Wonderfully wrong analogies

This week we asked philosophy professors to give us a  favorite example of an excellent yet mistaken analogy.


Never gonna fall in love
Garret Merriam

The idea of 'falling in love' resonates because it captures the gravitational power of the early stages of love. And because it feels so overpowering we often forgive otherwise questionable behavior. 'Can you really blame him?', we might ask. 'He was falling in love.'

But an honest look at both reveals a key difference between love and a fall. When you fall off building you have no say whatsoever in what happens next; Isaac Newton is in the driver's seat.

Compare this to when you meet someone: There is a spark of attraction. You approach them. The two of you have a conversation. You agree to meet again. And then again...


No matter how strong one's feelings, at every stage in this process you (and they) have many choices: you can walk away; you can not talk to them; you can refuse to see them again. There may or may not be any good reason for you to make these choices, but they are choices that you have.

Love, like falling, is indeed a process. But unlike falling, it is a process that happens THROUGH us, not TO us. Being in love, even in the powerful beginning stages, is constituted in part by making certain decisions and eschewing others. It is something that we do, not something that we endure. And like all things we do, we get to (and must) take responsibility for it.

In short, unlike falling, love is a choice. Or rather, a series of them.


Motion is motion
Brad Dowden

If you are driving along the road at 40 mph, and an oncoming car is traveling toward you at 40 mph, then from your perspective, you will be likely to judge that the oncoming car is traveling toward you at 40 mph + 40 mph, or 80 mph. It is clearly better for you to hit a telephone pole than collide with the oncoming car, since the relative speed at impact is so much higher. By analogy you’d expect the relative speed at impact to continue to be twice as high even when the two colliding objects are moving much faster.

If you were to send a beam of electrons down the road at 99% of the speed of light, or .99c, while at the same time someone down the road sends their beam of electrons back toward you at .99c, then from the perspective of one of your electrons, the relative speed at impact when two electrons collide is .99c + .99c or almost 2c. Or so you would think, if the analogy held.

No object can attain a speed greater than c, no matter whether the chosen perspective is from one of the electrons or from the gun producing the electron beam. Although there is an extremely slight deviation from additivity even back in the scenario with the oncoming cars, the deviation increases with speed and only becomes noticeable at significant fractions of the speed of light.

This failure of additivity is another one of the many unintuitive consequences of Einstein’s theory of relativity.


Health maintenance is like auto maintenance
G. Randolph Mayes

The best way to keep your automobile running smoothly is to have a trained mechanic regularly inspect critical parts for damage or wear. That way they can be replaced or repaired before they create catastrophic problems. Your body is just like your car. That is why it is important to have annual physical checkups and screenings for dangerous conditions, even if you feel fine. By doing so, your doctor will be able to detect and treat them early, preventing catastrophic health problems down the road.

This analogy turns out to be dead wrong. It is sensible on apriori grounds because your car and your body are machines subject to failure through abuse, neglect or bad luck. But it fails empirically because in medicine (a) the methods for detecting problems early and (b) the capacity for prophylactic intervention are unreliable.

Everyone has a story of someone who is alive today because of a routine medical exam that caught a life-threatening condition early. The vast majority of these stories are false. The patients aren’t lying, and until recently neither were the doctors. They just believed, on the strength of this analogy, that medical problems can be nipped in the bud in this way. Current data belie this faith for most conditions and interventions that we have been raised to believe in.

This analogy has created mind-boggling profits for the healthcare industry, but it has harmed the rest of us immeasurably. Sophists rejoice. Hippocrates weeps.


Marriage is a ball and chain
Chong Choe-Smith

This is more of a punchline than a serious analogy. As with most analogies, there is a hint of truth in it, but the real-life phenomenon is far more complex. Marriage generally involves a commitment to be faithful to one person, but this is about where the usefulness of the analogy ends.

