PHI 1101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 18: Hasty Generalization, Station Wagon, Aisle

• School: University of Ottawa
• Department: Philosophy
• Course: PHI 1101
• Professor: Sardar Hosseini

Document Summary

More examples: in the 19th century, when train travel was a novelty, Joe and maude farmer, who had never been out of. Silver city, colorado, were taking the pacific flyer to san francisco. When a vendor came down the aisle selling sandwiches and fruit, joe bought a banana. Neither had tasted one before, and they gazed at it with curiosity. You go ahead and try it, joe maude told him. He stripped back the peel and took a bite of banana. Just as he swallowed, the train roared into a tunnel, and everything went dark. Don"t eat any, maude joe cried out in alarm. The main idea: this fallacy consists of generalizing on the basis of an inadequate set of cases. Recall that inductive generalizations are weak if based upon samples that are too small. The human species seems to have a strong natural propensity or tendency for hasty generalization.