Beyond Feelings - Vincent Ruggiero [81]
The evidence, for example, may be insufficient to say with certainty that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer or that viewing television violence definitely harms people. Nevertheless, there is sufficient evidence on both issues to warrant your judgment about probable cause-effect relationships.
Whenever you cannot achieve certainty focus on probability.
MAKE YOUR SUBJECT APPROPRIATELY SPECIFIC
The subject in a careful judgment is appropriately specific. Consider these sentences:
Today's college students are less proficient in grammar and usage than their counterparts were ten years ago.
Today's U.S. college students are less proficient in grammar and usage than their counterparts were ten years ago.
Today's U.S. two-year college students are less proficient in grammar and usage than their counterparts were ten years ago.
Today's students at this college are less proficient in grammar and usage than their counterparts were ten years ago.
If the evidence covers only students at a particular college, only the last judgment can be sound. The other three are too generalized. To avoid this kind of error in your writing and speaking, choose the subjects of your judgments with care.
MAKE YOUR PREDICATE EXACT
The predicate in a careful judgment asserts exactly what you want to assert. Compare these sentences:
Peace has been achieved.
Peace can be achieved.
Peace must be achieved.
Peace should be achieved.
Peace could be achieved.
Peace will be achieved.
Though these sentences are very similar in construction, their meanings are very different. Unless we deliberately choose ambiguity (in which case we should expect to cause confusion), we should choose our predicates judiciously. A good example of what confusion can result is shown in the sentence that triggered theological debate in the 1960s: "God is dead." It made a nice slogan, but exactly what did it mean? Taking it by itself, a person would have great difficulty answering. In addition to the obvious possibility, "There is no supreme being," there are at least seven others:
People no longer want to believe God exists.
People are no longer able to believe God exists.
People are no longer certain God exists.
People no longer act as if God exists.
People no longer care whether God exist.
People no longer accept some particular conception of God.
People are no longer satisfied with the limitation of traditional human expressions of belief in God's existence.
Anyone who wished the message to be understood would have been better off using whichever of the above sentences (or some other) expressed the judgment clearly rather than saying, "God is dead."
INCLUDE ALL APPROPRIATE QUALIFICATIONS
Saying that something usually happens is different from saying that it frequently happens or that it happens every other Tuesday. The more care you take to make the qualifications necessary to say what you wish, no more and no less, the more defensible your judgment is likely to be. And that includes not only qualifications of time but those of place and condition as well. In the judgment "American men over forty who never attended college tend to be opposed to the idea of women's liberation advocated by the National Organization for Women" (which may or may not be true), almost every word is a qualification. It says: a) not all men but American men; b) not members of all age groups and educational levels but those over forty who never attended college; c) not the idea of women's liberation in general but the idea advocated by the National Organization for Women.
AVOID EXAGGERATION
Most of us know one or more people for whom every occasion "memorable," every problem is a "crisis," every enjoyable film