Who is a true scotsman

This fallacy does not occur if there is a clear and accepted definition of the group and what it requires to belong to that group, and this definition is violated by the arguer. For example:. This is not a fallacy because being a vegetarian, by definition, is the practice of abstaining from the consumption of meat; if she consumes meat, she is not really a vegetarian.

Thus, this fallacy can only occur in a situation where the definition can be redefined due to a lack of clear understanding or agreement of the criteria. What exactly we are supposed to think from there is a bit of a mystery. But they are inherently flawed, divisive, and corrosive.

And they are important not only for disabled people to recognize, but for non-disabled observers and allies, too. The ThoughtCo website explains :. You counter this by pointing out that your friend Angus likes sugar with his porridge. I then say "Ah, yes, but no true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge.

First someone states a broad generalization or prejudiced assumption about a group. Then, the person defending the stereotype responds by declaring the counter-examples are actually not a real part of the group, thereby leaving the stereotype unbreached. Here the conflict is typically between a disabled advocate and some variety of skeptic or opponent of something the advocate stands for.

The advocate answers by pointing out that they themselves are disabled, and fully capable of exercising basic human rights. Arguments like this happen all the time in disability discourse, but maybe most often regarding autism. Instead of readjusting their idea of autism to allow for more competence and personal agency, these critics redefine autism to exclude and discredit inconvenient exceptions to their stereotypical views. I am not more valuable as a state representative than a kid who needs to communicate with an iPad.

Rather than celebrated, their successes are used to sever them from other autistic people, or outright deny that they are autistic in any meaningful way. This also happens a lot with people who have other intellectual and developmental disabilities. Such disabled people are still often presumed to be incompetent. Those who seem to present as more competent than expected, and who therefore undermine the original stereotype, are defined out of the equation.

But this is more than simply annoying. The No True Scotsman fallacy is used in two ways. It can be used to try to enforce conformity and orthodoxy within a particular group, and it can also be used by people outside the group to "define" the group in negative ways. When the fallacy is used in the second of these ways it can bear a strong resemblance to the Straw Man fallacy, i. The fallacy also bears some resemblance to the fallacy of Equivocation , since the term at issue--"Scotsman" for example--shifts its meaning: a Scotsman is a member of a particular geographic or ethnic group, vs.

Despite these similarities, I have classified the No True Scotsman fallacy as an Inductive circularity, since it seems to me that the central error in the fallacy is the use of mere stipulation to disallow observable counterexamples that would otherwise refute the arguer's generalization about a population.