Is it unintentional plagiarism if your ideas coincide with those in the scholarship when you actually haven't read the scholarship?

[Anonymous]

If you analyse the same text as the scholars, you interpret it within the same framework, so your ideas cannot be that different and might coincide.

[SteveSmith1985]

Nope. That happens all the time. If you haven't read the scholarship it's impossible for you to have plagiarized someone's ideas. They are your ideas. You just happened to be thinking along the same lines as some of the scholarly work that already exists.

Let me put it this way... in most cases... someone wouldn't even be AWARE that they were doing this! (if they haven't read the work... they very well might not even know the work exists)

For that to be unintentional plagiarism, you would have to assume that everyone is already exhaustively familiar with what's already been written about a particular subject... before writing anything about that subject. You aren't expected to know everything that exists on a subject before giving your own thoughts on it. If your thoughts happen to be similar to someone elses... that's an innocent coincidence.

Now, I'm not gonna guarantee that nobody will ever ACCUSE you of plagiarism. But, it is, in fact, not plagiarism if you truly haven't read the works which happen to be so similar to your own ideas. Proving that might be hard. But it is NOT plagiarism.