On Religion and the Faulty Generalization

A number of ideologies depend on a logical fallacy called a faulty generalization.  It's probably the single biggest shortcoming of being human.

It's the classic tale of the old, blind men and the elephant.  Each man touches a different part and describes the elephant as something entirely different, and none of them see the entire elephant for what it is.

Folks, we have to grow outside of the boundaries of our own individual selves in order to reach any sort of enlightenment.  In order to do that, we have to abandon arguments from faith as well as from individual experience.  I'm not saying that individual experience isn't important--it is--but only that it is the germ of a discussion, the beginnings of reasoning, not the end product.

Here's an example of one I heard from the Carly Fiorina / Barbara Boxer debate (2010) that sticks with me.  When asked about her stance on abortion, Carly Fiorina replied that she was pro-life.  The reason for her stance, she said, was that her husband's mother almost decided to have an abortion.  Instead, she made the decision to keep the child, and it turned out just fine.  The fallacy, of course, is the assumption that "it turned out just fine" could be universally applied to anyone pondering the decision of whether or not to have an abortion.  It ignores the statistics outside of that one specific instance--her husband.  It is also arguing from a position of privilege.  If you are one of the lucky ones, then you can pretend the odds don't matter or that they are unimportant.

In a response to The Myth of the Enlightened Self-Interest, Part 2, Taliver brings up an important point: that the ideology of acting solely for self-interest (in a Tragedy of the Commons) is based on imperfect information.  Any ideology that follows directly from imperfect information (e.g., based on blind faith in something) without allowing itself to adapt for new information (e.g., statistics, science) is condemning itself to eternal faulty generalization.

One example that has come to my attention lately is the "Austrian School" of economic theory, which should have died a long time ago but seems to have enjoyed a recent resurgence due to the Koch brothers and the Tea Party.  Any school of thought that is based on a priori generalization is succumbing to the faulty generalization.