Chapter 61 <The child's father is a famous swimmer>

"Lu's Spring and Autumn" tells a story: A man was walking by the river and saw a grown man holding a child and preparing to throw it into the river. The child was so frightened that he cried.The passer-by asked: Why did you throw this child into the river, are you not afraid that he will drown?The man replied: It doesn't matter, I know his father is a famous swimmer!The grown man used the reason that the child's father was a famous swimmer to draw the conclusion that the child must also be able to swim, which violated the requirements of the law of sufficient reason and made an unreasonable logical error.Even if the reason is true, the inference may not be true.

This story reminds us that during the Cultural Revolution, the critical articles produced by the Gang of Four and their writing team were full of such unreasonable sophistry.For example, they go up to the sky from a country’s satellite, and launch the country’s red flag to the ground; from a person who learns a profession, he forgets the dictatorship; From the fact that the older a person is, the more refined he is; from the inability of a writer to write works against capitalist roaders, it can be deduced that the writer himself wants to take the capitalist road and feels comfortable with the bourgeois way, and so on.All these inferences are even more absurd than those of the grown man in the above story.

Deliberately fabricating a causal connection between things to demonstrate a point of view is a sophistry that violates the law of sufficient reason.