No true scotsman fallacy
"When faced with a counterexample to a universal claim, rather than denying the counterexample or rejecting the original universal claim, this fallacy modifies the subject of the assertion to exclude the specific case or others like it."
A simpler rendition would be:
Teacher: All Scotsmen enjoy haggis.
Student: My uncle is a Scotsman, and he doesn't like haggis!
Teacher: Well, all true Scotsmen like haggis.
Now that we have some understanding of this fallacy, I have a question.
On 1 John 2:19, it says
"They went out from us, but they did not really belong to us. For if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us; but their going showed that none of them belonged to us."
Is not this verse committing this same fallacy?
Thanks for reading
-BlackApologist24
The no true scotsman fallacy (NTSF) is a case of informal fallacy. Before getting to specifics, I want to make a general point. We have to be careful in dealing with these kind of fallacies, simply because they aren't always fallacious. Like a ten year old who gets a label maker and he is so excited about it that he goes around the house labeling everything, often young philosophy students get carried away with spotting "fallacies." I'm not saying this is the case with you, but I do think this particular charge of fallacy is mistaken.
As Douglas Walton explains,
"...informal fallacies [are] systematically deceptive strategies of argumentation based on an underlying, systematic error of reasoned dialogue. Unfortunately however, the traditional category of informal fallacy has been stretched too widely in traditional accounts, including not only arguments that are weak or incomplete, but even instances of argument that are basically correct and reasonable as mechanisms of argument in persuasion dialogue…. Both the use of the term sophistici elenchi [Aristotle's term for what we call informal fallacies] and its descendant 'fallacies' have engendered the unfortunate misconception that all kinds of arguments coming under the traditional categories of 'fallacies' are inherently bad or worthless, and that all such arguments should, by the standards of logic, be thoroughly refuted in every instance…. Recent research has indicated that many of the fallacies are instances of reasonable forms of argument, and therefore such forms of argument cannot be automatically dismissed without examining each case in detail…"
(Informal Logic 2nd ed, 15-16; emphasis original)
This should be fairly obvious when you consider some common informal fallacies like appeal to authority, ad hominem, etc. It's easy to think of ways in which these can be legitimate. So, for instance, Gensler in his logic text gives us examples of ways that they can be included in good reasoning:
Your doctor tells you A.
She's an authority on the subject.
The other authorities agree with her.
There's a presumption that A is true.
Gensler notes that "incorrect forms omit premise 2 or 3, or conclude that A
must be true" (Intro. to Logic, 333; emphasis original).
So we need to make sure we don't get carried away with the word "fallacy" tagged onto traditional informal fallacies.
Now, getting to specifics, what about the NTSF? I think we could come up with instances where the fallacy is being overly zealously applied without too much trouble. But in this case I don't think we even need to do that (to show that this is a legitimate case of the NTS). The definition you cite specifies that it occurs when the subject is modified to avoid a counter-example. The problem in NTSF is its apparently
ad hoc nature when (i) the demarcation of a category is the point of dispute and (ii) we have good reason to think that some case is an instance that fits the category, and yet doesn't meet the criterion suggested.
But is that what is going on 1 John 2:19? No. John isn't modifying the subject and the criterion isn't in dispute. If you're going to try and fit John into the NTSF, you're going to end up with a "fallacy" so braod that it captures every instance of demarcation.
