Andy Rooney Indians Seek A Role In Modern USmmary

Andy Rooney, author of the article “Indians Seek a Role in Modern U.S.” made multiple logical fallacies throughout his article. Logical fallacies concern themselves with the structure of arguments and the process through which conclusions are drawn. Logical fallacies focus on the relationships among statements, if the statements are true or false, and rather or not conclusions based upon the statements are validly drawn. Three logical fallacies Rooney made in his article is hasty generalization, either…or fallacy, and non-sequitur.

Hasty generalization is a form of logical fallacy based on insufficient or unrepresentative evidence. Stereotyping is a specific kind of hasty generalization that categorizes a group of people and assumes the beliefs

Andy Rooney used a stereotype when he made the statement, “Indians were always considered to be brave, strong, stoic, resourceful, true to their word and unconquerable. Anyone with a touch of Indian blood in their ancestry is proud of it” (51). While it may be true that some Indians are “brave, strong, stoic, resourceful, true to their word and unconquerable” (Rooney 51) these attributes cannot be used to describe every single person with Native American heritage as not every single person may necessarily have these qualities. Some Native Americans may possess these qualities, others may possess only some of these qualities, and some others may possess none of these qualities. The statement, “Anyone with a touch of Indian blood in their ancestry is proud of it” (Rooney 51) also may not necessarily be true. There is no way to determine if every person that has

Andy Rooney made this logical fallacy when he made the statement, “Illiteracy is widespread among Indians. Indians and whites blame whites for what’s wrong and, historically, that may be true, but it is the Indians who are doing the drinking” (52). Rooney’s statement is a non-sequitur because his first statement makes the claim that illiteracy is widespread among Indians, but he next jumps to the statement that Indians are blaming white people for wrong doings. Rooney then makes another jump to his next statement that Indians are the ones doing the drinking. Rooney should have backed up his initial claim about widespread illiteracy among Native Americans with fact based evidence before making his move to another topic. Instead Rooney jumped to the statement “Indians and whites blame whites for what’s wrong” (52). Rooney’s statement was not concise; it gave no explanation of what whites are being blamed for. Instead of elaborating on either of his prior two topics Rooney again made a jump to a new topic with the statement, “it is Indians doing the drinking” (52). Rooney was jumping from topic to topic in his statement, he made three assumptions and none of these assumptions were followed up with facts, instead the facts were just skipped over and more assumptions with no supporting evidence were made. Rooney’s statement was