Grapheme clusters, a.k.a.real characters

[Rick Johnson]

On Saturday, July 15, 2017 at 7:55:46 PM UTC-5, Steve D'Aprano wrote:
> On Sun, 16 Jul 2017 12:31 am, Rick Johnson wrote:
> 
> > I never hear Chinese or eastern Europeans
> > bellyaching
> 
> Do you speak much to Chinese and Eastern Europeans who
> don't speak or write English? How would you know what they
> say?
> 
> "All toupées are bad. I've never seen a good one that looked real."
> 
> http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Toupee_fallacy

A good retort!

But not airtight, i'm afraid.

Here, allow me to explain...

The implication of the Toupee Fallacy is that one cannot
ever discover a "good toupee", since "good toupees" would be
indistinguishable from _real_ hair. Which is true, however,
the Toupee Fallacy also applies inversely...

What i mean is that your implicit implication that i am
unable to discover "good toupees", and therefore unable to
quantify them,  also applies to your inability to prove that
"Good Toupees" even exist. Sure, we can _assume_ that "Good
Toupees" exist, but such a conjecture would never be
_scientific_. Therefore, the Toupee Fallacy is invalid as a
weapon of debate because it relies on the unproved premise
that "Good Toupees" even exist.

Isn't that ironic? 

Dontcha think?

[1] Save that the experimenter yanked on the hair of every
person she encountered, which of course is not polite, so we
will safely assume that such techniques, while arguably 100%
scientific, were not used during the "Toupee Fallacy Study".
Which incidentally is why the media never dubbed it the
"Toupee Terror Attacks". But i digress...