For anyone else to distinguish it from a No True Scotsman argument would probably require me to have been much more precise than I’m in the habit of being in regular conversation, but I have a pretty solid idea of what I meant when I made my original claim, and I’d be able to tell if a particular example met my specifications. Of course, if there were anything really obvious that qualified, I’d be likely to have thought of it before and not made the claim in the first place.
Anyway, it’s possible that there are specific technologies that were conceived of hundreds of years in advance of the point where it was possible to implement them according to the specifications I have in mind, and I’m not aware of it, but if they were conceived of before the industrial revolution, I don’t think we can take it as a very meaningful precedent to generalize from now.
For anyone else to distinguish it from a No True Scotsman argument would probably require me to have been much more precise than I’m in the habit of being in regular conversation, but I have a pretty solid idea of what I meant when I made my original claim, and I’d be able to tell if a particular example met my specifications. Of course, if there were anything really obvious that qualified, I’d be likely to have thought of it before and not made the claim in the first place.
Anyway, it’s possible that there are specific technologies that were conceived of hundreds of years in advance of the point where it was possible to implement them according to the specifications I have in mind, and I’m not aware of it, but if they were conceived of before the industrial revolution, I don’t think we can take it as a very meaningful precedent to generalize from now.