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People shouting 'fallacy' when there is no fallacy

No True Scotsman is the one I find most annoyingly misused. Any group has at least one probably more defining characteristics that they must share to be part of the group, for example Scotsmen must be human and either have Scottish parentage or have been born in Scotland. This is irrefutable, because otherwise the term Scotsman is meaningless, and can be applied to literally anything at all. However, if you claim that a group must do or think something that is an absolutely intrinsic part of being a member of that group, someone here will shout "No True Scotsman!" at you.
 
I've always thought of the True Scotsman and the Straw Man as flip sides of each other...the Straw Man fallaciously attributes an undesirable characteristic, whereas the True Scotsman fallaciously disavows an undesirable characteristic.
 
MarkCorrigan said:
No True Scotsman is the one I find most annoyingly misused. Any group has at least one probably more defining characteristics that they must share to be part of the group, for example Scotsmen must be human and either have Scottish parentage or have been born in Scotland. This is irrefutable, because otherwise the term Scotsman is meaningless, and can be applied to literally anything at all. However, if you claim that a group must do or think something that is an absolutely intrinsic part of being a member of that group, someone here will shout "No True Scotsman!" at you.
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gnome said:
I've always thought of the True Scotsman and the Straw Man as flip sides of each other...the Straw Man fallaciously attributes an undesirable characteristic, whereas the True Scotsman fallaciously disavows an undesirable characteristic.
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No True Strawman argument would fallaciously attribute an undesirable characteristic...

Damn, you're right Mark.
 
MarkCorrigan said:
No True Scotsman is the one I find most annoyingly misused. Any group has at least one probably more defining characteristics that they must share to be part of the group, for example Scotsmen must be human and either have Scottish parentage or have been born in Scotland. This is irrefutable, because otherwise the term Scotsman is meaningless, and can be applied to literally anything at all. However, if you claim that a group must do or think something that is an absolutely intrinsic part of being a member of that group, someone here will shout "No True Scotsman!" at you.
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Interestingly, there is no entry for the No True Scotsman fallacy in the Fallacy Files.

I think when used properly, it's the same as (or at least a subcategory of) Moving the Goalposts. I guess it's a bit more than that since it involves excluding from the definition of the class exactly the characteristic being debated. (In that way it's more similar to the flaw in the Ontological Proof of the existence of God--which predicates existence, or makes that a characteristic included in the definition when that is the point being debated--as such it is just question begging.)

I think your criticism, Mark, points out that the common misuse of it is the commission of the Division or Composition Fallacy (thinking the parts should all have the same characteristics as the whole and vice versa, respectively).
 
JoeTheJuggler said:
(In that way it's more similar to the flaw in the Ontological Proof of the existence of God--which predicates existence, or makes that a characteristic included in the definition when that is the point being debated--as such it is just question begging.)
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1. All gods are liars.
2. I am a liar.
3. Therefore I am god.

Simple!COUNT_THE_FALLACIES
 
stilicho said:
1. All gods are liars.
2. I am a liar.
3. Therefore I am god.

Simple!COUNT_THE_FALLACIES
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I only see one fallacy (remember, false premises and question begging are not fallacies). That one is affirming the antecedent. Note this argument takes the same form as

P1. if P then Q
P2. Q
C. Therefore P

(P="One is a god" Q="one is a liar")

ETA: If your example was meant to lead to a conclusion about the existence of god--and it doesn't mention anything about existence--then I would say it is question begging. For it to conclude anything about the existence of gods, liars or even "I" (which is just an example of a possible member of either of those classes), it must first hypothesize existence in a premise. For example, you could get from "I am a god" (using that conclusion as a premise) with the second premise "I exist" to reach the conclusion "a god exists". That argument is valid, but it is merely question begging. You're assuming a god exists in order to reach the conclusion that a god exists. It's a validating argument in that you could put anything there in place of god--dragons, unicorns, etc.--and it would still be valid, but not necessarily sound.
 
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JoeTheJuggler said:
I only see one fallacy (remember, false premises and question begging are not fallacies). That one is affirming the antecedent. Note this argument takes the same form as

P1. if P then Q
P2. Q
C. Therefore P

(P="One is a god" Q="one is a liar")

ETA: If your example was meant to lead to a conclusion about the existence of god--and it doesn't mention anything about existence--then I would say it is question begging. For it to conclude anything about the existence of gods, liars or even "I" (which is just an example of a possible member of either of those classes), it must first hypothesize existence in a premise. For example, you could get from "I am a god" (using that conclusion as a premise) with the second premise "I exist" to reach the conclusion "a god exists". That argument is valid, but it is merely question begging. You're assuming a god exists in order to reach the conclusion that a god exists. It's a validating argument in that you could put anything there in place of god--dragons, unicorns, etc.--and it would still be valid, but not necessarily sound.
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I try to be internally consistent if not necessarily sound all the time so that might be the key. Performance review time is coming up so I'll keep it mind.
 
