No True Scotsman

Type

Informal

AKA

Appeal to Purity, No True Scotsman Fallacy

Description

Dismissing counterexamples to a generalisation by changing the criteria to exclude them.

Examples

"No Scotsman would commit such a crime." — "But Angus did." — "Then he's not a true Scotsman."
"No real gamer uses cheat codes."

Linked from

Communism

The power problem: abolishing private property does not abolish power over resources; it transfers it to whoever controls the state. "Common ownership" in practice means ownership by the party. A system that concentrates economic and polit…

Argument from Religious Transformation

The sample is selected. The people who stand up at the service are those for whom it worked. The backslidden are not invited to speak; the converts who became worse (the zealot, the terrorist, the preacher who defrauds his flock) are decla…

Fitrah Argument

It functions to deny that ex-Muslims exist. As Romans 1 does for Christians, the doctrine implies that every unbeliever secretly knows and suppresses, which is a claim about strangers' minds that cannot be checked and that the people in qu…

Reformed Epistemology Argument

The non-believer is, on the model, cognitively damaged by sin. The explanation for why the faculty does not fire in me is that the Fall broke it, and the explanation for why it fires differently in a Hindu is the same. This is the No True…

Special Pleading

It is closely related to Circular Reasoning (the exemption is justified by the conclusion) and the No True Scotsman fallacy (the rule is redefined to exclude the counter-example).