Straw Man Argument
You may have heard criticisms of a "straw man" argument before and not known what that meant. This section walks you through a straw man argument and gives examples. After reading this section, try to come up with a few examples of straw man arguments, and look for straw man fallacies in your own life.
Suppose that my opponent has argued for a position, call it position A, and in
response to his argument, I give a rationally compelling argument against
position B, which is related to position A, but is much less plausible (and thus
much easier to refute). What I have just done is attacked a straw man - a
position that "looks like" the target position, but is actually not that position.
When one attacks a straw man, one commits the straw man fallacy. The straw
man fallacy misrepresents one's opponent's argument and is thus a kind of
irrelevance. Here is an example.
Two candidates for political office in Colorado, Tom and Fred, are having
an exchange in a debate in which Tom has laid out his plan for putting
more money into health care and education and Fred has laid out his plan
which includes earmarking more state money for building more prisons
which will create more jobs and, thus, strengthen Colorado's economy.
Fred responds to Tom's argument that we need to increase funding to
health care and education as follows: "I am surprised, Tom, that you are
willing to put our state's economic future at risk by sinking money into
these programs that do not help to create jobs. You see, folks, Tom's
plan will risk sending our economy into a tailspin, risking harm to
thousands of Coloradans. On the other hand, my plan supports a healthy
and strong Colorado and would never bet our state's economic security
on idealistic notions that simply don't work when the rubber meets the
road".
Fred has committed the straw man fallacy. Just because Tom wants to increase
funding to health care and education does not mean he does not want to help
the economy. Furthermore, increasing funding to health care and education
does not entail that fewer jobs will be created. Fred has attacked a position that
is not the position that Tom holds, but is in fact a much less plausible, easier to
refute position. However, it would be silly for any political candidate to run on a
platform that included "harming the economy". Presumably no political
candidate would run on such a platform. Nonetheless, this exact kind of straw
man is ubiquitous in political discourse in our country.
Here is another example.
Nancy has just argued that we should provide middle schoolers with sex
education classes, including how to use contraceptives so that they can
practice safe sex should they end up in the situation where they are
having sex. Fran responds: "proponents of sex education try to
encourage our children to a sex-with-no-strings-attached mentality, which
is harmful to our children and to our society".
Fran has committed the straw man (or straw woman) fallacy by misrepresenting
Nancy's position. Nancy's position is not that we should encourage children to
have sex, but that we should make sure that they are fully informed about sex so
that if they do have sex, they go into it at least a little less blindly and are able to
make better decisions regarding sex.
As with other fallacies of relevance, straw man fallacies can be compelling on some level, even though they are irrelevant. It may be that part of the reason we are taken in by straw man fallacies is that humans are prone to "demonize" the "other" - including those who hold a moral or political position different from our own. It is easy to think bad things about those with whom we do not regularly interact. And it is easy to forget that people who are different than us are still people just like us in all the important respects. Many years ago, atheists were commonly thought of as highly immoral people and stories about the horrible things that atheists did in secret circulated widely. People believed that these strange "others" were capable of the most horrible savagery. After all, they may have reasoned, if you don't believe there is a God holding us accountable, why be moral? The Jewish philosopher, Baruch Spinoza, was an atheist who lived in the Netherlands in the 17th century. He was accused of all sorts of things that were commonly believed about atheists. But he was in fact as upstanding and moral as any person you could imagine. The people who knew Spinoza knew better, but how could so many people be so wrong about Spinoza? I suspect that part of the reason is that since at that time there were very few atheists (or at least very few people actually admitted to it), very few people ever knowingly encountered an atheist. Because of this, the stories about atheists could proliferate without being put in check by the facts. I suspect the same kind of phenomenon explains why certain kinds of straw man fallacies proliferate. If you are a conservative and mostly only interact with other conservatives, you might be prone to holding lots of false beliefs about liberals. And so maybe you are less prone to notice straw man fallacies targeted at liberals because the false beliefs you hold about them incline you to see the straw man fallacies as true.
Source: Matthew J. Van Cleave
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.