Refraction (Bent Thinking) #4
Group Think Fallacy: Making a claim that a collective of people all think a certain way. This is one very big error that people make on a regular basis. Refutation: Communities or collectives of people cannot think. Organizations cannot think. A small group of people cannot think. Only individual people think… and no two people think alike… and no two people “think” together. All thoughts are individual. At best you can say person A and person B claimed the same thing – but only if you know that they have actually said that. Example: It is improper to say “Conservatives think so and so”, or “Liberals think such and such.” It would me more appropriate to say that, “Joe Blow said so and so.” When talking about communities or collectives, the safest thing to do is find a specific “official” stated position by the group’s mouthpiece or publication and argue against that. Even then, you can only make the claim that it is the official party line. You have to assume that some individuals within that community may take differing stands than the official party line.
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For His Glory,
Jim