 Hello, welcome to another one of my Dr. Sandler Chalk and Talks. This one has to do with a question that was asked to me by one of my critical thinking students who was using VU to ask about things that we talk about quite a bit in class, but which we sometimes don't get enough time to really explore in depth. And it's a very interesting question and it has to do with the connection between two different concepts. And so we ask, is stare at a thing always hasty generalization? And this comes up when we're talking about inductive arguments. Inductive arguments are arguments that at best are probable, they are not presented as being 100% certain, they do admit other assumptions. And in a good inductive argument, a strong inductive argument, the premises being true provide good reason or a strong sense of credence in the truth of the conclusion. It doesn't make the conclusion necessarily true. It doesn't make it possible for the conclusion to be false. Two ways of saying the same thing. Now, oftentimes in our stare-atio typing, we are carrying out some sort of inductive reasoning about groups of people based on some of the members of that group. This is why we bring out the terms of hasty generalization. Hasty generalization is a common name for a fallacy or a bad way of reasoning, a bad way of arguing that tends to produce weak inductive arguments. Inductive arguments where the premises being true does not entail that the conclusion is likely to be true. It does not make the conclusion probable, likely, plausible. So what is the fallacy of hasty generalization? Sometimes it's useful to have charts and this is the chart that I always use with my students when we're talking about enumerative inductions. Or another way of thinking this is how do you generalize about a group or about a given population, a given set of people or things? How do you generalize about those by sampling a representative hopefully, a representative portion of them? So there are a few technical terms that I'm using here. They're not the same in every single critical thinking textbook, but I think you can get the idea. The group itself, the entire group is what we call the target. Why do we call it the target? Well, you'll see why in a moment. We're actually, you might say, aiming the argument at it. It's going to be part of the conclusion of the argument. The sample is what we actually observe, what we actually take a look at. And that's a portion of that in the group. And the sample has some given quality. And we want to say that if the sample has this quality, that it's likely or it's probable that the group also similarly really shares that quality. So, for example, you go out to the marsh and you are looking around at all the frogs. Not all the frogs, actually, though, because can you actually find all the frogs in a given acre of land? Probably not. But what you do find is 100 of them. And you find that 98% of them have a given parasite, a new parasite that is invaded. That's your sample and that's your quality. So you said 100 frogs out of maybe let's estimate 1000, right? 100 frogs, 98% of them have this parasite in them. I'm willing to bet. I'm inferring reasonable assumption. They ought the larger groups also to share this quality. So the problem when you have a good sample, I mean, it's not 100% guaranteed. Pigeon polling is like this. That's why they have a margin of error. And the larger the sample gets in relation to the target, the better the inference is. But you still have a margin of error even if you have a fairly large sample. When the sample is too small or when the sample is not representative, that may have a problem. So I'm going to give you two examples of this. Let's say, we'll use a small sample example. Let's say you've only met three people from Wisconsin and all of them were happy to hear your conclusion. Well, you know, Wisconsinites are all alcohol. It's way too small of a sample to generalize about an entire state of people. It might also be unrepresented. Let's say that you actually met these three Wisconsinites at the bar. Well, now you've got a bigger problem. The sample is not only too small. It's also unrepresented because presumably you're going to meet people who are more interested. You have a habit of drinking considerably. The ones who are visiting the bar, if you're going to the zoo, perhaps, you went into three Wisconsin people and you saw them drunk, then maybe it's a better sample, still too small of a sample. Now, this is how stereotypical often formed. So this is where we get to the stereotypical itself. And one of the things I want to remind you of is that stereotyping can be done of any group of people who share some sort of trait. It can be racial or ethnic. That's what we often think of when we think of stereotypes. It could be in terms of gender. You can stereotype about the entire female sex, the entire male sex. You can talk in terms of particular groups within those, early girls and manly men, you know. You can talk about people from a given time era. You can talk about people from a certain age group. Younger people are flighty and irresponsible. These kids these days. That's probably a matter of stereotyping. You can talk about social class. People