JoeTheJuggler said:
Interestingly, there is no entry for the No True Scotsman fallacy in the Fallacy Files.

I think when used properly, it's the same as (or at least a subcategory of) Moving the Goalposts. I guess it's a bit more than that since it involves excluding from the definition of the class exactly the characteristic being debated.
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The odd thing about the No True Scotsman fallacy is that it isn't, properly speaking, a fallacious means of arriving at a specific conclusion from a given set of premises, and therefore isn't really a fallacy at all. The fallacy of moving the goalposts is a little different in that it involves setting a threshold of proof for a claim, then redefining that threshold if it appears that the orignal one will be achieved. The No True Scotsman fallacy, contrastingly, changes the conclusion to a different one than was originally proposed.

The classic formulation is something like:
Person A: I know a Scotsman who puts sugar on his porridge.
B: That's impossible. Scotsmen don't put sugar on their porridge.
A: Well, my friend Angus McTavish, who was born in Scotland, puts sugar on his porridge.
B: Then he isn't a true Scotsman, because no true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge.

What's interesting here is that B is no longer disputing A's claim that he knows a Scotsman who puts sugar on his porridge; rather, he is claiming that Angus McTavish, though possibly a Scotsman, is not a member of a the newly-defined set of True Scotsmen, defined as the subset of Scotsmen who never put sugar on their porridge. Since it's already stipulated that Angus McTavish is not a member of that set, then the conclusion is in fact correct within the definition specified - in fact, as the definition is tautological, it cannot be incorrect.

So the No True Scotsman fallacy isn't, I don't think, a fallacy at all. Rather, it's a means of derailing an argument, in which the person employing it goes off at a tangent to prove a tautology that has no relevance to the original claim.

Which, I suspect, makes all that I've written above an extremely complex and roundabout version of the No True Scotsman fallacy.

Dave
 
I must disagree... here's another way of looking at it... it's equivocating on Scotsman, changing the meaning from someone who was born in Scotland, to someone who was born in Scotland and conforms to ad-hoc norms. So it could be a subset of fallacy of equivocation.

It's clear in the example (especially since it is claimed to be 'impossible') that the porridge Nazi wants the meaning of Scotsman initially to be taken only as "Born in Scotland" without further examination, and then backpedals when given a counterexample.
 
Dave Rogers said:
The odd thing about the No True Scotsman fallacy is that it isn't, properly speaking, a fallacious means of arriving at a specific conclusion from a given set of premises, and therefore isn't really a fallacy at all. The fallacy of moving the goalposts is a little different in that it involves setting a threshold of proof for a claim, then redefining that threshold if it appears that the orignal one will be achieved. The No True Scotsman fallacy, contrastingly, changes the conclusion to a different one than was originally proposed.

The classic formulation is something like:
Person A: I know a Scotsman who puts sugar on his porridge.
B: That's impossible. Scotsmen don't put sugar on their porridge.
A: Well, my friend Angus McTavish, who was born in Scotland, puts sugar on his porridge.
B: Then he isn't a true Scotsman, because no true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge.

What's interesting here is that B is no longer disputing A's claim that he knows a Scotsman who puts sugar on his porridge; rather, he is claiming that Angus McTavish, though possibly a Scotsman, is not a member of a the newly-defined set of True Scotsmen, defined as the subset of Scotsmen who never put sugar on their porridge. Since it's already stipulated that Angus McTavish is not a member of that set, then the conclusion is in fact correct within the definition specified - in fact, as the definition is tautological, it cannot be incorrect.

So the No True Scotsman fallacy isn't, I don't think, a fallacy at all. Rather, it's a means of derailing an argument, in which the person employing it goes off at a tangent to prove a tautology that has no relevance to the original claim.

Which, I suspect, makes all that I've written above an extremely complex and roundabout version of the No True Scotsman fallacy.

Dave
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I agree that it's not technically a fallacy, and I think saying it's changing the conclusion (or changing the question, really) is accurate too.

I do think it's akin to the problem in the ontological argument (though as an exclusion in the definition rather than an inclusion). As you say, it's a tautology which is just question begging.

