A Response to Mr. Heaney

A RESPONSE TO MR. HEANEY MR. HEANEY IS interested in developing the theory of analogy beyond Fr. Bochenski's application to formal languages to embrace ordinary language. Mentioning the limitations of Bochenski's important account of analogy, in terms of the isomorphism of the formal properties of relations, Heaney rightly observes that that account is not general enough to satisfy our curiosity about sets of analogous terms in ordinary language. In particular, we need to know how difference of kinds among things is related to analogical predication. Heany's inquiry also seems limited by his not recognizing or at least mentioning that analogy of meaning is omnipresent in ordinary discourse.1 And whatever the other limitations of Bochenski's account, at least Bochenski makes clear what analogy of meaning is and what conditions must obtain for analogous predication to occur. Heaney's discussion does not show this clarity about the conditions for analogy, and yet, he feels confident that Bochenski errs in thinking " sees " is analogous in the pair "John sees a cow here," "John sees the truth of the first theorem of Godel." I can't understand why Heaney thinks we must be able to confuse the two kinds of seeing in order to be sure they have the requisite community of meaning to be analogous. Just the opposite appears true to me, if we have in mind a person who understands the language. For one of the strengths of the analogy regularities of natural language is that, if a person understands the use of a certain term, P, with another term, S, where S belongs to a 1 See: J. F. Ross: "A New Theory of Analogy" Proceedings of the ACPA, 1970; and "Analogy and the Resolution of some Cognitivity Problems," Journal of Philosophy, Vol. LXVII, No. 20 (Oct. 22, 1970), pp. 725-746. (See also critical comments by George I. Mavrodes, pp. 747-755. 305 306 JAMES F. ROSS pair of (appropriate) categorially contrasting terms (S and S'), then the person will understand the use of P with the other term, S', without any further explanation, provided only that he understands how to use both members (SandS') of the categorially contrasting pair with other predicates appropriate to each (" the cow and "the truth of the theorem ") . Heaney gets to the central issue when he observes, "On the other hand, other examples indicate that we may not be totally justified in considering a relational term analogical simply because of a difference of kind of the objects it is predicated of." That is quite right. Not just any difference makes a difference; yet some differences in kind certainly do. Although Socrates (male) and Xanthippe (female) differ in gender and therefore in kind, that difference in kind does not affect the sense of a common predicate, " is married to " or " is a person," though that difference will affect the sense of the same term predicate "has babies." When the subjects contrast enough in kind (in relation to the predicate), the same-term predicate is correspondingly differentiated in meaning. In fact, that is what analogy of meaning is: regularity-controlled meaning differentiation (by semantic contagion or by contrast of modes of ascription) of same-term occurrences in categorially contrasting discourse contexts; The difficulty is to describe just what differences among terms are categorial differences. And the first lesson that history offers us is not to look for the basis of those differences in our opinions or knowledge of the things designated by the terms under discussion but rather to look to the semantic functions of the terms: to found our theory of categorial differences upon the fact that there are sem:mtical fields/ without pretending, at the outset at least, that categorial contrasts have metaphysical justifications. Heaney is right to inquire into differences of kinds of things. I think, however, 2 See: John Lyons: Structural Semantics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1963), and lntroductioo to Theoretical Linguistics (Cambridge University Press, 1969), Chapters 9 and 10. A RESPONSE TO MR. HEANEY 307 that he looks in the wrong place and finds wrong conditions of difference. I agree with Heaney that the case for saying that some terms applied affirmatively to God are applied univocally with...