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Citizen Irrelevant

Putin’s Analogy : Is this a fallacy?

 

From a recent article:


“ President Vladimir Putin insisted Russia's homegrown coronavirus vaccine was as “reliable as a Kalashnikov assault rifle”…

Leave it to a rabid strongman to draw such an absurd analogy, but I was wondering if this might entail a fallacy?  Vaccine = Kalashnikov?  ( False analogy? )

 

asked on Friday, May 07, 2021 05:06:13 PM by Citizen Irrelevant

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account no longer exists writes:

It’s a simile in the service of an analogy, so more a rhetorical device than a logical fallacy, true if the reliability of the Sputnik vaccine is comparable to the legendary reliability of the Kalishnikov, which seems difficult to quantify. I’m not sure the vaccine would work as well as a Kalishnikov would if both were used in battlefield conditions for a month. As a simile it’s also a metaphor; as such a “shot” from either would not be mixed. Putinese hyperbole?

posted on Saturday, May 08, 2021 07:21:02 AM

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Answers

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TrappedPrior (RotE)
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I doubt Putin is making an argument. It's just a statement of opinion (and probably a way of hyping up his vaccine).

answered on Friday, May 07, 2021 05:40:05 PM by TrappedPrior (RotE)

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richard smith
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Seems like more of an opinion. Red cars are better than blue cars. Red cars are has reliable has Roberts pluming. You can set your watch to .........

 

answered on Saturday, May 08, 2021 08:23:12 AM by richard smith

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Jordan Pine
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It could be argued his statement is logically fallacious. The fallacy would be weak analogy. Vaccines have little in common with assault rifles.

Of course, President Putin is trying to be persuasive. That is, his rhetoric is less logos and more pathos. However, Scott Adams has argued that analogies are terrible for persuasion for just this reason: "Analogies are good tools for explaining a concept to someone for the first time," he writes. "But because analogies are imperfect they are the worst way to persuade. All discussions that involve analogies devolve into arguments about the quality of the analogy, not the underlying situation."

So it seems Putin fails here at both logic and persuasion.
answered on Saturday, May 08, 2021 11:01:42 AM by Jordan Pine

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