No true Scotsman Fallacy

JieXian

Malaysia4677 Posts

October 27 2011 06:43 GMT

I have a question after seeing this being used around here.

If I say American music sucks, you may tell me to stay away from Justin Bieber and Lil Wayne and listen to "true American music"

If I say American food sucks, you may ask me to look further than McDonalds or the crap cooked in a particular crappy restaurant I went to and instead eat "true American food".

If I say American movies suck, you may call me an idiot for only watching Transformers and Twilight and dig deeper for "true American movies"

Nothing against America, I know I'll do the same if you say that Malaysian food sucks and if I found out that you've been to a crappy place I'll lead you to "true Malaysian food".

So how is this a fallacy in this case?

I stand corrected.

huameng

United States1133 Posts

October 27 2011 06:53 GMT

The fallacy is that there is no value in saying "All american food, except the stuff that is bad, is good." Well of course all of the "true American food" is good if you just define "true American food" to be American food that isn't bad. If you keep saying "oh you didn't like that food? It must not have been true American food, try this instead" you have a fallacy; if you say "American food is good, but McDonalds and other fast food places are garbage so they don't count." you do not have a fallacy, as long as you don't go back and keep updating what you meant by "American food" to exclude more and more.

Chariot

United States36 Posts

October 27 2011 07:01 GMT

Essentially, the fallacy would actually look like this:

"All american food is good"

"I don't like McDonalds"

"Oh well, that's not *true* american food"

-----

Your phrasing is actually different:

"All american food sucks because McDonalds sucks"

Obviously, in this case it is a fallacy to generalize from some american food to all of it.

Dhalphir

Australia1305 Posts

October 27 2011 07:05 GMT

The fallacy is basically when you redefine a statement you made in order to cover up something you said that was flat out wrong.

For example, saying "All American food is good" is clearly making a bold claim - that is then trounced by saying "what about mcdonalds?" the fallacy is then when you cover up the fact that you made an unsupported, incorrect claim by redefining what you meant by "American".

For example, if you said "A lot of American food is good" and someone said "Mcdonalds sucks", there would be no fallacy if you said "Well McDonalds isn't even true American food", because you left room for there to be exclusions in your original statement.

ZaplinG

United States3818 Posts

October 27 2011 07:27 GMT

idk wtf you guys are talking about... I like mcdonalds and their 1$ double cheeseburgers/frosties

ComaDose

Canada10349 Posts

October 27 2011 07:28 GMT

McDonalds is pretty tasty tho. No fallacy.
EDIT: Ninja joke sniped by one minute

blah_blah

346 Posts

October 27 2011 07:35 GMT

In technical language, say that you have a set of objects S, some of which have property P, and some of which do not have property P.

The 'no true scotsman fallacy' is conflating the obviously true statement 'Every object in S which has property P has property P' with the false statement 'Every object in S has property P'.

JieXian

Malaysia4677 Posts

October 28 2011 12:21 GMT

Ok thanks for the explaination. I forgot about the blog until today..

Your phrasing is actually different:

"All american food sucks because McDonalds sucks"

Obviously, in this case it is a fallacy to generalize from some american food to all of it.

My examples were generalisation problems right?

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