Straw Man: Adventures in Logic

Dear Children:

Recognizing specious argument isn’t easy. Moreover, we often know something is wrong but we have no name for it. This begins a series about the various ways arguments are distorted.

Now don’t get me wrong. Some things aren’t open to examination by logic. Take matters of faith for instance. If you say you believe in Unicorns you have expressed a belief. No one can tell you that you don’t believe in Unicorns. Nowhere in all the rhetorical arts is it possible to fully know another person’s mind.

And, there are other statements of fact that do not have to be proved-up logically in order to be true. You say it is in the paper today that Bruiser hit two home runs. Such a statement is likely to be true.

It’s the statements that are offered up as reasoned and true that I want to discuss here. In these cases, statements used to argue a particular position are always subject to the crucible of logic.

One of my favorites is called Straw Man. It is a fallacy one finds everywhere. But first, let’s understand a principle of logic called argumentum ad logicum (argument to logic). A proposition is not false because the logic used to prove it is invalid. In other words, we cannot say that something is false and base it on the notion that the proposition was not proved with impeccable logic. That’s just fair. Understand that a statement may be valid even though it was wrongly argued.

That's right.  We are in the business of arguing such points rightly so that we can make a judgment about validity.

That’s where Straw Man comes in. Straw Man is a particular version of argumentum ad logicum that refutes an extreme version of someone else’s argument rather than the actual argument he or she has made. For instance, if some outrageous description of the other’s statement is false, what he actually said must also be false. Politics is rife with this fallacy.

Senator Snort: This fighter jet strikes me as frightfully expensive.

Senator Blather: Senator Snort is such a penny-pincher. He would leave our country defenseless.

Do you see? Senator Blather has fashioned a cartoon version of what Senator Snort had to say. Then, because penny pinchers and those weak on defense are silly, we needn’t listen to him. In no way did Senator Blather actually engage Senator Snort’s statement.

Here’s another one: “We know that evolution is false because we did not evolve from monkeys”. Never mind that evolution does not aver that humans evolved from monkeys. That’s a straw man. Make up something false to knock over and, in so doing, belittle someone who wants to engage on a serious topic.

With a little practice you will recognize this fallacy in everyday life. See if this one is familiar:

Mom: Today we’ll clean out the closets. They are looking messy.

Kid: We cleaned out the closets last Easter. Must we clean them every day?

Mom: Who said anything about every day? You just want to keep your crap forever. That’s ridiculous.

There are two straw men in one short argument. The important thing to note here is that nothing was accomplished.

I’m just sayin’

Poppy