Some may say many things in life are better with some rules: parental rules rather than living in a pigsty, traffic laws rather than a free for all, and a system of crime and punishment rather than insecurity.

Marriage, one can argue, also is more liberating than constraining or even that the constraints are themselves liberating! A marriage or other serious monogamous relationship should provide a safe environment for two people to be truly themselves. Two people can take off the masks they wear in public spaces and, in the privacy of their own home, they can be naked and unashamed in every way.

The ball and chain comes not with marriage itself, but with the projects that marriage partners undertake (children) or with the problems that arise within a marriage (poor communication, money problems, other people—the in-laws?). We can conceptually distinguish marriage from these projects and problems (not all marriages have these things) and say that marriage itself is nothing or not much like a ball and chain.

But, then again, maybe you should ask my husband?


Brains are to thoughts as hardware is to software
Matt McCormick

The idea that brains are related to thoughts as hardware is related to software is ubiquitous, powerful, and deeply misguided. There are significant philosophical differences between the hardware/software relation and the brains/thought relation. Our continued uncritical use of the metaphor misguides our understanding of both.

Computers have Von Neumann architecture. Inputs arrive at a processing unit which has a set of instructions loaded from memory, where serial computations are performed. Results are then sent to memory or converted into an output. Neither the hardware nor the software change significantly as a result of processing. The system is deterministic and employs a formal language with discrete, modular, and symbolic units. And system failures are catastrophic.

Brains are massively parallel distributed processing (PDP) networks.  Brain activity is best described as waves of activation patterns coursing across billions of synaptic connections. Instead of a single operation being performed on a single variable which is then sent to the next function, millions or billions of signals simultaneously course across connectionist nodes each of which have thousands of connections to their neighbors. The capacities of the system are stochastic, and embedded in the constantly updated weights of these nodes, which change due to the frequency and intensity of the signals from their neighbors. There are no discrete physical structures or processes that map easily onto concepts, symbols, or logic; there is no language of thought that mirrors my thoughts in English. There is no set of instructions to access. And neural nets degrade gracefully.


Government is what we all do together
Kyle Swan

Here’s Robert Nozick in The Examined Life: “There are some things we choose to do together through government in solemn marking of our human solidarity, served by the fact that we do them together in this official fashion.”

This statement is true. Sometimes the things we do as a collective society through the institutions of government are things that are aptly comparable to projects we set and pursue through the kind of genuinely voluntary associations that we’re familiar with in our communities, like worshipping with co-religionists or running little league baseball for kids. Yes, governments are groups of people and sometimes, in a more or less similar way, these people together pursue desirable social ends. And it’s even sometimes true that there is such widespread public support for these ends that it makes sense to say that we all participate in solidarity in their pursuit.

Something like Nozick’s statement is attributed to former Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank, which goes, “Government is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together.”

This suggests a much tighter connection between our government and things we might choose to do together, and it’s nonsense. We in no way that’s recognizably analogous with the examples above chose at any time to invade Iraq, provide bailouts to failing financial institutions, spy on each other, use drone attacks to kill and maim children, target Muslims for travel bans, and literally millions of other things.


It ain't a slate and it ain't blank 

Kevin Vandergriff

Human nature is like a blank slate; that is, human psychology and behavior is mainly, or even completely shaped by environmental causes. Many have believed this picture of human nature is plausible for philosophical, social, and political reasons. But, as Stephen Pinker argues in The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, human psychology and behavior is largely the result of natural selection having shaped the “selfish” genes inherited by those with the best overall chances of survival and reproduction.

In response, defenders of the blank slate view have said that our “selfish” genes would preclude significant moral progress being made by human beings during their short time on earth. Pinker says this worry is unfounded.

Even though “selfish” genes can and do construct human brains to be psychologically and behaviorally predisposed to respond selfishly in particular ways to particular stimulus events, genes do not make the moment-to-moment decisions themselves, or necessarily constitute our true selves (Pinker, 1997, 410). Moreover, as long as we have altruistic motives that can be harnesses and expanded via psychological mechanisms, moral theories, and the imitation of religious exemplars, significant moral progress can be made by human beings.

