Reasoning by Analogy

Suppose that you know quite a bit about a company called Biopharm.1 It is a biotech-
pharma company located in the Stanford Industrial Park, is privately held, has roughly
200 employees, and is ten years old. In addition, you have learned some details about its
organizational culture, including that the workforce believes that decisions about research
directions in the labs ought to be made collaboratively. Suppose further that you learn
about another biotech-pharma company, Zygenic located in Mountain View, which also
has roughly 200 employees, is ten years old, and is privately held. However, you don’t
know anything about its culture. If you have to make a decision about Zygenic (e.g.,
whether to apply for a job there), what should you conclude about its culture? One way to
reason is to note that Zygenic is similar to Biopharm in important respects, and, therefore,
it is likely that it has a similar culture.

Drawing such a conclusion is the result of reasoning by analogy. This is a form of

inductive argument, but it differs from the kind of inductive argument that we used in
analyzing data, which is often called a statistical inductive argument. Compare two
arguments:

A Statistical Inductive Argument

Premise 1: Most biotech firms have cultures that value collaborative decision making.
Premise 2: Zygenic is a biotech firm.
Premise 3: This is all that we know about the matter.
Conclusion: Zygenic probably has a culture that values collaborative decision making.

An Analogical Inductive Argument

Premise 1: Most things true of Biopharm are also true of Zygenic.

Premise 2: Biopharm has a culture that values collaborative decision making.
Premise 3: This is all that we know about the matter.
Conclusion: Zygenic probably has a culture that values collaborative decision making.

The difference in the two arguments comes from their first premises. In the statistical
argument, the first premise depends on what we know about many biotech firms; and in
the analogical argument the first premise rests on experience about many features that the
two organizations have in common.

1  This
note, written by Michael Hannan, adapts an account given by Harry Gensler,
Introduction to Logic, Routledge 2002.

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 To see the general structure of the two kinds of arguments, we write them in a more
abstract form as follows:

An Example of a General Statistical Argument

Premise 1. Most instances of the class of entities X have the property A.

Premise 2. Y is an instance of the class X.
Premise 3. This is all that we know about the matter.
Conclusion. Probably Y has the property A.

An Example of a General Analogical Argument

Premise 1. Most things true of X are also true of Y.

Premise 2. X has the property A.
Premise 3. This is all that we know about the matter.
Conclusion. Probably Y has the property A.

The tricky, but important, part of a good analogical argument concerns the first premise
in the analogy syllogism. How can we judge the quality of an analogy? It is not helpful
merely to count similarities. We have to judge which similarities are relevant. This makes
it hard to state precise rules about analogical reasoning.

Notice that the sketches of Biopharm and Zygenic indicate that they are similar in some
ways (industry, size, age, form of ownership) but that they differ in at least one way
(location). They might differ in other ways as well, e.g., age of CEO, whether they lease
or own their facilities. Some similarities/differences are trivial and unimportant; but
others are not. We want to find the relevant similarities. In doing so we appeal to what
logicians call background knowledge. But it is hard to pin down this notion; it surely
depends on the reasoner’s context.

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