Pretend that my views represent everyone in the broader group
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Original Question
Let’s say aliens come to earth and they have heard of socialism but they don’t really know what it is. The aliens ask me to define it. Let’s say I am a democratic socialist and I know that there are dozens of different kinds of socialism, some of which are against democracy. I know that the various types of socialists disagree with each other vehemently. This is embarrassing so I present socialism as a cohesive group who all agree on every topic. I want the aliens to prefer my type of socialism so I tell them that the type of socialism I believe is representative of the whole group. What fallacies am I committing?
I know that rationalists tend not to like socialism. I could be talking about anything. Do all feminists believe that stripping is empowering or exploitative? I would be lying if I said they all agreed.
Thanks
Answers
3By limiting the definition of socialism to the one that you feel is easier to defend you are falling foul of the definist fallacy by cherry picking. You have distorted the definition of socialism by limiting its scope (rather than just redefining it to suit your purposes). By telling the aliens that the type of socialism you believe is representative of the whole group you are either mistaken (possibly the fallacy of composition) or being deliberately misleading.
Whenever we use nominalisations (socialism, feminism) we freeze a process and therefore misrepresent it. Socialism and feminism are broad categories that house a range of characteristics (intentions, inferences, behaviours, etc). So if someone asks what socialism we are charged with providing a high level, intensional definition - when a more meaningful understanding requires the inclusion of an extensional one.
In the first example: what we're doing is defining terms in a way that is favourable to our argument. This is a definist fallacy.
In the second example: if you said "all feminists agree on X" then that'd just be a false premise. However, if you go further, and say 'those who do not agree on X are not feminists', this would be considered a no true scotsman.
You're committing the fallacy of waking dreamworld idealismism. Or what I call the unique ismism fallacy....'laughs' 'jeers' 'boos'?
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