What's this form of rhetoric called?

Question

Let's suppose my father was a good moral teacher to me. I say:

"I learned my virtuous morals from my father."

This is a true statement, because he did teach me good morals. However the subsequent claim:

"That is the reason why I am a moral person."

May sound suspicious. The statement may be only a partial explanation for my moral principles, ie., I also learned from my mother, siblings, friends, teachers, etc.

If it were the case that I had many moral teachers, and my father was only one among many, what do you call the statement:

"I learned my virtuous morals from my father."

?
It's true, but is misleading because it makes a tendentious argument towards my father being the reason. I thought of the term half-truth, and in fact it does fall into the definition of half-truth. But I don't like this term because the above statement is FULLY true. I DID learn good morals from my father, so as far as I'm concerned it is FULLY true, and I don't like the term half-truth. Neither do I like "partial-truth", because as I said it's fully true.

Also, I'm aware that the second statement is a case of making a possibly wrong conclusion from a valid premise, I'm not referring to this as in the case of syllogisms. I'm specifically asking about:

"I learned my virtuous morals from my father."

True in every way but sounds biased towards one particular cause. Maybe it's simply a case of omission: if there are my father, mother, siblings, friends etc., and I only mention my father, it may be simply a case of omission to persuade another that my father is the reason for why I'm moral.

Are there any terms that fit this? I've already considered half-truth and affirming the consequent and these don't fit. The best one word I've thought of so far is "omission", but that just means leaving something out, doesn't seem specific enough. Can be a word or multiple, preferable if it's a recognised term in the field of logic, rhetoric, or popular culture, or can be cited from a dictionary or anywhere else for that matter.

Answer 1

This looks like causal reductionism, also known as:

• complex cause
• fallacy of the single cause
• causal oversimplification
• reduction fallacy

Essentially, this fallacy refers to arguments that focus on a single cause while ignoring other potential causes, such as attributing one's morals totally to a father.

The fallacy occurs when an explanation of an event is assumed to be a single, simple cause when it may have had multiple causes. The cause is oversimplified, preventing a more in-depth analysis, often in order to deceive the listener as to the real causes.

• Believing Science

An example from Logically Fallacious provides context, though the example is quite different from the case in the question:

Hank: I ran my car off the side of the road because that damn squirrel ran in front of my car.

Officer Sam: You don’t think it had anything to do with the fact that you were trying to text your girlfriend, and driving drunk?

Answer 2

I would not call it a rhetorical device. I would call it an example of the logical fallacy post hoc ergo propter hoc (Wikipedia):

Post hoc ergo propter hoc (Latin: "after this, therefore because of this") is a logical fallacy that states "Since event Y followed event X, event Y must have been caused by event X." It is often shortened simply to post hoc fallacy.

A logical fallacy of the questionable cause variety, it is subtly different from the fallacy cum hoc ergo propter hoc ("with this, therefore because of this"), in which two events occur simultaneously or the chronological ordering is insignificant or unknown.

Post hoc is a particularly tempting error because temporal sequence appears to suggest causality. The fallacy lies in a conclusion based solely on the order of events, rather than taking into account other factors potentially responsible for the result that might rule out the connection.