Subversive Analogies
Keywords:
Analogy, Atom, Natural Selection, Rutherford-Bohr Model
Abstract
The paper calls attention to a type of analogy that, despite its fruitfulness, harbors an internal tension that exposes a significant disanalogy. I focus on cases in which this disanalogy turned out to lead to the solution of the problem that the original analogy had failed to solve. I call such analogies subversive and, by means of two examples from the history of science - the Rutherford-Bohr model of the atom and Darwin's concept of natural selection - illustrate how they work.
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2026-10-13
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