"You can't generalize." How many times have you heard that? And yet, interesting how saying this broadly, without qualification, that "you can't generalize," is in and of itself a generalization! This kind of internal self-refutation abounds. For example:

• One of the general assumptions of much of "Post Modern" thinking is that viewpoint is paramount, that "objective" "knowledge" is an illusion, that you can't really ever be definitive. Of course, this assertion is in and of itself magically immune to this general truism for the proponents of this paradigm. An outsider might ask whether or not the assertion itself might be a subjective "truth" that might not hold universally across time & space? Certainly this seems to open up a clean wedge in favor of some sort of operational objectivity.
  
• The logical positivists, who still color much of the thinking of scientists though their philosophical system has long gone into decline often held to the "verification principle," that for a sentence to have meaning it must be empirically verifiable (read scientifically: for a hypothesis to have meaning it must be testable). But how exactly do you verify the verification principle?
  
• A common argument for the existence of God asserts that God is the "Uncaused cause." The term "uncaused cause" is rather bizarre, and no doubt wrapped up in a transcendent truth (to god-believers), but the problem is that one is solving the conundrum of causational regression by violating the assumption itself (all effects need a cause). Certainly a divine mystery of logic if ever there was one....
  

My point is not to throw cold water on all these assertions and drown them in their own internal inconsistency. There is something to the idea that one should qualify and not overgeneralize in all circumstances. Subjective viewpoint is one reason that scientists demand reproducibility. Sentences often are very fertile when one can examine their meaning in the light of evidence "out there" as opposed to the inner world of cognition. As for God, well, the idea obviously appeals to the common-sense intuition of many people. My overall point is that one can have too much of a good thing, and taking a common sense assertion narrowly and judiciously applied and using it as the brick upon which your inverted pyramid of a paradigm rests is intellectually seductive, but in the finality futile. All these "systems" tend to come crashing down because human logical systems always seem to beg questions and assert unprovable axioms (pity Russell & Whitehead for toiling on Principia Mathematica before Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem). In the realm of practical reality people know how to apply these general guidelines in their own lives, scientists understand the importance of verification (or falsification), scholars the dangers of overgeneralization, religious people the importance of some element of reason to give firmness to their faith and everyone the reality of subjectivity. But when these tools, these means toward a fully-fleshed out mental universe become the ends, "idols" so to speak, they birth monsters of the mind. We should be wary of the beasts that come out of the dark depths of our logical mind, because in many ways we are but fish at the bottom of the pond philosophizing about the reflections of flotsom careening above us. The tools listed above are the midwives that aid in the birthing of ideas and handmaids in their maturation, they should never occupy the full expanse of our mindspace.