Curls & Twirls

Hello & Happy New year!!!

Wow, it has been long since I blogged…and *forgive me*, I am not entirely in the mood for blogging but I just read FJ’s blog and I just couldn’t help but put this up:

" Extract from The English Legal System by Gary Slapper and David Kelly (from the chapter about Judicial Reasoning). The power of syllogism lies in its certainty. If the premises are true, then the conclusion cannot be false. The reason for this is that the conclusion is actually contained in the premises and amounts to no more than a restatement of those premises. With regards to syllogisms, however, it is important to distinguish between validity of form and truth of content. It is quite possible for a syllogism to be logically valid but false. an example of this would be:

Major premise:…………….. A = B for example, All men are pigs.
Minor premise:……………….. B = C for example, Socrates is a man.
Conclusion: therefore………. A = C that is, Socrates is a pig.

The logical form of this argument, as represented in alphebetical terms is valid, but the conclusion is not true. The reason for this is obviously that the minor (sic. I think the authors mean “major”) premise is false: the statement that all men are pigs is simply not true. WAHHAHAHAHAHHAHA. Imagine my astoshnishment when I read that example. Hahahaha eh so fair is fair la right? I mean, BOTH the authors are Phd holders As you can see, I am not the only one who thinks that all men are pigs. There must be many many many who think like that, so much so that the authors tongue-in-cheek-ly inserted this example to *ahem* salvage some of their ruined reputation. Hahahahhah. "

Hahaha. I’ve nothing more to say, FJ hit it spot-on.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 6th, 2006 at 6:08 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.