Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2023 October 7

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October 7

Are the No true Scotsman and special pleading fallacies related?

To me, they both seem to involve modifying an original claim upon presentation of disproof in order to make the disproof no longer count. Special pleading more-or-less directly does this. The No true Scotsman is more indirect, with the initial claim being that a certain category either universally does or universally does not have a given trait, then (upon presentation of a counterexample, a member of the category either lacking a trait the category is claimed to universally possess or possessing a trait the category is claimed to universally lack) either directly modifying it to state that all true members of the category have/lack the trait that the category was previously claimed to universally have/lack (and by extension labeling the counterexample as not a true member of the category and thus not an actual counterexample), or saying the counterexample isn’t a true member of the category (indirectly modifying the original claim to say that all true members of the category have/lack the trait). Are these two fallacies related? Primal Groudon (talk) 16:52, 7 October 2023 (UTC)

They are somewhat obviously related in that they attempt to save the statement of a general principle by implying that a possible counterexample does not apply. Neither is an instance of the other, though; they achieve their objective by somewhat different means. The original statement asserts that some property holds for all members of some domain, and in both cases the counterexample is witnessed by some instance that does not possess this property. In the No true Scotsman case, the manoeuvre is to maintain that the witnessing instance is not actually a member of the domain. This contention can then be debated. In special pleading, the fact that the instance is a counterexample is simply ignored, making further rational discussion futile.  --Lambiam 05:17, 8 October 2023 (UTC)

Is there a special term for this?

Is there a term for something that goes like this: "Individual entities may behave unpredictably, but the collective as a whole is predictable." Ioe bidome (talk) 18:16, 7 October 2023 (UTC)

Are you looking for Spontaneous order, Self-organization, or Emergence? I'm sure there are more. Folly Mox (talk) 18:24, 7 October 2023 (UTC)

Psychohistory (fictional) -- Verbarson  ^talk_edits 23:02, 7 October 2023 (UTC)

The totalitarian principle in quantum physics is similar. --142.112.221.246 (talk) 01:01, 8 October 2023 (UTC)

I don't know a generic name for the phenomenon, but it is related to the central limit theorem of probability theory. It underlies the kinetic theory of gases (see also Thermodynamic limit). Predictability of the collective behaviour fails in a chaotic system.  --Lambiam 04:41, 8 October 2023 (UTC)

Besides the links already provided, it also comes from The Sign of the Four: "Winwood Reade is good upon the subject," said Holmes. "He remarks that, while the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty. You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will do, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to. Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant. So says the statistician." According to Wikiquote that's not actually a quote from Reade, or is at least a very broad paraphrase. Matt Deres (talk) 03:47, 9 October 2023 (UTC)

Hari, is that you? Are you trying to make us invent the word Psychohistory? 85.76.148.95 (talk) 15:08, 9 October 2023 (UTC)

We have the article Mass action (sociology), which I found when I looked up the Foundation series by Isaac Azimov. The IP editor above is referencing the same thing. HiLo48 (talk) 02:01, 10 October 2023 (UTC)

So did Verbarson two days earlier.  --Lambiam 06:38, 10 October 2023 (UTC)