A Poem Re-Draft and Three New Poem Drafts

bad cat

some cat has got
into the poetry books
jumbling all the words
cutting lines and verses
into pieces
shredding sonnets

rhymes are all displaced
meters
disarrayed
tissue-paper shreds
are all the metaphors

and when i catch
the crazy feline
who stole the capitals
the punctuation marks
i will say
bad cat

Cradle

How swiftly youth will wither,
and dreaming sense of wonder,
like clouds in windy weather
that curl and caper yonder!

How swiftly time will fly
and carry this infant flesh,
as with me it flew,
like wind or lightning flash.

Tired of Listening

No, I will not hear again
the tale of how a clever you
overcame, made right, got gain.
And all your family, too,
you can pack away in a box
and shove it in an attic loft,
of how they lost, won back,
of how they sorrowed, sighed, and laughed.
No! I will not hear
of how a stupid teenage friend
and you escaped by just a hair;
there is no interest there
and your stories do not end.
No, I said, no! Not a word,
not a discourse, not a tale
will be heard;
all your tales are far too tall,
and all your stories drear;
your exploits like your fresh-washed shirts
should hide in some small drawer
until you can keep them short.

Maria Assumpta

Hear, my daughter,
lend your year,
forget your people,
leave your home.
  The queen will stand,
  your right hand
  adorn with gold.

The king will love,
fairness seek;
he is your lord,
adore his name.
  The queen will stand,
  your right hand
  adorn with gold.

With cheerful sound,
with joyful noise,
their name is praised.
They pass within.
  The queen will stand,
  your right hand
  adorn with gold.

Eunice on Patience

Edith Stein on the Intrinsic Value of Woman

This intrinsic value [of woman] consists chiefly in the ability:

1. To become a complete person oneself; i.e., a person all of whose faculties are developed and coexist in harmony;
2. To help others to become complete human beings;
3. In all contact with other persons, to respect the complete human being.

Certain maladies of modern culture such as the dehumanization of the person, fragmentation, and the one-sided development of certain faculties leading to the atrophy of others may be cured through recourse to the intrinsic value of woman.

Edith Stein, "The Significance of Woman's Intrinsic Value in National Life," Woman, Freda Mary Oben, tr., 2nd edition. ICS Publications (Washington, D.C.: 1996) p. 39. This is from the typed summary of a talk that Stein gave at the 15th convention of the Bavarian Catholic Women Teachers in 1928. The idea that womanhood or femininity plays an essential role in the development of complete personhood is a fairly important one in Stein's version of feminism; it occurs in different guises in a number of places. The claim would be very controversial today because of a widespread (but not universal) skepticism about the notion of womanhood or femininity.

Practice and Principle

A nice quote on ad baculum arguments:

Practice meets principle in ad baculum, though practice, not principle, is, in many cases, the primary aim of the arguer.

[Michael J. Wreen, "A Bolt of Fear," Philosophy & Rhetoric, Vol. 22, No. 2 (1989), p. 138.]

I just came across Wreen's paper, a bit belatedly, and it's very much worth reading; I think it's a bit loose in parts, but it is certainly a work that should be read by those interested in some of the traditional fallacies.

Et Laeteri Bonis Rebus et Dolere Contrariis

It is not reasonable to refuse to undertake any honourable task or activity, or to lay it aside once undertaken, in order to avoid trouble. If we are to run away from anxiety, we must run away from virtue, which naturally feels a certain sense of anxiety when it meets things contrary to itself, and finds them hateful and repulsive; as good nature is repelled by ill nature, self-control by excess, courage by cowardixe; similarly one may see that just men are most distressed by instances of injustice, brave men by cowardly behaviour, decently-behaved men by indecency. It is the property of a well-constituted mind to be glad at good things, and to be distressed by the opposite. Therefore, if distress of mind is permissible in a wise man at all (which it surely is, unless we think that human qualities have been altogether uprooted from his mind), what reason is there why we should totally remove friendship from life merely to avoid having to go to some trouble because of it?

