Analogical Arguments

Answers

1. Weak: if the painting is hanging in your high school, it probably isn't a Rembrandt. That is the disanalogy: even if the colors are very similar, almost all Rembrandts hang in galleries, not in high schools.
   
2. Weak. Although the similarity is that they are both poodles, there is probably some other characteristic that accounted for me being bitten. That is, it probably wasn't the fact that the dog that bit me was a poodle, but more likely that I was invading its space or it felt threatened, etc. It could have likely been some other breed in the same circumstances. So it isn't "poodleness" that accounts for the biting. That said, if we had evidence that poodles are much more likely to bite than other breeds then this argument would be stronger.
   
3. Strong. Unlike, the last one, this argument delivers a much stronger analogy between past events (poodle-encounters and poodle-bitings) and the current event (poodle-encounter).
   
4. Strong. The relevant similarities are: 1) Van Cleave's class doesn't change much from semester to semester, 2) the person has the same abilities as their friend who got the A.
   
5. Weak. Although both are crimes, there are many relevant differences between committing rape and robbing a bank.
   
6. Weak. There is no particular relationship between having seats, wheels, and brakes, on the one hand, and being safe to drive, on the other. So having seats, wheels and brakes is not a relevant similarity between the two cars, if what we are interested in is how safe they are.
   
7. Strong. The car company (Volvo) is a relevant similarity between the old cars and the new car. We can expect similar quality between cars from the same company. In contrast, knowing that a car as wheels, brakes and seats tells us essentially nothing about its quality, including its safety.
   
8. Strong.
   
9. Weak. A birthday party and a funeral are not relevantly similar in this case. A funeral is a much more important family event than a birthday party (typically). So we should not expect similarity with respect to a professor's absence policy when comparing birthday parties to funerals.
   
10. Weak. Although both may influence happiness, the relevant difference is that whereas heart and brain surgery are typically a matter of life and death (and hence much more likely to be paid for by insurance), cosmetic surgery is not a matter of life and death.
    
11. Weak. Although a knife and spoon share the property of being eating utensils, that is not a relevant similarity on which we can expect that they will share functional properties like cutting. Answers to exercises 233
    
12. Whether this famous argument for the existence of God is strong or weak is a matter of some debate. One reason for saying it is a weak argument is that there is a disanalogy between artificial objects and natural objects, since complex natural objects may evolve without being designed by an intelligent designer, whereas no artificial objects (yet) can evolve on their own.
    
13. Weak. Running the same number of miles as an elite runner is not a relevant similarity for determining how fast one will run a race. The relevant dissimilarity here is that although Bekele runs his mile repeats at close to 4:00 flat, I can only run mine at 5:30. So it is the pace at which one runs, rather than the number of miles one runs, that is the better predictor of how fast one can run a race.
    
14. Strong. The fact that we are both humans is relevant to determining whether someone will feel pain. Humans all have similar physiology, which is why we should expect that if x causes one person physical pain, then x will also cause anyone else a similar pain. (However, this argument also raises a famous problem in philosophy of mind called "the problem of other minds." The issue is whether or not we can ever know that people have mental states, such as pain, like my own. Even if you exhibit pain behavior in similar instances in which I experience pain, how do I know that you are actually feeling what I am feeling - that you are having the experience of pain, rather than simply exhibiting pain behavior without have the mental experience of it? Many philosophers have argued that we cannot overcome this problem and must admit that we cannot know whether people other than ourselves actually have mental states like ours).
    
15. Again, the common sense answer would be that this is a strong argument based on a strong analogy. Since you and I are both human and share similar perceptual systems, we should expect that we will perceive the world very similarly (even if not exactly the same). (However, we can raise the same "problem of other minds" problem here as I did in #14 above. Suppose we both point at the grass and say that it is green. However, how do I know that your experience of green is like my experience of green? Maybe your experience of green is more like my experience of red and vice versa).