To: ought-six
Maybe you should find out what you are saying before using terms incorrectly. It gives the impression you don't know what you're talking about.
From: www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/straw-man.html
Description of Straw Man:
The Straw Man fallacy is committed when a person simply ignores a person's actual position and substitutes a distorted, exaggerated or misrepresented version of that position. This sort of "reasoning" has the following pattern:
Person A has position X.
Person B presents position Y (which is a distorted version of X).
Person B attacks position Y.
Therefore X is false/incorrect/flawed.
This sort of "reasoning" is fallacious because attacking a distorted version of a position simply does not constitute an attack on the position itself. One might as well expect an attack on a poor drawing of a person to hurt the person.
Examples of Straw Man
Prof. Jones: "The university just cut our yearly budget by $10,000."
Prof. Smith: "What are we going to do?"
Prof. Brown: "I think we should eliminate one of the teaching assistant positions. That would take care of it."
Prof. Jones: "We could reduce our scheduled raises instead."
Prof. Brown: " I can't understand why you want to bleed us dry like that, Jones."
"Senator Jones says that we should not fund the attack submarine program. I disagree entirely. I can't understand why he wants to leave us defenseless like that."
238 posted on
08/14/2003 4:01:16 PM PDT by
LexBaird
(Views seen in this tag are closer than they appear.)
To: LexBaird
Your description of a straw man argument is well taken, and is indeed one example of such a position. A poor analogy is, of course, another example; and, in fact, the example you cited is also analogical, since one party changed the subject of the discussion, but kept the basic premise.
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