No True Scotsman

The No True Scotsman (NTS) fallacy is a logical fallacy that occurs when a debater defends the generalization of a group by excluding counter-examples from it. For example, it is common to argue that "all members of [my religion] are fundamentally good", and then to discard all bad individuals as "not true [my-religion]-people". This can occur in two ways:

  1. During argument, someone re-defines the group in order to exclude counter-examples. Instead of backing down from "all groupmembers are X" to "most groupmembers are X", the debater simply redefines the group.[2][3]
  2. Before the argument, someone preemptively defines some group such that the group definitionally must be entirely "good" or entirely "bad". However, this definition was created made up arbitrarily for this defensive purpose, rather than based on the actual qualities of the group.[4]

Cogito ergo sum
Logic and rhetoric
Key articles
General logic
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v - t - e
Not to be confused with Definitional fallacies, when the initial definition of a term is ambiguous or useless. Also not to be confused with True Scotsman,File:Wikipedia's W.svg when Scots get skimpy with clothing.
“”Real unicorns have curves!
—Real articles have opening quotes![1]

One can think of NTS as a form of inverted cherry picking, where instead of selecting favourable examples, one rejects unfavourable ones. The NTS fallacy paves the path to other logical fallacies, such as letting the "best" member of a group representing it. Thanks to these remarkable qualities, the NTS fallacy has proved a vital tool in the promotion of denialism.

In short: different sides in an argument should agree on a definition and stick to it...

Origin

The coining of the term is attributed to professor Antony Flew,[5] who gave an example of a Scotsman who, in his 1975 book Thinking About Thinking, wrote;[6]

“”Imagine Hamish McDonald, a Scotsman, sitting down with his Glasgow Morning Herald and seeing an article about how the "Brighton Sex Maniac Strikes Again". Hamish is shocked and declares that "No Scotsman would do such a thing". The next day he sits down to read his Glasgow Morning Herald again; and, this time, finds an article about an Aberdeen man whose brutal actions make the Brighton sex maniac seem almost gentlemanly. This fact shows that Hamish was wrong in his opinion, but is he going to admit this? Not likely. This time he says: "No true Scotsman would do such a thing".

Thus, when McDonald is confronted with evidence of a Scotsman doing similar acts, his response is that "no true Scotsman would do such a thing". This denies membership in the group "Scotsman" to the criminal on the basis that the commission of a heinous crime is evidence for him not having been a Scotsman (or at least a "true" Scotsman) in the first place.

This reasoning is clearly fallacious, as there exists no premise in the definition of "Scotsman" which makes such acts impossible.

Form

P1: All X are Y.
P2: Clearly, not all X are Y.
C: All true X are Y.

In practice, application of the NTS fallacy is far more subtle than this, but the line of thinking always boils down to a denialistic attitude towards counterexamples.

Retroactive use

When used in the past tense, NTS can also be used to retroactively disqualify group membership based on future wrongdoing. In this scenario, the axiom becomes "having done something bad just proves how you never really were a member of this group in the first place", a statement as comfortably shallow and devoid of meaning as answering a question regarding which sports team you're rooting for in a game as "the team that wins".

Exceptions

NTS is a fuzzily-defined fallacy, because the nature of "groups" themselves is fuzzy. It's hard to definitively say where one group ends and another begins (think Catholics versus Protestants: how many Catholic traditions does one have to follow to be Catholic?). Thus, there are some notable exceptions to NTS.

Well-defined Scotsman

Noteworthy is that the fallacy does not occur if there is a clear and well-understood definition of what membership in a group requires, and it is that definition which is broken (e.g., "no honest man would lie" or "no theist can be an atheist" and so on). Thus, the NTS fallacy only occurs if the group is later redefined for no valid reason.

Consistency

NTS places no restrictions on whether a definition is sensible or not. NTS only concerns if a definition is applied consistently or not.

Examples

In religion
“”No man can ever be opposed to Christianity who knows what it really is.
—Henry Drummond, The Spiritual Writings of Henry Drummond

With respect to religion, the fallacy is well used, often even overused. Religious apologists will repeatedly try to use NTS to distance themselves from more extreme or fundamentalist groups (and vice versa), but this does not prevent such extremists from actually being religious — they themselves would certainly argue otherwise. Moderate Muslim leaders, for example, are well known for declaring Islamic extremists as "not true Muslims" as Islam is a "Religion of Peace".

