To: Right Wing Professor
For every bird, for every environmental disruption, bird is resilient to the disruption. That is what you need for your inference. But you don't have it, the "for every"s are missing. Pretending you have a "for every" when you have only a statement about a class, is how the fallacy of division works. It is the logical mistake involved. One can predicate of classes without implying "for every", we do it all the time to refer to general tendencies, expectations, correlations, averages, etc. By repeating the error thinking you are showing that no error is being committed, you show only that you do not know the reasoning is fallacious. It should therefore have been educational for you to have the fallacy in all its generality pointed out to you. You resist the instruction and it is your loss, but that does nothing to help your argument, which remains a known fallacy by now exhaustively demonstrated to you.
344 posted on
06/08/2006 10:13:57 AM PDT by
JasonC
To: JasonC
For every bird, for every environmental disruption, bird is resilient to the disruption. That is what you need for your inference"Birds are like rats". Not "some birds", not "many birds", "birds". In English, usage of 'Xs are Y" clearly carries the implication "all Xs are Y. Use of the unqualified term carries an implication of generality or universality. The idea that, of the three species in the intersection of the two sets, Coulter meant to include two in and exclude one from the comparison with rats, is just plain idiotic. If I showed you three cards, two of which were black and one was white, would you say that "the cards are black" was a true statement?
Some women are undoubtedly whores. In fact, many women are whores. So, according to you, "women are whores" is a true statement. I guess that puts you in with Dr. Dre.
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