Good point, perhaps my view is skewed as I do almost all of my learning and explaining in technical fields (mostly chemistry and biology) and with people who are on a similar knowledge level to me. I can imagine that in a situation of trust but little knowledge (e.g. I am explaining my work to a family member) or in a different field to mine they would be more useful.
I think my assessment here may have been too focussed on a specific subset of analogy use, which I did not properly specify in the post.
Edit to clarify: I still believe intuition pumps in philosophy are a bad sort of analogy in that they are too easily manipulated to serve the philosophical interests of the speaker
Good point, perhaps my view is skewed as I do almost all of my learning and explaining in technical fields (mostly chemistry and biology) and with people who are on a similar knowledge level to me. I can imagine that in a situation of trust but little knowledge (e.g. I am explaining my work to a family member) or in a different field to mine they would be more useful.
I think my assessment here may have been too focussed on a specific subset of analogy use, which I did not properly specify in the post.
Edit to clarify: I still believe intuition pumps in philosophy are a bad sort of analogy in that they are too easily manipulated to serve the philosophical interests of the speaker