3.3: Being Too General
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Vagueness is not the same as generality. What, then, is generality? This is harder to explain. It’s something like broad.
A statement is called a generalization if it uses a general term. A general term refers to a class of objects. The general term metal refers to the class of metals. Classes are sets or groups. Classes are more general than their subclasses and usually are more general than any of the members of the class. For example, the term detective is more general than English detective, which in turn is more general than Sherlock Holmes. The latter term is not general at all; it is specific.
Being overly general can cause imprecision. Suppose you are asked, "Who would you like to see run for your state's attorney general in next year's election?" You would be answering at too general of a level if you responded with "Oh, a citizen." The term citizen is neither ambiguous nor vague, but it is too general of an answer. The questioner was expecting a more specific answer.1
Often, we state generalizations with quantity terms, such as 17, one-half, all, many, or some. For example, the statement "All metals conduct electricity" is a generalization about metals. So is "Many metals are magnetic." The former is called a universal generalization because of the quantity term all, whereas the latter is a non-universal generalization because the quantity term is something less than all. By using the word many, the speaker implies that the property of being magnetic need not be as universal (pervasive) for metals as the property of conducting electricity. Saying that "33 percent of all metals are magnetic" is also a generalization. It is a non-universal generalization, a statistical generalization. Universal generalizations are sometimes called categorical generalizations.
When someone says, "Generally speaking, adults prefer chocolate ice cream to vanilla ice cream," the word generally here indicates a non-universal generalization. It means most of the time but not necessarily all the time. Ditto for in general and usually.
Generalizations aren't always easy to detect. "A shark can be dangerous" is a generalization about the class of sharks. Generalizations about time are even more difficult to spot. "This grain of salt is water soluble" is a universal generalization about the class of all times, because the speaker is essentially saying that if this specific grain of salt were put in water at any time, it would dissolve.
When the child care worker says, "I caught your baby almost every time I threw him in the air," she is generalizing about the times she threw your baby. Her generalization is
a. universal
b. non-universal
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Answer (b). It is non-universal because it permits exceptions, and that’s a good reason to fire the child care worker.
Suppose you know Jane Austen's street address and you know that your friend Sarah needs to get in touch with her. You and Sarah are citizens of the U.S. and are in Iowa. If Sarah asks you if you know where Jane Austen lives and you say, "I think she lives in the United States," Sarah will think you are weird. Your answer is too general. You are violating the rule of discourse that
Vagueness, ambiguity, and overgenerality are three forms of imprecision. Imprecision, in turn, is intimately connected to lack of sufficient information. For example, when a salesperson describes a music system as "powerful," and "having twice the clarity of the competition," and "being well designed," you are getting a bunch of imprecise descriptions and hardly any information at all. There is a certain safety in imprecision. It's the kind of safety enjoyed by writers of fortunes for Chinese fortune cookies. These fortunes are always sufficiently imprecise that anyone can find a way of making them apply to his or her own life. A fortune says, "You will have success tomorrow." This is surely true, because almost everyone will have some success at something, even if it's only the success of tying one's shoelaces in the morning before getting hit by a truck. Here is an astrological example of safety via imprecision:
Astrologer Judi sees a good year for all Zodiac signs, except that those born under the signs of Scorpio, Taurus, Aquarius, and Leo will remain in a continuing state of transformation—a period of intensity. "My advice to people with these signs is to do what has to be done and do it the very best you can. This will be very important."2
How could you test whether this astrological forecast turned out as predicted? Untestability due to imprecision is one of the negative aspects of astrological predictions.
The value of a precise claim, as opposed to an imprecise one, is that you learn so much more when you learn that it is true. Saying that Latonya is twenty-three years old is more informative than saying she isn't a teenager any more. Putting a number on her age makes the claim more precise and thus more informative. Nevertheless, making a precise claim is riskier than making an imprecise one. If her twenty-third birthday is still a week away, then calling her twenty-three is incorrect but saying she's not a teenager any more is correct.
Another value of precise claims is that they are easier to check. If someone says that the city of Vacaville has ghosts, the person is not being very precise about where or when or how the ghosts appear. As a result, scientists won't pay much attention. However, if someone reports that two ghosts in blue gowns appear at midnight in front of the Vacaville City Hall whenever there is a full moon, this claim is worthier of scientific attention, provided reasonable eyewitness testimony exists to support it. The scientist now has a better idea of how to test this ghost story as opposed to the original, imprecise one. In short, the precise claim is more readily testable, and testability is a scientific virtue.
Bombarding your reader with too many details is a way of covering up information but is not a technique of imprecision.
It's Monday and you are a factory manager who has just sampled some of the resistors manufactured in your electronics factory today. All of them are defective. However, you believe you have detected the cause of the problem, and you have some good ideas about how to fix things for tomorrow. After making those changes, you need to forecast the quality of tomorrow's production of resistors. Which one of the following statements would be most likely to be true?
a. All of Tuesday's total output of resistors will work OK.
b. Most of Tuesday's total output of resistors will work OK.
c. Some of Tuesday's total output of resistors will work OK.
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Because (c) is the least precise, it is also the most likely to be true
The moral again is that there is safety in imprecision.
It's Monday and you are a factory manager who has just sampled some of the resistors manufactured in your electronics factory today. All of them are defective. However, you believe you have detected the cause of the problem, and you have some good ideas about how to fix things for tomorrow. After making those changes, you have to forecast the quality of tomorrow's production of resistors. Which one of the following statements would be most likely to be true?
a. Over 90 percent of Tuesday's total output of resistors will work OK.
b. Exactly 95 percent of Tuesday's total output of resistors will work OK.
c. At least 95 percent of Tuesday's total output of resistors will work OK.
d. 94 to 96 percent of Tuesday's total output of resistors will work OK.
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The least precise answer is (a). Here is another way to think about it. There is more room for success in "90 to 100" than in "at least 95" or in "94 to 96." Notice that answer (a) is not especially vague or ambiguous; the problem is just imprecision, but the kind that doesn’t involve vagueness or ambiguity.
Saying "exactly 95 percent," if it were true, would be much more informative than hedging with "over 90 percent."
1 Is the word tree in "He purchased a tree at the nursery" ambiguous or vague or general? In answer to this question, consider the fact that the word tree could refer to apple tree or maple tree, but that's not ambiguity, because there are not multiple meanings involved, only multiple references. If there were a problem about whether the tree is a phone tree, then there would be ambiguity, but the context here rules out the phone tree. However, the term tree does denote (refer to) a class—the class of trees of which apple and maple are members. So, tree is general even if not ambiguous. Is it also vague? It is vague only insofar as you have trouble with borderline cases. Because we do have trouble telling whether tall shrubs are trees, to that extent the word is vague. Consequently, the answer to our original question is that the term tree is not ambiguous, yet it is both vague and general. However, it is not important for most persons to be skilled at classifying a term this way. That is a skill for philosophers and linguists.
2 This was a real prediction. It is from "Astrologers Make Their Predictions for 1991," by Pat Christensen, The Independent, January 1,1991.