[lit-ideas] Re: The Fallacy of Hasty Generalization
- From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 22:57:43 -0700
Hey! Don't lecture me. My fault here is that I forgot the name of the
fallacy. Heck, I'm old. I forget the names of lots of things. Simon was
guilty of the fallacy. Why not lecture him?
In order for your "I think Lawrence sometimes you confuse . . . "lecture to
have substance, you will have to go back to Simon's sampling: one terrorist
attack in London plus conversations with several Muslims and conclude that
was a valid sampling.
As it happens, I'm very familiar with inductive sampling from Aerospace (as
well as some other subjects I've been interested in from time to time). All
the parts that keep our planes flying have been analyzed inductively. We
established MTBFs (mean time between failure). We schedule R&R (remove and
replace) schedules before the MTBF so that we are less likely to experience
failures. And if a part's failure is determined to be catastrophic, we may
add a back up part or improve its reliability to some astronomical number
that satisfies the FAA that while failure isn't impossible it is very very
unlikely. If you fly you trust in these procedures. So no I am not
uncomfortable with inductive reasoning. I was however uncomfortable with
Simon's inductive reasoning.
If you said, "You know, Lawrence, I think you're old and don't remember
clearly the names of logical terms that you were familiar with 45 years
ago," I'd buy that.
Lawrence
-----Original Message-----
From: Robert Paul
Sent: Friday, September 29, 2006 9:44 PM
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: The Fallacy of Hasty Generalization
Lawrence:
> I have some texts on logic but couldn't find the one that was best in
> describing fallacies; so I went back to Google. This is the fallacy I
have
> been attempting to describe:
> http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/hasty-generalization.html
Ah, while I was laboring away, Lawrence slipped this in over the
transom. Why is
the many-hued fallacy of 'hasty generalization' a fallacy? Because it could
be
false that all Xs are Ys (the desired conclusion, apparently) and yet
true that
some Xs are Ys. This fallacy I tried to express when I noted earlier that
from
'There is an x, such that...' one couldn't infer 'So, all x are such
that...'
This is easily formalized, which might appear to some good evidence that
such
fallacies have an common underlying form.
I think, Lawrence, you sometimes confuse the limits of induction with
something
else. Its as if you thought that what was wrong with inductive
generalizations
was that they weren't spiffy deductive arguments in which one could not deny
the truth of the conclusion and grant the truth of the premises without
contradiction.
And here I leave and commend the subject to Donal.
Robert Paul
reed.edu
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