Video Transcript: Hasty Generalization, Red Herring Fallacy and Tu Quoque

Henry - We continue on with our discussion of logical fallacies, finding them how to stop them. And we're going to talk about hasty generalization.  

Dr. Clouser - There's a classic example. This is also a joke. Someone says, All  North American Indians, March single file. And the questioner says, so how do  you know that? And the answer is the one I saw did. Three, that's right. One  case, that just means taking something is generally true when you haven't seen  enough instances to know that, right? And there are a lot of hasty  generalizations that pass for arguments, and you read them in the newspaper  every day. This is generally like that, wait a minute, how do you know that?  Right? Did you do the research? Do you know that? Did you take a sample and  find the majority of the sample is like this, then you have some reason to think  that's true. Otherwise? If you don't have enough instances if you haven't done  enough survey and research work, you're not entitled to the conclusion that  generally it's like this,  

Henry – A lot of times. Experience, sort of helps you not do hasty  generalizations. And when you're young, you know, I noticed, I don't want to pick on the young but I know when I was young, I made way more hasty  generalization. Now, I mean, experience sort of heals you of some of this, you  start realizing doesn't work. I guess it did.  

Dr. Clouser - I think we noticed them when people apply them to us. You do this  often, don't you? And some action I've never done before. Right? I never did this before in my life. Just generally what you do, right? No, I never did it before.  What they're taking the one instance as typical. And it's not fair. Right?  

Henry - I often find that with hasty generalizations, too. We kind of want to see  what we want to see  

Dr. Clouser - there's that, too. I mean, that. It could be that you do some  research, and you do take a number of samples, and they are enough to come  to a generalization. But maybe you've been biased in collecting the evidence.  More, you end up seeing more evidence than there really is. Right. And that will  that will turn out to be a hasty generalization, even though you don't know it and  didn't intended to be right. So these things can come up and bite us in the butt  when we don't, when we least expect it. They don't require ill will. Now they they  often people make them. They're arguing in perfect goodwill in perfect good  faith, but they're still making a mistake called a fallacy.  

Henry - You know, it's interesting, when we did the people, smart class Dr.  Clouser, they're talking about the art of listening, and listening, when you listen 

to someone to be fully present, be fully there. But then, it talks about how we  can make hasty generalizations in our mind about what we're hearing, instead of actually listening. So and I thought that works like so there's a discipline of  listening, without making a hasty generalization of what the person saying what  we think they're saying. And we do, we do it's hard.  

Dr. Clouser – It is hard, it takes practice. And I think, in philosophy, there's a lot  of that people get to be rather good at it. They listen to what they listen to what  you're actually saying. And they if they're not clear, they ask for clarification. And we try to do that so as to be very clear about arriving at our conclusions. and for  what reasons, right.  

Henry - Okay, let's move on to the next one. Red Herring fallacy. That's sort of  like one earlier.  

Dr. Clouser - I think there's, there's no no essential difference between what's  called a red herring and what's called a strawman. In the straw man argument,  you instead of dealing with what the reasons are the conclusions been  presented to you. You shift them slightly, in order to make them easier to attack.  Red Herring is similar in resource to an old practice, that if you were a fugitive,  and you were being trailed by dogs who had your scent. And you you would  have a fish that's over ripe and really stinks to high heaven and come to a fork in the road. You run up one fork with red herring, you leave it there, come back and run up the other fork. Now the dogs go after the red herring instead of you. sets  up a false target. That's very close to being the strawman. That's where the  expression comes from. Red Herring.  

Henry - So So, so if there is a slight difference in the strawman is basically  constructing an argument that that might be related, but it's going to a different  direction. Is that a red herring? Just a distraction? Yes. Any kind, any kind of  distraction. That's very interesting. Here's another one. So how do you  pronounce this?  

Dr, Clouser – Tu Quoqueo. It means while you're doing the same thing. It  means you've attacked me for drawing this inference claiming that we should do X, Y and Z. Okay. And you say That's wrong. But now I'm telling you that over  here in this other set of sentences, you did same thing, oh, sort of like a you're a hypocrite. That's right. That's right. It doesn't really attack the conclusion. The  conclusion might be right, and maybe we shouldn't do X, Y and Z. Right. And  maybe he is, in another circumstance circumstances doing that. Right. But the  fact that he is doesn't show that this is right or wrong, that we've sort of moved  away from the debate, which really should be are X, Y and Z what we ought to 

do, right? And we move it to, you're doing the same thing over here. So I don't  have to pay any attention to your attack on this. No, the person may be doing  the same thing over here, and may be dead, right that we shouldn't do it. Do  what you're proposing. Right. So it's really off the mark. Again, all of these  fallacies have in common, that instead of debating the truth of what's at stake,  they shift it to something else.  

Henry - Let's reflect on that. So back to last at the last session, we talked to like  a simple premise. But what you're really saying here is if you really love God  and love your neighbor, you want to stay on the main subject and deal with the  main subject and not deceive anybody. You think  

Dr. Clouser – Not all these are deceptive. They're sometimes they're just  mistakes that as a person doesn't realize  

Henry – Is it possible to just make mistakes. Oh, absolutely. just wrong. Meaning people and just sombody made a mistake,  

Dr. Clouser - maybe they're somebody's insincere and is trying to deal with what you're presenting and doesn't realize that they're actually shifting the subject or  tossing out a red herring or something else.  

Henry - We are sinners. we can omit that we have heard  

Dr. Clouser - up the wazoo. Take a logic course and do the exercises and you'll  see.  

Henry - Very good. Well, we look forward to coming back and looking at some  more