> therefore saying that they are not true believers of faith because of their terrorist actions is a fallacy.
As I understand it, the no true scotsman boils down to "group A all do this. Person B belongs to group A, but does not do that. Only real members of A do this."
So the terrorist claim wouldn't be part of the fallacy, just a difference in interpretation. The fallacy occurs not in the thesis (group A all do this), but in the operation of arguing itself, when the reaction to the counter is to repeat the thesis but now excluding the counter example. You could imagine that every counterexample was so specially treated until the generalization is true, but meaningless.
The overall argument becoming trivially true: forall i in {A - B}, i has property C
As I understand it, the no true scotsman boils down to "group A all do this. Person B belongs to group A, but does not do that. Only real members of A do this."
So the terrorist claim wouldn't be part of the fallacy, just a difference in interpretation. The fallacy occurs not in the thesis (group A all do this), but in the operation of arguing itself, when the reaction to the counter is to repeat the thesis but now excluding the counter example. You could imagine that every counterexample was so specially treated until the generalization is true, but meaningless.
The overall argument becoming trivially true: forall i in {A - B}, i has property C
Where A is the whole group
And B is a subset of A, having the property not-C