I think (not feel) that anecdotes often provide weight and potency to posited points. We must be vigilant, however, to use them as support for and not instead of reasoned evidence or sustained systematic research, lest we thereby slip into an anecdotal fallacy.
IEP on Anecdotal Fallacy:
"This is fallacious generalizing on the basis of a some story that provides an inadequate sample."
A single instance from experiences past is insufficient and inadequate to demonstrate nigh any hypothesis.
"This is fallacious generalizing on the basis of a some story that provides an inadequate sample."
ReplyDeleteSounds suspiciously like an instance of what it criticizes.
I'm confused. I hope this does not come across as flippant, but how so?
ReplyDeleteResearch often excludes certain groups to the point where they are underrepresented or not represented at all. Using anecdotal evidence to support a claim is sometimes the only way certain experiences can be heard and recognized. I agree with you that using anecdotal evidence alone isn't a great way to present an argument, but sometimes it is the only way for certain truths to be acknowledged in the public sphere.
ReplyDeleteEmily's comment is to the point. Science makes something of a fetish of statistically significant results from a controlled experiment, but a great deal of what we need to know cannot, for various reasons, be be subjected to such a test. Nor are such results infallible -- witness the frequency with which a new study, or a re-evaluated theoretical framework, calls earlier results into question. Epistemically, scientific findings of this sort are de facto glorified anecdotes themselves -- somewhat less hasty generalizations, and valuable for that reason, but generalizations nonetheless that very often turn out to have been over-hasty.
ReplyDeleteI was the one being flippant. Since the sentence quoted from IEP give no context, the antecedent of "this" is wide open -- so the alleged fallacy is only a raw claim, or anecdote, itself begging the question of the adequacy of the sample. It could have claimed that "[Epistemically] inadequate samples are inadequate," but that would be no better...