To: LexBaird
And what, pray, is my revisionist spin on 140 year old history? Please advise. Oh, by the way, poor analogies are the most common form of straw man argument.
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.)
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