Straw Man
Scott Aikin and John Casey
The argument for Hillary Clinton was never quite made at the convention, at least other than the fallback that their Trump is purportedly a worse crook and a bigger liar than our Hillary.
Victor Davis Hanson
How one can straw man someone’s view or argument happens in a variety of ways. We will focus here on three. The first is the representational straw man fallacy. What one does here is represent the opponent’s views in worse or less defensible form than that given by the opponent. Consider the way Salon.com,s Sophia Tesfaye (2015) represents Ben Carson’s claims about guns in schools. Carson, on ABC’s The View, makes the following statement:
If I had a little kid in kindergarten somewhere I would feel much more comfortable if I knew on that campus there was a police officer or somebody who was trained with a weapon. [...] If the teacher was trained in the use of that weapon and had access to it, I would be much more comfortable if they had one than if they didn’t.
Tesfaye’s headline to report what Carson said was, “Carson wants kindergarten teachers to be armed.” The force of the headline is that Carson is making a policy proposal and positively wants, as opposed to prefers, armed kindergarten teachers. One may still reasonably disagree with Carson on the matter, but the disagreement needn’t now be with someone so extreme.
The second form of the straw man fallacy is that of the selectional straw man, or better the weak man. In this case, instead of distorting an opponent’s view for the worse, one simply finds the worst representative of the opposition and takes that to represent the entire group. One cherry-picks opponents, and the results are, ultimately, men of straw. Consider the way many reacted when a man at a Donald Trump (who was also at the time a candidate for the 2016 Republican nomination for president) rally said: “We have a problem in this country.
It’s called Muslims. You know our President is one. You know he’s not even an American.” Trump’s reply was that, “We are going to be looking at that and many other things.” The criticism of the exchange led Debbie Wasserman Schultz (the Chair of the Democratic National Committee) to say: “Racism knows no bounds. This is certainly horrendous but unfortunately unsurprising, given what we have seen already. The vile rhetoric coming from the GOP candidates is appalling” (De Graaf 2015).But it is too quick to say that the Republican base is Islamophobic and racist on the basis of this. In fact, many Trump supporters at the rally recoiled in disgust when the man asked Trump the question and again when Trump failed to set him straight. One particularly bad and indefensible version of Republican support and ardor needn’t be representative of the entire party’s support.
The third and final type of straw man fallacy is what we’ll call the hollow man. One does not take any particular opponent’s view and distort it but rather one just invents a ridiculous view for one’s opponents whole cloth. Consider how National Review columnist Dennis Praeger (2015) portrays the position of ‘The Left’ on gun control. It comes down to three things that he maintains are behind their commitment:
The Left believes in relying on the state as much as possible. [...] The Left is uncomfortable with blaming bad people for bad actions. [.] The Left is more likely to ask “Does it feel good?”
For Praeger, the gun control debate really comes down to having to answer people who want government-dependent, irresponsible, hedonists for citizens. Of course the debate won’t look very good when your opponents are so depraved.
Notice that straw manning requires a form of misrepresentation of the overall intellectual situation in an area of dispute. The speaker, the one who straw mans, must portray the opposition in an untoward light. This requires, then, an audience that must not know better.
That is, if the audience for a straw man argument knows that there are better versions of the view available,then the argument will not work on it. And so straw man arguments depend on their audience’s being generally unfamiliar with the issue or at least with the opposing view on the issue.
This fact, that straw manning depends on audience ignorance, is significant. This is because with straw manning, not only is a conclusion established fallaciously, but a picture of the opposition is painted in a way that yields intellectual contempt. A result of this picture of the opposition as incompetent or mendacious is that one is less likely to want to engage honestly with them in further discussion. And as a consequence, we see the polarization of discourse on matters of significance. Straw man arguments not only produce bad argumentative results at the times they are given, but they have lasting repercussions on the communities they convince.
What makes straw manning fallacious is that one is not responding to the better reasons of one’s opponents. And when one does not reply to the better versions, the argument does not cover the intellectual ground it should. Issues are left unanswered, we gain no better understanding of the matter, and the sides are made more polarized by the exchange.
How does one avoid and correct straw man fallacies? Given that the fallacy depends primarily on the fact that the audience is unfamiliar with the views and arguments of the opposition, the best prevention is simply being informed about the variety of views on an issue. This means that one should, when being presented with a criticism of a view, be familiar with the case for the view made by those who hold it. And so when criticism of the American Civil Liberties Union’s defense of privacy rights is brought forth, one should be familiar with its reasons, not just the ones that the critics attribute to them. Or when the National Rifle Association is a target for critique on protecting Second Amendment rights, one should go to them for their reasons, not to their critics.
This means that one should read widely, watch the news shows from the opposing viewpoint, and have conversations with those who disagree. Straw manning depends on us being unaware of a misrepresentation of opponents, and the only way to detect that is to know what the correct representation is.References
De Graaf, Mia. 2015. “Outrage as Donald Trump Fails to Correct Ignorant Supporter.” The Daily Mail, September 17. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3239373/ Outrage-Donald-Trump-fails-correct-ignorant-supporter-stood-said-President- Obama-Muslim-not-American-live-Q-A.html#ixzz4IDsBJcpt (accessed September 29, 2017).
Praeger, Dennis. 2015. “Differences Between Left and Right: It’s All about Big Government.” National Review, July 7. http://www.nationalreview.com/article/ 420820/differences-between-left-and-right-its-all-about-big-government-dennis-prager (accessed September 29, 2017).
Tesfaye, Sophia. 2015. “Carson Wants Kindergarten Teachers to Be Armed.” Salon. com, October 7. http://www.salon.com/2015/10/07/ben_carson_is_just_this_ vile_5_repugnant_ statement_hes_made_since_the_oregon_mass_shooting/ (accessed September 29, 2017).