Is this the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy or No True Scotsman?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I know - another “identify the fallacy” thread, which we have one of every month. So I am putting this in MPSIMS, not even in GQ.

A fallacy has been cropping up a lot lately and it bugs me, and I also can’t quite pin down what it’s called. I’ll illustrate it like this:

“If you have confidence, you’ll make every three-pointer you shoot.”

“But Steph Curry has a lot of confidence. And yet last night, he only made 10 out of 20 three-point attempts.”

“That means that 10 of his shots were shot with confidence - all the ones that went in. The other ten that didn’t go in, by definition, were thrown without confidence since they missed.”

2

That is fundamentally a Socratic fallacy; that is, the speaker has defined their condition for truth in an exclusionary way such that any other result is false and all successful shots are definitionally true, e.g. confidence is required to make a three point shot, therefore any shot that is not made is the result of a lack of confidence. It does not allow for the potential for a three point shot to be made by random chance, nor that a three point shot made without confidence could occur. Since ‘confidence’ is not an externally observable condition it is not an empirically verifiable statement regardless.

Stranger

3

I’d still call it circular reasoning. It is using the original claim as proof.

But, of the two you picked, I’d go with No True Scotsman. It’s clearer if you reword to equivalent statements:

  • No confident person would miss a three pointer.
  • But Steph Curry is confident but only made 10 out of 20 three-point attempts.
  • Then Curry must not have been truly confident in 10 of those throws.
4

I’d call it begging the question. Because part of the “proof” assumes the truth of the proposition being proved.

A confident person would make all free throws.

Steph Curry is confident.

Steph Curry only made half of his free throws.

(Because confident people make all free throws) Curry must have not been confident for half of his free throws.

Because he was confident for half of his free throws, he made all of the one he was confident for.

5

Seems the very definition of the “no true Scotsman” fallacy to me. I mean you could almost replace “confidence” with “scottish” in the description:

No true Scotsman would miss a free throw
Steph McCurry is Scottish
Steph McCurry missed a free throw last night
Ah he but must not be a true Scotsman then.

6

I’d go with closer to the “no true Scotsman” fallacy.

The “texas sharpshooter” would be more like if you picked a series of 10 consecutive free throws that were hit and concluded that indeed his confidence aphorism holds.

7

None of the above.

It’s simply a self serving assumption made without evidence. It’s not a fallacy as such.

A No True Scotsman involves asserting certain characteristics of a thing, and denying counter examples by giving primacy to one’s assertion about characteristics rather than reality.

  • Scotsmen don’t have sugar on their porridge
  • Duncan McSporran the fiftieth generation resident of Dundee has sugar on his porridge
  • then he’s not a True Scotsman

The OP is not this. The key point in the OP is lack of evidence either way about the reason Curry missed. In an NTS there is no doubt the facts forming the counter example exist, the issue is whether the assertion gives way or the counter example gives way. In an NTS, it is not asserted that Duncan McSporran doesn’t exist. The OP is more like:

  • Scotsmen don’t have sugar on their porridge
  • that guy over there has sugar on his porridge and he may well be a Scotsman
  • you haven’t produced a counter example because that guy won’t turn out to be from Scotland

The key here is lack of evidence about whether “that guy” is a Scotsman, not whether he can still be a Scotsman given that he has sugar on his porridge

The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy involves finding some data that supports your theory and ignoring the data that doesn’t. There is no data that supports or disproves the theory in the example in the OP. We don’t know Curry’s state of mind so his shooting results take the matter nowhere.

8

We also have no evidence that “shooting with confidence”, whatever the hell that means, has any actual influence on which shots go in and which don’t. It’s simply a bald assertion by the speaker. And a BS one to boot.

So working from the OP’s opening bits I’d rephrase it like this

If you have confidence, you’ll make every three-pointer you shoot.

But Steph Curry has a lot of confidence. And yet last night, he only made 10 out of 20 three-point attempts.

Therefore the evidence proves that having confidence is unrelated to three-point shooting performance.

So the fallacy, if there is a formal one besides the old standby “This is a BS argument”, is simply that the evidence presented fails to prove the conclusion stated.

9

Victory by Definition.

In this case, a “confident person” is being redefined as being “someone who never misses three-pointers.”

10

I don’t agree. There is a difference between A logical, and an evidential, fallacy.

In the OP, the speaker isn’t redefining a confident person as someone who always hits three-pointers, they are simply making an assumption about why they hit the three-pointer.

The effect may be the same when their evidential assumption can’t be challenged due to practicalities.