To my understanding, this intersection between racism and sexism, (or sexism and class) is exactly where second wave feminism gave way to third wave feminism. If the goal of a social movement is to improve the lives of its constituents, you’d expect its goals to evolve.
In that general direction, I’d like to belong to a men’s movement that recognizes how poorly we are equipped to be caregivers, to be emotive, to heal from emotional pain, given the macho sterotypes within which this gender is expected to conform. But with “men’s rights activists” hogging up that bandwidth, it’s not a good time to try to make such a noise.
“No True Scotsman” is not “No member of group A can possess attribute B”. It’s “no member of group A can possess attribute B, therefore this member of group A who possesses attribute B is not really a member of group A”.
The fallacy is in the “therefore”, not in the original factual statement. “All men are mortal” is not a True Scotsman fallacy; “all men are mortal, this man is not mortal, therefore this man isn’t a man” is.
Also note: like most logical fallacies, No True Scotsman is a warning flag rather than an automatic win. If your immortal “man” is in fact Thor, the error may be in the initial classification of Thor as a “man” rather than the later exclusion of Thor from the class of “man”.
No True Scotsman is an invitation to more closely examine your initial criteria of classification.
Says who? The International Logical Fallacy Association? I think you are, as has been done earlier in the thread, making an NTS fallacy by trying to exclude my argument from being a “true” NTS.
So, for a popular, if not necessarily definitive, definition of NTS, let’s take a look at the wiki:
[quote=“Wikipedia”]No true Scotsman is an informal fallacy, an ad hoc attempt to retain an unreasoned assertion.[1] When faced with a counterexample to a universal
claim (“no Scotsman would do such a thing”), rather than denying the
counterexample or rejecting the original claim, this fallacy modifies
the subject of the assertion to exclude the specific case or others like
it by rhetoric, without reference to any specific objective rule (“no true
Scotsman would do such a thing”; i.e., those who perform that action
are not part of our group and thus criticism of that action is not
criticism of the group).[2][/quote]
So,
Universal claim
Counter example.
Counter example is not a “true” example of the Universal Claim.
Looks to me like you are committing a NTS fallacy.
But, I do also take your point that one can argue that a narrowed definition is legitimate and that it hasn’t been opportunistically narrowed just to expeditiously omit counter examples. However, I think that the usages of racism and sexism that exclude entire classes of people from being able to have those characteristics are opportunistically narrowed to exclude counter examples to conveniently avoid proof by contradiction.
Minority societies not monolithic. There is racism within them. Same for women. There are sexist women. Those examples may pale in comparison to the larger issues of racism and sexism by white males, but it doesn’t make them non existent.
When a group identity is defined as e.g. “men from Scotland” it’s perfectly valid to say that men who are not from Scotland are Not True Scotsmen. The fallacy arises from moving the Scottish goalposts — “Sure, he was born in Aberdeen, but he’s an asshole so he’s not a real Scotsman.”
It’s not a fallacy to say that No True Christian worships Satan, or that No True Feminist advocates wife-beating.
It is surprisingly hard to define a set of universally recognized criteria for being a Christian. Not all Christians even agree on the Deity of Christ, or the Trinity. They don’t agree on what it takes to get to heaven, either. And to worship Satan (for real, rather than as a symbol as the Satanists I know do, or not at all, as the Satanic Temple don’t) you have to beleive in the Christian god, and belief in the Christian God is one of the only tenets that pretty much every Christian agrees on. So, I guess I agree with your example, but it’s a much closer thing than one might think at first glance.
Debatable. Looking at Christianity from the “outside” (atheist in a traditionally Christian country), I would instead contend that All True Satanists are Christian. This follows from the fact that I tend to regard anyone who subscribes to a Christian view of metaphysics (i.e., there is a God, Jesus is His Son but in some way Jesus is God) as Christian.
