MODR 1770 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Hasty Generalization, Begging, Epithet
14 Dec 2015
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Document Summary
Fallacies of presumption violate the sufficiency criterion of a good argument. Every member of my family used to have at least one winter cold every year. Last fall each of us started taking 1000 milligrams of vitamin c a day, and there hasn"t been even a sniffle at our house in over nine months. Premise 1: each family member started taking 1000 milligrams of vitamin c. Premise 2: hasn"t been a sniffle at their house. Insufficient because only one family was used as evidence and that is not enough to prove that vitamin c works: moving from the universal to the particular. Sweeping generalization: to apply a rule across the board without taking context into consideration, deals with abstract laws. Question-begging epithet: a set of assumptions embedded in the epithet, influencing the outcome of a situation simply because of the prejudicial nature or the slanted nature of the epithets.
