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Word for "drawing a decisive conclusion about a phenomenon according to specific personal experience"

English Language & Usage Asked by user31961 on December 4, 2020

What is a single word for “drawing a decisive conclusion about a phenomenon according to specific personal experience”?

I often encounter people who can follow a pattern like that in an argument:

A: What do you think about the new X cell phone?

B: My sister bought one, and she could not operate it, so it’s not
user friendly.

It’s not only generalization, but also taking a case that you are familiar with and making conclusions about a certain object according to that case even if the conclusion is not relevant or connected.

4 Answers

"Hearsay", besides the legal definition, describes the scenario you described:

  1. Unverified information heard or received from another; rumor.
  2. Law Evidence based on the reports of others rather than the personal knowledge of a witness and therefore generally not admissible as testimony.

From the freedictionary.com

Answered by Kristina Lopez on December 4, 2020

This Wikipedia article calls it Hasty generalization, but if I were A in OP's example I'd say...

You can't generalise from the particular.

I don't understand why OP says his example is "not only generalization", since that's precisely (and only) what it is. Which arguably makes the question itself pointless, but I'm posting this answer because future visitors might find it after searching for words in the question title.

Answered by FumbleFingers on December 4, 2020

This is similar to the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy: basing a conclusion on a single instance. It doesn't matter whether it's true (it's true that the woman in the OP's example sentence found it not user-friendly), false (Reagan's "welfare queen"), or merely hearsay. A single instance of event A followed by event B doesn't prove anything: it merely illustrates a correlation or coincidence.

It's also called "the fallacy of anecdotal evidence" and "the cherry picking fallacy".

Answered by user21497 on December 4, 2020

The word you are looking for is anecdotal.

Anecdotal (adj): (of an account) not necessarily true or reliable, because based on personal accounts rather than facts or research.

Example: Historic accounts of this era give no indication of any negative impact to fish populations and in fact, anecdotal accounts reflect quite the opposite.

[Lexico]

Answered by Murray Fischer on December 4, 2020

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