> Your analogy is a great demonstration why reasoning-by-analogy fails It's a matter of understanding what the analogy is giving you. In many cases, as above,

> Your analogy is a great demonstration why reasoning-by-analogy fails It's a matter of understanding what the analogy is giving you. In many cases, as above, it's merely a foothold, a way of getting started understanding what something is through partial identification with something already known. From that point, the differences between the two can be clarified. You can think of it in terms of compressing descriptions: let's say you need to describe an SUV to someone; you could start by saying "it's like a truck but [...]," and remove a lot of the redundancy you'd get by starting from scratch. AFAICT people who think there's something wrong with reasoning-by-analogy are analyzing it with the false assumption that people are just doing "X is like Y" rather than "X is like Y EXCEPT [...]," while also having an understanding on some level of the imprecision/limits of the partial identification. That people are out there reasoning with analogies thinking they form perfect, limitless mappings between the domains involved seems like an imaginary problem.