If you define God as something that must have the characteristic of existence (to be perfect), then concluding that God exists is logical, but meaningless. It's just if P, then P.

As you point out, the Scotsman issue is slightly more complicated because it's unclear what conclusion we're after, but there is still the circular reasoning (if you accept that part of the definition of Scotsman is having the characteristic "never does x").

Also, as you correctly point out, Moving the Goalposts isn't actually a fallacy either--in the sense of resulting in an invalid argument. It's just changing the burden of evidence after the original one has been satisfied. I liken the No True Scotsman "fallacy" to it as changing the question after the original one has been proven.
 
gnome said:
I must disagree... here's another way of looking at it... it's equivocating on Scotsman, changing the meaning from someone who was born in Scotland, to someone who was born in Scotland and conforms to ad-hoc norms. So it could be a subset of fallacy of equivocation.

It's clear in the example (especially since it is claimed to be 'impossible') that the porridge Nazi wants the meaning of Scotsman initially to be taken only as "Born in Scotland" without further examination, and then backpedals when given a counterexample.
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I'm not sure I'd go along with that simply because the No True Scotsman argument is so specialized and does involve changing around the structure of the argument entirely.

[ETA: Also equivocation involves ambiguous words. I think redefining a term in an unconventional way is something else. The term "Scotsman" doesn't seem to me ambiguous. The term "true Scotsman" is an explicit attempt to redefine the term or, rather, to change the question to refer to a new term which is defined as a subset of the term in the original question.]

Would you consider the flaw in the Ontological Argument for the existence of God to be equivocation as well? (Starting with a conventional definition of God, and then changing the definition to include the characteristic of "must exist" in order to beg the question?) The conventional criticism is to point out that you can't predicate existence, but I would generalize that to say you can't predicate a characteristic if that characteristic is the question. And you logically can, but the argument is then simply begging the question.

Another point I've heard raised is that complaining that an argument is circular is really a matter of judgement or degree, since, at some level the conclusion really is already present in the premises in a valid argument. But there really does seem to be something different about arguments like the ontological argument, such that even someone not schooled in logic and reason, upon first hearing it, senses that someone's trying to pull a fast one!
 
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gnome said:
For example, someone says "I don't like that serial killer, killing is always wrong."
Someone else responds, "But this war hero killed a lot of people too."
The first says "Seriously? You're likening this war hero to a serial killer?"

No, they're not. They're just refuting the rule that killing is always wrong.
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This one is so annoying. It makes it impossible to argue with some people. They always make some absurd argument, and whatever you say to prove that the argument is flawed, they get outraged over the "comparison". It drives me crazy.
 
Fredrik said:
This one is so annoying. It makes it impossible to argue with some people. They always make some absurd argument, and whatever you say to prove that the argument is flawed, they get outraged over the "comparison". It drives me crazy.
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Same here. It's so hard to make a comparison without someone who assumes that the comparison is meant to be seen over the whole spectrum.

When I compare embryo sex selection to the Chinese one child per family program, I don't mean that there will be many deaths, and I certainly don't trivialise the Chinese situation. I merely point out that it will have adverse effects.

And just try to explain that in a conversation without bringing it to a grinding halt. It will always sound like justifying yourself, which seems to give the person you're speaking with more confidence in the conversation.

I would love to just sit with someone, and just talk all the time, take as much time as needed to clarify something, and not be interrupted because of something which I was going to address any way.
 
Fredrik said:
This one is so annoying. It makes it impossible to argue with some people. They always make some absurd argument, and whatever you say to prove that the argument is flawed, they get outraged over the "comparison". It drives me crazy.
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I've got two more good examples of this.

"Abortion stops a beating heart."
"So does slaughtering a cow to make beef."
"You can't compare a child to a cow!"
"I wasn't. Try this: some kinds of open heart surgery stop a beating human heart, does it follow from that that it's morally wrong?"

And worse was the fallout when one of the skeptical magazines said exactly what I'd been saying about putting the 9/11 terrorism attacks into perspective: more Americans are killed in traffic fatalities about every 6 weeks than were killed on 9/11. I thought this was especially important when tens of billions of dollars went to Homeland Security to keep us safe from terrorism.

People right away--even the subscribers to the skeptical magazine--complained that you can't compare these deaths. My question is, is a death in the family due to an auto accident less tragic than a death from a huge newsworthy terrorism attack? Are the loss of those lives more important or significant than the loss of other lives? More importantly, does any of that somehow alter the cost/benefit analysis of what we spend our federal dollars on?
 
