![]() This clearly constitutes a counter example, which definitively falsifies the universal proposition originally put forward. Our reader is, as he confidently expected, agreeably shocked: 'No Scot would do such a thing!' Yet the very next Sunday he finds in that same favourite source a report of the even more scandalous on-goings of Mr Angus McSporran in Aberdeen. He reads the story under the headline, 'Sidcup Sex Maniac Strikes Again'. Imagine some Scottish chauvinist settled down one Sunday morning with his customary copy of The News of the World. In his 1975 book Thinking About Thinking, he wrote: ![]() The description of the fallacy in this form is attributed to British philosopher Antony Flew because the term originally appeared in Flew's 1971 book An Introduction to Western Philosophy. "No true Scotsman would do something so undesirable" i.e., the people who would do such a thing are tautologically (definitionally) excluded from being part of our group such that they cannot serve as a counterexample to the group's good nature. To protect people of Scottish heritage from a possible accusation of guilt by association, one may use this fallacy to deny that the group is associated with this undesirable member or action. Scottish national pride may be at stake if someone regularly considered to be Scottish commits a heinous crime.
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