Syllogisms and analogies almost never grasp the complexity of life, especially in politics

Grandma runs, the train runs, grandma is a train. Pierino's reasoning, that of the old jokes, now seems to have become THE rule. Even if Aristotle would turn up his nose for the casual use of the terms that make up the famous reasoning of the syllogism, even if certain statements of today would seem far from the perfect syllogism and only improperly attributable to the rhetorical scheme, there is no field of knowledge. in which one cannot help reasoning according to this mental setting.

In particular, if we pay attention to the common talk of everyday things, it is really difficult to argue one's reasons without resorting to easy-to-understand syllogisms. That said, although it is almost inevitable in the immediacy of the speech, this method is not always correct, and it almost never is when it comes to politics. Let's take a few examples: let's talk about Renzi, just to choose a random politician. Opponents of the casual Rignanese, assuming that it is easy to identify who esteems him and who does not, reason as follows: "It was necessary to blow up the Conte government, Renzi blown up the Conte government, Renzi was necessary" and from this logic it is difficult to schioda, regardless of the fact that to discourage Conte could be many others, and even doing it before. The same reasoning, still based on the subject, predicate and conclusion, is equally adopted by the opposite faction, where one wants to put some supporters of Salvini annoyed by his abandonment in the first Conte government who today employ this simple scheme: "To do well you have to stay inside the government, now the League is (again) in government, the League is doing well ”, neglecting the extreme complexity and intrinsic danger of the League's position in the current Draghi government.

Examples of this kind could go on indefinitely, and would not spare even Grillo or the pathetic Sardines if the importance of the intermediate predicate between the two parts of the syllogism is overestimated, for which it is considered apodictically deserving and correct to approach two situations (overlapping?) leading to the same conclusion. Unfortunately, things do not go exactly like this and there are countless historical cases in which a certain "worthy" action has been positive or feral, if committed by different subjects or in different circumstances. In the last century, many criticized D'Annunzio's interventionism and it was precisely those who then accused the United States of having entered the war too late. Likewise, taking a few steps in the intricate field of political economy, the theory of John M. Keynes is still almost universally considered positively, according to which the state must intervene with injections of money to move the stagnant waters of the economy and thus, generically, for which any heavy state investment is considered correct, regardless of the secondary damage and the discontent that will result fatally if said disbursements prove ineffective or even unfair and harmful. If one did well once, acting in a given way, it does not necessarily have to follow that everyone else, acting in a similar way, does as well.

Society, our state schemes, the various types of public intervention are dramatically different and changeable in order to be able to rely on universal rules and the proof is even found in the incredible amount of regulatory provisions that make up our corpus iuris , never as much as now. ephemeral and provisional, precisely because too often we make use of the easy scheme that refers to situations that appear similar and perhaps are not at all, or, and it is even worse, when we want to regulate in Italy in the wake traced by other countries that of the our almost uniqueness have very little or nothing at all. The wise farmer of the Po valley does not even think about using a small and agile mountain mower, just like that of the Trentino farm the use of the giant combine harvester, common in Piacenza, would never come to mind. Could it then be said, following the principle of the syllogism, that "if the peasant is wise, the minister must be wise, the minister must be a peasant"? Oh my God, some say it, we've even tasted something like this, but we've all seen the results .

Tractent fabrilia fabris, the Romans said, but the doubt remains as to who can honorably call himself a blacksmith and which objects should be part of his professional armory, also being able to ascertain that we see a lot of fake blacksmiths and we don't talk about those who, perhaps , blacksmiths are but they use baker tools. However you want to put it, we always end up in the same corner: we do not know how to resign ourselves to judging the work of others with more balance and depth, especially when the judge is completely devoid of the minimum cognitive bases and experience in that sector, because now everything seems having to respond to the easy solution based on the grandmother and the train, which often sees the poor old woman fumbling miserably supported by sticks and who not only does not have the strength to run but, not negligible, not even the slightest desire.

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This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/sillogismi-e-analogie-quasi-mai-colgono-la-complessita-della-vita-soprattutto-in-politica/ on Sat, 13 Mar 2021 04:49:00 +0000.