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The straw man argument: a mainstay for convincing the credulous to believe in your particular fiction.

Suppose you are making a movie and you need to have some guy chopped up or hanged, or something dramatic. Knowing you will be unable to chop up or hang a real person, you create a dummy. A dummy that won’t fight back. A man of straw. Now you can drive over this dummy with a truck, throw him out of an aeroplane with no parachute, or stick him in a microwave or a blender. Oh, the blender, particularly useful, as straw blends easily. No bone, no substance, which might clog the blender’s blades or hurt the gears of the machine.

That is the nature of a straw man argument. You create a caricature of the thing you would like to attack, and then you point out all the flaws of your caricature. You don’t bother dealing with reality, because fiction can be very convincing to those that would like to believe. They’re quite happy ignoring all the straw sticking out of the sleeves and the legs, and the lack of blood? Ah, no matter, throw on some tomato sauce or just move on to another scene before too many questions are asked.

The straw man argument. We will be investigating a huge number of such arguments in the upcoming weeks. Here is Wikipedia’s definition of the straw man logical fallacy:

A straw man argument is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent’s position. To “set up a straw man” or “set up a straw man argument” is to create a position that is easy to refute, then attribute that position to the opponent. Often, the straw man is set up to deliberately overstate the opponent’s position. A straw man argument can be a successful rhetorical technique (that is, it may succeed in persuading people) but it is in fact a misleading fallacy, because the opponent’s actual argument has not been refuted.

Its name is derived from the practice of using straw men in combat training. In such training, a scarecrow is made in the image of the enemy with the single intent of attacking it. It is occasionally called a straw dog fallacy, scarecrow argument, or wooden dummy argument.

Any questions about straw man arguments in general, before we investigate examples of such arguments employed to great effect?

Straw Man @ Cectic