Saturday, March 27, 2010
Vague generalities
Earlier in this class this semester, we discussed vague arguments in one of the discussion weeks. This week, I am going to discuss vagueness again but this time it involves using vague generalities. It was something that I found a little hard to grasp at first. It was just a little hard to understand but after reading over it several times, it was much easier to understand. The section on vague generalities is in chapter eight of the epstein book. For precise generalities, the book tells us that we need to make sure that if we use percentages in a claim, that it is not always going to be a strong aegument. Then there are vague generalities. The book states that we use all or part of a collection without specifying a precise number using the words all, almost, many, most, a few, and some. The use of some and all can be further examined to see if the argument is valid. Overall it was an interesting section and now that I understand it, it is even more interesting.
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Vague generalities is a hard concept to understand but once you understand it, it was pretty easy. Its "almost" like riding a bike for the first time. I like how you also wrote about precise generalities to let people know how to create a precise generalities instead of generalities are too vague. What people do not notice is that in everyday conversation people use generalizations too vague. By reading this article, it has taught me to be more aware of my words and try to speak in precise generalizations when used. I really thought this section was pretty interesting but pretty short.
ReplyDeleteI know what you mean about trying not to use generalizations in conversation. It's especially hard for me to try not to do it if I'm trying to make an argument. Sometimes I get caught up with thinking out the claims I'm making to make sure they are valid, that I forget that the person I'm talking to may not be understand what I'm talking about because I'm not being specific enough. I try to confirm that they understand what I am talking about before continuing my argument. But even then, sometimes I think we all can inadvertently generalize things without knowing it.
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