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Straw Men, Weak Men, and Hollow Men

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Abstract

Three forms of the straw man fallacy are posed: the straw, weak, and hollow man. Additionally, there can be non-fallacious cases of any of these species of straw man arguments.

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Notes

  1. “A straw man fallacy is committed with an arguer distorts an opponent’s argument or claim in order to make it easier to attack” (Bassham et al. 2002:151); “The point of the straw person fallacy is… to radically and unfairly mischaracterize what a person says… and proceed to refute those claims….” (Bickenbach and Davies 1997: 68); “Straw man: The fallacy of distorting, weakening, or oversimplifying someone’s position so it can be more easily attacked or refuted” (Vaughn 2008: 534); “Straw man: A fallacy that occurs when the arguer misrepresents an opponent’s position for the purpose of more easily attacking it, demolishes the misrepresented argument, and then proceeds to conclude that the original argument has been demolished” (Hurley 1994: 622); “We commit the FALLACY OF STRAW MAN when we mischaracterize our opponent’s position in order to make it easier to refute” (Perkins 1995: 39); One commits the straw man fallacy "when a position being attacked is first stated in a distorted and hence more vulnerable form"(Vernon and Nissen 1968: 160); “Straw man fallacy A fallacy committed when a person misrepresents an argument, theory, or claim, and then, on the basis of that misrepresentation, claims to have refuted to position the person has misrepresented” (Govier 1997: 201); “Straw man fallacy: A form of fallacy of emphasis in which someone’s written or spoken words are taken out of context, thereby purposely distorting the original inference in such a way that the new, weak inference (the straw man) is easy to defeat” (Baronett 2008: 287); “In the case of the Straw Man fallacy, the clear irrelevance emerges in the argument that is constructed on the basis of, or in response to, the misrepresentation or caricature” (Tindale 2007, 25).

  2. Talisse and Aikin (2006).

  3. The conditions for this implicature, we assume here, are those cooperative conditions observed by Grice (1975) and integrated into the pragma-dialectical framework for argumentative interpretation by van Eemeren and Grootendorst (2004). The core of this implicature is that A’s contribution to the discussion, in order to meet the relevance and quality conditions, are presumed to be representative of the best state of the dialogue, as A can see it. So if A selects an argument to respond to (and responds to no more), A must take the argument (and his response) to best reflect the state of play in the discussion.

  4. Analogize this strategy to that of gerrymandering evidence, or ‘nut picking.’ Gerrymandering evidence is the act of selecting only evidence that supports one’s preferred thesis or undercuts the opposition’s. In weak-manning, one gerrymanders one’s evidence of the opposition’s views by selecting the worst of the opposition as representative. The phrase, “nut picking” specifically refers to the practice, common in internet forums (but not limited to them), of trolling the comments sections of an blogs or discussion forums of in an effort to find either absurdly weak arguments or wildly unrepresentative arguers. The phrase was first coined on August 11 2006 by a commenter on Kevin Drum's “Political Animal” blog: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2006_08/009324.php

  5. Hollow manning has only infrequently been recognized as a possibility for straw man fallacies. Johnson and Blair’s definition of the straw man leaves open room for the possibility of hollow man, namely that an arguer attributes to another some position Q, but the other arguer’s position is actually R. (1983: 74). Whether Q is a distortion of R or something entirely different is not explicit in their model. Frans van Eemeren and Rob Grootendorst distinguish two forms of straw man, one of which involves "imputing a fictitious standpoint to the opponent" (1992: 126–127). Frans van Eemeren, Rob Grootendorst and Francisca Snoeck Henkemans present two forms of the straw man. One is along the representational lines and the other along hollow man lines: “There are two different ways of attacking a standpoint that is not really the one presented by the opponent. The original standpoint can be misrepresented, or a fictitious standpoint can be attributed to the opponent” (2002: 117). See also Copi et al. (2007): 445) and Rudinow and Barry (2008: 325).

  6. We should caution, however, that certain argumentative contexts are poorly suited to specifically identifying one's opponents. American presidents delivering addresses such as the State of the Union address do not by tradition identify their opponents by name. As we shall note below, however, this does not mean their opponent is a fiction.

  7. Cf. Sunstein’s (2009) work showing that overtly addressing rumors actually backfires in cases where the audience has accepted the rumor as likely true. “Corrections of false impressions can be futile; they can also actually strengthen those impressions” (46).

  8. Barker (1993) has reported that early immersion students “lag behind” their monolingual peers in spelling, reading, and grammar in their home language. There is evidence that these students catch up later. We should note that we, the authors, are taking no stand on any of this research and are presenting the exchange as an example of hollow man arguments.

  9. People were asked to respond to various civic proposals, some framed by straw men of the opposition, others without. The variations of interest were affected by changing the geography of where the civic proposals would be put into effect (near = higher interest, far away = lower interest).

  10. Sunstein (2006) identifies polarization as an explanation for why deliberating groups will regularly underperform non-deliberating groups. See Aikin and Clanton (forthcoming) for an account of how properly run group deliberation and virtuous deliberators correct and guard against these distortions.

  11. See, for example: Walton and Krabbe (1995) and van Eemeren et al. (2007)

  12. See Walton and Krabbe (1995), who term such interpretations “dark side commitments.”.

  13. The authors wish to thank Hugh Nicholson, Robert Talisse, and the two anonymous referees at Argumentation for their helpful comments on this essay.

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Aikin, S.F., Casey, J. Straw Men, Weak Men, and Hollow Men. Argumentation 25, 87–105 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-010-9199-y

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