This Joke Isn’t Kosher
Wednesday, September 5, 2007 at 09:27AM 
Quote: “You don’t make a hog fatter by weighing it.” Presidential candidate John Edwards, replying to a voter’s question about educational testing, in the Washington Post.
Figure of Speech: analogy (an-AL-o-gy), the figure of parallel cases. From the Greek, meaning “proportion.”
Edwards, a millionaire former litigator, appeals to the rural vote with folksy farmisms to show he’s a man of the land. Linking the No Child Left Behind law to hog fattening makes an excellent analogy, a figure that reasons from comparable cases. An analogy achieves the greatest rhetorical effect when it makes a huge semantic leap. It’s a form of reductio ad absurdum — a fallacy in formal logic but extremely apropos in the political pigpen.
Actually, farmers do weigh hogs for much the same reason tests weigh students’ knowledge: to tell whether the swill they’re fed has any effect. Still, Edwards’ analogy appeals to voters who think testing has become the end-all and be-all of education.
Beware of using analogies that fail to match your ethos. While Edwards is no more a pig farmer than Senator Clinton is, Figaro cringes at the thought of Hillary making a hog joke. Only Edwards has the southern accent to pull it off.
He reminds us of the Texan expression, “All hat and no cattle.” But in politics, it’s all about the hat.
Snappy Answer: “A drawl makes great manure.”
Reader Comments (15)
Fig.
And if we extend the analogy any further…what we’re teaching our students is garbage?!? Was that an intentional inference by Figgy?
Fig.
I have to disagree on two counts with the statements, "An analogy achieves the greatest rhetorical effect when it makes a huge semantic leap. It’s a form of reductio ad absurdum."
First an analogy can be equally effective rhetorically without the huge leap. The strength of the analogy is that it changes the terms of the topic into concepts familiar to the audience. This does not require huge semantic leaps for all cases; therefore we cannot arbitrarily say that the best case is one with a large leap. In some situations a small leap will be most effective.
And second, an analogy is not a form of reductio ad absurdum. This implies that the former is a subset of the latter, and that all analogies contain contradictions. This is not the case. Some analogies may be a form of reductio ad absurdum, and some arguments using reductio ad absurdum may be a form of an analogy, but neither is a subset of the other. We would say in these cases the rhetoric intersects both forms.
You write, "Still, Edwards’ analogy appeals to voters who think testing has become the end-all and be-all of education." But why is that? You seem to show that Edwards's analogy isn't as effective as it seems by pointing out that weighing a pig "tell[s] whether the swill they’re fed has any effect." So that should tell us that testing should give us an indicator to the effectiveness of the educational program. His analogy should support testing. But I'm thinking Edwards's analogy is appealing to us in a different manner by implying something negative when nothing negative has actually taken place.
I *love* this line. :)
Your usage of this term is not the same as I remember from my logic classes. There, far from being a fallacy as you claim, it was a valid form of argument.
In using it to prove an assertion, one first asummes that the assertion to be proved is false. Then one shows that this assumption has logically impossible consequences. It can then be concluded that the original assumption must be true.
In other words, if it couldn't possibly be untrue, then it must be true.
Your usage is what we were taught to regard as a common mistake, something like the currenly popular misunderstanding of "begging the question".
Nitro, I'm certainly no expert on formal logic; but the popular usage is so complete that I think we have to bow to the hoi polloi on this one--just as we do to the lumpen definition of "begging the question."
Ooh, THAT ought to bring me more comments!
fig.
Fig.
You mean like a certain übermenschen jetfighter cowboy famous for his large Texan ranch (cattle conspicuously absent) who is most certainly NOT a blue-blooded New Englander who studied at Yale and summered in Maine?