philosophy. Plato's analysis in The Republic of the good person runs on an analogy between justice in the soul and justice in the city. The arguments by analogy that are commonly deployed in debates concerning same-sex marriage demonstrate the difficulty. Arguments by analogy confront a second dialectical complication, one that arises from the background presumption that beliefs about the proximal phenomenon are more settled or obvious than those about the distal. The lesson is that the analogies deployed in arguments by analogy can be criticized as being inappropriately framed, as false analogies.