very often do stereotype about social classes. That's been going on since the beginning of time. You can stereotype about just about anything else and the things that people enjoy. You can stereotype about those who read comic books. You can stereotype about those who are into soccer. You can stereotype about, for example, when I used to be into endurance lifting and I remember visiting a friend of mine in France and he said, you know, it's really kind of tough for us here in France because here we're looked at as real weirdos. It's not like it is in America or in England or in Germany where weightlifting seems a more common phenomenon. I don't know if this is the case today in France, but back then, if you went to the gym and you spent a lot of time there, there have been lift weights, you were considered a little bit weird. Well, that could be something you can stereotype about as well. We stereotype about athletes. We stereotype about weekend athletes. We stereotype about all sorts of words. And what makes it a stereotype? Well, we have some sort of a given concept with a set of traits, and we use that to make sense out of people that fall into that class. So, you know, you see somebody with a soccer ball, aha, I know about that person. We also do this with religion. We see somebody, for instance, that had a meal across themselves, they're a Catholic. It's interesting because you don't realize that you wouldn't, in fact, have good reason, not only, well, let me back up a little bit. These days, if you see somebody in the United States, especially at my age or younger, crossing themselves at a meal, unless you actually know something about Catholics, you probably don't know what that probably signifies. It probably signifies not only are they Catholic, it probably signifies also that they're a particularly observant or traditional Catholic, because many people in my generation and in the younger generations have completely let it slide. How do I know that? I don't know that on the basis of just looking at a few people and then coming to a conclusion. I have, because I do religious studies and I keep up on these sorts of things and these are the kind of indices that we like to look for. But we do research about this. We don't just rely on purely anecdotal information. That's how you get stereotypes, right? Stereotypes are generated. Very often, stereotypes are generated through the fallacy of hasty generalization. You mean three Irish people and now you know all about the Irish. You mean three black people, everything about the African Americans, everything about not only the African Americans but Africans everywhere, right? That's crazy, isn't it? There are so many differences within groups that quite often stereotypes fail to capture or to accurately predict what sort of trace person is going to have. You actually have to look a little bit more closely. We have stereotypes not only about how a person is going to behave but what they're going to believe. As soon as you find out that somebody belongs to a religious group that you don't feel comfortable with, you may have a tendency to ascribe to them a certain kind of fanaticism, a belief in something irrational. It may turn out that that person is actually in the midst of a huge struggle with their faith and they're not sure what they believe at all and they're just going through the motions because they don't want to leave their religious community. Very often stereotypes can steer us into quite mistaken conceptions of people. And again, one source of stereotypes is case degeneralization. You do this by encountering people in real life or perhaps just through television or movies and you get an idea of a certain group of people. Again, it could be anything. It could be about people who play a violin. It could be about smokers. Some stereotypes are actually quite positive. I'm not going to call on that because where I want to go after this and this is where we get to answer this question. The stereotype is always case degeneralization. The answer is no. Stereotyping quite often involves a case degeneralization made by somebody somewhere along the line but does it always involve inductive reasoning? This is what I think about most of this group because of my experience. Inductive reasoning is quite often experiential. No, the answer is wider than that. Sometimes there's also what we call deductive reasoning. In deductive reasoning, if the premises are actually true, the conclusion has to be true because deductive reasoning works by looking at, while these are with groups, it's going to look at the inclusion of groups with each other. So let's say, for example, let's take a common stereotype about Irish. Irish people are drunk and violent. Well, if you begin from definitions, let's say you got those degrees of degeneralization. If you begin from definitions like, all Irish people are drunk and violent, that's a group of Irish people over there, they're going to be drunk and violent as your conclusion, then you conclude further. I better get away from them or not provoke them. You're engaging in deductive reasoning and if those premises actually were true, that conclusion would have to be true. The problem is that you're