"No True Scotsman Fallacy" cannot be applied to matters of faith.

[Hyker]

Hello all.

Personally, I do find special pleading to be a little tricky in religious debates. To quote the All-Knowing Wikipedia:

Essentially, this involves someone attempting to cite something as an exception to a generally accepted rule, principle, etc. without justifying the exception.

If god(s) did indeed exist, the being(s) would be would be the exception to so many generally accepted rules by definition that I find it difficult to fairly assess what additional exceptions would be justifiable. This is not to say that I don't think the fallacy can be applied, but I do think extra consideration is needed. Personally (and I confess that it's a judgement call) I sometimes find special pleading to be over-applied on this forum.

Thanks.

[mordant]

Originally Posted by Hyker

Hello all.

Personally, I do find special pleading to be a little tricky in religious debates. To quote the All-Knowing Wikipedia:



If god(s) did indeed exist, the being(s) would be would be the exception to so many generally accepted rules by definition that I find it difficult to fairly assess what additional exceptions would be justifiable. This is not to say that I don't think the fallacy can be applied, but I do think extra consideration is needed. Personally (and I confess that it's a judgement call) I sometimes find special pleading to be over-applied on this forum.

Thanks.

Arguments for gods are themselves based on special pleading, as you yourself point out. Therefore it's my view that any pointing out of special pleading in this space tends to overlook the massive special pleadings that came before, and therefore, are not excessive at all. Quite charitable, actually. And we do often argue within the theist framework, as theists can relate to it. And if it can be shown that their belief-system is self-inconsistent, then there is a glimmer of hope that they can see that it's also reality-inconsistent.

[NoCapo]

Originally Posted by Artifice32

No, you are very much correct. I'm definitely not an expert in fallacies. To be honest I wouldn't even know how to study them. By that what I would want is not an explanation of a fallacy but moreso the origin and history of the fallacy who coined it and when. I am not certain if a book like that exists.

Now, my suspicion is that the so-called informal fallacies that are older are universal. For example, False Dilemma is apparently an informal fallacy. Now, I am being completely sincere when I write that when I was writing the post you were responding to I was going to use it as an example of an older Fallacy. So, the only way I could was to do a search on the internet to try to get the history or when it was coined or what have you. I unfortunately couldn't find anything. I could find definitions and examples but not history.

Now, here is the tricky part I know from reading older philosophical works that the concept of the False Dilemma is an old one. It may not have been termed at the time but the concept is referred in some form of critique or argument. I can't think of an example right now but if you need an example just ask and I will try to find something of what I mean. To be honest I almost want to think Aquinas addresses it but even before him it is addressed and I even want to go back as far as Plato but that might be wrong. However, if you don't believe me I can find some work online that is out of copyright to give an example.

So, for me the distinction is not so much formal and informal but rather the period of time if it was understood to address a universal problem or a particular problem. What I will call the ancients, who aren't so ancient, had a tendency to be concerned with the universal. It seems more contemporary thinkers tend to be concerned with particulars. To be honest, from my bias to prefer the more ancient thinkers--pre-middle of nineteenth century--I do think this presents a problem. Again, that is just my lone perspective. So take it with a grain of salt, disagree...it's all about learning.

I guess I am not sure what you mean by "universal"... I would think they all are universal. I am not sure the date of giving a particular fallacy a name makes that much of a difference. I tend to think of it taxonomically, we are simply labeling various bits of incorrect reasoning. While formal logic can be discussed independent of a particular example, informal logical fallacies are dependent on the particulars. In formal logic we can abstract an argument to "if A -> B and A is true, then B is true" and often expose fallacious reasoning by such abstraction, informal fallacies are more complicated.

One of my favorite informal fallacies that shows up on this board is that if a word have two meanings, someone will switch or conflate meanings halfway through the argument. This is not something that you can see by abstracting the argument and examining its form, so it is an informal fallacy, that of Equivocation.

The term "No True Scotsman" is relatively recent, but the underlying logical fallacy is simply a particular type of fallacy that can be viewed either as a specific type of "Begging the Question" or "Equivocation". It is a very narrow category of fallacy, but it is simply a specific subset of the broader type of informal fallacies. While this specific example has been classified recently, I would suspect that equivocation and begging the question can be followed back to early Medieval thinkers if not much earlier ( especially since begging the question has a latin name as well )

-NoCapo





-NoCapo

[TRANSPONDER]

Originally Posted by Hyker

Hello all.

Personally, I do find special pleading to be a little tricky in religious debates. To quote the All-Knowing Wikipedia:



If god(s) did indeed exist, the being(s) would be would be the exception to so many generally accepted rules by definition that I find it difficult to fairly assess what additional exceptions would be justifiable. This is not to say that I don't think the fallacy can be applied, but I do think extra consideration is needed. Personally (and I confess that it's a judgement call) I sometimes find special pleading to be over-applied on this forum.

Thanks.

Aside from the fallacy of assuming 'God' as a given, we get special pleading right away, as soon as we say 'Which god?' I have seen that dismissed out of hand on the grounds that there is only One God. It is true that it appears that they are talking everybody -god, but in fact they have one particular god in mind, though they haven't even begun to consider that aspect.

Thus I'd say that special pleading hasn't failed to apply to religion, but has rarely been tried.