Besides, as Pinker argues, it is the belief in the blank slate that has hampered significant moral progress by resulting in the:“…persecution of the successful, intrusive social engineering, the writing off of suffering in other cultures, an incomprehension of the logic of justice, and the devaluing of human life on earth (Pinker, 2002, 193).”

That's a real painy stick you got there mister
Tom Pyne

Several examples of an analogy pervasive in early modern philosophy:

• Perceiving heat is like being tickled (Galileo). 
• Light, heat, whiteness, or coldness is like the nausea produced by a purgative (Locke). 
• Perceiving intense heat or cold is a feeling of pain (Berkeley).

All propose an analogy between:

• perceiving features of the external world, and
• having a sensation like pleasure, pain, nausea…

The analogy is advanced in the service of two philosophical claims:

• The contents of perceptual states are private and subjective.
• The intrinsic nature of those contents does not reveal any feature of the external world.

Just as the ticklishness is not in the hand, nor the nausea ‘in’ the purgative, the perceived qualities are not in external things. Roses aren’t, strictly and literally, red. Fires aren’t, strictly and literally, hot.

Since sensations are immune to error through misidentification, our perceptions involve things we can’t be wrong about either. They have gone by various names over the years: ideas, sense data, qualia,…

Even in the present it is difficult to overstate the power, seductiveness – or mischievousness – of this analogy.

It generates so many gratuitous philosophical problems that a complete list starts to look like contemporary philosophy itself: The problem of other minds; anti-realism about secondary qualities; countenancing qualia as a problem in philosophy of mind. You name it.

The analogy doesn’t limp; it crawls. The tickle does not present itself as a property of the hand, but the rose looks red. The phenomenology is all wrong.


Life is like a box of chocolates
Brandon Carey

There’s something attractive about the analogy that life is like a box of chocolates. It makes your life seem full of options, each of them a (probably good) surprise. There’s also something exactly right about it. When you choose a course of action, there’s always a chance that you’ll be surprised. Things might not work out the way you planned, and the world might not be quite how it seems. Fundamentally, life is uncertain, which is a good reason to be open-minded and intellectually humble

But uncertainty comes in various degrees and kinds, and most things in your life are not like choosing from a box of chocolates. Chocolates may have various distinguishing features, but you have no idea how those features correlate with their fillings. So, based on the information you have, you have no reason to think that that next chocolate is filled with coconut rather than anything else—you never know what you’re going to get.

In life, though, you typically do have some reasons to think that certain choices will lead to certain outcomes. When you choose which bus to take, you’re not picking blindly. You take the 67 because the schedule says it will take you downtown, and you’re almost always right. There’s some chance that the driver will get confused and take you to the airport instead, but you have excellent reasons to think that you’ll end up downtown. So, unlike with a box of chocolates, you often know what you’re going to get.

Like sand through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives
Russell DiSilvestro

Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives.

This was the opening tagline used in the American TV show Days of Our Lives from 1972-1993.

The analogy is an attractive one if you know what an hourglass is. (If not, pause your online stopwatch and Google it.)

There are conflicting prudential tips that might flow from this picture of our lives.

"Your life is gradually, relentlessly, inevitably going away, so live it up now while you still can." (An hourglass-half-empty tip.)

“Your choices build your character gradually, like grains that form a heap, so be careful how you live.” (An hourglass-half-full tip.)

In any case, I think this analogy may be misleading.

Set aside whether we have a pre-set number days to live. And whether a possible afterlife counts as part of your life. I think the analogy pushes a kind of existential reduction on us.

A philosophy professor once asked me why Sartre’s famous slogan "you are—your life and nothing else" was not obviously true. "What else are you if not your life?" He asked me.