Whether someone who subscribes to that world view worships the Good Guy or the Bad Guy is just a matter of personal ethics, just as the question whether they actually follow those commandments about Loving Thy Neighbor.
And defining everyone who Loves His Neighbor as Christian and everyone who doesn’t as Not A True Christian is just about the single example of NTS that has annoyed me the most in my life.
Well, “Racist” is an out-group term, hardly anyone defines themselves as being racists. The classic NTS is about good attributes that the in-group is supposed to have, but the same works for supposed bad atrtibutes of the out-group.
It can be played both ways:
A: All Muslims support terrorism.
B: (Randomly point to one of over a billion non-terrorist-supporting muslims)
A: All True Muslims support terrorism.
Or, alternatively,
B: No Muslim would condone terrorism.
A: …
B: No True Muslim…
The NTS fallacy applies when you actually switch definitions. Otherwise, it’s just a misunderstanding:
A (using the racism = prejudice + power definition): Black people are never racist.
B (assuming the racism = prejudice based on race definition): That’s not true! (Names a prejudiced black person)
A: I was using the racism = prejudice + power definition.
Not a NTS fallacy.
However, consider this hypothetical example:
A (using the racism = prejudice based on race definition): Black people are never racist. They are too smart for prejudice.
B (using the racism = prejudice based on race definition): That’s not true! (Names a prejudiced black person, for example A)
A (switching definitions, committing the NTS fallacy): Black people are never truly racist because they lack the power.
Now we’ve found our Scotsman.
The racism/sexism examples are of course muddled by all the debates about how the terms should be defined.
P.S.: I really enjoy NTSing the Boy Scouts of America. Those who are offended by that either deserve it, or I can quickly re-include them by saying that they are not behaving like True BSA Members and are therefore, after all, True Scouts. NTS FTW!
I don’t think so. When you hear people saying that black Americans attributing qualities to white Americans as a group isn’t “racism” I think they are speaking from a concept of racism that was developed academically by examining how racism functions. They don’t start with a definition of racism that ought to include that and then ignore part of their own definition because they don’t like the outcome, they actually have a definition that does not include that. And that definition was developed as an attempt to best describe what racism is and how it functions.
The No True Scotsman fallacy was originally formulated:
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”.
But what if Hamish never thought people from Aberdeen were true Scotsmen to begin with? Maybe he has ideas that certain clans are real Scots and other clans are basically just English and he judges people from different regions of the country. If he had these ideas ahead of time and the reasons for them are independent of the issue at hand (even if the reasons for them are foolish) then he isn’t doing a No True Scotsman (not a true Not True Scotsman).
Dunno. But what if he decides that brunettes can never be true Scotsmen “to begin with”? Either way, it is a narrower definition. Just because one has always had that narrower definition doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t also a fallacy.
But the original use of the term “temperature” didn’t refer to the average kinetic energy of the molecules in a substance. That point makes little difference to the definition in physics.
Conflicts between academic jargon and colloquial usage can come because academics who study something actually understand it better than most people, they can also come because a term took on a life of its own in some academic field and its usage doesn’t related back to the original word. Physics temperature is a better understanding of colloquial temperature, calculus “smooth” is totally unrelated to colloquial “smooth” (it’s a loose metphor).
But either way we are talking about people with different definition having a conversation. Such conversations may give the appearance to one participant of containing No True Scotsman fallacies without having them.
There are a lot of ways to be wrong without making the No True Scotsman fallacy. If I think “birthday cake” is a term for ducks, then when someone points at a birthday cake I might say, “That’s not a birthday cake” but that’s not NST, I’m just wrong. This is the same as if I think only beef burgers are real burgers. Someone might call something a “salmon burger” and I would say, “That’s not a real burger” but that’s just me faithfully applying my definition. No True Scotsman is when you shift your definition on the fly because you don’t like the implications of it, not when you just have an unusual definition, specifically when you take a statement of the form “All A are B” and continuously alter your definition of A to exclude counterexamples.
