Example argument: all the people that I have seen selling pirate DVDs in pubs are Chinese, all pirate DVD vendors are Chinese.
Problem: you can’t possibly have been offered a badly cropped, squawky, camcorder, copy of Jennifer Anniston’s latest grief-com by every DVD salesmen in the land, nay the world. You can’t be in every pub at once, besides, you’re banned from some of them. You poor daft racist, the Chinese aren’t the only people that enter this country hiding in the back of a lorry behind a pallet of Spanish tomatoes who can operate a camcorder and a DVD burner in an East London warehouse.
Example argument: every morning I watch the sun rise, so I know it is true that the sun rises every morning.
These are both examples of a converse fallacy of accident, arguing from a special case to a general rule. Even when you talk about something as reliable as a sunrise you can only have observed a subset of all the sunrises, just like the Chinese DVD salesmen, you can not have observed all of the sun rises and you certainly have not observed tomorrow’s, so you can’t possibly know that just because the sun rose this morning that it will rise again tomorrow. Other examples of this fallacy are: every swan I have seen is white, so it must be true that all swans are white. They aren’t. Or every beautiful woman I have seen in a magazine is skinny, so all beautiful women must be skinny (they aren’t).
What I’m getting at here is that you may have beliefs which you hold up to be true from what you have observed that are, on closer examination, just a subset of reality. If you have observed that every time you make love to a woman they wretch, and after scrub their skin raw with scalding hot water, and you think this is how all women make love, think again. I’m glad I did.
