Analogical Argument, Liberalism, and the Avoidance of Relativism: Reply to Lessnoff
| DOI | 10.1111/1467-9248.00073 |
| Author | Hilliard Aronovitch |
| Published date | 01 March 1997 |
| Date | 01 March 1997 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Analogical Argument, Liberalism,
and the Avoidance of Relativism:
Reply to Lessno
HILLIARD ARONOVITCH
University of Ottawa
I am grateful to Lessno for his thoughtful response to my paper.1I want to
address brie¯y four (overlapping) issues he usefully raises. All, I believe, can be
answered by clari®cations or rebuttals.
1. Must analogical arguments presuppose generalizations as the key to cogency?
Are analogical arguments merely rhetorical? Evidently, I maintained that the
answers are no, but Lessno is not persuaded. Regarding my example that
someone's disliking Garcia-Marquez's surrealism would render probable their
disliking Rushdie's surrealism, Lessno objects that the example actually
depends on assuming a general dislike of surrealist novelists, but why? The
intent was a striking anity between quite exceptional cases (the inhibiting
realist temperament I mentioned was to be a reaction speci®cally to them). But
maybe the anity is not striking. Lessno oers himself as someone in fact
disliking Garcia-Marquez but liking Rushdie, apparently because he thinks
Rushdie is a good surrealist and Garcia-Marquez is not. Then a proposed
analogical argument has been defeated by an internal disanalogy, which is part
of the game. As to any generalization here: why is not Lessno's liki ngRushdi e
and disliking Garcia-Marquez proof against generalizations? What general-
ization covers his preferences? Maybe he would say he likes all good surrealists;
but that seems implausible, and is anyway vague and risks irrefutability.
Yet Lessno `can see no way of discussing the merits of any analogy ... that
does not involve assessing the merits of the implied generalizations'. To my
illustration that we can best decide whether spanking a disobedient child is
acceptable by seeing if it is like or unlike plain bullying, Lessno replies that `the
answer depends on which of two principles one accepts: roughly, it is never right
for a stronger person to hurt a weaker one, or (alternatively) that controlled and
limited in¯iction of such hurt ...is acceptable if its intention and ee ct is moral
education'. But both these alternative principles are unacceptable because
overly-generalized (the ®rst rules out various sports and some self-defence, and
the second is not limited to (one's own) children and is both too broad and too
narrow in tying spanking to `moral education', etc.); and the more we try to
remedy the alternatives the more we come back to the pristine instances. Lessno
is of course not to be faulted for slips in formulating principles he intends only as
rough and illustrative. The diculties are endemic to the endeavour of general-
izing, and why go that route when we have pristine instances whose similarities
#Political Studies Association 1997. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main
Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
1Michael Lessno, `The role and limits of analogical argument', Political Studies, XLV (1997)
93±96.
Political Studies (1997), XLV, 97± 99
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