Cicero, Laelius: On Friendship, section 47; from Cicero, On Friendship and The Dream of Scipio, Powell, tr. (Oxbow: 2005) p. 51. Cicero is arguing against the Stoics here, of course.

In one of my Intro courses for this Fall term I will be experimenting with teaching the Laelius as part of a brief introductory section on philosophical views of friendship. If anyone knows of any resources that could help students get a better grasp on the dialogue, or that could contribute to helping me teach it in a discussion-based course, suggestions along those lines would be welcome.

Mill's Examples of False Analogy

It's interesting to look at Mill's examples of what counts as false analogy, as he considers them in Book V of A System of Logic.

(1) Paternal government and despotic government. Paternal government is good, so too will despotic government be good. This is a false analogy, says Mill, because it implies that despotic government shares with paternal government that feature which makes it good, namely, that there is a responsible authority (who cannot be the children in the familial case or the general populace in the case of the state); but, in fact, the goodness of paternal government is due to two features it does not share with despotic government, namely the superior experience of the parents and the affection of the parents toward their children.

(2) Individual stages of life and political stages of life. As human beings and animals go from youth to maturity to old age to death, so do nations. But in human beings and animals this progress is due to "the natural progress of those very changes of structure which, in their earlier stages, constitutes its growth to maturity" but political bodies die not because of the progress of their structures but because of the stagnation and regression of their structures.

(3) Immutability and unpunishability. An argument made by Hooker: As natural bodies require an unmovable mover in order to have motion, so political bodies require an unpunishable member in order to have punishment. Mill doesn't give a specific reason for the falseness of the analogy; he gets distracted by the fact that he also thinks its premise (about immovable movers) is false.

(4) Monetary utility and utility of resources. An example taken from Whately: “It would be admitted that a great and permanent diminution in the quantity of some useful commodity, such as corn, or coal, or iron, throughout the world, would be a serious and lasting loss; and again, that if the fields and coal-mines yielded regularly double quantities, with the same labor, we should be so much the richer; hence it might be inferred, that if the quantity of gold and silver in the world were diminished one-half, or were doubled, like results would follow; the utility of these metals, for the purposes of coin, being very great. Now there are many points of resemblance and many of difference, between the precious metals on the one hand, and corn, coal, etc., on the other; but the important circumstance to the supposed argument is, that the utility of gold and silver (as coin, which is far the chief) depends on their value, which is regulated by their scarcity; or rather, to speak strictly, by the difficulty of obtaining them; whereas, if corn and coal were ten times as abundant (i.e., more easily obtained), a bushel of either would still be as useful as now. But if it were twice as easy to procure gold as it is, a sovereign would be twice as large; if only half as easy, it would be of the size of a half-sovereign, and this (besides the trifling circumstance of the cheapness or dearness of gold ornaments) would be all the difference. The analogy, therefore, fails in the point essential to the argument.”

(5) Metropolis and heart. Also an example taken from Whately: As the metropolis is like a heart, and as significant increase of the heart is a disease, so too significant increase in the size of the metropolis is a disease of the political body.

(6) Pythagorean analogies. There are proportions in the monochord that give music; there are similar proportions in astronomy, and thus a music of the spheres, "as if the music of a harp had depended solely on the numerical proportions, and not on the material, nor even on the existence of any material, any strings at all." Likewise there are various numerological and cosmological speculations through history that later are held to be fanciful. These often identified real resemblances (proportions and the like) but drew the wrong conclusions from them.

(7) Technical defect and moral defect. From arguments of the Stoics, an example taken from Cicero. Suppose a number of lyres that are out of tune; we can say that they are equally out of tune; therefore all departures from the rule (of right living) are equally departures from it, and so all are equal. Likewise a navigator has equally failed at his task whether he loses a ship carrying straw or he loses a ship carrying gold; likewise, it doesn't matter whether a man beats his father or his slave if he does it without due cause.

