On the history of the Concept of

"Analogy". The Greek-Latin Antiquity

Ionel Apostolatu
Lecturer Ph.D. University of Galati, Romania
 Background
Analogy is one of the very few phenomena, which
raises interest for a large number of sciences due to the
fact that people are confronted with a very complex
reality that has multiple and heterogeneous facets,
with profound implications for human thought and
knowledge (and thus, to the human understanding
through language).
 Aim
• The study aims at tracing back the history of the
concept of «analogy» within the Greek-Latin Antiquity,
analyzing namely its role attributed by some ancient
thinkers, philosophers and grammarians concerned
with language functioning and organization.

• This study paid a special attention to the famous

controversy, held around the middle of the second
century BC, between the Analogists and Anomalists,
the subject of the dispute being to what extent
language conforms to some rules or it is dominated by
irregularities, ‘anomalies’.
 Analogy
The term analogy had and still has two fundamental meanings:
• In the narrow sense, this term was used first in mathematics, where analogy is
understood as a proportion. i.e. equal ratio (Firstly found in Pythagorean
mathematics and Euclidean geometry).

• Definition 1: two quantities that depend on each other are called proportional if
they meet the following condition: a) if one increases, the other one also
increases, b) if one increase by n times, then the other one increases by the same
number of times.

• Definition 2: two quantities that depend on each other are called inversely
proportional if they meet the following criteria: a) if one increases, the other
decreases, b) if one increases by n times, then the other decreases by n times.

• In a broader sense, analogy expresses the idea of similarity, which implies at the
same time the existence of the common feature and differences. (Modern
Philosophy – Fr. Bacon, John Locke and J.S. Mill).
 Analogy
Bellow are definitions of analogy:

Report, partial <<likeness>> between two or more things, circumstances, situations, etc., the
<<matching>> of size, shape, composition etc. between two things, which are actually opposite.
(Gram.) The matching of a word or construction with another one with whom it is connected in
form or meaning.

(Dictionary of the Romanian Language, (AD), Bucharest, 1913 - 1948).

 Analogy
Bellow are definitions of analogy:

1. Partial similarity between like features of two things, on which a comparison may be based;
2. Agreement, similarity;
3. (biol.) an analogous relationship (corresponding in function, but not evolved from
corresponding organs);
4. (Ling.) a. the process by which words or phrases are created or re-formed according to existing
patterns in the language; b. a form resulting from such a process;
5. (logic) a form of reasoning in which one thing is inferred to be similar to another thing in a
certain respect, on the basis of the known similarity between the things in other respects.

(Webster, 1997)
 The Greek Antiquity: From Geometry to Philosophy
and From Philosophy to Grammar
The concept of analogy was initially used in mathematics, more
specifically in the plane geometry studies in order to designate an
identity of proportions, relations between terms.

In an era in which the whole science was reserved to philosophers, it is

not at all surprising to encounter the mathematical notion of analogy
in the argumentative discourse of some thinkers.

Plato was the one use the term Analogy in a proper philosophical
acceptance. His dialogues (especially Grodias, Timaeus and The
republic) resort to analogy in order to facilitate the understanding of
some complex problems, such as the relationships between the
different types of knowledge or speheres of reality or to express the
similarities between the functions of two different things.
 Cont…
In georgias, the dialogue involves both the nature of the rhetoric
and the benefits it claims to offer. Due to its political and moral
stakes, rhetoric competes with philosophy. In his intransigent
criticism against the art of oratory, Socrates uses reasoning by
means of analogy, showing that rhetoric should not be situated
between arts and sciences, but among the occupations that
aims at “flattery” or producing delight and gratification to the
crowd, such as, “attiring”, “cookery” and sophistry”. These would
endanger the true sciences and arts, such as medicine,
gymnastics or politics (with its two aspects: legislation and
justice).
 Cont…
Speaking in The Republic, about the “Absolute Good”, the great
philosopher does not define Good directly, but uses an analogy:
what is the sun to the surrounding world in reation to perception
and the objects of perception, so is the Good to the world of
ideas and objects connected to this idea.

