Why I'm about to "No true Scotsman" you · 4:18am Oct 14th, 2014
Wikipedia says,
When faced with a counterexample to a universal claim ("no Scotsman would do such a thing"), rather than denying the counterexample or rejecting the original universal claim, this fallacy modifies the subject of the assertion to exclude the specific case or others like it by rhetoric, without reference to any specific objective rule ("no true Scotsman would do such a thing").
And yet, I am about to "No true Scotsman" all over you. I'm looking for objective rules about what makes a story a story. "No true Scotsman" is a fallacy when you have a rule saying who is and who is not a Scotsman. When you don't have the objective rules, and you're arguing about what they are, you can't reference them.
Say you're on the Olympic committee that decides what should and should not be an Olympic sport. The question of the biathlon comes up. One might suggest that, as there are already individual events for skiing and marksmanship, they should not be combined into a single sport unless all possible combinations of two single-event Olympics sports are also recognized as Olympic sports. Or one might suggest that a military training exercise is not the same thing as a sport. Or the question of curling comes up, and one might object that to be an Olympic sport, for an international competition, a sport should be practiced in more than one nation. Or one might say that a true Olympic sport should not make observers fall down laughing, or should not be something done to pass the time while drinking beer.
You wouldn't accuse the Olympic committee member of committing the "no true Scotsman" fallacy (unless, perhaps, you were a biathlete). She's just trying to do her job. She has to look at the set of sports, and the set of recognized Olympic sports, and try to figure out what distinguishes Olympic sports.
Similarly, I'm going to look at stories, and try to figure out what distinguishes "proper" stories. I already believe there are rules to these things, because I see so many regularities in stories. The properties of stories are not distributed randomly! But even supposing that there are rules, I still expect people, in their error-prone ways, to write and publish many "improper" stories that don't fit the rules. So if you can point to a story published in The Youth's Companion in 1902 that breaks my rule, I don't care. I'll No True Scotsman it without a second thought. I expect to find fake Scotsman all over the place. I wouldn't be too dismayed if most published stories broke my rules, as long as most of the great stories observe them.
In fact, a rule that's followed by great stories and broken by lots of not-so-great stories is better than a rule broken by no stories at all! A rule broken by no stories at all (say, "A story must contain at least 2 different letters of the alphabet") is useless. I want rules that help me avoid making mistakes that I might have made, not mistakes I wouldn't consider making.
Rather than ask yourself what makes a story, instead ask yourself what doesn't make a story.
Or, in the words of Lyra's maestro, "What does the stone want?"
2531525
I feel like suggesting that no truly bad horse would devote so much time to sharing his or her literary insights.
I suggest a name change to "Abrasive-but-Morally-Upstanding Horse".
2531525
'Tis, as they say, the exception that proves the rule.
Find an example of something that is not a story, and figure out why it isn't.
Then, find something halfway between that and storydom.
Continue whetting, as there are always going to be ambiguities with art.
See also: Is John Cage's 4'33" music?
I like the rule that a story has to develop both internally and externally.
For it to be called a story a character must have developed in relation to an outside stimulus.
Character growth is what seems to separate a lot of wheat from chaff.
That Olympic example wasn't very good. You didn't apply the "No True Scotsman" fallacy to your example at all, because while the counter-examples to your suggested rules are implied, you completely skipped the stage where you reject them by adding a nebulous modifier (like "True") to the rule.
EDIT: In fact, the whole scenario is backwards, now that I think of it. You wouldn't suggest have a sport, like the biathlon come up and then suggest a rule, you'd suggest the rule and then someone would bring up the counter-example.
2531542
That's debatably a rule for what makes a good story, not for what makes a story.
2531534
In the scene, Lyra's maestro had a rock garden, with a boulder at the center. The maestro asked Lyra to study the stone and Lyra spent all day finding out what it was made of, how much it weighed, etc. And then her maestro asked her, "What does the stone want?"
Like all purely intellectual constructs, I think the definition of a story is always going to be subject to interpretation -- that said, I also think it's entirely valid for individuals to develop their own definitions, and to apply them strictly. Simply agreeing that something is subjective doesn't mean it's undefinable -- merely that the definition will vary from person to person.
To me, a story should advance a proposition. The more strongly it does that, the stronger a story it is. A slice-of-life vignette that follows a character throughout their day, but doesn't feature any significant choices or developments on their part, isn't much of a story. A work that follows a character who is confronted with a conflict, and must make a decision that will change them or cost them something significant, on the other hand, has a lot of potential. It can say a lot about what it means to be human.
