analogism

Ancient Greek ἀναλογία (analogía) (from ἀνά (aná) + λόγος (lógos, “speech, reckoning”)) +‎ -ism.

analogism (countable and uncountable, plural analogisms)

1. (logic) An argument from cause to effect; an a priori argument.
   • 1657, Henry Pinnell, Oswald Croll, Philosophy Reformed & Improved in Four Profound Tractates:

     all Judications and Analogisms may faile

   • 2012, P. Nicolacopoulos, Greek Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, page 106:

     Epilogism as opposed to analogism proceeds from what is seen.

   • 2017, Jacqueline Hill, Mary Ann Lyons, Representing Irish Religious Histories, page 105:

     The inclination toward simplified and/or distorted (but often useful) reasoning in the form of analogism and a propensity to organise events into teleological narratives to which causality is attributed, is of particular interest to this discussion.

2. The investigation of things by the analogy they bear to each other.
   • 1818, George Field, “The Third Organon Attempted; or Elements of Logic and Subjective Philosophy”, in The Pamphleteer, volumes 11-12, page 481:

     As the analogism, to be perfect, requires equal extremes in evidence of an equal mean, it is principally applicable to intellectual science and universals, in which these perfect or necessary relations are principally found;

   • 1999, Christianity & literature - Volume 49, page 260:

     Visible most obviously in the Metaphysical poets, analogism finds in humankind and all creation "the vestiges and signature of their creator" ( 61 ) .

   • 2011, Peter Hedström, Peter Bearman, The Oxford Handbook of Analytical Sociology, page 81:

     We have an analogism when we draw the conclusion from
     1. the fact that object A has properties p and q
     2. and the observation that object B has the property p
     ----
     3. that object B also has property q.
     Hence, analogism is fundamentally an inference based on categorizations and it may be a relatively parsimonious way for people in ambiguous situations to make sense of what is going on and what to expect in the near future.

   • 2011, Min Zhu, Information and Management Engineering, page 108:

     Analogism is a learning method of making comparison between the content of a course and those similar or identical to the content of the course, thus to establish a knowledge model to turn abstract to simple

3. (linguistics) The belief that grammar is not arbitrary, but follows rules and patterns.
   • 2014, Lotfi Sayahi, Diglossia and Language Contact, page 23:

     A large part of the modernization process consisted in lexicon building which relied on vocabulary creation using analogism and derivation from classical sources.

   • 2018, James E.G. Zetzel, Critics, Compilers, and Commentators, page 42:

     It was long thought that these books represented a genuine debate among Greek grammarians—normally thought to be Pergamene (anti-analogist) and Alexandrian (analogist)—and that a conflict between analogism and anomalism was a dominant feature of Roman grammatical thought in Varro's day.

4. (philosophy) The belief that the world consists of separate entities that follow certain rules or universal forces.
   • 2018, Zayin Cabot, Ecologies of Participation, page 146:

     Why the drive to reduce these multiple modes of identification, forms of participatory knowing, and/or ontologies to one? My animism is better than your naturalism, totemism, analogism, or whatever.

   • 2022, Olaf Almqvist, Chaos, Cosmos and Creation in Early Greek Theogonies:

     Defining pantheism as an ontology alongside analogism, it may be noted, requires an emendation to Descola's four ontologies: naturalism, totemism, animism and analogism.

• magnolias

Borrowed from French analogisme.

analogism n (plural analogisme)

1. analogism