Somewhat of the topic of accurate labels: This reminds me of Scott A’s old posts on the Non-central Example Fallacy and Motte-and-Bailey: A statement starting with ” Technically, …” is designed to pick out a non-central example, like that from the post, the motte of, say, “Technically, MLK was a criminal,” to justify the bailey of, say, “Shoplifing is no big deal, even though it is against the law.” Or, in your example, the motte is “technically, everything is a chemical,” and the bailey is “No need to worry about the content of the food you buy.”
As for the term for your first example, it is something like an industrial synthetic compounds never found in a home cooking recipe.
Gah, I keep finding myself in the unpleasant position that I agree in general, but every example I see is problematic. “shoplifting is no big deal even though it’s against the law” is a weird thing to say unless in response to “shoplifting IS a big deal because it’s against the law”. And the latter _should_ be attacked by showing all the ways that the law is insufficient evidence of big-deal-ness. The motte-and-baily is on the other foot in this case (bailey being “shoplifting is illegal”, motte being “shoplifting is a big deal”).
Somewhat of the topic of accurate labels: This reminds me of Scott A’s old posts on the Non-central Example Fallacy and Motte-and-Bailey: A statement starting with ” Technically, …” is designed to pick out a non-central example, like that from the post, the motte of, say, “Technically, MLK was a criminal,” to justify the bailey of, say, “Shoplifing is no big deal, even though it is against the law.” Or, in your example, the motte is “technically, everything is a chemical,” and the bailey is “No need to worry about the content of the food you buy.”
As for the term for your first example, it is something like an industrial synthetic compounds never found in a home cooking recipe.
Gah, I keep finding myself in the unpleasant position that I agree in general, but every example I see is problematic. “shoplifting is no big deal even though it’s against the law” is a weird thing to say unless in response to “shoplifting IS a big deal because it’s against the law”. And the latter _should_ be attacked by showing all the ways that the law is insufficient evidence of big-deal-ness. The motte-and-baily is on the other foot in this case (bailey being “shoplifting is illegal”, motte being “shoplifting is a big deal”).