Mistake of Generalisation

MISTAKE OF GENERALISATION A form of faulty thinking is taking one particular example and projecting it as a general phenomenon and, on that basis, presenting a generalised opinion about a subject as a whole. O ne form of faulty thinking is what can be called ‘Making a generalisation.’ It is to take one particular example and project it as a general phenomenon and, on that basis, to present a generalised opinion about a subject as a whole. Making generalisations is so common that only a few people can be said to be free from it. Consider the following case. In the Bible (Mathew 10:34), Jesus is quoted as having said, ‘Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.’ Now, this saying attributed to Jesus has the status of an exception in the entire corpus of utterances attributed to him in the Bible. Most of the other utterances attributed to him in the Bible are based on teachings such as love and ethics. This being the case, to take the above words and claim that Jesus’ mission was to pick up the sword, is to project what