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paul

is there an error in reasoning here?

If someone says: most people care about "x", therefore you are likely to also care about "x". Used probabilistically, is this argument fallacious?

asked on Tuesday, Apr 29, 2025 07:16:04 AM by paul

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Answers

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Bo Bennett, PhD
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Context matters. On the surface, this looks reasonable, and perhaps in most cases is a reasonable, probabilistic statement. But imagine one is at a gay bar and says "Most people are heterosexual, therefore the patrons of this bar are likely to be heterosexual." This is fallacy involving ignoring context (no name for it that I know of). Pretty much the opposite of base rate fallacy .
answered on Tuesday, Apr 29, 2025 07:23:45 AM by Bo Bennett, PhD

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paul writes:

Thanks for the answer Dr. Bo. I wonder what the relevant context would be in this scenario:
most people care about material wealth, therefore you are likely to also care about material wealth?

posted on Tuesday, Apr 29, 2025 07:31:52 AM
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Bo Bennett, PhD writes:
[To paul]

Immediately, I can think of saying this at a Buddhist colony or a convent - which would not be true. Other than that, it seems like a reasonable induction. If there is disagreement (i.e., someone says this is reasonable and another says it is not) it might be due to ambiguity . "Material wealth" can mean anything from having enough wealth to live comfortably (virtually all people care about) to being excessively rich, which I would guess that "most people" don't care about. So the disagreement with the statement is less about the induction being made and more about first part of the claim about most people caring about material wealth.

[ login to reply ] posted on Tuesday, Apr 29, 2025 07:39:12 AM
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Arlo writes:
[To paul]

If we look at it from the point of view of deductive reasoning (going from a general rule to a specific case), the argument might go something like this;

Premise 1 : most people care about material wealth.

Premise 2 : you are a “people”

Conclusion : therefore, you care about material wealth.

For the conclusion to be valid (or true), both premises would need to be true.

To check the validity of that argument, we’d need to confirm the two premises.  I suspect we can buy into premise 2.  We might get some debate about premise 1.  

We’d need to define “most” and hunt up data to tell us if it’s true.  I suspect it would end up leading us to either undefined terms or a hasty generalization that we might not be able to support.

[ login to reply ] posted on Tuesday, Apr 29, 2025 07:00:19 PM
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Bob
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Inductive Reasoning?

answered on Tuesday, Apr 29, 2025 11:42:37 AM by Bob

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