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Your last paragraph suffers from hyperbolic rhetoric and a faultful analogy (common with arguments from analogy). A librarian offering to photocopy a book for y

by oska 6y ago

Your last paragraph suffers from hyperbolic rhetoric and a faultful analogy (common with arguments from analogy). A librarian offering to photocopy a book for you is incurring cost of resources (the paper used for the photocopy) and giving you an inferior copy (not bound and nicely finished). Neither of those apply with a digital copy, which is essentially cost-free to make and indistinguishable from the source. And why should a digital library have to work in the same way as a physical library? Why should we be bound by analogising the way a physical library works to how a digital library could and can work? A library, to me, is an accessible store of published works, with some level of curation. That's it. It doesn't have to include the idea of physical access limits, artificially imposed. Indeed, one of the benefits of digitisation is escaping the limits imposed by physicality and opening new ways of doing things.

ketzu 6y ago
The problem with arguments from analogy are that people often just try to figure out some way in which the analogy doesn't work, instead of challenging the point it made. Which is easy, otherwise it would be a terrible analogy. In this case, copying a book has cost and reduces quality, are not related to the point of the analogy, even though they differ from digital copys. Given your last paragraph, it seems that the you and the original comment disagree on what a library is. In the end, like in your second paragraph, it doesn't really matter what we currently think a library is and what we want to make of it. And that's an important discussion.
- oska 6y ago
  Arguments from analogy can be useful to infer some possible further similarity. So as a creative, inductive process. But using an argument from analogy to say why something can't or shouldn't be done is yes, as you say, problematic, because it's 1) usually easy to pick apart the analogy but also because 2) it's intellectually dubious and lacking in rigour.

by oska 6y ago

ketzu 6y ago

The problem with arguments from analogy are that people often just try to figure out some way in which the analogy doesn't work, instead of challenging the point it made. Which is easy, otherwise it would be a terrible analogy. In this case, copying a book has cost and reduces quality, are not related to the point of the analogy, even though they differ from digital copys. Given your last paragraph, it seems that the you and the original comment disagree on what a library is. In the end, like in your second paragraph, it doesn't really matter what we currently think a library is and what we want to make of it. And that's an important discussion.

oska 6y ago
Arguments from analogy can be useful to infer some possible further similarity. So as a creative, inductive process. But using an argument from analogy to say why something can't or shouldn't be done is yes, as you say, problematic, because it's 1) usually easy to pick apart the analogy but also because 2) it's intellectually dubious and lacking in rigour.