Analogy

Ever feel misunderstood? It is often because people don't understand this concept

Only a little effort has been spent on understanding this foundational epistemological resource. Even those who attempt to construct it as a concept from famous philosophers struggle to do so. However, the questions likely remain for you, how is analogy foundational or resourceful? That is the question I hope to answer for you. The issue is there is much of what we claim to know that is "like" something else and that is the best we can come to understand something without dedicating many resources from effort to money and time to studying a subject. We know that I am a human, and you are a human, but if one is telling someone an answer to "What is a monkey?" and one says, "not a human", what is gained in knowing "monkeyness"? All that is gained is the fact that monkeyness and humanity are not the same, but it still has the connotation that there is no commonness, and this is false. One may take the idea to mean, a rock is a monkey, being not human and all. This is how the univocal method falls short. Equivocation is perhaps worse because it makes alphabet soup of our current understandings. Let us say that a monkey is intelligent, and a human is intelligent, but are they in the same sense? No, so then if we expect a monkey to design a computer or to be able to learn how, we would be disappointed because our concept of "monkeyness" is still wrong. Analogy allows us to understand things by connecting similarities between concepts of things, in a way avoiding both univocities (limitation to the immediate and obvious truths with limited range) and equivocates (conflating differences in meanings).