This way of thinking presupposes a kind of realism about properties and relations.
(How strong is this realism? We’ll return to that question in section 7.3.) But we
might wish for someflexibility and try to carve out a distinctively metaphysical
notion of analogy that applies to terms directly and independently of the semantic
relations that terms in a given language bear to each other. (Recall the machinery
introduced by Sider that we discussed in the previous chapter, which allows one to
state comparative naturalness claims without ontologically committing oneself to
objects such as properties.)
These remarks are at this stage highly abstract, and perhaps it’s useful to discuss
some of the historical accounts of analogy in order to contrast those accounts with
the one to be explored here. In the medieval tradition, a variety of kinds of analogy
were catalogued and explored. We’ll look at some of them in order to draw out the
desired comparisons and contrasts.
One kind of analogy is theanalogy of inequality, sometimes also called theanalogy
of priority and posterity. With respect to this kind of analogy,“F”is said analogously
ofxandywheneverxandyare both F but one of them is a more perfect F than the
other. One way to be a more perfect F is to be more of an F.^1 This way of thinking of
the analogy of being naturally leads to considering whether being is gradable, so that
one thing can be more of a being than another. Since this will be the focus of chapters
5, 6, and 7, and our focus here is on modes of being rather than grades of being, in a
moment we will set this kind of analogy aside. However, before we move on,first note
that this kind of analogy is primarily metaphysical rather than semantic. It might be
no part of themeaningof the term“F”or the concept of F that F comes in grades, or
that instances of F can be more perfect Fs than others. That“F”is analogous might
have more to do with the nature of F than with the meaning of“F.”
A second kind of analogy is the analogy exemplified by“healthy,”which was
briefly discussed in section 1.2. Often this kind of analogy was calledan analogy of
attribution.^2 As noted there, in contemporary parlance a term that is analogous in
this respect exhibitsfocal meaning. A term with focal meaning is polysemous but the
polysemy is structured in an orderly way. There is a primary meaning of the term
“health,”and the other meanings of the term are definable in terms of this primary
meaning. This kind of analogy is primarily semantic rather than metaphysical. For
example, it might be that all of the meanings of a given term with focal meaning
correspond to properties or relations that are roughly on a par with each other with
respect to how natural or fundamental they are.
That said, there is an analogous metaphysical kind of analogy, one that is exhibited
bybeingaccording to the Aristotelian tradition, of which I take Heidegger to
tenuously belong. On this metaphysical analogue of focal meaning, an analogous
property is akin to a determinable property in that it has specifications that bear
(^1) See Hochschild (2010: 101–3) for discussion.
(^2) See Coffey (1938: 36), Ashworth (1995: 56–9; 2013a), and Ward (2008: 2).