“The Sun is the source of light and Good is the source of truth
and knowledge.” Sun is not the same as light, as well as Good is
not the same as truth and knowledge. Both the Sun and the
Good outweigh the effect they produce
 Cont…
In the dialogue called Timaeus, Plato, following in the footsteps of the
Pythagoreans, set up a coherent system of explaining the world: for him, the
universe is created by the participation of four bodies to which correspond
the essential elements: earth, fire and water; out of the earth, to be solid (the
cube); out of fire, to observable (tetrahedron); out of water (icosahedron);
and out of air (octahedron), so that there should be a harmony as a result of
proportion.
Chaos was a part of the universe where reasoning was missing, where the
elements had no ratio and were individualized, they were floating – already
made up – in firmness, but the whole did not yet take any shape. The one
who starts the order of the world is the Demiurge. By the correspondence
between objects and elements that he initiated, gave impetus to order,
making the elements become participating because he gave them shape and
ordered them by using numbers. Plato seeks the connecting relation of the
elements that cause so much harmony in Universe and he finds it in what is
called the golden section which represents the basis for the “Devine
Proportion”.
 Cont…
“God placed water and air in the mean between fire and earth,
and made them to have the same proportion so far as was
possible (as fire is to air so is air to water, and as air is to water
so is water to earth);and thus he bound and put together a
visible and tangible heaven. And for these reasons, and out of
such elements which are in number four, the body of the world
was created, and it was harmonized by proportion, and therefore
has the spirit of friendship; and having been reconciled to itself, it
was indissoluble by the hand of any other than the framer”
 Cont…
This reasoning makes him emphasize the perfect forms of geometry: both the forms
and the geometric reasoning connect the material world (human beings and objects)
and the divine essence of ideas.

Analogy or proportion will be henceforth involved in the field of logical reasoning as a

heuristic means of argumentation, a type of textual figure used in the philosophical
language.

“The comparison in the form of an analogy or proportion can be found – with a

rhetorical function – in numerous lyric and epic poems written by the ancient Greek
authors. It is used, for example, in Empedocle’s cosmogonic poem Peri physeos (On
Nature), dedicated to the evolution of the material world, from its elementary forms
to the making of the Universe and the birth of the living beings, or in Heraclitus’s
fragmentarily preserved work also entitled Peri physeos.”
 Cont…
Aristotle was a logician showed much interest in analogical processes.
He was the one who extended the methodological and practical field
of application of analogy, by attributing new functions.

Speaking about the nature of Good, Aristotle also starts from analogy:

“The good, therefore, is not some common element answering to one

Idea. But what then do we mean by the good? It is surely not like the
things that only chance to have the same name. Are goods one, then,
by being derived from one good or by all contributing to one good, or
are they rather one by analogy? Certainly as sight is in the body, so is
reason in the soul, and so on in other cases”
 Cont…
In his Poetics, Aristotle defines analogy as a particular case of metaphor:

“Metaphor is the application of an alien name by transference either from

genus to species, or from species to genus, or from species to species, or by
analogy, that is, proportion [...]. Analogy or proportion is when the second
term is to the first as the fourth to the third. We may then use the fourth for
the second, or the second for the fourth. Sometimes too we qualify the
metaphor by adding the term to which the proper word is relative. Thus the
cup is to Dionysus as the shield to Ares. The cup may, therefore, be called 'the
shield of Dionysus,' and the shield 'the cup of Ares.' Or, again, as old age is to
life, so is evening to day. Evening may therefore be called, 'the old age of the
day,' and old age, 'the evening of life,' or, in the phrase of Empedocles, 'life's
setting sun.' For some of the terms of the proportion there is at times no
word in existence; still the metaphor may be used. For instance, to scatter
seed is called sowing: but the action of the sun in scattering his rays is
nameless. Still this process bears to the sun the same relation as sowing to
the seed. Hence the expression of the poet 'sowing the god created light'”
 Cont…
Regarding the applicability of reasoning by analogy,
Aristotle admits that the analogy is not itself an
instrument of logical reasoning, because you cannot
always infer true sentences by analogy. However,
analogy can be undoubtedly an effective means of
argumentation and persuasion.
 Cont…
The direct involvement of the analogy phenomenon in grammar
occurs with the famous controversy, held around the middle of the
second century BC, between the Analogists and Anomalists. The
subject of the dispute was to what extent language conforms to some
rules.

