I'm getting so incredibly tired of hearing from the cherry-picking fundamentalists (yes, I admit. I shouldn't have listened to fundamentalist talk radio on the way home from work tonight). Here's a challenge for each of them: If the entire Bible is inerrant, then read each of its passages closely. Don't…
When I finished reading Grumpypilgrim's recent post on the Bush administration's abject denial of reality and its incompetence, it made me mad. It got me in a bad mood. Perhaps his post had the same effect on you. Don't worry. We're not going to let you leave this site in…
I've been fighting two consecutive colds over the past ten days, so I've pulled back a bit on my writing. Yesterday I spent some time looking for some interesting videos with my six-year old daughter. We both enjoy setting up strings of dominos and letting them fall. I didn't realize, though, that…
Recent reports are that South Dakota Senator Tim Johnson is recovering from a life-threatening episode of bleeding in the brain. That is good news, indeed. It remains to be seen, however, how well he will function cognitively in the coming months. Johnson suffered a brain hemorrhage last Wednesday caused by…
All my life I’ve been suspicious of the alleged power of syllogisms. Here is an often-cited syllogism:
• All men are mortal
• Socrates is a man
• Therefore Socrates is mortal
Syllogisms can be expressed in this logical form:
• All B’s are C
• A is a B
• Therefore, A is C
The above example is a perfect syllogism: the conclusion naturally follows from the premises. Syllogisms constitute deductive reasoning (from a given set of premises the conclusion must follow).
Many excellent thinkers and writers have stressed the need to present one’s arguments in terms of syllogisms. For example, in his excellent book on legal writing, The Winning Brief, Bryan Garner advises lawyers to frame every legal issue as a syllogism (see p. 88).
But what is really behind the power of syllogisms? It turns out that they are actually based on a metaphor—the metaphor of objects in a box. Consider this diagram in tandem with the classic syllogism (“All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore, Socrates is mortal”)
As Judge Posner points out (in “The Jurisprudence of Skepticism,” 86 Mich L. Rev 827, 830 (1988)), the first premise presents a box labeled “all men,” in which each of the contents are each labeled “mortal” and one of those objects is labeled “Socrates.” Posner notes,
…“The second premise tells us that everything in the box is tagged with a name and that one of the tags says “Socrates.” When we pluck Socrates out of the
