An American rhetoric by Watt William Whyte 1912-

Author:Watt, William Whyte, 1912-
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: English language
Publisher: New York : Holt, Rinehart and Winston
Published: 1980-06-14T23:00:00+00:00

Krutch compares the educator prescribing a diet for children's minds to the pediatrician prescribing for their stomachs. Duerr supports a hypothetical argument with an implied comparison between the "struggle for existence" in modern society and the evolutionary process by which Homo sapiens has descended through untold ages from the beginning of time. Both arguments employ the extremely common device of analogy.

This book contains other analogies: for example, Huxley's customer at the fruiterer's unconsciously illustrating the process of induction (see p. 150). But Huxley is primarily bent on exposition, and the chief test of the analogy's effectiveness is whether it helps to make the point clearer. Krutch and Duerr are using analogies to carry the burden of argument. The main question is: Do they logically support that argument?

From the strict standpoint of logic, all analogical arguments are unsound. (It is sometimes maintained that they do not deserve to masquerade under the banner of induction, but represent a third kind of argument.) No matter how many points two things may have in common, the comparison always breaks down somewhere along the line. But a useful distinction can still be made between a tight analogy, which, though it may actually prove nothing, helps to support the argument, and a loose analogy, which leaves the writer wide open to attack from a skillful adversary.

Regardless of convictions about education or politics, a trained reader could hardly fail to see this difference in the passages cited. Why, says Krutch, should an educator let children draw up their own mental menu when no responsible pediatrician would dream of letting them prescribe their own physical menu? The question is hard to answer. It can be pointed out, of course, that pedagogues are not pediatricians and the mind is not the stomach. But are these differences significant in this context? Is there any reason why children need less guidance in feeding their minds than in feeding their bodies? On the contrary, whereas the stomach might teach them an immediate lesson, rebelling violently against a surfeit of chocolate sodas and orange pop, the brain could survive for years on a diet of comics and picture magazines before its owner became aware that chronic illiteracy had set in. Krutch has thrown an embarrassing spotlight on the professors' proposal; although

Exercises

his tight analogy is only a small part of the argument of a long article, it helps to support that argument.

By contrast, the analogy in the second passage conceals a fallacy that Huxley exposed in the 1890s:

There is another fallacy which appears to me to pervade the so-called "ethics of evolution." It is the notion that because, on the whole, animals and plants have advanced in perfection of organization by means of the struggle for existence and the consequent "survival of the fittest"; therefore men in society, men as ethical beings, must look to the same process to help them towards perfection. I suspect that this fallacy has arisen out of the unfortunate ambiguity of the phrase "survival of the fittest." "Fittest" has a connotation of "best"; and about "best" there hangs a moral flavour.

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