People's political behavior frequently does not match their rhetoric. Although many complain about government interv...

shunhe July 31, 2020

Hi @lsatstudier1,

Thanks for the question! So these words are used in somewhat murky ways, and honestly, they’re interchangeable a good amount of the time. I don’t think that an answer on the LSAT would ever hinge on being able to differentiate between whether something was a principle or a generalization. However, I’d say that principles generally have an “ought/should” component to them, or in other words, a prescriptive component. Often, you can think of them as rules. So a principle would be something like: You should eat three meals a day. Because it’s prescribing a course of action, it’s suggesting one state of affairs as somehow better than others. Generalizations, however, are more likely to just be descriptive, or describing things. So something like “politics is messed up.” You’re making a statement about the way things are, not the way things should be. So while they both share the basic idea of something that applies to more than one situation/entity, that often differentiates the two. I say they’re interchangeable because it wouldn’t be wrong to say that “You should eat three meals a day” is a generalization, so there’s definitely some overlap. It’s possible that principles are a subset of generalizations, but I wouldn’t be too surprised if this wasn’t the case.

Also, I’d say that the first sentence here is a generalization. People’s political behavior frequently doesn’t match their rhetoric. That’s a generalization about people’s political behavior.

Hope this helps! Feel free to ask any other questions that you might have.