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College of Liberal Arts
Department of Philosophy

Faulty Analogy

This fallacy consists in assuming that because two things are alike in one or more respects, they are necessarily alike in some other respect.

Examples:

  1. Medical Student: "No one objects to a physician looking up a difficult case in medical books. Why, then, shouldn't students taking a difficult examination be permitted to use their textbooks?"
  2. People who have to have a cup of coffee every morning before they can function have no less a problem than alcoholics who have to have their alcohol each day to sustain them.
  3. Detroit Mayor Dennis Archer on why he accepted Louis Farrakhan's call to African-American men to take part in the 1996 Million Man March on Washington, D.C.: "If somebody has a cure for cancer, would you reject it because it was somebody you may not like who came up with it?"
  4. To say humans are immortal is like saying a car can run forever.
  5. During the Cold War, Congressman Charles Rose (Democrat, North Carolina) answered (in part) the arguments of those opposed to government-sponsored research to develop "remote-viewing" the ability to see a distant place telepathically by stating, "It seems to me that it would be a hell of a cheap radar system. This country wasn't afraid to look into the strange physics behind lasers and semiconductors, and I don't think we should be afraid to look into this.
  6. Making people register their own guns is like the Nazis making the Jews register with their government. This policy is crazy.
  7. If one were to listen to only one kind of music or eat only one kind of food, it would soon become tasteless or boring. Variety makes eating and listening exciting and enriching experiences. So it seems to me that an exclusive sexual relationship with only one partner for the rest of ones life, that is, marriage, does not hold out much hope for very much excitement or enrichment.
  8. Smoking cigarettes is just like ingesting arsenic into your system. Both have been shown to be causally related to death. So if you wouldn't want to take a spoonful of arsenic, I would think that you wouldn't want to continue smoking.
  9. Because human bodies become less active as they grow older, and because they eventually die, it is reasonable to expect that political bodies will become less and less active the longer they are in existence, and that they too will eventually die.
  10. People who buy stocks are no different from people who bet on horse racing. They both risk their money with little chance of making a big profit.