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Fredrik said:
This one is so annoying. It makes it impossible to argue with some people. They always make some absurd argument, and whatever you say to prove that the argument is flawed, they get outraged over the "comparison". It drives me crazy.
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Two possibilities:

1. Some people don't have the cognitive capacity to assimilate a hypothetical or an analogy. Abstract thinking, you know. Or they lose this ability when their emotions get involved. "Ain't nobody gonna suppose no hurt to George!"

2. They most certainly do, but rather than take back an overly broad statement, they take refuge in the confusion that can occur when you stop arguing about the subject and drift into a meta-argument about the analogy itself.
 
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gnome said:
Two possibilities:

1. Some people don't have the cognitive capacity to assimilate a hypothetical or an analogy. Abstract thinking, you know. Or they lose this ability when their emotions get involved. "Ain't nobody gonna suppose no hurt to George!"

2. They most certainly do, but rather than take back an overly broad statement, they take refuge in the confusion that can occur when you stop arguing about the subject and drift into a meta-argument about the analogy itself.
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Yes, I think that pretty much covers it. Option 2 is what you will get from a politician who chooses to throw the argument back in the opponent's face rather than try to refute it rationally. In a private conversation, I think we're almost always dealing with option 1. They always get emotional, but it's hard to tell if they stopped thinking rationally because they got emotional, or got emotional because they don't know how to think rationally.

I have some examples too. This is the best one from my personal experiences: I had been out to dinner with a friend, his girlfriend and some of their friends, and was walking to the subway with a couple that had been at the dinner. Somehow the conversation touched on the subject of prostitution, and the female half of the couple said something to the effect that paying for sex is an evil, abusive thing to do because these women don't really want to do what they're doing. I tried to explain that the first part of that doesn't really follow from the second, by saying that e.g. a cleaning lady may not like to do what she's doing for money either. By her logic, it would be morally wrong to hire a cleaning lady. She went completely ******* because I had "compared" having a boring job with being raped for money, and started accusing me of being a horrible, evil, rape-supporting *******. It was really unpleasant.

Here's an example from Real Time with Bill Maher: This was one of the first episodes of Real Time that I saw. Andrew Sullivan was one of the three in the Panel when Bill interviewed Noam Chomsky. Chomsky wasn't in the studio, he just appeared on a screen. When the interview was over, Sullivan went nuts because Chomsky had "compared" the Bush administration to Nazis. What he had actually done was to say that if we take the Nuremberg trials as the definition of what we mean by a "war crime", then these guys are war criminals. That's very different from saying that the Bush guys are as bad as the nazis. OK, there's certainly a hint about that in the argument, but if you have a problem with that, and you feel that the claim itself is wrong, then you should start by refuting the argument rationally and then say that Chomsky is an ******* for using a flawed argument that involves nazis just to make the viewers think of Hitler when someone mentions Bush.
 
Actually, way I learned it, the No True Scotsman fallacy is a special form of circular reasoning.

1."All X are Y"
2."Well, Z is an X and not an Y"
3."Then Z is not a true X"

It's circular because the conclusion is turned into a premise to dismiss a counter-example, thus supporting the conclusion.

Basically the key there is that X=>Y is equivalent to !Y=>!X. The underlying argument in #3 above is basically "!Y=>!X" If Angus McTavish doesn't eat his porridge without sugar, then he isn't a True Scotsman. But that is equivalent to the original claim that "X=>Y", so basically the claim is used to support itself.

However it's not a fallacy when there is some other reason to dismiss the objection that Z is an X. E.g.,

"No eel can discharge electric shocks"
"Well, the electric eel can."
"Sure, but the 'electric ell' is not a true eel, but a species of knifefish."

... is not a No True Scotsman fallacy. The 'electric eel's' status as a true eel doesn't depend on conforming to the conclusion, but is simply how marine biologists classify them.

Or to use the porridge example, the following is not a No True Scotsman fallacy:

"No Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge."
"Well, I'm in the same WoW guild with some guy called McChirton who does put sugar on his porridge."
"Heh, I know that guy. He just calls himself McChirton online, but is a third generation American of Polish descent. I'm pretty sure that playing a dwarf with a Scottish accent doesn't qualify him as a true Scotsman."
 
While it might not be the "According to Hoyle" definition, to me the "One True Scotsman" fallacy is when you adjust the definition of a group based on how you need to define it to win whatever argument you are in at the moment.
 
The One True Scotsman is Ian McIan the Redundant.
 
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