No true Scotsman is a term coined by
Antony Flew in his 1975 book
Thinking About Thinking - or do I sincerely want to be right?:
Imagine Hamish McDonald, a Scotsman, sitting down with his
Press and Journal 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
Press and Journal 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." Flew's original example may be soften into the following
[1]:
Argument: "No Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge." Reply: "But my uncle Angus likes sugar with his porridge." Rebuttal: "Ah yes, but no
true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge." This form of argument is a
fallacy if the predicate ("putting sugar on porridge" or "doing such a thing [as committing a sex crime]") is not actually contradictory for the
accepted definition of the subject ("Scotsman"), or if the definition of the subject is silently adjusted after the fact to make the rebuttal work.
Note that in the original example, Hamish is stated to be wrong (and is in fact wrong) in his opinion that no Scotsman would commit a sex crime. In the above restatement, it
is traditional to put salt, and not sugar, on porridge in Scotland. It is unclear, therefore, whether the restatement accurately reflects Flew's intended argument.
...
[edit] Examples
Using the context of culture, religious individuals, for example, sometimes employ this fallacy. The statement "no true
Christian" would do some such thing is often a fallacy, since the term "Christian" is used by a wide and disparate variety of people. This broad nature of the category is such that its use has very little meaning when it comes to defining a narrow property or behaviour. If there is no
one accepted definition of the subject, then the definition must be understood in context, or defined in the initial argument for the discussion at hand.
It is also a common fallacy in politics, in which critics may condemn their colleagues as not being "true"
Communists,
liberals or
conservatives because they occasionally disagree on certain matters of policy. It comes in many other forms - "No decent person would" - it is argued "support hanging/watch pornography/smoke in public", etc. Often the speaker seems unaware that he/she is, in fact, coercively (re)defining, 'objectifying', what the phrase "decent person" means to include/exclude what he/she wants and NOT simply following what the phrase is already accepted as meaning. The argument shifts the debate from being about hanging/pornography/smoking and tries to make it seem that anyone disagreeing with the speaker is arguing for the "indecent".