I love choices. Stories to me are about choices and their consequences. That trifecta -- the dilemma, the choice, and the consequence -- is how the author makes a statement, a proposition, about the way the world is or the way she believes it ought to be.
If I met someone who had never seen a matchstick before, and they asked me what it was, I wouldn't try to explain to them through words what the matchstick was, I'd just strike the match and light my cigarette. Then they'll understand what a matchstick is.
I don't know what value you see in making up abstract rules when you have a world of actual, real-world examples to parse through. Why not just grab a few stories you think are emblematic of what makes a story a story, and point people towards those?
Also, the biathlon is nigh-universally fatal. But you knew that already.
I'm curious if you are trying to formalize something that you already judge on a subconscious basis, or if it is a metric for things that should be considered proper stories. For instance, out of the following set, which would you choose as "proper"?
1-) Hemmingway's "Baby Shoes"
2-) Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings"
3-) Kafka's "The Castle"
4-) "The Eye of Argon"
5-) A scientific paper (Random Example
6-) A news article (Random Example
7-) Joyce's "Ulysses"
8-) "Fifty Shades of Gray"
9-) The Twilight Saga
10-) A traditional form poem
11-) This blog post
12-) A specific subset of your blog posts
There is only one true law in writing: If it works, it works.
2531590 Chemists are able to see a burning matchstick in a radically different way, and that leads to new things.
Here's an instructive quote from a paper I read recently discussing how narrative writing differs from how scientists normally write their papers:
http://m.pnas.org/content/111/Supplement_4/13614.abs
Thus, a story or a narrative provides an account of a specific event from which the reader can abstract a greater truth. That seems like a fair definition to me.
The paper also offers this definition of a narrative from the point of view of a communications scholar:
Rather than rule, might "guideline" be a better word choice? It feels less rigid. After all
Rules were made to be broken.
I have a friend that's trying to do something similar. He's trying to group and distinguish qualities of all stories, not just good stories. He's starting with a giant list of observables, checking them against stories, and trying to derive rules from the results. I take it you're doing the reverse by starting with rules?
2531655
Scientists can look at matchsticks for what they are. They can discover new ideas and concepts that already existed, but they shouldn't and don't make up new ones where they aren't needed. Making up rules where rules don't exist doesn't lead to radically new things. Making up rules where they aren't needed leads to false labels, unnecessary restrictions, and arbitrary, easily subverted guidelines.
Stories can speak for themselves.
If we're talking proper stories, I would say that for a series of events to classify as a story, something must have changed by the end due to those events--unless, nothing having changed is the point of the story (i.e. to illustrate how people often will not change their ways no matter what happens because of them).
Otherwise you may have to say that any series of events qualifies, technically, as a story. "Mary picked up a bucket, walked to a well to get water, fell in, was rescued, and later that evening went back to get more water, the end." vs "Mary took a bucket to the well, fell in, and as a result, became terrified of water for the rest of her life, the end." The former might classify as a "story" you would tell when recounting your day to a friend or family member, but probably not as the kind of "story" you would write down and give to others to read...unless it was very dramatically written and gripping, which leads me to basic qualifier number two: a story must reveal something about its setting, its characters, its readers, or the world they live in/the people in it (a dramatic telling of the first story of mary might reveal she's very brave or very terrified of dying"). Since a story can do this without anything having changed by the end, a "proper" story can fulfill either the first qualifier, the second, or both.
Also, "proper" does not mean "good quality". A rotten piece of fruit is still technically a fruit.
This is probably full of holes, but eh, I gave it a shot.
A good story makes reader to ask some question. It also have to be written in a way that allows to read it without violence against the reader, i.e. use rich language which still does not use too much long words and make the reader to associate himself or his close ones with the characters of the story.
Unfortunately, people are different, so, good stories for different target audiences have to be executed using different instruments and, consequently, story that is good for one particular target audience is bad for another target audience.
In addition to this, author can play with his audience in some games, say put some code or mystery into the story so the readers could exercise their minds solving it, but it is and option to be put on top, not a definitive trait of good story.
You know, I can't help but think that any attempt to rigidly define stories by what they must do or mustn't do will run into a sort of an incompleteness problem, because to create a rigid definition you must determine some rules the prospective story must follow[1], and you must publish them somehow. And the moment you do, some writer is going to write the story that breaks your rule on purpose. Guaranteed.
