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WillowOne's Positions

Straw Man

Type

Informal

AKA

Strawmanning, Aunt Sally, Straw Figure

Description

Misrepresenting or distorting someone's argument to make it easier to attack, then refuting that weaker version instead of the original. The misrepresentation can be an exaggeration, a simplification, a quotation out of context, or a shift from what the person said to what the attacker would prefer they had said. The argument that follows may be perfectly valid; it is simply aimed at something nobody claimed.

Common forms:

  • The classic straw man. Restate the position in a cruder or more extreme form and attack that.
  • The weak man. Pick the worst real advocate of a position and treat them as representative. Everything said is accurate; the sample is not.
  • The hollow man. Invent an opponent who holds a position nobody holds, usually introduced with "some people say" or "the left" or "the church".
  • Nut-picking. Find the most extreme individual who shares a label and present them as its voice.

Examples

  • "You want to reduce the military budget? So you want to leave us defenceless!"
  • "She said we should be more environmentally conscious. Clearly, she wants us all to live in caves."
  • "Atheists believe everything came from nothing." (No atheist position requires this; it is a straw man of the claim that the universe needs no creator.)
  • "Evolution says we came from monkeys, so why are there still monkeys?" (Evolution says no such thing.)
  • "You accept the historical consensus on the Gospels, so you think the whole Bible is fiction."

Notes

  • A straw man is a failure of Steelmanning, and the cure is the same: state the position back and ask whether it is fair before answering it. Most straw men collapse at that question.
  • It is the house style of debate formats built for an audience rather than for the participants, where there is no time to check the restatement and a crude version of the other side plays better. See Jordan Peterson vs 20 Atheists -Surrounded - Jubilee.
  • The weak man is the hardest form to notice in oneself, because nothing said is false. If I find I am only ever answering the stupidest version of a view, I should ask whether that is because the view has no better advocates or because I have not looked.
  • Being straw-manned is not evidence that one's position is right. It is evidence that the other person did not engage with it, which is a different thing, and a tempting one to confuse.
  • The Motte-and-bailey fallacy is the mirror image: an arguer presents a weak version of their own position when challenged and a strong one when not, so that any criticism can be met with "that's a straw man" whether or not it is.

Also see

#fallacy