Sweeping Statements

SWEEPING STATEMENTS

People are prone to making sweeping statements. See, I just did it myself. What did I mean? Did I mean that all people are prone to making sweeping statements? Do I mean some people are? This is certainly true, but hardly a very emphatic statement. Do I mean that most people are? I think everyone I know is, but I’ve only met a tiny proportion of all people, so really I should just say “Everyone I know is prone to making sweeping statements”. I have now refined my statement and made it less ambiguous, hence more defensible using logic. The way I did it was by refining its scope. Refining your scope means being precise about what world of objects you are focusing on.

“Mozart is more boring than Brahms” is a sweeping statement that many people would disagree with. Whereas “In my opinion Mozart is more boring than Brahms” is now just a statement about my taste, so nobody can logically disagree with it. It would be even more precise to say “In my opinion almost all Mozart is more boring than almost all Brahms.” I can probably think of one example of a piece of Mozart that I think is less boring than one example of a piece of Brahms: for example, I am not a huge fan of Brahms’s second symphony but I like Mozart’s Masonic Funeral Music. Whereas I can make a sweeping statement “The macarons in Paris are much better than the macarons in Chicago” by which I mean “In my experience every macaron I have bought in Paris was better than every macaron I have bought in Chicago.” Harsh, but true. Also impossible for someone other than me to refute logically.

“Almost all” is a form of qualifier that has a whole related family, like “most”, “some”. If you qualify a statement with one of those, together with perhaps “In my experience”, you can almost never be wrong. (See?) “Perhaps” also works, along with “probably”, “maybe” and “might”. Carefully qualified statements with these words are very precise in their correctness, but do not make good headlines, so unfortunately the media tends to overstate everything. “New research shows that sugar causes cancer!” screams a headline, but if you look at the research what it shows is that there is evidence to suggest that there might be some kind of a connection between sugar consumption and cancer. We could also add “seems”, as in “It seems like there might be some kind of a connection between sugar and cancer.”

Looking for the truth in someone’s statement can be much more productive than pedantically demonstrating that they are wrong. I think this is an instance of the principle of charity, where you try to think the best of everyone all the time. Finding truth in someone’s sweeping statement by applying the right qualifiers can lead to greater understanding of what people are trying to say and where disagreements are coming from.

For example, in a typical argument about homeopathy, someone says that there is no evidence that homeopathy works, and someone else insists that homeopathic remedies make them feel better. These statements may concern different comparisons: evidence of effectiveness beyond placebo and a person’s experience of feeling better. The report of improvement alone does not establish what caused it. So the anti-homeopathy person is comparing homeopathy with placebo, whereas the pro-homeopathy person may be comparing their experience with doing nothing. “No better than placebo” does not contradict “better than nothing”, so the claims need not logically conflict. People may still disagree about the evidence, cost, or value of something described as “just” placebo.