The Language of Argument

1 8 8

C H A P T E R 8 ■ A r g u m e n t s T o a n d F r o m G e n e r a l i z a t i o n s

Which do you favor: (a) preserving a citizen’s constitutional right to bear

arms or (b) leaving honest citizens defenseless against armed criminals?

Which do you favor: (a) restricting the sale of assault weapons or

(b) knuckling under to the demands of the well-financed gun lobby?

In both cases, one alternative is made to sound attractive, the other unattrac-

tive. When questions of this sort are used, it is not surprising that different

pollsters can come up with wildly different results.

Now we can summarize and restate our questions. Confronted with induc-

tive generalizations, there are four questions that we should routinely ask:

1. Are the premises acceptable?


2. Is the sample too small?


3. Is the sample biased?


4. Is the sampling procedure biased?

By asking the preceding questions, specify what, if anything, is wrong with the

following statistical generalizations:

1. This philosophy class is about logic, so most philosophy classes are
   probably about logic.


2. Most college students like to ski, because I asked a lot of students at
   several colleges in the Rocky Mountains, and most of them like to ski.


3. K-Mart asked all of their customers throughout the country whether they
   prefer K-Mart to Walmart, and 90 percent said they did, so 90 percent of
   all shoppers in the country prefer K-Mart.


4. A Swede stole my bicycle, so most Swedes are thieves.


5. I’ve never tried it before, but I just put a kiwi fruit in a tub of water. It
   floated. So most kiwi fruits float in water.


6. I have lots of friends. Most of them think that I would make a great
   president. So most Americans would probably agree.


7. In exit polls after people had just voted, most people told our candidate
   that they voted for her, so probably most people did vote for her.


8. Mary told me that all of her older children are geniuses, so her baby will
   probably be a genius, too.


9. When asked whether they would prefer a tax break or a bloated budget,
   almost everyone said that they wanted a tax break. So a tax break is
   overwhelmingly popular with the people.


10. When hundreds of convicted murderers in states without the death
    penalty were asked whether they would have committed the murder if
    the state had a death penalty, most of them said that they would not have
    done it. So most murders can be deterred by the death penalty.

Exercise II

97364_ch08_ptg01_177-194.indd 188 15/11/13 10:44 AM

some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materiallyCopyright 201^3 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights,

affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.