The Strawman

In these blogs, sometimes I pay attention to correct reasoning. I simply find it interesting, but I think that it’s also important. False argumentations can have important consequences, especially when done by politicians. And don’t we all make mistakes in this respect, often because we don’t know better or inadvertently? Moreover, how often doesn’t it happen that people try to mislead you with deliberately false reasonings? Therefore, it’s important to know when an argument is false and when it is correct.
There are hundreds of ways you can go wrong, when you try to convince others with your arguments. Some false reasonings have funny names, like “red herring”, a fallacy that I discussed already some time ago (see here). Now I want to write about a fallacy called “strawman”. Actually, a strawman is a human figure made of straw. Sometimes it takes the place of a real person, like a scarecrow or a puppet that functions as a shooting target in military training. A strawman is weaker than a real person and that’s also the essence of this fallacy: You don’t attack the real argument of your opponent but one you have constructed and ascribed to him or her: The argument you attack is weaker or otherwise different from the actual argument used by your opponent. For instance, I read many philosophical articles and I am always annoyed, when an author first constructs a view he or she disagrees with and then attacks this constructed view with her or his own arguments. It’s essential in this case that such a constructed view doesn’t contain precise references to other authors, quotations of their works, etc. It’s not more than a kind of summary of the view that the author wants to refute made by the refuter. Then this constructed view is a strawman, a dummy that takes the place of what the author’s opponent really said. Such a strawman is problematic not only, because an opponent can be attacked with the wrong arguments (if the constructed view isn’t correct), but it can also stop useful discussion, if the opponent says “I don’t need to react, for it’s not about me”; or if the author of the constructed view says “I didn’t mean you” against his/her opponent, which makes it difficult to correct a false view.
Strawman argumentations can be of at least of three types. (quotes from Aikin/Casey; see below) The first type of the strawman fallacy is the representational strawman or actual strawman: “What one does here is represent the opponent’s views in worse or less defensible form [or at least in a different form] than that given by the opponent.” (p, 223) See my example above. Even when honestly done, it’s not correct. The second type of the strawman fallacy is the selectional strawman or weak strawman. Instead of distorting the opponent’s view, “one simply finds the worst representative of the opposition and takes it to represent the entire group.” For example, a conservative may say that socialists want to increase all taxes, because Peterson, a member of the Socialist Party said so, though in fact the party program only says that the wealth taxes and profit taxes must be increased. The third type of the strawman fallacy is called the hollow man. “One doesn’t take any particular opponent’s view and distort it but rather one just invents a ridiculous view for one’s opponent’s whole cloth.” (p. 224) “The hollow man argument is a complete fabrication, where both the viewpoint and the opponent expressing it do not in fact exist, or at the very least the arguer has never encountered them.” (Wikipedia) We can call this also the “some say argument”, for who has the view concerned cannot be identified, since the person or organisation referred to with the word “some” simply doesn’t exist. Islamophobic arguments are often of this kind.
Straw manning, for short, is a certain kind of distortion of the opponent’s view in a negative way in order to reject it. This requires, so Aikin and Casey, an audience that must not know better, for if the audience knows that the view of the opponent is not correct, the strawman argument doesn’t work. The speaker doesn’t want to engage in an honest discussion with the opponent (present or not) but to run him or her down, if not put the opponent in a bad light. “Straw man arguments not only produce bad argumentative results at the times they are given, but they have lasting repercussions on the communities they convince.” (245) One such a repercussion can be an increasing polarization as the present debates in democratic countries show.

P.S. The smart reader will have noted that sometimes I had to base my explanations on strawmen in order to make this blog not too long.

Sources
- Scott Aikin and John Casey, “Straw Man”, in Robert Arp; Steven Barbone; Michael Bruce (eds.), Bad arguments. 100 of the most important fallacies in Western philosophy. Oxford, etc.: Wiley Blackwell, 2019; pp. 223-226.
- “Straw man”, in Wikipedia.