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9 - The Straw Man Fallacy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2014

Douglas Walton
Affiliation:
University of Windsor, Ontario
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Summary

Straw man is a modern addition to the list of informal fallacies treated in logic textbooks, where it is said to be the fallacy of misrepresenting an opponent’s real position as a weaker one that can more easily be attacked (Johnson and Blair, 1983; Freeman, 1988; Govier, 1992; Walton, 1996c). However, much earlier, Aristotle remarked (Topics 159b30–35) on the danger in argumentation of misrepresenting another arguer’s position, and no doubt philosophers have often made similar comments in the past. Thus although straw man represents the extreme kind of case of misrepresenting another arguer’s position, it would be useful more generally to have some tool that could assist in making objective determinations of when an expressed position has been wrongly represented in a given case. For it is a rule of rational argumentation that before you criticize or refute another party’s view in a critical discussion, you should be sure that the view you are attacking actually represents the other party’s position. This chapter develops a formal dialogue system that can utilize three different kinds of commitment query inference engines that are designed to help in analyzing and evaluating cases where the straw man fallacy is alleged to have been committed.

Such an engine is meant to be used to search through an arguer’s commitment set in a case of argumentation that can be structured in a formal dialogue format, so that it can be fairly judged whether a queried statement is in an arguer’s commitment store or not. Only if it is not in the arguer’s commitment store can an attacker of the alleged position of the second party be fairly judged to have committed the straw man fallacy, based on the evidence in the case at issue. The project undertaken is not to implement any of these inference engines computationally, but only to construct formal models specifying generally how they should work.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2013

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  • The Straw Man Fallacy
  • Douglas Walton, University of Windsor, Ontario
  • Book: Methods of Argumentation
  • Online publication: 05 June 2014
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139600187.009
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  • The Straw Man Fallacy
  • Douglas Walton, University of Windsor, Ontario
  • Book: Methods of Argumentation
  • Online publication: 05 June 2014
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139600187.009
Available formats
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To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • The Straw Man Fallacy
  • Douglas Walton, University of Windsor, Ontario
  • Book: Methods of Argumentation
  • Online publication: 05 June 2014
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139600187.009
Available formats
×