Rathering is a way of sliding you swiftly and gently past a false dichotomy. The general form of a rathering is “It is not the case that blahblahblah, as orthodoxy would have you believe; it is rather that suchandsuchandsuch—which is radically different.” Some ratherings are just fine; you really must choose between the two alternatives on offer; in these cases, you are not being offered a false, but rather a genuine, inescapable dichotomy. But some ratherings are little more than sleight of hand, due to the fact that the word “rather” implies—without argument—that there is an important incompatibility between the claims flanking it.
Source:
Philosopher Daniel Dennett’s Book Intuition Pumps
