My basic rule is that analogies are great for a sympathetic audience and bad for an antagonistic one. If you're trying to illuminate something to someone who wants to understand your point, an analogy is a great shortcut to building a tangible architecture in their mind. But if the other person has an opposing viewpoint and you're trying to dismantle that and replace it with yours, analogies usually end up just moving the goalposts in the argument.
(I started posting the below as a top-level comment, but in the end it arrived at the same point as yours, so leaving it as a reply…)
In Indian/Sanskrit literary theory (poetics), in the discussion of figures of speech (rhetoric, etc), similes are called upamā ("her face is like the moon", etc). The discussion of it in the literature is extensive and would fill several volumes (and I hardly know anything), but one thing recognized early is that in a simile/analogy, there needs to be a sādharaṇa-dharma, a shared property: the point is that there's something in common ("her face is beautiful, like the moon") while of course there is going to be a lot that is not (the intended meaning is not "like the moon, her face is pockmarked, full of craters", etc). In any given instance, this intended shared property may either be stated explicitly, in which case the simile is called "complete", or left implicit, in which case it's called "partial". Both can be highly effective.
In the context of this post, it seems that when making an argument, it may help for the analogy to be "complete": actually spell out what you intend by the analogy. Also, to echo the comment by @munificent, it is worth remembering that figures of speech are very effective as poetry, but poetry requires a sensitive and sympathetic reader (sahṛdaya). The same rhetoric can fail when used in argument with an unsympathetic audience.
That's a good rule. People on this site often make arguments using analogies, and those threads always devolve into arguments about the specifics of the analogy. I have an amazing screenshot I saved where the discussion turns into something about companies hiring clowns to yell at patrons. It's unintentionally comical. The participants are intelligent adults, talking about a domain that they all share some understanding of, yet the crux of their debate is the behavior of some obnoxious clowns.
> People on this site often make arguments using analogies, and those threads always devolve into arguments about the specifics of the analogy.
That is because analogies are only useful for illustration, not as a chain of reasoning to prove something.
Conversations almost universally become low quality once analogies are brought in. They should be used sparingly, and explicitly only for the purpose of illustrating an idea.
It's so common to see people arguing with an analogy, which should be obviously pointless. Proposing an alternate analogy is slightly better, but really you should just discuss the actual issue in front of you, it's much clearer.
I think analogy is useful in an argument for a few reasons:
1. It can reduce the problem space to the factors which the parties see as important.
2. It can uncover differences of opinion as to which factors are deemed important to the problem space. ie: "yeah, but your analogy discounts x!".
Of course, analogies can be used in bad faith as rhetorical tools to win an argument on grounds other than it's merits, and that is the real problem with them.
Big +1. I think this is a really good distinction to keep in mind in general. Teaching and debating look very different.
E.g., it's going to come off as condescending if you try to "educate" someone on something where they already have a formed opinion and don't see you as an authority.
thats a good observation, yes, an antagonistic audience is likely to derail your point by focusing on the ways in which the things compared are dissimilar, even though analogies only compare the ways they are similar and requires the listener to figure out which ways those are, while ignoring the dissimilarities.
I often just mention that definition. I actually get really far by avoiding certain polarizing words and just saying the definition of the word. Flies right under the radar.
Yep, "false equivalence" is the response I always get from an antagonistic audience when I try to use an analogy. Of course an analogy is not an equivalence, but that gets conveniently ignored. These days I just make the most direct argument possible and avoid analogies altogether, or else we end up in an argument about what an analogy actually is. Analogies work a lot better during a disagreement if the person you're disagreeing with is operating in good faith, which unfortunately most humans aren't able to do when their views are being challenged.
I’d never thought about it such explicit terms, but of course using analogies with an unsympathetic interlocutor is basically building them a all-too-convenient strawman
It doesn't need to be sympathetic vs antagonistic. I think the better dichotomy is scout mindset vs soldier mindset. Are they actively trying to change their beliefs or are they defending some notion? If the person you're talking to is in a scout mindset an analogy would be helpful, but to a soldier an analogy is like red meat. It's the perfect fodder for both sides to dig in and assail each other which is what they really want whether they realize it or not.
