“This is the best post on apologetics ever!”
While at first glance--or from intuition--you might brush my
statement aside as ludicrous, there is actually a fallacy represented here by my
hyperbolic enthusiasm for my own writing: a hasty generalization.
Hasty generalization: generalizing about a class based upon
a small or poor sample.
In committing the hasty generalization fallacy, there are
normally two problems involved:
#1.Too small of a sample
#2. Not a representative sample
#1.Too small of a sample
#2. Not a representative sample
Going back to my original statement, I am committing a hasty
generalization because I do not have access to all the posts written on
apologetics in order to know if the post I just wrote is the best post
ever. The sample size for my inference
would be too small.
Let’s look at the first problem: too small of a sample size.
If the sample size is too small, we risk it not being
representative of the broader class which we are referencing. In our political campaign examples, a
Democrat candidate might claim that because Republican Randy Presidential
Hopeful demeans other candidates then all Republicans are demeaning to other
people; therefore a democrat cannot vote for any Republican. But Republican Randy doesn’t represent how
all Republicans would treat Democrats (or other republicans, independents, etc).
The sample size here is too small to
make an accurate judgment. However, I’ve
heard this kind of inference from members of both parties!
Let’s look at the second problem: not a representative
sample.
Perhaps the person making the generalization has a large
sample size but it may not be a sample that aptly represents the class.
Example: All plumbers are rich. I just went to the international plumbers
convention and studied 3,000 plumbers there.
They all made over $100,000 a year.[1]
