Strawman arguments get us no where.

I've noticed in my time lurking, and shorter time posting that quite a few posts in general or replies to the original posting are quite often straw-man arguments. One in particular has recently caught my eye and enticed me to create this thread.

First off, you may ask; "What is a straw-man argument?". Reasonable question, being the lazy person that I am here is a wiki article that gives a pretty good definition: en.wikipedia.org...

For lazy people like myself, the definition they give is: "A straw man argument is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent's position.[1] To "attack a straw man" is to create the illusion of having refuted a proposition by substituting a superficially similar proposition (the "straw man"), and refuting it, without ever having actually refuted the original position."

The example I would like to use is here: www.abovetopsecret.com...

To be 100% honest, I have not read past the original post in this thread. The reason for that is because the entire premise of the thread is based on a straw-man argument.

Without going into detail and performing a sort of ad-hominem attack on the thread or the poster (which I could easily do), I simply have a request.

PLEASE, for the sake of logic and sensible debate, do not use a straw-man argument. They do not make you look intelligent and they certainly do make your position on a subject OR your thread in general look foolish, and worse, illogical.

Please and thank you.

-edited to make sense (lost my train of thought while typing the original thread)-

[edit on 22-3-2010 by thatguy1]

reply to post by thatguy1


Well said. I have been on the victim end of countless straw-man arguments and I try to do my best to ignore them.

However, when trolls are unable to adequately argue your points, they would much rather try to derail the topic as much as possible and it seems the straw man is the weapon of choice in the ATS world; not to say that several other logical fallacies show their faces quite often.

Sadly, it is hard to argue logic with those who lack it and so the fallacies will probably continue on forever. A more prominent solution would be to try to get people to ignore straw man arguments or perhaps try to attain stricter moderation against such obvious topic derailments, or in the event of an entire topic.

S&F.

-Gwyd

reply to post by thatguy1


Just out of interest can you give us an example of a Straw man argument?

I don't think that other thread is based on a strawman. Provided the "hey you" he's talking to is the GOP leadership. The attitude towards deficit spending changed on a dime since they lost the White House.

The other thread IS an example of a straw-men.

He is making a generalization that people that do not agree with the current health care legislation were the same who were in support of GWB (not necessarily true). The topic creator then goes forward and attacks GWB and basically says that it if you agreed with GWB and you disagree with healthcare reform (in its current state) you are wrong.

This is not necessarily true. It can easily be argued that GWB was a horrible president and ran up the deficit, but to say that you can not disagree with the current legislation based on what GWB did is a fallacy and a bad one at that.