The meaning and role of “organizing analogy”

Question

The paragraph below is from a book, From Plant Traits to Vegetation Structure - By Bill Shipley.

I cannot figure out the meaning of “organizing analogy.”

To make any specific picture of the term, I googled and found out three sentences with “organizing analogy,” but still the meaning of it is in the middle of nowhere.

Can you tell me what it is - the meaning of each word "organizing" and "analogy," and combined meaning of “organizing analogy”?

If you give me an example sentence, it would be much obliged.

(Am I asking too much? But I cannot help it.)

In medieval discourse the organizing Aristotelian analogy was nature-as-an-organism. Natural phenomena were seen to possess a life cycle: birth, growth, old age and death. Processes in the natural world were made intelligible in this way and were understood by comparison with the inherent desire (the “nature”) of sentient organisms to attain goals (teleology).

*They also need an organizing perspective, metaphor, analogy, or principle.

*The concept offers a useful organizing principle or analogy.

*I know I can make an organizing analogy out of anything.

MalRey · Accepted Answer

They thought of nature as being similar to a living creature, so events in nature were seen as unfolding in the same way a living creature does: "birth, growth, old age and death" and that natural events seek goals just as living creatures do.

CalifJim · Answer

Roughly, organizing analogy = a comparison of one set of relationships with another that helps us to organize our thoughts on a given topic and helps us to understand the facts about the topic in an systematic way.

To understand the flow of electricity through wires, for example, we can establish the organizing analogy of water flowing through pipes. Thinking about electricity as water is thinking in terms of an analogy. Once we have that analogy in mind, we can imagine different facts about electricity in terms of the corresponding facts about water. For example, electrical voltage is like water pressure. Voltage works in the world of electricity the same way that pressure works in the world of water. This is an analogy, and it can be expressed more briefly in the typical grammatical form for expressing an analogy:

Voltage is to electricity as pressure is to water.

Or symbolically:

voltage : electricity : : pressure : water

Many other facts about electricity fall into place in a logical way once we make the analogy with water, and we can build a whole system of understanding based on this analogy, so we have here "an organizing analogy".

_________________

In the text you quoted, medieval scholars tried to understand natural phenomena by observing corresponding facts about organisms (plants and animals). They organized their thoughts about natural phenomena by making a comparison (an analogy) with organisms. For example, they would have noticed that animals that are hungry are attracted to food, so when they saw that iron was attracted to a magnet, they might have thought that the iron was hungry (in some sense) and that the magnet was food (in some sense), and that the iron "wanted" the magnet.

As you can see from the "hungry iron" example, not all organizing analogies continue to be useful throughout history. In fact, the history of science is full of examples where one organizing analogy is replaced by another more useful one.

CJ

Stenka25 · Answer

Thanks as always, CalifJim.

Thanks for your awesome answer.

Stenka25 · Answer

Thanks for your immediate answer, Malrey.

The meaning and role of “organizing analogy”

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