Editor,
In a letter published in the Daily Lobo on Wednesday, Laura Perlichek wrote about the recent protests by medical students against the exhibit of skinned, plasticized human bodies.
Concerning the protesters' statements that the exhibit ought to be boycotted because the public doesn't know if the bodies have been illegally obtained from China, Perlichek wrote, "This may just be my inner English major speaking out, but isn't this what we refer to in the compositional world as hasty generalization?"
Perlichek certainly had a valid point in sensing something logically awry with the protesters' statements. But she was completely wrong about precisely which logical fallacy they've been engaging in.
A hasty generalization, according to Lewis Vaughn's The Power of Critical Thinking, is "the fallacy of drawing a conclusion about a target group based on an inadequate sample size."
An example of a hasty generalization would be to say that since English major Perlichek doesn't understand logical fallacies very well, then all English majors don't understand logical fallacies - obviously not a safe assumption to make.
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A more accurate condemnation of the student protesters' statements would be to say that the students' statement - since we can't prove the bodies didn't come through illegal means, we might as well assume they did - is a clear example of an appeal to ignorance.
An appeal to ignorance, again as defined by Vaughn, is "the fallacy of arguing that a lack of evidence proves something. In one type of this fallacy, the problem arises by thinking that a claim must be true because it hasn't been shown to be false."
No further example of an appeal to ignorance is needed here, because the medical students' claim about these bodies' origins is a perfect one.
Is the exhibit a bit grotesque? Well, yeah. Is it enough to start a lot more people thinking - as they gaze upon the spectacle of flayed corpses playing tennis and jumping hurdles - about cremation? It is for me.
The students' request that the exhibit's creators and exhibitors have a responsibility to publicly account for where exactly they obtained their cadavers seems to be a reasonable one, but it's hardly enough, as it stands right now, to build a strong argument around.
It's a logically fallacious statement, for sure, but not a hasty generalization.
Mike Smith
UNM student
