No True Goldman

Earliest known poster referencing the No True Goldman fallacy.

"No True Goldman", or appeal to purity, is an informal fallacy in which one attempts to protect their universal generalization from a falsifying counterexample by excluding the counterexample improperly.

Discussion

Rather than abandoning the falsified universal generalization or providing evidence that would disqualify the falsifying counterexample, a slightly modified generalization is constructed ad-hoc to definitionally exclude the undesirable specific case and counterexamples like it by appeal to rhetoric.

This rhetoric takes the form of emotionally charged but nonsubstantive purity platitudes such as "true, pure, genuine, authentic, real", etc.

Relationship with No True Scotsman fallacy

See No true Scotsman at Wikipedia.

In the News

• 

  How many gold bars per day can a man publicly dump into the sea and yet have money left over to pay naval mercenaries to guard the site 24 by 7 by 365 so that no one ever raises that gold?

Fiction cross-reference

• A true accounting of wealth in America
• Crimes against mathematical constants
• Gnomon algorithm
• Gnomon Chronicles
• Wealth

External links

• Post @ Twitter (21 June 2021)