Your example would be adequate only in the case that three things are assumed within it.
First, that the person applying the judgment experienced that particular culture
in vacuo, and as a consequence, was abstracted away from all other means of receiving knowledge about that culture
prior to experiencing it. If we were speaking about a small tribal village in Papa New Guinea, your point is well made, most certainly.
Second, and related to the above, all possible knowledge of a given culture would need to come
a posteriori by necessity, as you are apparently excluding all other avenues of obtaining information about a given culture and making a judgment thereon. Again, if we are speaking about a small tribal village in Papa New Guinea with no access to media forms, your point is well made.
Third, and most importantly, your example only holds true in the case that the individual engaging in the judgment was completely incapable of applying basic reasoning to avoid a fallacy of composition. It is a basic, intuitively valid component of abstract reason that what is true of the individual constituents is not
necessarily true of the whole.
In your example, despite the fact that my experience is limited to the people on
this side of the hill, it is entirely possible and moreover probable that I have and/or am able to obtain knowledge about people on
that side of the hill - at least to the point where I could conclude that, low and behold, not all people are the same! And again, this is assuming I am unable to develop that incredibly basic component of logic on my own.
Now, none of these are the case in this
particular discussion, and so your argument holds no weight. More on this below.
Not at all, D. I am suggesting
abstention from making a judgment in such cases where sufficient knowledge has not been obtained to substantiation it: or in other words, I'm saying the precise opposite of what you claim. In the example above, I obtained enough knowledge about people on the other side of the hill to realize I was unable to make any type of judgment about them whatsoever.
I'm not criticizing anybody for forming
a particular judgment, about
particular Muslims, just so long as the judgment is contained in the context of their
direct experience. See, that is how
a posteriori knowledge works, D: one gains knowledge about a particular object through direct experience and is therefore able to apply that
highly individuated knowledge to similar experiences with said objects.
In the case of categorically defined objects - that is, objects which by definition have only certain characteristics, and are something else entirely if they lack those characteristics - we are able to apply that
a posteriori knowledge to scenarios beyond the scope of our experience. Again, this is intuitively valid, as a square is by definition always a square, and we are therefore able to say, "1 square = all squares." With people, not so much.
If I meet a Muslim from Morocco, and he's an *******, I am unable to mold that experience into any other truth claim beyond, "This
particular Muslim is an *******." Now, if I met a large sample of Muslims from Morocco and conversed with them thoroughly enough to form an opinion about their individual personalities, I would in that case be able to make a reasonable judgment about
most and/or all Muslims from Morocco being *******s without committing a fallacy of composition. This is commonly called, "evidence" and/or "justification."
Alternatively - and keeping with my sticky little notion of knowledge coming from other avenues than experiencing an object
directly - if one studied the tenets of all the separate derivations of Islam, studied the Qu'ran, and studied the cultures in which Islam is predominantly expressed in order to abstract away from behavioral tendencies which are geographically influenced, they would have sufficient justification for making a statement about the
religion of Islam.
See, my "special" rubric is intuitively valid logic, D.
