Hacker News Reader

> ...true Americans...

Careful with that; it's the no true scotsman fallacy. The sad thing is that these people are, in fact, True Americans.

Here it's used as a rhetorical device, "true Americans" is an appeal to our sense of national identity. Be careful identifying fallacies by the superficial qualities they have, pay attention to the context where phrases are used.

Isn't "no true Scotsman" an appeal to national identity?

No it's not. It's a redefinition of terms to exclude counterexamples. I could say "no sandwich is vegetarian" and you show me a grilled cheese sandwich and I say "no true sandwich is vegetarian."

The problem is that people have been passing around a cheat sheet of logical fallacies, but using the mental version of a regex to try and match them. This is not a reliable technique for identifying fallacies. Usually, you would want to recognize them by their content, not their form, and it's essential to know the difference between formal and informal fallacies.

Thank you for the great post! I especially agree with your second paragraph. I admit that my post constitutes a mixture of ethos, pathos, and logos - as opposed to being perfectly aligned with logical stipulations.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com