working from bad information. It's the classic problem of garbage in, garbage out. Deductive reasoning is unassailable and true if the deductive reasoning, of course, is a valid argument. There are ways of setting up deductive arguments where they become valid. For example, all Irish people love potatoes, all terrorists love potatoes, therefore all Irish people are terrorists. By working with false premises, but even if those premises were true, that conclusion wouldn't fall, would it? Because there's something wrong with the form of it. The nice thing about deductive arguments is you can look right at them and see that there's something wrong with the form. I'm not so concerned with that right now. What I'm really interested in is the fact that we do engage in deductive reasoning based on stereotypes. So-and-so is Eastern Orthodox. The Eastern Orthodox all love John de Massime. Therefore, so-and-so is going to love John de Massime. I don't know that. He may not even know what he's thinking about. The problem comes in assuming that one has almost exhaustive or at least adequate knowledge of the entire class of people that allows one to engage in this sort of inferential process of deductive reasoning. French people eat frogs and snails. Frogs and snail are vermin. Therefore, French people are verminators. Well, again, I would have to sort of parse this out. Do all French people eat frogs and snails? I don't think so. Are frogs and snails really vermin? Not by most definitions. But you see the problem here. Stereotyping quite often begins not from experience where the hasty generalization would come in, but from just beginning from assumed starting points that one may have gotten from one's environment, from one's family, from one's social class, from one's group. Interestingly, our stereotypes quite often don't come from a more individual process of looking at our experience and then coming to bad inferences about this. But quite often, from the very fact that we belong to groups, we're inclined to believe what it is that our group has to say, not only about itself, but about other groups. And to do that, we're engaging in, if we're just going sort of a candidate along that inferential line, we're engaging in deductive reasoning. So there's a good case where Stereotyping not only is not involved hasty generalization, it doesn't involve inductive reasoning. There's also type of reasoning called abductive reasoning. And this is now often treated in critical thinking textbooks and sometimes not even treated in logic textbooks, but it is an important type of reasoning. And in abductive reasoning, it's a little bit more loosey-goosey. Sometimes it's called in terms of the best explanation. There's a lot of different terms for it. What you're doing is you're saying I'm observing something here. Now what would explain that? What would provide me with an intelligible understanding of how this came to be, the way it is? It's usually something puzzling. Now think about this in terms of human behavior. So-and-so does this. So-and-so engages in this behavior and it's kind of puzzling to me. Is there any sort of general rule that would explain that? Because if there was, that's probably true. That would then make sense out of my experience. That's a little bit different than induction. With the induction, you're trying to sort of accumulate cases and that's why the AC generalization is a bad induction because it goes from just too few just a small amount. It doesn't pile them up. You actually go to a given population. Let's say you want to generalize about gamers and you go to some big game convention and you actually observe a thousand gamers. You're probably doing pretty good inductive reasoning right there. Adaptive reasoning is different. What you're doing there is you have a case and you're trying to, you have a case, an experience and you're trying to make sense of it. So-and-so acts in this way. Is that because they belong to this group? And if they belong to this group, those kind of people act this way. That explains it. That could be stereotyping, actually. That could be how you use stereotypes that either come to you from your group or from your own experience, insufficient experience, and that might be one way in which you categorize people too quickly. There's a couple of us, which is a little bit dated, Archie Bunker, that character. He was constantly engaging in abductive reasoning about the motives of people, and it was almost always based on stereotypes. He sort of made a classic case in point. We can think of other ones. So, to recap and to summarize, is stereotyping always hasty generalization? No, it's not always hasty generalization. As a matter of fact, it's not always a matter of induction. Sometimes it's a matter of deductive reasoning or abductive reasoning. And in real life stereotypes that are floating around out there, often these things mesh with each other and reinforce each other. So that previous deductive reasoning is used to make an abductive leap or hypothesis. Or previous hasty generalization becomes the data that gets fatted to the deductive reasoning. And this is how stereotypes not only get formed, but continue through social systems and get prepared.