Literary notes about Generalize (AI summary)
The term "generalize" appears in literature as both a cognitive process and a methodological caution. In some texts, authors highlight a deficiency in forming broader views—Stowe [1] depicts a character who struggles to generalize, while Gross [2] warns against generalizing without considering conflicting cases. Conversely, Coleridge [3] playfully introduces an "uncouth" generalization to encapsulate a recurring defect, and Jones [4] criticizes attempts to derive universal truths from isolated instances. Keller [5] even touches on the evolution of memory into a generalized form, emphasizing personal growth. Meanwhile, James [6][7] employs the term to explain how individual observations can extend to ancient or even cosmic levels of truth, and Durkheim [8] discusses generalizing as a crucial mental operation for discerning commonalities among diverse ideas.
- he had not learned to generalize, and to take enlarged views.
— from Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe - We must not generalize, as Schiel says, until we have shown that if there are cases which contradict our generalizations we know those contradictions.
— from Criminal Psychology: A Manual for Judges, Practitioners, and Students by Hans Gross - The second defect I can generalize with tolerable accuracy, if the reader will pardon an uncouth and new-coined word.
— from Biographia Literaria by Samuel Taylor Coleridge - But having done this, we count it folly to attempt to generalize truth therefrom.
— from Know the Truth: A Critique on the Hamiltonian Theory of Limitation by Jesse Henry Jones - Some of the details she had forgotten, as she grew more and more to generalize.
— from The Story of My Life by Helen Keller - Now Dewey and Schiller proceed to generalize this observation and to apply it to the most ancient parts of truth.
— from Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking by William James - We can vaguely generalize this into the doctrine that all the evil in the universe is but instrumental to its greater perfection.
— from Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking by William James - By his own power, the individual can compare his conceptions and images, disengage that which they have in common, and thus, in a word, generalize.
— from The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life by Émile Durkheim
