An example of an analogy drawing upon scientific concepts:
"And so we hear cultural integration spoken of as a harmony of meaning, cultural change as an instability of meaning, and cultural conflict as an incongruity of meaning, with the implication that the harmony, the instability, or the incongruity are properties of meaning itself, as, say, sweetness is a property of sugar or brittleness of glass.
Yet, when we try to treat these properties as we would sweetness or brittleness, they fail to behave, 'logically', in the expected way. When we look for the constituents of the harmony, the instability, or the incongruity, we are unable to find them resident in that of which they are presumably properties. One cannot run symbolic forms through some sort of cultural assay to discover their harmony content, their stability ratio, or their index of incongruity; one can only look and see if the forms in question are in fact coexisting, changing, or interfering with one another in some way or other, which is like tasting sugar to see if it is sweet or dropping a glass to see if it is brittle, not like investigating the chemical composition of sugar or the physical structure of glass."
Clifford Geertz (2000) Person, time, and conduct in Bali (first published 1966), in The Interpretation of Cultures. Selected Essays (2nd Edition). New York. Basic Books.
Here Geertz uses both a positive and a negative analogy, comparing the investigation of some cultural concepts (cultural integration; cultural change; cultural conflict) to being like a {qualitative} phenomenological investigation of sugar and glass (tasting, dropping) rather than a {quantitative} investigation of their underlying structure using laboratory instruments.
Read examples of scientific analogies
