Chapter 30

THE UTILITY OF THE SYLLOGISM.

The main use of the Syllogism is in dealing with incompletely expressed or elliptical arguments from general principals. This may be called Enthymematic argument, understanding by Enthymeme an argument with only one premiss put forward or hinted at, the other being held in the mind. In order to test whether such reasoning is sound or unsound, it is of advantage to make the argument explicit in Syllogistic form.

There have been heaps and mazes of discussion about the use of the Syllogism, much of it being profitable as a warning against the neglect of Formal Logic. Again and again it has been demonstrated that the Syllogism is useless for certain purposes, and from this it has been concluded that the Syllogism is of no use at all.

The inventor of the Syllogism had a definite practical purpose, to get at the simplest, most convincing, undeniable and irresistible way of putting admitted or self-evident propositions so that their implication should be apparent. His ambition was to furnish a method for the Yes and No Dialectician, and the expounder of science from self-evident principles. A question being put up for discussion, it was an advantage to analyse it, and formulate the necessary premisses: you could then better direct your interrogations or guard your answers. The analysis is similarly useful when you want to construct an argument from self-evident principles.

All that the Syllogism could show was the consistency of the premisses with the conclusion. The conclusion could not go beyond the premisses, because the questioner could not go beyond the admissions of the respondent. There is indeed an advance, but not an advance upon the two premisses taken together. There is an advance upon any one of them, and this advance is made with the help of the other. Both must be admitted: a respondent may admit one without being committed to the conclusion. Let him admit both and he cannot without self-contradiction deny the conclusion. That is all.

Dialectic of the Yes and No kind is no longer practised. Does any analogous use for the Syllogism remain? Is there a place for it as a safeguard against error in modern debate? As a matter of fact it is probably more useful now than it was for its original purpose, inasmuch as modern discussion, aiming at literary grace and spurning exact formality as smacking of scholasticism and pedantry, is much more flabby and confused. In the old dialectic play there was generally a clear question proposed. The interrogative form forced this much on the disputants. The modern debater of the unpedantic, unscholastic school is not so fettered, and may often be seen galloping wildly about without any game in sight or scent, his maxim being to--

Spur boldly on, and dash through thick and thin, Through sense and nonsense, never out nor in.

Now the syllogistic analysis may often be of some use in helping us to keep a clear head in the face of a confused argument. There is a brilliant defence of the syllogism as an analysis of arguments in the _Westminster Review_ for January, 1828. The article was a notice of Whately's Logic: it was written by J. S. Mill. For some reason it has never been reprinted, but it puts the utility of the Syllogism on clearer ground than Mill afterwards sought for it.

Can a fallacy in argument be detected at once? Is common-sense sufficient? Common-sense would require some inspection. How would it proceed? Does common-sense inspect the argument in a lump or piecemeal? All at once or step by step? It analyses. How? First, it separates out the propositions which contribute to the conclusion from those which do not, the essential from the irrelevant. Then it states explicitly all that may have been assumed tacitly. Finally, it enumerates the propositions in order.

Some such procedure as this would be adopted by common-sense in analysing an argument. But when common-sense has done this, it has exhibited the argument in a series of syllogisms.

Such is Mill's early defence of the Syllogism. It is weak only in one point, in failing to represent how common-sense would arrive at the peculiar syllogistic form. It is the peculiar form of logical analysis that is the distinction of the syllogism. When you have disentangled the relevant propositions you have not necessarily put them in this form. The arguments given in text-books to be cast into syllogistic form, consist only as a rule of relevant propositions, but they are not yet formal syllogisms. But common-sense had only one other step to make to reach the distinctive form. It had only to ask after analysing the argument, Is there any form of statement specially suitable for exhibiting the connexion between a conclusion and the general principle on which it is alleged to depend? Ask yourself the question, and you will soon see that there would be an obvious advantage in making the conclusion and the general principle uniform, in stating them with the same predicate. But when you do this, as I have already shown (p. 197) you state the argument in the First Figure of the Syllogism.

It must, however, be admitted that it is chiefly for exhibiting, or forcing into light, tacit or lurking assumptions that the Syllogistic form is of use. Unless identity of meaning is disguised or distorted by puzzling difference of language, there is no special illuminative virtue in the Syllogism. The argument in a Euclidean demonstration would not be made clearer by being cast into formal Syllogisms.

Again, when the subject matter is simple, the Syllogistic form is not really required for protection against error. In such enthymemes as the following for example:--

She must be clever: she is so uncompromisingly ugly. Romeo must be in love: for is he not seventeen?

it is plain to the average intelligence without any knowledge of Syllogism that the argument takes for granted a general proposition and what the general proposition is.

Another thing is plain to the average intelligence, perhaps plainer than to a proficient in the use of the Syllogism. Clearly we cannot infer with certainty that a woman is clever because she is ugly, unless it is the case that all ugly women are clever. But a Syllogiser, seeing that no certain conclusion can be drawn except upon this condition, is apt to dismiss the argument as altogether worthless. This may be specified as an error incident to the practice of the Syllogism, that it inclines us to look for necessarily conclusive premisses, and to deny all weight to anything short of this. Now in ordinary life it is comparatively seldom that such premisses can be found. We are obliged to proceed on maxims that are not of universal scope, and which lend only a more or less strong colour of probability to cases that can be brought under them. "A little learning is a dangerous thing;" "Haste makes waste;" "Slowness of speech is a sign of depth of thought;" "Vivacity is a sign of shallowness:" such are the "endoxes" or commonplaces of popular knowledge that men bring to bear in daily life. They are not true for all cases, but some of them are true for most or for a good many, and they may be applied with a certain probability though they are not rigidly conclusive. The plain man's danger is that he apply them unthinkingly as universals: the formal logician's danger is that, seeing them to be inapplicable as universals, he dismisses them as being void of all argumentative force.

It helps to fix the limits of Formal Logic to remember that it lies outside its bounds to determine the degree of probability attaching to the application of approximate truths, such as are the staple of arguments in ordinary affairs. Formal Logic, we may repeat, is not concerned with degrees of truth or falsehood, probability or improbability. It merely shows the interdependency of certain arguments, the consistency of conclusion with premisses.

This, however, is a function that might easily be underrated. Its value is more indirect than direct. In showing what is required for a certain conclusion, it puts us on the road to a more exact estimate of the premisses alleged, a sounder judgment of their worth. Well begun is half done: in undertaking the examination of any argument from authority, a formal syllogism is a good beginning.