"Broadly, the analogy – anomaly controversy turned on the extent to

which orderliness and especially proportional regularity held sway in
the Greek language, and by implication in language as a whole, and to
what extent irregularities, ‘anomalies’ characterized it. The regularities
looked for by the analogists were those of formal paradigms, wherein
words of the same grammatical status had the same morphological
terminations and accentual structure, and those involving the relations
between form and meaning, whereby words that were comparable
morphologically could be expected to bear comparable, ‘analogical’
meanings, and vice versa"
 Cont…Analogist
The Analogists, through the voice of the Alexandrian philologists and
grammarians, Aristophanes of Byzantium, Aristarchus, Dyonisius Thrax and
Apollonius Dyscolos, stated that since language is a convention, a creation of
people. It is analogous, logically formed and as such, they dedicated their
efforts to establishing some different models (paradigm) by reference to
which the words of a language could be classified and grouped. The analogies
“looked for” by the Alexandrians represent the basis for morphology, namely
the establishment of the paradigms of different classes and subclasses of
words (declensions and conjugations) as recurring patterns. Thus, as
Dyonisius Thrax noted, the morphological component of grammar is generally
concerned with "finding analogy"
 Cont…Anomalist
At the opposite side there stood the Anomalists (mainly from the philosophical school
of the Stoics) who, therefore being only partly likely to be described in terms of some
formative analogous models. They stated that language is anomalous, i.e. judging by
the canons of logic, they concluded that language does not go with such patterns and
that is why it must be accepted as such, with all its irregularities. Consequently, the
Stoics admit the existence of exceptions, the unsystematic elements that cannot
simply be isolated from language, according to the grammarians’ wishes. In support of
this argument they emphasized the many cases of irregular words for the formation of
which the analogous model was useless (see, for example, in Romanian, the
opposition between the singular om “man, male” and the plural oameni “men,
people”, or the paradigm of the irregular verb a fi “to be” which presents almost eight
variations of the radical), or the cases in which the form of the word is in contradiction
with its meaning, that is the non-correspondence between the natural and
grammatical gender (see, for example, in Romanian, nouns such as catană “soldier,
recruit” or beizadea “prince; son of a ruler”, which formally are feminine but refer to
males, or the noun “servant” which may refer both to the feminine and masculine
genders).
 Cont…Anomalist
The Anomalists also highlight the error of a correspondence of
the type one form – one meaning, showing that more often than
not, as a result of some historical processes, one form of a word
may have more referential functions. Even the existence of
synonymy and homonymy was considered an annoying anomaly
which might generate confusion in language.

The conclusion of Anomalists was that more attention should be

paid to the language use than to its compliance with certain
rules.
 Cont…
At the end of the discussion on the philological controversy between the Analogists
and Anomalists, and also as a general conclusion on the main issues in philosophy of
language in ancient Greece, we consider worth presenting Eugenio Eugenio Coseriu's
point of view. The famous Tubingen Scholar considered the two theses, thesei and
physei, the expression of intuition held by the ancient philosophers in connection with
the two fundamental dimensions of language: the objective dimension and the inter-
subjective dimension, which, in turn, correspond to the two universals that define the
essence of language: semanticity and otherness. Thus Semanticity is nothing but the
intuition behind the idea that language, or better said words, correspond to the
essence or nature of things. This means that there is an objective dimension of
language, that language corresponds to reality or being, and that every word makes –
as Plato said – a "delimitation of the essence" of things.
 Cont…
The other theory represents the intuition of the Otherness dimension, of language
inter-subjectivity, in the sense that every word (and, in fact, the language, in general)
is common, not personal or individual. This is, in fact, the foundation of the social
dimension of language, and, at the same time, of the human sociability, which can be
rendered by "to be one with another" or "one with others". As far as its origins are
concerned, human language presupposes the communication with someone, and it is
even the community (cf. Lat. communis "common," "which belongs to several or all";
Lat. communicare "to make something available for everybody", "to share something
with someone") that explains and justifiesthe otherness of language, which was later
interpreted in the sense that language represents an institution or a social function.
Language is the essential, primary form of human manifestation by means of which
the speaker, as an empirical individual, reveals himself and opens to someone else
whose humanity is thus recognized through communication
 The Latin Antiquity: The middle way to
obtain order
The dispute between the Analogists and Anomalists will also reach Rome,
where "the controversy" will not only be continued, but also commented on
by the Latin grammarians. Varro (11627 BC), a famous encyclopedist and man
of letters, the first important author in Latin linguistics, who presents the
dispute in three of the books of his work entitled De lingua latina (On the
Latin language) one of the main sources of the details as regards the
controversy between the Analogists and Anomalists). From his presentation,
it can be concluded that some irregularities and lexical exceptions confirmed
through spoken language must be accepted, but the subject of concern of any
grammarian must be the organization of language description so as to include
in grammar rules (as generalizations)as much of the language as possible.
According to G. Mounin, Varro is a proponent of analogy, especially regarding the
understanding of the structural functioning of the noun inflection and conjugation
system.

Thus, if anomaly represents the lack of regularity or of a rule (as in the interpretation
given by Varro and other ancient authors), analogy appears to be the expression of
regularity.

Analogy will be also analyzed by Quintilian, who, in Institutio oratoria (Institutes of

Oratory) makes a very interesting remark as to analogy from the epistemological point
of view. It can be considered, at the same time, the orator’s critical remark addressed
to those grammarians who abused the principle of analogy in order to introduce
"rules" in language.

Therefore, Quintilian considers that analogy is merely a consequence of the

functioning of the language system, which makes us not seek its origin in the human
mind. However, this point of view will be later overturned by the authors of the
rational grammars in the 17th century.