In your analogy, if I understand you right ...lyndon taylor wrote:Kind of like we're kindly being asked to support the American government, even though its killing a lot of innocent civilians in foreign conflicts,
• ‘Dinner host’ = ‘US government’.
• ‘Offering a guest food of a kind that happens not to accord with her dietary preferences’ = ‘killing innocent civillians’.
• ‘The guest’s eating of that food for courtesy’s sake’ = ‘approving of the government in spite of its killing of innocent civillians’.
Don’t these parallels strike you as perhaps just a wee bit contrived?
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Argument from analogy
False analogy
Several factors affect the strength of the argument from analogy:
• The relevance of the known similarities to the similarity inferred in the conclusion.
• The amount and variety of the examples in the analogy.
• The number of characteristics that the things being compared share.
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I believe the implied situation here is not one in which the host offers meat to a vegetarian out of sheer bloody-mindedness, but rather one in which she has no prior knowledge of her guest's dietary preferences and simply offers the kind of food she would offer to any guest. And so the question of whether a vegetarian's motivations are intelligible to her isn't really relevant.lyndon taylor wrote:any host that can't understand someone might want to refrain from killing and eating animals, especially if they're Buddhist, almost deserves to be insulted!!!