Some commentators seem to regard “analogical reasoning” to be a distinct form of reasoning in the early Chinese philosophical context, attributable mostly to the later Mohists and to Mencius. So far as I’ve been able to understand it, the distinctiveness of such reasoning seems suspect; but I’m not 100 percent sure I’ve understood it correctly.

Part of the issue seems to be that we get an account of the method or technique of reasoning in the later Mohist canons, but we get what some people consider the most explicit, or at least self-conscious, use (or misuse) of the method in the Mencius. “Argument” in Mencius, according to most commentators, seems primarily to work on a model of analogy.

There is the statement from 3B9 of the Mencius that Mencius sees himself as engaged in bian 辯, “disputation,” in response to the Mohists. There are technical discussions in the later Mohist writings about the various modes of bian. Among them is the technique called tui 推, “to push” or “to extend.” As A. C. Graham translates the definition of the technique (A. C. Graham, Later Mohist Logic, Ethics and Science, 483), to tui is “…using what is the same in that which he refuses to accept and that which he does accept in order to propose the former” (tui ye zhe yi qi suo bu qu zhi tong yu qi suo qu zhe yu zhi ye 推也者以其所不取之同於其所取者予之也). So, as the later Mohists understand it, in this technique, one “pushes” the opponent’s judgment from a case he already accepts to another case, using something that both cases have in common. Hence this has often been called the method of “analogical inference.”

But now, consider the following reconstruction of so-called “analogical inference,” using the example from Mencius 1A7 that both Graham and Nivison examine as an example of such inference. The example is Xuan’s compassionate response to the ox being taken away to slaughter and the analogous case of his people, the people of Qi, who also seem to require compassionate response. Graham, Nivison, and most others think there’s an inference, then, that Mencius encourages Xuan to make.

Here’s what it seems to me to take, to go from the one case to the other:
1. Xuan ought to feel compassion for O, because O possesses F.
2. Q also possesses F.
3. Therefore, Xuan ought also to feel compassion for Q.

But it seems like we can further analyze 1 as relying on a suppressed premise, one which says something more general about feeling compassion for objects possessing F. If we push the analysis further, the entire inference involved in the case of this “analogical” inference seems most plausibly to be the following:
A. Xuan ought to feel compassion for objects that possess F.
B. O possesses F.
C. Xuan ought to feel compassion for O. (from A, B)
D. Q (also) possesses F.
E. Xuan (also) ought to feel compassion for Q. (from A, D)
A-E seems to spell out more explicitly how the Mohist principle of extending, which is the principle of applying rational pressure to treat similar cases similarly, would actually apply the rational pressure of maintaining consistency among one’s judgments. But then the technique of tui 推 is not so distinct or different from regular, boring inference. This raises two questions for me:

Q1) Have I misunderstood or misconstrued the technique?

Q2) Was I looking for something unreasonable in looking for something distinct or different in a reasoning technique in the first place? In other words, should we think, “Of course it turns out that analogical reasoning is just a familiar form of reasoning!”?