I replied: "a traditional philosophical answer from materialists and dualists alike is that you are a stuff or a substance or a thing that has a life. But you are not literally identical to your life, since it could have gone entirely differently than it did, and yet it still would have been yours."

The axe and the lance
Jon Chen

Chinese Legalist philosopher Han Feizi writes: “Benevolence might have worked long ago in the ancient times, but it certainly does not serve us today. Shields and battle axes worked before, but they no longer worked with the invention of iron lances.”

Here, Han Feizi seems to suggest that different times require different standards, and that contemporary society has little use for benevolence in governing. In fact, benevolence isn’t just regarded as ineffective, but as positively harmful. Wielding a short-ranged axe and facing off against an opponent with a long-ranged lance is foolish and will put one in mortal danger. What the axe-wielder ought to do, then, is replace his axe with a more suitable weapon.

This foxy analogy is compelling at first, but only if benevolence were akin to the axe. I don’t think so. I think benevolence, at least in this context, more so resembles good leadership, in that it has the ability to rally others to one’s side. Thought of in this way, benevolence is at the very heart of winning any era of wars and its usefulness is not contingent to some chapter in time. This sort of leadership, it appears, is guided by an appreciation for certain principles that one deems necessary and inherently valuable to the welfare of humanity (e.g. a deep respect for goodness and uprightness). If I’m right about this, then an iron lance is as futile as a battle axe if it is not guided by benevolence.

Poverty or bullets?

There are many parts of immigration law and policy that are morally problematic, but one that seems to have drawn less attention than others is the distinction between political refugees and other migrants, sometimes referred to as ‘economic migrants.’

The US State Department defines a refugee as “someone who has fled from his or her home country and cannot return because he or she has a well-founded fear of persecution based on religion, race, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group or political opinion.” According to the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, refugees are of “special humanitarian concern.”

An economic migrant can be defined as someone who has fled from his or her home state for other reasons, such as extreme economic hardship, poverty, or famine. These individuals are often perceived as foreigners who are seeking prosperity or a better life for themselves and their children. When a state has to limit the number of foreigners granted admission, priority is usually given to political refugees over other migrants. The reason for this may be that the needs of political refugees are more urgent because they lack even the basic good of membership in a state.[1] Or, the reason may be that, because political refugees are denied certain basic rights by their state of origin, a liberal state that believes that everyone should be protected by certain basic rights ought to extend these rights to those who are stateless and therefore unprotected.[2][3] Whatever the reason, many states extend to refugees special consideration and prioritize them over other migrants seeking admission.

I want to challenge this practice of giving priority to political refugees. This is not because political refugees do not deserve special consideration, but because other migrants are equally deserving. 

Here are two lines of argument.

Argument 1

Henry Shue argues that the distinction between a political refugee and an economic migrant is not as sharp and significant as it may appear. If the state is concerned about how best to use its scarce resources, it doesn’t make sense to prioritize political rights because subsistence rights are equally basic and satisfying subsistence rights do not involve any more resources than the satisfaction of political rights.

1a. Applying Shue’s argument for a basic right to subsistence rights, we can say:

(1) Everyone has a right to freedom of association.
(2) Minimum economic security is necessary to enjoy one’s freedom of association.
(3) Therefore, everyone also has rights to minimum economic security.[4] 

Shue defines subsistence or ‘minimum economic security’ to mean “unpolluted air, unpolluted water, adequate food, adequate clothing, adequate shelter, and minimum preventive public health care.”[5]  Subsistence rights are basic too.

