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Black cat analogy
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The Black Cat Analogy is an analogy, accounting for the differences, mainly between science and religion, but also between others, such as philosophy and metaphysics.
Contents
Description[edit]
The analogy can be described like this:
- Philosophy is like being in a dark room and looking for a black cat.
- Metaphysics is like being in a dark room and looking for a black cat that isn't there.
- Theology is like being in a dark room and looking for a black cat that isn't there, and shouting "I found it!"
- Science is like being in a dark room and looking for a switch. The light will reveal a cat... if there is one.
It can also be applied to other bodies of knowledge or learning, e.g. by Ernest Gellner to Marxism.[1]
Explanation[edit]
Vincent Barry explains the difference between philosophy and theology as lying in the fact that philosophy is scientific and open-minded, concerned with proof, while theologians "have found their final truth" before they begin the search.[2]
Origin[edit]
Wendy Doniger relates it to a French and English proverb: "In the dark, all cats are grey." Hegel criticised naive ideas of the Absolute, which he ridiculed as "like a night, as people say, in which all cats are black." Dashiell Hammett in The Dain Curse (1929) referred to a "blind man in a dark room hunting for a black hat that wasn't there". Ernest Gellner referred to an East European joke about science, philosophy, and Marxism as looking for a cat in a dark room with various consequences: with science the cat is present, with philosophy absent, and with Marxism absent but found.[1] And right-wingers say they have not found anything even if it is there? To wit, how did they not find the exploitation of labor?
References[edit]
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Doniger, Wendy (2011). The Implied Spider, p. 31-33, Columbia University Press.
- ↑ Barry, Vincent (2011). Bioethics in a Cultural Context, Cengage.
