Arguing With Geeks 10

The YNSTRILT Fallacy — A relative of the IDSISINT Fallacy, the YNSTRILT (or “You’re Not Supposed To Read It Like That”) Fallacy is the predication of significance solely upon conscious purpose, generally in an attempt to justify an Argument by Insignification. Where significance is a sixfold product of conscious and unconscious purpose (authorial intent), content (textual denotation) and import (reader response), the YNSTRILT Fallacy recognises only one of these six facets, denying that any significance may emerge due to unconscious purpose, become manifest in the actualities of articulation, or be generated in the act of reading. Presented with a text containing, for example, a swarthy, hook-nosed, child-stealing, gold-loving, subhuman race, the upholder of a YNSTRILT Fallacy will argue — e.g. by reference to the author’s professed animosity to anti-Semitism — that we cannot impute an anti-Semitic significance in the absence of an anti-Semitic intent; it would be a misreading to project a meaning into the text that the author was not purposely trying to convey. Such significances will be characterised as Import Artifices, the perceived meanings disregarded as spurious products of an ISM or some other biasing factor. This is a legitimate grounds for challenge on specific points. The YNSTRILT Fallacy is distinguishable, however, by its essentialism -- its implicit or explicit assertion that all such significances are and can only be Import Artifices.