Chapter 73 <To be hated or to be praised>
An ancient Athenian said to his son who was trying to gain fame and wealth through his oratory skills:
The nobles will hate you if you tell the truth (reveal the fact that the nobles exploit and oppress the common people);
If you tell lies (sing praises to the nobles), the common people will hate you;
Either you speak the truth or you lie; so either the nobles hate you, or the common people hate you.
In short, no matter what the situation is, it is not good for you.
The son replied:
If I speak the truth, the common people will praise me;
If I tell lies, the nobles will praise me;
I either tell the truth, or I tell a lie;
So, either the commoners praise me, or the nobles praise me.
Either way, in any case, it's in my favor.
Both the father and the son applied the constitutional formula of the sufficient conditional hypothetical disjunctive reasoning, and the reasoning form is correct.But the reasoning of the father and son was one-sided, and both made the mistake of one-sided reasoning.
In a slave society, since the interests of nobles and commoners are fundamentally opposed, no matter whether they say good things for the common people or for the nobles, it will cause two different results at the same time, which are beneficial to themselves and unfavorable to themselves.
From the point of view of formal logic, the consequent of the two sufficient condition hypotheses made by the father and the son should not be a simple judgment, but a joint judgment (complex judgment).The full statement of reasoning would thus be:
If you tell the truth, you will be hated by the nobles and praised by the commoners;
If you tell a lie, you will be hated by the common people and praised by the nobles;
In either case, the result will always be hated by one and praised by the other.
When the father uses reasoning to make an argument, he only speaks of results that are unfavorable to his son, and when the son uses reasoning to make an argument, he only speaks of results that are beneficial to him.Therefore, both father and son used sophistical reasoning and made the mistake of incomplete consequences.But judging from his son's motivation to gain fame and wealth through speeches, in order to achieve this goal, under the historical conditions at that time, I am afraid that he can only tell lies to praise the nobles.
In this way, the result is: the praise of the nobles and the hatred of the common people.