[1] And to make it a useful definition it must discriminate, which means that the rules must be strict and/or demanding enough that you can break them.
2531557
I swear, one day I'll write a story where the Inscrutable Mentor pulls a stunt like that, the pupil goes away to think about it, comes back, and tells said Inscrutable Mentor that she's sick of his mystic gibberish. The mentor then smiles and says, "Ah, finally I can start teaching."
2531539
Don't.
He'll just take it upon himself to prove his name is accurate. Instead, just imagine him as the Cthaeh, divulging ruinous truths for his own dark purposes.
2531589
I think what Bad Horse really means to develop is a heuristic for stories, rather than a rigid rule/definition. Something that is accurate for the preponderance of stories most of the time. That way, he can focus his work on his 'definition' generating interesting things to consider and intriguing conclusion rather than being impossibly widened to include anything anyone might write, ever. Because such definitions are, generally speaking, either banal or false.
Also, I'm not sure I'm 100% in agreement with your definition. Certainly the idea of 'choice, price, and change' is a good heuristic, and it will net a number of excellent stories, but I don't think it is close to being universal. What of a slice-of-life that doesn't feature a jot of choice, but paints a sharp portrait of an unique character and something of the path that brought them here? Hell, a few examples of Bleakhorsiana are all about characters not changing, not making a choice, and remaining trapped in their personal purgatories.
2531557
It doesn't want anything. It's a rock. :maudpie:
2531869
It wants to ROCK
I didn't really see the use of No true Scotsman here, though. The fallacy arises when you make a set of rules to define something, then, when something that would fit those rules acts in a way that runs counter to what you think should be, you modify your rules to exclude this.
You seem to simply be attempting to define something to start with. Unless I read this all wrong. It IS rather late...
I have nothing constructive to add, other than that I own a kilt, in my family's appropriate tartan, and I do wear it to work (with a sporran, and a sgian dubh tucked into my hose) on occasion.
If we are throwing around terms, I like "taxonomy."
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2531655
I'm a chemist and I agree with overload.
Although I'll add the addendum that, given infinite resources, I'd put on a bench small pieces of wood on one end, and beakers of phosphorous, potassium chlorate and whatever on the other.
In the middle, I'd put as many matches of as many different compositions that I could find.
I'd draw a boundary in chalk around the matches, then say to my hypothetical alien "those are matches", and then I'd show it how all the things on the bench reacted to different things.
Soge, while being able to see things in terms of activation energy, chemical composition and so IS very useful, those things are related to the future and past of a match (namely, how to design one and what happens to it when you strike it). So I don't think that that would help in seeing the match as it is :-/
Also, I've started reading your reviews just an hour ago for unrelated reasons, and they're very good
For this sort of thing I've always preferred the term lens over the term rule. Especially for something as subjective as stories. Different lenses let you see the same thing in different ways. Doesn't mean that one lens is more true than the other, or that one lens is 'more true' than the other. Though you can have lenses that are closer to true than others, or at least let you see certain things more clearly. The analogy isn't perfect.
For the matchstick example, just lighting the match is a very immediate and short-term look at it. If, in a story, I write the line 'Twilight gets a glass of water' it kind of matters if she's getting a drink for herself, or if it's for a sick friend.
Anyway, I don't think Bad Horse is attempting to define things to explain what a story is. He's trying to figure out a way to make his own writing better. See the last line of the post:
If I want to make better matches, examining the chemical composition is going to be much more useful than just lighting one.
If you're going ahead with this exercise, then 1) godspeed and 2) you may want to, for the sake of both politeness and accuracy, come up with a word for things that are not stories but close enough that reasonable people would see what you mean when you say that. Things that look like stories but are not, or things that meet some but not all of the criteria you decide to use.
Something like "narratives." So I would accept that one of the stories I posted was "a narrative, but not a story" if you were inclined to judge it so.
Simply saying "not a story" might come across as ungentlecoltly.
(the set of <stories> need not be wholly within the set of <narratives>, though my imagination falters when asked to describe a story that is not a narrative.)
2531975
The "fallacy" is when you say things in a certain category X behave in a particular way, then someone brings up an example of something allegedly in X that doesn't behave that way, you say "That's not a true example of X".