1b. While some assume that the satisfaction of subsistence rights is more onerous or less urgent, this assumption is flawed. Some may believe that the satisfaction of subsistence rights involves positive duties, while respect for political rights, especially security rights, involves only negative duties. As Shue explains, both subsistence and security rights involve three kinds of correlative duties: not to destroy or deprive, to protect, and to provide. Sometimes all that is needed to satisfy a person’s subsistence rights is not to destroy that person’s capacity to be self-supporting. Shue discusses several cases of foreign intervention in developing countries as examples of a violation of even the duty to avoid deprivations. Contrary to the popular assumption that security rights involve only or primarily negative duties, we can think of all that is required to ensure national security or public safety: the training and maintenance of a police force; providing courts, lawyers, and prisons; and developing an entire system of criminal law and punishment. While it is easy to assume that one can satisfy another person’s security rights by simply not harming her, the reality is that this involves the provision of many costly resources. 

The deprivation of security rights is usually perceived as more urgent. Consequently, when one state deprives a person of his or her security rights, that person enjoys the right to asylum in another state. But what about a refugee who is fleeing a regime that, deliberately or otherwise, deprives him or her of economic security—i.e., subsistence? In applying Shue’s analysis, the distinction between political refugees and economic migrants is not as sharp and significant; it cannot do the work of justifying the prioritization of political refugees.

2. The second line of argument is this: Even if we accept the current definition of a refugee under US and international law, proper administration of refugee law depends crucially on fair decisions regarding who qualifies under the definition. But when it comes to economic migrants, these decisions are not fair. This is basically the argument offered by James Nickel.[6]

Writing in the mid-80’s, Nickel noted that the Reagan administration’s position on those applying for asylum from certain states in Central America was that these applicants were not motivated by fear of persecution, but merely fleeing poverty and seeking better lives for themselves and their families. Nickel specifically observed that the Reagan administration generally denied refugee status to applicants for political asylum from places such as El Salvador. Only 3% of the applications from El Salvador were granted, as compared to 14% from Nicaragua and 30% from Poland.[7] The State Department’s decisions on applications for asylum may reflect, rather than a fair application of the qualification, US foreign policy concerning the state of origin, including whether the US has sponsored or supported the regime (see Dirty Hands). Rather than a fair administration of law, the decisions are political and sometimes discriminate against Central American and Mexicanmigrants. 

Why do I think this is such an important part of the immigration debate? Because if we had recognized these so-called ‘economic migrants’ as entering lawfully in the first place, our current mess might have been avoided.   

Chong Choe-Smith

Department of Philosophy

Sacramento State

---

[1] Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice (New York: Basic Books, 1983).

[2] Stefan Heuser, “Is There a Right to Have Rights? The Case of the Right of Asylum,”

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 11 (1): 3-13 (2008).

[3] The reason may be a legal one; the 1951 Refugee Convention, the 1967 Refugee Protocol, and the US Refugee Act of 1980 require certain protections including the principle of non-refoulement, which prohibits the return of a refugee to his state of origin where he or she might be threatened on account of his race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular political group or political opinion.

[4] See Shue, Basic Rights (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 31.

[5] Shue, supra, p. 23.

[6] James Nickel, Sanctuary, Asylum and Civil Disobedience, In Defense of the Alien 8 (1985): 176-187.

[7] Nickel, supra, at p. 178, fn. 4.

Sex, Witches and Phlogiston

Categories are great. Categorization practices make the complexity of the world manageable. Like everything else in science, categorizations are not perfect, and revisions are needed. We used to categorize Pluto as a planet, but not anymore (it’s smaller than we thought). Sometimes we have good reasons to abandon a category. It happened to phlogiston and witches. I argue that current sex categories, female/male (F/M), should face the same fate of witches and phlogiston: we should abandon them.

There are two different lines of argument for my claim. First, F/M do not do the work they are supposed to do. F/M are not descriptively accurate. More and more research indicates that sex dimorphism is a myth. There are at least six markers related to sex (chromosomes, gonads, hormones, secondary sex characteristics, external genitalia, and internal genitalia) and they are not binary but can take, for each individual, different values along a spectrum (see e.g. here and here .)