Some of these are interesting; with regard to (7), for instance, Cicero himself identifies the problem as equivocation, which makes for dissimilar similars. Mill rejects the navigator/abuser analogy because he holds that a failure of skill and a moral failure differ precisely in that interest is irrelevant to the former but not the latter; Cicero rejects it because the actual cargo doesn't affect our assessment of skill but who gets beaten does affect our assessment of justice. (But Cicero also denies the premise of the comparison, saying that when we consider negligence, it does matter whether the cargo was straw or gold.) But what's notable is that every single one of the responses that clarifies why the analogy is false argues that it is a false analogy because the causes involved in each are not really and truly the same kinds of causes. As he explains:

In these and all other arguments drawn from remote analogies, and from metaphors, which are cases of analogy, it is apparent (especially when we consider the extreme facility of raising up contrary analogies and conflicting metaphors) that, so far from the metaphor or analogy proving any thing, the applicability of the metaphor is the very thing to be made out. It has to be shown that in the two cases asserted to be analogous, the same law is really operating; that between the known resemblance and the inferred one there is some connection by means of causation.

That is, each analysis purporting to show that the Fallacy of False Analogy has been committed is simply an argument that the similarities have been used improperly as a basis for generalization.

This Fallacy [of False Analogy] stands distinguished from those already treated of by the peculiarity that it does not even simulate a complete and conclusive induction, but consists in the misapplication of an argument which is at best only admissible as an inconclusive presumption, where real proof is unattainable.

It looks very much like analogical inferences are not allowed defeasibility on Mill's account; the very failure of the inference to get the right conclusion is itself sufficient evidence that it commits the Fallacy of False Analogy. This is an unusual use of the word 'fallacy'; fallacious reasoning isn't usually taken to be proven by the mere fact that you got a wrong answer. But this broad usage is not unique to Mill; Bentham regularly uses the word in something like this way, too. And it ties in with the fact that Mill thinks of 'fallacy' as naturally connected to evidence: a fallacy is a case where apparent evidence is not real evidence or apparently conclusive evidence is not actually conclusive, so that a false conclusion is drawn. Thus the very test of a fallacy in Mill's sense is that the evidence results in a false conclusion, or involves a false assumption. So, for instance, Mill says (3) is doubly fallacious: it involves false analogy and it inolves the scholastic error of thinking that motion requires an immutable mover. A great deal of philosophical content is being packed into this understanding of fallaciousness. When you take it in this sense, one sees that all the false analogies are analogical inferences that Mill thinks result in incorrect conclusions. This is all well and good for people who agree with Mill about (for instance) the nature of the body politic, but it means that Mill's conclusions about the Fallacy of False Analogy -- including the claim that there is such a fallacy -- are not necessarily consistent with non-Millian views.

False Analogy

I've occasionally sketched out some rough criticisms of Wikipedia's false analogy article. The current version is much better than the versions I've seen before. But it still seems to be struggling with finding any good examples. Here's the current example being used:

An example of a false analogy between energy and mass would be to assume that since E=mc2, then energy and mass must be identical. Energy and mass are not identical, energy can travel at the speed of light while mass cannot. Analogies should never be mistaken for establishing an equivalence. Not recognizing the misapplication of analogy can be as potentially disastrous as not recognizing a misapplication of logic.

It's certainly true that analogies should not be confused with equivalences or identities, but it's hard to see how such a confusion is supposed to be an example of a fallacy of false analogy, given that the whole problem is that the analogical character of the relation is not being recognized. It's also not obvious that the proper way to think of the equality in the E=mc2 example is as establishing an analogy rather than something else. It's possible, though, the idea is that E=mc2 establishes that measurements of energy and mass have a proportion or analogy to each other, and that the mistake is to think that this analogy implies or is identical to a different analogy, between energy and mass themselves. In any case, the way in which this is supposed to be an example of false analogy is obscure in both ways.

