How to Think #14: Ferison

The 14^th syllogism we will study is called Ferison.

In symbols Ferison looks like this:
No M's are P's.
Some M's are S's.
Therefore, some S's are not P's.

An example of Ferison in words would look like this:
No one who commits war crimes is worthy of respect.
Some people who have committed war crimes were soldiers.
Therefore, some soldiers are not worthy of respect.

If someone says all S's are P's – maybe, for example, that "All liberals are stupid," - you might think that is too extreme to be true. Surely there must be SOME exceptions; surely there must be SOME liberals who are intelligent, or, in other words, it must be that some S's are not P's.

You can use the Ferison syllogism to construct a counter argument. You want to end up with the conclusion "Therefore, some liberals are NOT stupid" which has the same pattern as the conclusion of a Ferison syllogism – "Therefore, some S's are not P's" - so now we just need to find an appropriate first and second premise to complete our syllogism.

The first premise of a Ferison syllogism is "No M's are P's." Given the conclusion we are trying to prove, the P in this line stands for "stupid." So we have "No M's are stupid." Now we just have to think of some group "M" that has no stupid members. How about Nobel Prize winners? That would give us a very reasonable sounding first premise, "No Nobel Prize winners are stupid."

So far we have:
No Nobel Prize winners are stupid.
Some M's are S's.
Therefore, some liberals are NOT stupid.

In the syllogism we are creating M stand's for Nobel Prize winners and S stands for liberals. Substituting these into the second premise we get "Some Nobel Prize winners are liberals."

Our final syllogism is:
No Nobel Prize winners are stupid.
Some Nobel Prize winners are liberals.
Therefore, some liberals are NOT stupid.

This is the valid syllogism Ferison so if the premises are true then the conclusion must be true. We chose the first premise because it seemed obviously true. By doing a little research we can determine if the second premise is true. Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman both won Nobel Prizes in economics and both are generally believed to be liberals so it would seem the second premise is true as well as the first.

Based on this syllogism we conclude that the person who said "All liberals are stupid" is wrong. Our syllogism actually proves that "Some liberals are NOT stupid."

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