Someone might count as male along one dimension and female in others. Individual variability in human bodies is not exceptional, but a norm. For this reason, F/M fails. To use a favorite in the philosophical jargon: it doesn’t “carve nature at its joints”. The Olympic committee ignores this evidence and insists on searching for the sex test that reveals who is a female and who is not. In the meantime, they ruin the careers of athletes (see here:  and here: ). They do not get the hint that sex is not about two kinds of people. Fortunately, more people are starting to accept this, and to realize the impact this should have on how we run our societies (here is a piece by California judge Noël Wise on how science does not support the legal requirement to determine whether someone is female or male).

But wait, isn’t it true that F/M categories help us successfully predict reality most of the time? That is, isn’t it true that if someone has XX chromosomes, you’ll be right most of the time if you predict that this person also has breasts, no facial hair, vagina, and uses the female public restrooms? Yes, there are regularities in relation to sex. However, this does not save F/M. Here is why. The reason why F/M categories are so often predictively successful is not the right reason, at least not all the time. We trust our categories because they get things right for the right reasons. We would not hold dear a category that helps us make good predictions by chance, or because we manipulate reality to fit the category. Usually, when we make a prediction about an entity appealing to its category membership (e.g. “this mushroom is edible, it’s a chanterelle”), we assume that what makes our prediction correct or incorrect has to do with properties of the entity; not chance, not our own skills tailoring reality to fit the category (Pluto cannot change its mass to fit the category of planet). We trust our categories because they parse the world in some interesting and systematic way and do so independent of anyone’s wishes (Pluto’s included). 

F/M, however, work differently. When they help make successful predictions, quite often they do so because reality adjusts to them. That is, we shape the world and ourselves to fit them. We wax, dress, and work out in particular ways to mask any deviations from the ideal dimorphism; we also get hormonal treatments and are even forced to undergo surgical interventions (as in the case of many intersex children.). A big part of the statistical regularities we observe are the result of our orchestrated determination to keep the F/M system working. If we care about why these regularities hold, as opposed to merely whether or not they hold, we see that the F/M picture is a poor caricature of the complexity of human bodies that works mostly because we are too in love with it.

The second line of argument appeals to moral and political reasons: F/M should be abandoned because the distinction does more harm than good. It imposes a norm on our complex bodies that for many is not possible to follow, and this inflicts harm (psychological and social punishments, unwarranted medical diagnoses and unnecessary interventions). For those who seem to fit the norm, it requires a cognitive, economic and social effort they could be spending on something more interesting and beneficial. Moreover, F/M is at the basis of one of the deepest divisions in our societies: women vs men. This division has historically worked to the benefit of the latter, although it is in general detrimental to every individual. Gender norms, based on sex dimorphism, are a burden we carry on every single day of our lives.

Using political and moral considerations to argue against the appropriateness of a scientific theory or category is dangerous: you might be accused of being anti-scientific. Let’s call this the naïve science lover (NSL) response. NSL urges us not to let our concerns for equality and social justice trump science. “Just look at the facts”, the NSL says, “there are females and males, clearly distinguished, everywhere”. But as I mentioned above, scientific research indicates that sexed bodies are much more complex than that. Evidence accumulates that questions long-accepted truths about differences between females and males. In this case the facts align with the political concerns. 

Amongst other flaws, NSL assumes that ordinary observed statistical regularities directly and straightforwardly tell you how reality is. This is not how science works. We need to ask why those regularities happen, and whether the underlying mechanism is independent of the very categorization practice. Some categories, F/M amongst them, influence the things they categorize. Ian Hacking calls these “looping effects.” We ourselves create much of the statistical regularities observed about sex. Taking statistical regularities as an accurate representation of the world is pretty much behaving like an internet search engine. And we don’t even call that intelligence.

In sum, either as a response to current scientific research on the complexity of sexed bodies, or to political considerations, or both, we need to rethink what current sex categories, female & male, do for us. I personally invite them to join witches and phlogiston.

Saray Ayala-López
Department of Philosophy
Sacramento State