Similarly, moderate Christians, such as those in Europe, are sometimes aghast when viewing their fundamentalist counterparts in the United States, immediately declaring them "not True Christians™", even though they believe in the same God and get their belief system from the same book. Many of these statements claiming that the extremists are not true believers are often used as a reaction against Guilt by Association. The NTS fallacy likewise occurs when believers attribute any and all good fortune to divine intervention on their behalf, yet insist that the same can never be true when things go awry.

The NTS fallacy can also run the other way when it comes to extremism. Extremists will make a religious statement, and when someone points out that there are many believers who don't believe the extremist's viewpoint, the moderates are deemed not to be true believers (i.e., Christians who support gay marriage or accept evolution as fact are not "real Christians" or Muslims who support women's rights are not "real Muslims"). Modern pagans do it all the time, perhaps even more than other religions, due to the fact that there is no agreed-on orthodoxy for the whole group, with some well-established practices in one setting being considered unpalatable in others. Silver Ravenwolf, one of the best-selling "leaders" of neopagans, has done this with multiple ancient, well-established practices.

It's a tricky business, as being a member of a religious group, to the minds of those involved, encompasses adhering to a certain standard of behavior. For example, charity can certainly be called an essentially Christian ethic, considering the emphasis that Jesus placed on it. The man himself would most definitely disavow the greedy and "What's mine is mine" mindset of many right-wingers who call themselves Christians. However, strictly speaking, a Christian is defined as "one who professes belief in the teachings of Jesus Christ"; there's no rule saying they have to do it right.

In non-religion

Atheists can also be guilty of the fallacy, such as someone hypothetically exclaiming that "true atheists" don't believe in ghosts or UFOs when such disbelief actually has nothing to do with atheism.

In politics
“”Argentina was then under the rule of these neo-Nazi generals, and I was sent La Prensa from Buenos Aires, the big newspaper in Argentina−there was a big article saying, "You can't read this guy's linguistics because it's Marxist and subversive." The same week I got an article from Izvestia in the Soviet Union which said, "You can't read this guy's linguistics because he's idealist and counter-revolutionary." I thought that was pretty nice.
—Noam Chomsky[7]

Language-users can use NTS to uphold positive, neutral, or negative stereotypes by portraying people who do not conform to them as exceptions. For example, note the claim that feminists, being "well-educated and having strong opinions about gender issues", do not speak for "typical" women. NTS also commonly occurs as a form of name-calling (e.g. "Real men eat meat", "Real Americans don't question the existence of God", "Real artists don't use a computer", etc.)

Phrases such as "un-American", "un-Christian", "un-Islamic" or "inhuman" are widely used in politics and media to distance oneself from a subject, defining them as outside the bounds of what the speaker regards as truly "American", "Christian", "Muslim" or "human" behaviour. Such phrases strongly suggest NTS is in use, since the use, for example of "un-American" to describe specific political activities by some American citizens implies some special definition of "American" beyond mere nationality.

In recent years with the advent of the Tea Party Movement circa 2009, the label "Republican in name only" (RINO) has come into more prominence from people who want to disassociate from certain fellow-supporters of the Grand Old Party. The trouble with this phrase is that it is not useful at all - its use tends to be a replacement for "Republican I don't agree with, despite being in the same party". People who use this phrase tend to throw it even if there is only one issue the supposed RINO doesn't toe the party line on, such as being pro-choice. The term of art Cuckservative has similarly been used for otherwise conservative persons who believe that racial and gender inequality persists in the United States. This also exists on the other side of the Great U.S. Political Divide as well, but having terms that identify subgroups like Blue Dog Democrat is far less damning and more useful.

Speaking of feminists, multiple feminists claim that TERFs are not real feminists due to their transphobic beliefs and because not only do they refuse to support trans women's rights, but they also campaign against trans women. This is in spite of the fact that those same TERFs were hailed as Feminists years prior to their outspoken transphobia. TERFs are still to be considered as feminists since they still support cis women's rights, which was the basis of the movement several decades ago.

