Straw Man

<h4><a id="description" name="description">Description of Straw Man</a></h4>

<p>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:</p>

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<li>Person A has position X.</li>

<li>Person B presents position Y (which is a distorted version of X).</li>

<li>Person B attacks position Y.</li>

<li>Therefore X is false/incorrect/flawed.</li>

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<p>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.</p>

<h4><a id="examples" name="examples">Examples of Straw Man</a></h4>

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<li>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."

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<li>"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."

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<li>Bill and Jill are arguing about cleaning out their closets:

Jill: "We should clean out the closets. They are getting a bit messy."

Bill: "Why, we just went through those closets last year. Do we have to clean them out everyday?"

Jill: "I never said anything about cleaning them out every day. You just want too keep all your junk forever, which is just ridiculous."</li>

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Straw Man

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