Today something happened in class that is a rare one for a teacher, and that is giving myself homework. Today in Speech class I was introducing the fifth speech for my students: “Get the facts,” in which I expostulated eloquently on my love of logic and evidence (subjects which are, I hope, in evidence on this particular blog in spades). However, during my commentary on syllogisms, I ran into a serious problem: the Thai-English dictionaries our students had did not have the word syllogism in them (I assume they do not cater to a market of philosophers of epistemology, or students of formal and informal logic such as I am). And given that syllogism, even in English, is not exactly the most friendly term to understand, I gave myself the homework to give them the word in Thai.

This was not exactly a difficult assignment to fulfill. Thankfully, Google translator knows what the dictionary did not, and gave a Thai word for syllogism: การอ้างเหตุผล (Note: I’m not sure how this would be transliterated). As it happens, I have my students two examples of syllogisms, one of them a standard “textbook” example of a syllogism and another one a slightly more controversial example of the syllogism. The textbook example was:

All men are mortal.
Socratese is a man.
Therefore Socrates is mortal.

The slightly more controversial one was the following:

All men are created equal.
Lahu, Burmese, and Thai are all men.
Therefore Lahu, Burmese, and Thai are equal.

Syllogisms are one of my favorite examples of formal logic. In a syllogism, if you concede the major premise (all men are created equal), and you concede the minor premise (that all peoples of humanity are human), then you must concede the conclusion (that all peoples are equal in the eyes of their Creator). To disagree with the conclusion, you must attack the premises. You could, for example, deny that men were created equal, but argue they evolved (perhaps unequally). You could also argue that they were created unequal, in some kind of great chain of being. You could, similarly, deny that all peoples were men. You could say that some men were in fact nothing more than apes, denying them as members of the same species. You would be wrong in making any of these arguments, but that is the only way that you could deny the conclusion, given the premises. In formal logic, acceptance of premises means acceptance of the conclusion.

Nonetheless, even though the logical examples I gave them were somewhat trivial (except for one example about how the Bangkok elites did not respect the people of the North and Northeastern regions of Thailand as equals based on economic, historical, and political evidence), it is my hope that my students for their “get the facts” speech are able to and inclined to dig into the evidence, because the only way that one can get a fair hearing for new or controversial theories is to do the hard work of proof, because at least then one can convince the fair-minded, and then outlast the bigots. Not that this is an easy task.