No True Polishman (or, The Duck That Won The Lottery)

No True Scotsman Fallacy.

Fans of Star Wars appeal to this fallacy with the prequels. Fans of The Matrix, with the sequels. Everyone does it in real life: we delete the parts of the things we love that we wish weren’t around.

  Julian Baggini, in The Duck That Won The Lottery, asks if alcoholics can consider themselves cured if they have only 1 or 2 drinks a week, or if total abstinence is necessary, because that’s what “The Book,” says.*

  David McRaney writes, “[AA]...says that no truly cured alcoholic would ever have a drink. If while at Applebee’s with your fruitarian roommate, she asks the waiter for a bowl of pomegranates & pine nuts & he politely explains such off-menu items are not available, would you clutch your chest in shock if she ordered some chicken tenders? What if she explained that sometimes she strays, maybe two or three times a year? What makes a fruitarian a fruitarian? Does briefly pausing from a diet really change anything? What if you declared today that you were a fruitarian, but you haven’t actually eaten your first all-fruit meal? When do you cross that line?”

Whereas, for members of Alcoholics Anonymous, they are by definition a thing, that thing being “an Alcoholic.”

My lady-friend had to go to one of their meetings yesterday, as an assignment for class. She decided to go to the one they have here in San Diego for agnostics & atheists. The disappointment on her face when she got home was priceless.

“They mentioned God all night long,” she said. “Literally G-O-D. But sometimes they also said higher power, whatever that may be for you. But it was awkward. Everytime they read from this book [The Book], they mentioned God.”

She was totally turned off on them. But I don’t mind the God, higher power thing, whatever. To me, it’s just pointing these noobs to the prefrontal cortex, to the subconscious, to the right hemisphere of their brain, & that’s super.

What I do mind is that AA asks its members to define themselves in a simplistic manner, much like McRaney just talked about. “I am an alcoholic.” “Alcoholism is a disease.”

Personally, I find these words vague & non-scientific. I can’t even approach these people until they make a little more sense. If they want to define themselves as addicts, perhaps I can work with that. But to say “Alcoholic” as if there is something coded in your genes that desires fermented grains to be imbibed in order to reach full gene expression is absurd. Maybe there’s an addiction gene, maybe, but it’s not specific to alcohol. What is, is your environment. Pay attention to the right things, people who think you’re “alcoholics.”

What if, rather, you happen to be some mysterious ball of consciousness, will, & further abysses of mystery, that happens to have engaged in SOME behavior that people for a while have been calling “alcoholism?”

You are not one thing. You can be a thing if you’re set on it, I’m not stopping you, but know you’re a thing with a string of adjectives & adverbs behind it so long you couldn’t begin to narrow it down to just one.

Simplicity is important. We all need to be knocked down a peg. We don’t need to be told we’re robot-simpletons by definition who can only hope to keep our demons at bay until we die. What the fuck point to life would there be in that?

McRaney (continued) from You Are Now Less Dumb, one of my favorite non-fiction encomiums around: “Much of what you think are facts about the groups to which you belong & the groups that you see as alien to your ideologies are actually just beliefs. When those beliefs are challenged, you can just step to the side & alter them by editing your definitions with the no true Scotsman fallacy.

  “The truth is, most things aren’t clearly defined, no matter what the dictionary says. You love to define things, to divide & categorize & develop nomenclature. It helps to keep life from being too cluttered, but most things are blurry. Most things exist along a gradient of degrees. The no true Scotsman fallacy steps in when you mistake your personal definition for the official, widely accepted definition. If you think no true American dances in a Gay Pride parade covered in honey & glitter, that’s just your definition. If you think no true scientist believes in Bigfoot, that classification belongs to you. When someone reveals your definition to be crappy & inaccurate with a counterexample, you can just regroup & dismiss the challenge with a redefinition.”