26 Unit 2 Critical thinking: the basics
problem-solving skills than men. Even so, it
would be a generalisation, and a vague one
too; and vague generalisations are hard
to justify.
The opposite of the word ‘general’ is the
word ‘particular’. It would not be a
generalisation to select a particular woman,
or group of women, and talk about their
thinking skills. Imagine that two teams – one
all female, another all male – competed in a
problem-solving competition, and the
adjudicator concluded at the end that:[J] The women (in the women’s team)
were more organised in their thinking
than the men.This would be a particular claim, not a general
one, stating that these particular women, on
this particular occasion, were superior to the
men – at certain particular tasks. Claim [J]
would be justified if the women won the
competition. But no sort of general claim
could be made on the strength of [J],
especially not [I]. (You will meet up with this
topic again in Chapter 2.10.)Summary
• We have discussed what is meant by
justifying a claim, and considered different
standards of justification.
• We have looked at simple and complex
claims.
• It has been shown that strong claims are
harder to justify than weak claims.
• We have seen the distinction between
general and particular claims.Because it says a lot, and says it so forcefully, it
would take a lot to justify it in full.
One important point to add about this
distinction is that if a claim is very strong it
is easier to challenge, or to cast doubt on,
because there is more, potentially, to find
fault with. [H] could be made easier to justify
if it were weakened, or modified, for example
like this:
[H 1 ] Some parts of the world could one day
be under water, and if so man-made
climate change may be at least partly
to blame.Obviously [H 1 ] needs less to justify it than [H],
and would be easier to defend if a denier of
climate change wants to attack or disprove it.
Words or phrases such as ‘some’, ‘could’, ‘may’
and ‘one day’ are weaker terms than ‘whole’,
‘will’ and ‘soon’; and partial blame is easier to
pin on something than direct cause. Whereas
you need something approaching proof to
justify [H], you need only danger signs to justify
[H 1 ]. But then [H 1 ] does not have the impact
that [H] has. It is not the same claim any more.Generalisations
A generalisation is a claim that applies very
widely – sometimes universally: that is, in
every single case. For example:[I] Women are better problem solvers
than men.
This is a strong claim because it is about
men and women generally. It is especially
strong if it is taken literally to mean that all
women are better at problem solving than
all men. Clearly that would be unwarranted,
since it would take just one or two counter-
examples to prove it false. However, [I]
could be understood to be the less sweeping
claim that on balance women exhibit better