Suppose that a syllogism has four terms: uncommunicative people, communicative people, Ruth, and people who make friends easily.Can the rules of validity determine whether or not the syllogism is valid?

A) Yes, but only after immediate inference is used to collapse the first two terms into one.
B) Yes, but only after immediate inference is used to expand the number of terms to six.
C) Yes, the rules can be applied without first making any changes to the syllogism.
D) No, because it is impossible to put the syllogism into standard form.
E) No, because the rules of validity cannot be used when one of the terms is a proper name.

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Belana Hannula · Accepted Answer

Final Answer : A, Explanation :  The syllogism has four terms, but the rules of validity require that syllogisms have only three terms. Therefore, we must use immediate inference to collapse the first two terms into one before applying the rules of validity. In this case, we could collapse uncommunicative people and communicative people into simply people. Once we have done this, we can apply the rules of validity to determine whether the syllogism is valid.

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