Chapter 78 [Case Analysis] <Sophistry in Simple Enumeration>

(1) A story of Yanzi is recorded in "Yanzi Chunqiu": Once, Yan Ying, a doctor of Qi State, was ordered to go to Chu State, and the king of Chu hosted a banquet in honor of Yan Zi.During the banquet, two Chu soldiers tied a man to see the King of Chu. This was arranged in advance by the King of Chu, in order to humiliate Yanzi. The King of Chu deliberately asked: What crime did the tied man commit?Where are they from?Chu Bing replied, "He is a thief from Qi."After hearing this, the king of Chu looked at Yanzi proudly and said: People of Qi like to steal things! What the king of Chu is playing here is a sophistry that deliberately overgeneralizes.Because even if the person who is tied up is really a thief, only a singular judgment can be formed: this person from Qi State likes to steal things, but the full-name conclusion that all people from Qi State like to steal things cannot be deduced from this.The wise Yanzi strongly refuted and counterattacked King Chu's sophistry on the spot.

(2) In real life, some people see a small number of cadres committing corruption and draw a general conclusion: none of the cadres is good.Anyone who is an official has a black heart and a thick skin. (3) During the Cultural Revolution, Lin Biao, a counter-revolutionary double-faced faction, further generalized and extrapolated the correct assertion that the basic principles of Marxism are universal truths: what Marxist classic writers said, especially Chairman Mao Every sentence is the truth; one sentence is worth ten thousand sentences. (4) Some people adopt a discriminatory attitude towards comrades who have made mistakes.The reason is: this person has made mistakes, so he cannot be trusted.Some people seize the fact that Comrade Mao Zedong made serious mistakes in his later years and attempt to completely deny Comrade Mao Zedong's glorious and great life and his historical achievements in the Chinese revolution.

(5) During the period of bourgeois liberalization in the past few years, some people based on certain feudal dross in our country's traditional culture, completely denied our country's traditional culture for thousands of years, promoted national nihilism, and talked about China's way out It is all about westernization. (6) In order to elevate and beautify a certain person, some people talk about his strengths, abilities, and achievements, and even artificially elevate him to the sky; but they keep a secret about his shortcomings and mistakes and keep silent. .On the contrary, in order to belittle and vilify a person, only talk about his shortcomings and mistakes, attack one point, not the rest, exaggerate as much as possible, even fabricate lies, maliciously slander him, and demote him to the ground; while talking about his strengths and achievements do not mention.

The common techniques of the above cases are all deliberate sophistry to generalize. The difference is: Cases (1), (2) and (3) exaggerate the attributes of some objects to the class to which they belong; Case (4) It is to extend the attributes of an individual object at a certain stage to the whole process of its development; cases (5) and (6) are to extend the attributes of a certain part or aspect of things to the whole. It can be seen from the above that the extreme one-sidedness of metaphysics is a major feature of sophists. They use this method to distort or conceal the true colors of things in order to achieve their intended goals.In fact, objective things are extremely complicated, especially in the field of social history. It is very easy to find individual facts as arguments for a certain point of view.

Regarding this question, Lenin had a brilliant exposition. He said: In terms of social phenomena, there is no more general and untenable method than picking out some individual facts and playing with examples.It is easy to enumerate general examples, but this is pointless or quite counterproductive, since everything has its individual case in a concrete historical situation.If facts are grasped from the sum total of facts and from the connection of facts, then facts are not only eloquent, but also conclusive.Facts are child's play, or even less than child's play, if they are grasped not from the sum total, not from the connections, but fragmentary and picked out at random. ("Statistics and Sociology", "The Complete Works of Lenin", Volume 23, 1958 Edition, p. 279) A sophist is a master at juggling individual instances.

In addition, any objective thing is specific, and it is the synthesis and diversity of many regulations.Sophists only grasp the specificity of a certain aspect of specific things and use it to replace the whole thing, which has a lot of subjective arbitrariness.They can arbitrarily choose the stipulation of one aspect of things as an argument in favor of one thing, and they can also pick out the stipulation of another aspect of things to oppose the same thing. In our daily life and work, some people are also consciously or unconsciously using this kind of generalization sophistry.For example: carry out social surveys with pre-determined conclusions, collect only those facts that support the conclusions, and discard facts that contradict the conclusions; when summarizing or reporting work, report good news but not bad news.And there is a fixed pattern: the summary of last year said that the year before last was not good and last year was good, and the summary of this year said that last year was not good and this year is good.No wonder some people point out that every year is good if you look forward, but no year is good if you look backwards; The understanding of class struggle in the socialist historical stage is either arbitrarily exaggerated, describing all phenomena as class struggle, or the theory of the extinguishment of class struggle, which does not even admit the fact that class struggle exists within a certain range; The opinions of others are cut from the beginning to the end, taken out of context, used for oneself, and so on.

All of these, logically speaking, are sophistry of overgeneralization.