False Equivalence in Analogies

ANALOGIES

False equivalence can arise when you argue a point by making an analogy. This is usually a bit fraught because analogies don’t always play a strictly logical role in an argument, but rather, an emotional role in persuading people of things. These false equivalences are not exactly logical fallacies any more, but something more subtle in the grey area.

A false equivalence logical fallacy often comes into an attempted logical argument like this:

• A is (falsely) equivalent to B.
• B is true.
• Therefore A is true

Someone might well successfully argue statement B, but if B is not actually equivalent to A then they have not argued A at all. Often in life this takes the form:

• A is (falsely) logically equivalent to B.
• B is good/terrible.
• Therefore A is good/terrible.

A straw man can use the same structure. For example:

Saying we should remove gender labels from children’s clothes (A) is logically equivalent to saying we don’t want to just let girls be girls and let boys be boys (B). B is terrible. Therefore A is terrible.

Using analogies is a more nuanced way of using equivalence as a pivot. Instead of claiming that A and B are logically equivalent, we compare them under a particular principle X.

We can then try to convince someone of the principle by applying it to situation B that makes a more emotional connection. The idea is that A and B are equivalent at the level of the abstract principle X. The example doesn’t justify the principle, but is supposed to help us feel the principle.

The question is about the level of abstraction and thus the extent to which A and B really are similar because, after all, everything is the same if we go up to a high enough level of abstraction, but that would not illuminate the argument at all. So the question should not be “Are these things equivalent?” but rather “in what sense are these things equivalent?”

A and B might be analogous according to principle X, but not according to principle Y. If someone says A and B are analogous we can’t simply say it’s a false equivalence or not: we should discuss which principle is appropriate.

An example of this situation is in arguments about “mansplaining”. I have found that using the term “mansplain” is likely to cause at least one person (usually a male person) to get rather wound up, but I usually think that is more evidence that we need to continue using it.

Mansplanation is not just when men explain things to women in a patronising way. This is a false equivalence. Mansplanation is in fact when a man explains something to a woman despite the fact that there is strong evidence that the woman already knows it, and a man is ignoring this evidence as part of the systemic societal assumption that men know more things than women, whether or not he is consciously applying that bias in this particular case. This happens to me a lot, for example, if a man explains something very basic about infinity to me despite the fact that I have written a book about infinity. Rebecca Solnit described a guy explaining her own book to her after she mentioned having written a book on the subject. He did it to show that this book was much more important than hers, apparently without ever considering that it might be hers.

Sometimes it happens that someone explains your own area of expertise to you, so the evidence that you don’t need the explanation is in the fact that you are an expert. But sometimes the evidence that you don’t need the explanation is that you already said that very thing yourself. The assumption of the woman’s ignorance isn’t just generally patronising, it is specifically part of a broad pattern in society of men undervaluing or neglecting the contributions of women. Because this contextual aspect is built into the word “mansplain”, it is by definition not something that women can do. The frequent straw man argument is that “women mansplain things too”. I would say the straw man in this case is misrepresenting the argument as claiming that only men explain unnecessary things in a patronising way. While in my experience it is almost always men who do that, that is not the point. The point is that when men do it, it is part of a society-wide assumption about women, and that is why it is so aggravating.

Those who think “women mansplain things too” seem to think that mansplanation was coined just to describe men being patronising to women. At the broad level of patronising behavior, the situations are analogous. In my argument, however, that level of abstraction leaves out the societal pattern that the term is intended to name.