Abstract
I said in chapter 1 that most of the fallacies in the gang of eighteen are research programmes in their own right. In the present chapter I shall try to make good on this claim. Hasty generalization is usually classified as an inductive fallacy. The research programme that inheres in a correct understanding of it is little short of the project in inductive logic. Inductive logic is too much to handle in a single chapter, even if I knew how. But headway can be made with the problem of induction and a well-known attack upon the confirmation relation.
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References
For more of the connections, or lack of them, between Aristotle’s and modern treatments of secundum quid, see chapter 18.
It should be noted that according to David Perkins, in conversation with the author, the toddler’s ‘inference’ is subcortical. Still, the example is instructive.
The distinction between cognitive and strategic rationality is fruitfully discussed in [de Sousa, 1987].
This might be a good place to touch on what I call Philosophy’s Most Difficult Problem. Consider any valid argument whose conclusion is highly counterintuitive. There are two ways of interpreting this argument. One is to see it as a reductio ad absurdum condemnation of at least one of the implying premisses. Or it can be seen as a sound demonstration of a surprising — or even shocking — truth. The problem is that there seems to be no generally efficacious way to determine which interpretation is correct, case by case. Perhaps it is not wholly surprising therefore that whereas most philosophers of science tend to see the Raven as paradoxical, some see it as a demonstration of a surprising truth.
Goodman himself draws out a different moral. What is anomalous about the grue-case — and nothing less than an “intolerable result” — is “that anything confirms anything” [Goodman, 1965, p. 75]. For example, on the basis of our observations about emeralds to date we will be able to confirm that roses subsequently inspected will be blue [Goodman, 1965, p. 74 n. 10].
An historical note. The solution here proposed is not Goodman’s own. For one thing, although it is argued that ‘grue’ is unprojectible, Goodman doesn’t want to rule out ‘grue’ completely: ‘grue’, he thinks, is sometimes projected. Goodman’s own solution is a matter of degree. ‘Grue’ is less projectible than ‘green’ and this is because green things are more entrenched than grue things. But saying this is only to say that the frequency of projections from ‘green’ is greater than those from ‘grue’.
As did Leslie Burkholder in correspondence, for which my thanks.
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© 2004 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Woods, J. (2004). Hasty Generalization. In: The Death of Argument. Applied Logic Series, vol 32. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-2712-3_19
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