A change in the concept of analogy ““ from the analysis of understanding to a psychological interpretation of decision

Abstract

Analogy is commonly held to be a type of reasoning where the resemblance between any two objects based on one or more attributes is taken to imply that these objects are also similar in some other attributes. Analogy understood this way is then generally seen as a type of inductive reasoning. This view of analogy as a method of acquiring knowledge was popularized by John Stuart Mill. The problem of acquiring new knowledge is usually considered to be the problem of psychology, leaving the knowledge corroboration problem to the sphere of philosophy. From this point of view, analogy does not play any role in philosophical investigations. Thomas Aquinas reinterprets Aristotle’s view of analogy and explains it as a relationship between the names based on proportion which enables us to understand the use of these names in theoretical contexts and allows the new ones to be created. The question of how to use a word and how that word functions is one of the topics of the philosophy of language. In our opinion, the contexts of understanding words and their functioning in language are of no less importance than the contexts of acquiring or verifying knowledge.