anti-inductive situations: forum for week of 17 October

It's a shame that there is a lack of a question this week. I can easily provide an example, but rather of my own experience, I'd like to present a story which I have learned from a past "Theory of Knowledge" teacher. In his childhood, he lived in a small-town in Edmonton. It was a population of a few hundred or so at the most, and as expected, was relatively isolated. Further more, there were only Caucasians living in this town. One day, he and his family go to a much larger town (as a trip I believe), and there he notices performers (dancers I believe!) who seem to have dark skin. He had never seen anyone with a darker skin color before, and thus had trouble reconciling what he was seeing with his experiences. He then noticed that the dancer's palms were white, and much lighter than the rest of their skin. He came to the false, (though arguably, justified) conclusion that the skin must have been painted on, and the sweat of the palms must have cleaned off some of the paint.

In this example, he is taking a small sample (his hometown) and extrapolating the data to a much larger community. Thus, in a town where there seem to be no Africans, the rate of African occurrence is zero, and extrapolated would mean that no Africans exist. Of course, this is false, and just another example of how limited data, and mindless extrapolation can easily lead to error in knowledge.

JamesWu 21:39, 19 October 2011 (PDT)

I originally had a question, but its hard to formulate over text. Perhaps if I become more lucid in my text, I will try to repost the question.