I realized that I made a very important error in my brief description of prejudice. Prejudice is the application of over-generalizations, typically critical, that are inappropriately applied to a group. The cause of the prejudice is based on a superficial characteristic that most of the members of the group do share but the assertions that the critical characteristics can be pinned to the group are made contrary to evidence that only a few members of the group actually exhibit the characteristics or contrary to the lack of evidence that would show almost all the members of the group do exhibit the characteristics.
So prejudice, which is over-generalization based on one or a few superficial characteristics of the group in spite of the evidence of the diversity of the group, will typically be used to apply a list of grievances onto the group as a whole even though the lack of evidence that they all exhibit the undesirable behavior that the grievances highlight is evident. So then one of the earmarks of intellectual prejudice, that is prejudice against a group based on ideas, is that the group is typically mis-characterized as being of one mind. That is, prejudice, based on a single or a few superficial characteristics that the group does share to some extent, is used inappropriately to suggest that all of the members of the group share some other idea in common in spite of evidence to the contrary. However, even if the over-generalization of the group is obvious this does not mean that the intellectual prejudice is intentional. There is also a case for the style of presentation. But when a person doesn't ever try to qualify his remarks or to explain that he gets a criticism about his presentation of obvious over-generalizations, then we can take the this as evidence that his remarks are based, at least to some degree, on superficial prejudice rather than objective evidence and reason to the contrary. Jim Bromer ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=111637683-c8fa51 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
