Antony Flew.
Thinking about Thinking: or, do I sincerely want to be right?.
Fontana. 1975
3.1.
Imagine some Scottish chauvinist settled
down one Sunday morning with his customary copy of The News of the
World. He reads the story under the headline, 'Sidcup Sex Maniac
Strikes Again'. Our reader is, as he confidently expected, agreeably
shocked: 'No Scot would do such a thing!' Yet the very next Sunday he
finds in that same favourite source a report of the even more
scandalous on-goings of Mr Angus MacSporran in Aberdeen. This clearly
constitutes a counter example, which definitively falsifies the
universal proposition originally put forward. ('Falsifies' here is, of
course, simply the opposite of 'verifies'; and it therefore means
'shows to be false'.) Allowing that this is indeed such a counter
example, he ought to withdraw; retreating perhaps to a rather weaker
claim about most or some. But even an imaginary Scot is, like the rest
of us, human; and we none of us always do what we ought to do. So what
in fact he says is : 'No true Scotsman would do such a thing!'