Chapter 70 <I am also learning from Lei Feng>

As soon as the bus stopped at the stop, a young man pushed away the people waiting in line in front of him and rushed onto the bus. An old man said to him: Young people should learn from Lei Feng! The young man said: I am also learning from Lei Feng! Is Lei Feng like this?the old man said angrily. The young man said: I am learning Lei Feng's nail spirit, and the nail spirit is to have the force of squeezing and drilling. Logically, the young man's words constitute a syllogism.The so-called syllogism is such a kind of reasoning, which is a deductive reasoning that uses a common concept (middle term) to connect the premises of two qualitative judgments to draw a conclusion.

To ensure the correct form of syllogistic reasoning, the rules of syllogism must be followed.One of its rules is that a syllogism can have only three concepts (major term, minor term, and middle term), neither more nor less.If a syllogism is three words in language form, but actually expresses four concepts, then there will be a lack of a common concept to connect the major and minor premises, and wrong or even absurd conclusions will be drawn.Such mistakes are called four-concept mistakes. The young man mentioned above made exactly this mistake, because his words applied the following syllogism:

Squeezing and drilling are Lei Feng's nail spirit (major premise), My rampage on the bus is squeezing and drilling (minor premise); Therefore, my rampage on the bus is Lei Feng's nail spirit (conclusion). Although the word forms of squeeze and drill in the premise of this syllogism are the same, they express completely different concepts. The former is the squeeze and drive of work and study, time is squeezed, scientific knowledge and the ability to serve the people; the latter is the squeeze and drive of disrupting public order, crowds are squeezed, and the It's a loophole, it's benefiting oneself at the expense of others.Therefore, the young man deliberately distorted Lei Feng's spirit, and used the method of stealing concepts to justify his uncivilized behavior of not abiding by social morality, so it is pure sophistry.

One of the usual techniques used by sophists when applying syllogisms is to use the same words as a cover to secretly replace the concept as the middle term.