The term "false generalization" is correct and can be used in written English.
It is used to describe a statement or belief that is not supported by evidence or is based on incorrect assumptions. Example: It is a false generalization to say that all teenagers are irresponsible. While some may exhibit irresponsible behavior, it is not fair to make a blanket statement about an entire age group.
The false generalization that portrayed huge classes of people as prone to terrorism scared Americans into increasing aid.
"I think that's a false generalization for people who take a very superficial view of clean technology," said Vinod Khosla, the firm's founder.
Replacing utopianism with realism helps to eliminate self-defeating notions in feminist theory, such as false generalization, idealization, and unnecessary dichotomies.
Further, claims that the push for multicultural policies diverts energies, time and resources from the struggle for redistributive policies assume that the pursuit of justice is zero-sum, seemingly a false generalization.
"At this point, the only remaining scientific question appears to be why so many intelligent and well-educated people have so easily--even eagerly--accepted and spread what appear to be fabricated numbers supporting a false generalization," says linguistics professor Mark Liberman of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, who was not involved in the research.
Are fallacies present, especially appeals to the man, authority, fear, antiquity, novelty, pity, crowd, ignorance, self-interest, the fallacy of origins, vicious circle, self-evident truth, tautology, question-begging epithets, irrelevant conclusion, false cause, false generalization, false analogy, unqualified generalization, insufficient options, or complex question?
Can a science rest on false generalizations?
This has critical implications for mainstream epistemological conceptions of knowledge, insofar as the latter are based on false generalizations drawing only from examples of ungendered knowledge.
Moreover, following Haleblian et al.'s (2009) argument, more precisely defining restructuring success avoids misinterpretations and false generalizations in the empirical findings.
So, in response to the objection that experience could lead to false generalizations, Avicenna advises that proper use of experience would include careful attention to the domain of a species, which was subject to repeated observation.
Stereotypes, therefore, may be based on false generalizations derived from very small samples or even from a unique case.