But, as I think I've suggested before, the problem here is not in Wikipedia or its editors but in the fact that standard accounts of false analogy are neither consistent nor well-motivated. Part of it is that standard accounts of almost all the fallacies are patchwork, crazy quilts sewn out of striking pieces of accounts that are not obviously consistent and sometimes are obviously not consistent, because the accounts are built up in the way any folklore is, however philosophical this form of folklore may be.

Part of the problem, however, is historical; we seem to owe our special confusion about false analogy to John Stuart Mill and his readers. Mill, in A System of Logic, doesn't seem to be the originator of the label, but his account of it was for a very long time the most widely read account. his account, however, has a number of idiosyncrasies. On Mill's view there is one legitimate form of analogical inference, which is basically nothing other than an inductive argument to raise the probability that this or that cause is operative in a certain kind of phenomena. In other words, since induction is primarily taken to be about causes, analogy is a form of causal generalization; false analogy is a form of bad causal generalization. We see the residue of this in the fact that a number of late nineteenth century authors treat false analogy as a lapse in causal reasoning, non tali causa pro tali causa. In order to be legitimate, the bare analogical inference is not enough; you need in addition a reason to think that it takes into account all the relevant causal conditions. It is because of this that his description of false analogy almost makes it sound like all analogy is out the window:

There is another, more properly deserving the name of fallacy, namely, when resemblance in one point is inferred from resemblance in another point, though there is not only no evidence to connect the two circumstances by way of causation, but the evidence tends positively to disconnect them. This is properly the Fallacy of False Analogies.

All analogical inference requires that there be "evidence to connect the two circumstances by way of causation." This is an extraordinarily strong condition on analogical arguments -- one can see the reasoning behind it, but very few people think that the field of legitimate analogical reasoning is this sharply restricted. For instance, many people think that there can be legitimate analogical inferences to the relevant causal conditions; these would all arguably be either illegitimate or circular on Mill's account. What seems to have happened, then, is that some of Mill's claims about false analogy continued to be accepted, but detached from Mill's unusual account of analogical legitimacy. The result is incoherence: on almost any newer account the line between legitimate analogy and false analogy is arbitrary because Millian claims about the fallacy are still fairly standard but are unsupported by any of the very distinctively Millian reasons why Mill originally made the claims.

In order to have a good account of false analogy, then, one needs a good account of analogy. And while some accounts are no doubt better than others, there is no general consensus as to the best account of analogy. I've already mentioned Mill's, in which there is one and only one class of analogies that are good. It's interesting to contrast it to another notable historical account of analogy, namely, Hume's. Hume doesn't talk about On Hume's account of analogy, analogical inferences can be stronger or weaker, but there is one and only one class of analogies that could be taken to be candidates for false analogy: those that essentially posit a similarity between existence and nonexistence. In other words, on Hume's account as long as there is any real (i.e., not purely verbal) similarity an analogy has force. (This is actually somewhat important for understanding Hume and his project, but getting into this would be too long a digression here.) I would suspect that most people have a view of legitimate analogical inference that lies somewhere between Mill's minimalism and Hume's maximalism. (Hume has always seemed to me to be obviously right on this point, but I have found that many people do not agree.) The problem with regard to false analogy should be clear enough: even assuming that there is some coherent fallacy here, the slate of possible candidates for examples of such a fallacy varies wildly depending on what, exactly, your view of analogical inference is. Finding even a reasonably uncontroversial example of false analogy will be fairly difficult, given that people don't even agree as to what makes an analogy bad in any sense.

UPDATE: Reworked some of the statements for greater accuracy. Also, it should be pointed out that, despite the label 'minimalism' used here, Mill actually allows quite a bit of room for analogical inference -- what makes him a 'minimalist' is not that he thinks there is very little value to analogical inferences or that they should be used minimally but that on his account all analogical inferences have to meet fairly restrictive conditions to be of significance.