Another recent example that has become common on social media is when someone posits a somewhat politically conservative ill-considered idea, is called a boomer, but turns out to be younger, resulting in the reply "boomer is a mindset". However, this fallacy is not limited to the right side of politics: for instance, a common meme among radical leftists is that the Soviet Union wasn't "a real attempt to achieve socialism", even though it was clearly the objective of the state to own the means of production, just as is dictated by Marx. You can decry the crimes of the Soviet Union (like the Holodomor) without resorting to fallacies to deny that it was actually a socialist regime.

In autism
“”This separation between real autistics and people who are "just quirky," "just awkward," or "almost too high-functioning to count" is a mental dance that non-autistics have to do whenever they're confronted with a three-dimensional autistic human being in the flesh. Otherwise everything they've ever thought, everything they've ever been told about us, starts to seem a little monstrous.
—Sarah Kurchak[8]

The No True Scotsman fallacy may be used to dismiss autistic advocates who dare to point out that groups like Autism Speaks are doing more harm than good to the demographic they represent. When they say "I'm autistic and X is harmful to us," detractors reply "You're not autistic, because..."[9]

  • "real autistics can't speak for themselves/use social media/stand up to me."
  • "real autistics live lives of constant suffering and sadness."
  • "real autistics hate themselves and want a cure for autism so they can stop being burdens."

Then, the anti-autism advocates claim that the person is simply "too high-functioning" to understand the horrible constant suffering of the "low-functioning" people, and thus their entire argument is invalid. This might lead to an autistic person feeling pressured to describe their impairments in detail to prove their autism, even though this could harm the autistic person socially or professionally.[10]

Never mind the fact that you don't have to be autistic at all to recognize that a lot of so-called "autism advocacy" and "autism organizations" are downright horrible to autistic people.

And if an autistic person with obvious impairments protests against ableism, they may say that the person either (a) is too stupid to know better, or (b) is either faking disability or being used as a puppet via facilitated communication.

In any case, the only "true" autistics are apparently the ones who are willing to shut up and be grateful for whatever attention/abuse that non-autistic people are willing to bestow upon them.

In vaccines
From the Vaccines Work blog

See also.

Inverse Scotsman

All the above being said, one should be wary of an "inverse Scotsman": Taking an (usually extreme) example of a self-proclaimed "Scotsman" as typical of the class. To provide one example, "I don't like Christians, because Bob says he's a Christian, and he lies, murders, and steals" would probably not be very sound, since in the context of Christianity, Bob is probably not a very good at being a Christian (what with all the lying, murdering and stealing). Further, if the objection also includes "Bob also argued against the divinity of Jesus Christ", that would probably add a great deal of validity to the "Bob's not actually a Christian" claim.

Such is particularly necessary in political science, where the problem of self-proclaimed "Socialists", "Libertarians", "Conservatives" and so on who aren't actually all that whatever they claim to be can be particularly acute.[11]

gollark: > Neo-KiteismCan you *explain* neokiteism?
gollark: Yes. Yes it is.
gollark: Anarchoprimitivism: for when you want to die of preventable diseases after living a life where you had to hunter-gather all day with no modern conveniences!
gollark: Oh, anarchoprimitivists.
gollark: Anarcho-anarchism?

See also

References
  1. Real quotes have sources!
  2. https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/no-true-scotsman
  3. http://www.logicallyfallacious.com/index.php/logical-fallacies/136-no-true-scotsman
  4. "‘No True Scotsman’ Fallacy". logicalfallacies.info.
  5. http://www.scotsman.com/news/obituaries/obituary-professor-antony-flew-1-79991
  6. Flew, Antony (1975), Thinking About Thinking: Do I Sincerely Want to Be Right?, London: Collins Fontana, p. 47, ISBN 978-0-00-633580-1
  7. Chomsky, Understanding Power p.210, The New York Press (2002).
  8. Real Autism - Hazlitt
  9. Autism Speaks and the No True Scotsman Fallacy - This Mess
  10. I'm Not "High-Functioning" - Autistic Dreams

ru:Ненастоящий шотландец

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