The article blurb that follows is the second time I have known someone in the NYtimes. Not that I feel the need to brag but I think it is super exciting. Haha.. yes, dork.
Replacing logic questions with writing is perfectly in keeping with these instant-messaging, 500-cable-channel times, when the emphasis is on communicating for the sake of communicating rather than on having something meaningful to say. Obviously, every American should be able to write, and write well. But if forced to choose between a citizenry that can produce a good 25-minute writing sample or spot a bad analogy, we would be better off with a nation of analogists.
To the literature of embarrassing childhood revelations, let me add this: When I was growing up there was a Miller Analogies workbook on our living room bookshelf, and I spent many a happy hour flipping through the pages and quizzing myself. The questions looked something like this:
Poverty: money::
(A)Wealth: gold; (B) Hunger: food; (C) Car: Driver; (D) Cook: Stove.
On a good day, I would guess (B), because just as poverty stems from a shortage of money, hunger is the result of a shortage of food.
Questions of this sort are the building blocks of arguments by analogy, which are a mainstay of many disciplines. Philosophers like Aristotle relied on analogies to reason about man and nature. Scientists have long analogized from things they know to things they do not, to form hypotheses and plot experiments.
Law is almost entirely dependent on analogies. In my first year of law school, my contracts professor, Gerald Frug, said something brilliant in its simplicity: "All things are alike in some ways and different in other ways." It was a warning that for the next three years, we would hear endless arguments that a case must be decided a particular way because a previous case or a statute required it. The two cases, or the case and the statute, would always be alike in some ways and different in others - and law school was really about arguing whether the similarities or the differences were more important.
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