There is no way to be Scot free

While I have long been of the opinion that arguments are largely a waste of time, I am always fascinated by the pathology which might help explain why.

A post by Steve Sailer discusses the pros and cons of the well-known “No True Scotsman” fallacy. Sticking to the case of the Scotsman makes it a bit easier to expose the fallacy, which I have seen applied countless times by political activists. “No true Republican would etc…..”

Or “No Principled Republican”

Or “No true conservative”

Or even “No True Libertarian”

Usually, the idea is that if you don’t agree with whoever claims the right to determine what is genuine or “true,” then you are not genuine.

This switches the argument from one over the merits to one over definitions of the nature of whichever group’s name is being invoked.

The Left often applies the fallacy to identity politics,  with conservative/libertarian blacks being told they are not “really” black, or even race traitors, conservative/libertarian women being told they are traitors to their gender, and right-leaning gays are in the unique position of getting the fallacy from both sides (to the left they are traitors to their sexuality while to certain social conservatives they are traitors to “true” conservatism).

I recently saw a perfect example in an online debate over gay marriage:

“No true Christian would ever support gay marriage.”

Which could just as easily be said about divorce, but never mind that. There has been much back and forth over who gets to define what is true Christianity.

There is of course no “winning” these sort of debates, because there is no basic agreement on definitions or logic.

Depressing though it was, I liked Steve Sailer’s conclusion:

…we’re seeing an ongoing convergence between the bad intellectual habits of two groups that are powerfully represented in Internet discussions: the politically correct and the Aspergery. The former dislike pattern recognition and the latter love mechanistic computer-programming style reasoning. And they increasingly come together to try to shut down probabilistic thinking about human behavior.