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hot take: analogies should not be used as evidence for positions, except as the weakest form used to privilege an otherwise arbitrary hypothesis to any consideration at all. otherwise, they should be used purely as a way to effectively convey a hypothesis, but the actual evidence needs to come from something other than the mere analogy itself.
Agreed here. Basically, analogies are mainly useful from a "bounded rationality" perspective. A logically omniscient agent would reason directly from observations alone. On the other hand, analogies are most useful pedagogically, allowing someone who does directly understand something to teach it to someone else more quickly. You also have things like simulations. There we deliberately try and construct an analogy between a computer program and reality. In principle, there could also be "naturally occurring simulations" where we don't try to set things up ... (read more)
It seems to me that you are greatly broadening (that is, redefining) the word “analogy” to mean any sort of approximation. For example, survey results are not an analogy to the ground truth but an approximation to it.
1DanielW
I think it depends on what you are including by analogy, when making general cases, we have to pretty much exclusively deal with analogs.
The most basic case might be stated as:
1. If ∀x(a⊃x⊢b) ⊃ ∀y(a⊃y⊢b)
2. y1⊢a
3. ∴ y1⊢b
That is, e.g.
1. If all for all convicted criminals, killing someone implies they are bad, then for cops killing someone implies they are bad.
2. Officer Bob killed someone.
3. Therefore, officer Bob is bad.
If it is the case that for convicted criminals killing someone is only bad because, e.g., there wasn't a justification, then (1) is false (and you would have to include that as a qualifiers to make it true). But it is trivial to accept as true.