And that's what I'm going to do. But I claim it's not a fallacy, because even if my rules are all true, we would expect lots of bad stories not to follow them. "No true Scotsman" is a fallacy only if you presume there's no such thing as a "half Scotsman" or "not very good Scotsman".
(I wouldn't even call it a fallacy. Someone might say, "No true Marine would leave his squad leader behind to die." You can probably find Marines who've done that. Maybe the circumstances forced it. Maybe they weren't true Marines. It doesn't mean statements like that are all wrong. The fallacy, if anything, lies in omitting a string of qualifiers about circumstances in which a true X might in fact do Y.)
2531590 Because I don't want to waste time writing stories that don't work for reasons I don't understand.
But are you really "no true scotsman"ing here? I mean, you're explicitly trying to create a set of rules so that you can then reference them. Is it still no true scotsman if now you can reference the rules?
2531854
Surely you of all people have heard of and are familiar with the Godel-Turing theorem.
2533097
What you want to do, I think, (read stories that work, try to understand why they work, and then apply that to your own writing) is something that I'm pretty sure you're doing already, and have been doing for a long time, even if you weren't writing rules down for yourself afterwards. I mean, isn't that something all writers do all the time while they read? I guess I'm very confused by exactly what you feel you're doing here that's different, or why you would feel the need to announce something I always assumed was a basic aspect of reading and writing anyway. Writing it down and sharing what you find that makes good stories work is a great idea, but you've worded this all in very strange ways. What does the 'no true scotsman' fallacy have to do with any of this, again?
And if you write something that doesn't work and you don't understand why, isn't the best way to figure it out to show it to other people and see what they think? Reading other stories that you know work and seeing what they're doing differently than you would lead to similar results, I'm sure. Again, though, that seems like something you probably already know well. I'm genuinely very confused by this whole deal. The most I can get out of it is that you're saying, "I'm going to read great stories and see what they have in common so I can figure out what makes for a great story, and then use that to write my own great stories." And... well... yeah. Me too. And everybody else. This is something the literary community at large has been going after for quite some time now.
2533327
I was making an oblique reference to such, yes. Though I fear you may be conflating incompleteness and the Turing/Church[1] solution to the Entscheidungsproblem. Related, of course, but fundamentally different.
[1] OTP?
2533097
Known knowns, known unknowns, unknown knowns, and unknown unknowns. There's only so much traction to be found applying logic and theory versus testing and practice.
Having said that, I do have some guidelines I truck with, even though I cannot call them 'objective'. (I cannot conceive of how to apply universal objective standards of quality to creative works, because I cannot find anything without counterexamples. 'It is a sin to waste the reader's time.' Not if that's the point. 'Bleak narratives are immoral.' What, because they're disturbing? Why are a particular kind of disturbing narratives automatically invalid? What makes a specific subset of immoral stories 'wrong' on some level underneath?) I'm not going to relay them here because I'm pretty sure they won't stand up to rigorous analysis. I'm more about guidelines, I guess.
What I will say is the pattern I've discovered personally: Breaking rules can lead to great stories, but you have to be willing to break them carefully and without overdoing it. Just as, say, a single-gear bike is actually an advantage for certain things, doing something underpowered can occasionally produce powerful effects. Breaking more than one rule typically raises the challenge considerably, and three -- well, I can't think of any moderI went with fiction I've ever read that broke three baseline rules and didn't feel like a gimmicky gimmick fried in gimmick grease.
2533778
...fairly likely. I saw you mentioned an incompleteness problem, and I went "but... math! Godel incompleteness theorem! No such thing as complete formal logic! Make points blauugh!" Then I scrounged around for a way to reference it without naming it.
I should probably re-read Turing's Cathedral. I freely admit that I only remembered how to spell Godel's name because I'd flagged the page mentioning it for further thought, and flipped to it when I knew I'd be referencing it.
2533447
Yes; I just want to try being more rigorous and precise, and see what that gets me.
I'm going to try to come up with principles for stories of type X, and then people are going to name stories that don't follow those principles, and I'm very possibly going to say, "That's not a type X story", or, "That's a bad type X story". Like, "Titty Mouse & Tatty Mouse" doesn't follow any of the principles people have come up with for fairy tales, but I think that's not a refutation of the principles. It's a demonstration that stories that don't follow the principles are probably bad.
2531854
Oh yeah?
Go for it.
2536480
I have a truly wondrous story that breaks that rule, but this comment is too narrow to contain it.