Do you know how it works?
“A straw man is a common form of argument and is an informal fallacy based on giving the impression of refuting an opponent’s argument, while actually refuting an argument that was not advanced by that opponent.”
How Does the Straw Man Argument Work?
I think that Donald Trump is good at this tactics. Let’s note what he has said about global warming and mass shooting.
“This very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bullshit has got to stop. Our planet is freezing, record low temps,and our GW scientists are stuck in ice”–Donald Trump
“The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”–Donald Trump
These are not good examples. I don’t know what he wanted to say in the first tweet. What does “expensive … bullshit” mean? Did he think that “record low temps” would continue for ever?
The second tweet simply shows how he is violently stupid. He is not qualified to be president.
“Isn’t it interesting that the tragedy in Paris took place in one of the toughest gun control countries in the world?”-- Donald Trump
I wonder what he wanted to say in the above tweet. I think he wanted to say something about gun control in the U.S. Did he mean to insinuate that strict gun control is unnecessary in the U.S.?
None of these are strawman arguments.
A strawman argument is where you argue against a point as if your opponent in a debate had said it, even though they didn’t.
So if you say you don’t like rock music, if i respond to your argument by claiming that people who don’t like art are fundamentally flawed, this is a strawman because i’ve responded to an argument you didn’t make even though it can be construed as a similar point.
In the above, he’s making statements that may or may not be true, and isn’t responding to a specific line of debate as far as i can tell, and so it’s merely an opinion and not a strawman. As far as i can tell, to be a strawman it must be specifically aimed at what someone else has said.
As a side note, you do realise all politicians are full of shit? Why the obsession with Trump? They ALL work for big business and banking. ALL of them. If you don’t think this is true then ask yourself how the so-called highest authority in the land (the country/government) can be in debt.
“Global warming means that there are no freezing days in all parts of the globe. We are experiencing this phenomenon.”
This might be Trump’s straw man. By refuting this false statement, he rejects the consensus shared among scientists all over the world. It goes without saying that global warming does not mean that it is very warm every day at any parts of the globe.
P.S.
“Notably, Americans and Chinese, whose economies are responsible for the greatest annual CO2 emissions, are among the least concerned.”
“The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”–Donald Trump
This is Trump’s demagogy.
No, going against consensus doesn’t make it a strawman. Refuting an argument that was never made makes it a strawman.
As for ‘consensus’, until you know how peer review, journals and modern ‘science’ really works, i’m afraid you’re not in a position to judge someone based on their refutations of the consensus. There are plenty of real bona fide scientists that simply say the wrong things based on what those who run academia want them to say and therefore they are not heard.
I went to university at UEA in the UK. Google their global warming scandal. They are government and bank funded, by the way.
“I went to university at UEA in the UK. Google their global warming scandal. They are government and bank funded, by the way.”
You mean the one where hackers stole emails from UEA servers and then scoured the emails for parts of sentences that when taken out of context and/or put in the wrong context can sound bad for the scientists so that they could lie about the behavior of climate scientists?
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Is this a straw-man argument? I am a little confused.
No. I don’t think any of these arguments are straw-man arguments.
I don’t know whether those UEA e-mails can be explained away quite so easily? :-0
(Anyway, I thought that the mainstream scientific consensus on climate change has shifted a little in the last couple of years, and is now a little less confident in its predictions…no?)
The UEA emails can be explained away that easily. The scientific consensus on climate change has only gotten stronger in the last years.
Okay, wenn du es mir sagst…
I personally don’t have a dog in the climate change fight.
(Still, I don’t think it is of any relevance at all what we in the UK do, as long as the Chinese and the Indians are still building dozens upon dozens of coal fired power stations…)
A straw man argument is a fallacy (illogical argument) that unfairly makes the opponent look like something that it is not, and then attacking that false part of the opponent.
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“Atheists are idiots! They think that all those different species are a product of random chance!” is a strawman because atheists don´t believe that because natural selection is not “random”.
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Guten Tag. I actually came here to post this exact example!
I think straw men can sometimes arise from lazy assumptions, rather than a deliberate attempt to misrepresent.
I was once discussing gun control with someone (an intelligent guy too) and I mentioned that I believe people without a criminal record or mental health issues should be allowed to own most kinds of non-automatic firearms. Instead of addressing the issue about guns he said: “So, let me guess, you also believe in the death penalty, you supported the invasion of Iraq, and you would like to abolish all publicly funded health care, am I right?”
I had to explain that, no, just as a matter of fact, I did not support or endorse any of those things!
People can hear a certain opinion which is commonly pidgin-holed as “rightwing” or “leftwing” and then assume that a person must be identified along crude tribal lines. In fact there is no reason why people can’t have more a varied and nuanced range of views.
(People are sometimes amazed to find out that the late Christopher Hitchens was opposed to abortion, for example.)
Here is an example of what I would consider a (rather convoluted) straw man argument (in conjunction with moving the goal-posts):
The proselytizer keeps claiming over and over that the “atheistic world view” is that all we are is a sack of elements on a periodic table, but since we don’t live our lives as a non-living element, which is incapable of love and has no consciousness, free will, empathy or a moral code, then atheism isn’t “true.”
Of course the truth is that, although the universe, including living humans, is made up of elements, and all of the elements which make up life appear to operate through a combination of extremely complex chemical processes, the fact that individual elements are non-living does nothing to explain the complexity and diversity of life. But atheism doesn’t claim that it does. This is a straw man argument.
Theism is the belief that an anthropomorphic immortal magically spoke or breathed all life into existence. This is what theists believe. Atheism is a response to this belief which says that there is no reason to believe that an actual magical, anthropomorphic immortal really exists. That’s it! That’s all that atheism is. Atheists are not convinced that a supernatural “lawgiver” created us and handed us down a moral code.
Atheism certainly does not claim that “all we are is a sack of elements on a periodic table.” Nor did anyone there, other than the one making this false argument, make this claim. This is a straw man argument.
The straw man argument goes something like this:
– Life consists of a combination of extremely complex chemical processes which are composed of natural elements; there is no reason to believe that life was spoken into existence supernaturally by a magical, anthropomorphic immortal.
– (Straw man): Preposterous! If all we are is a sack of elements on a periodic table, which are incapable of love and have no consciousness, free will, empathy or a moral code, then we would be incapable of love and have no consciousness, free will, empathy or a moral code. Our consciousness and free will and love and empathy and moral code had to be handed down to us by a supernatural lawgiver.
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Thank you. It might be a typical case of the straw man argument.
Am I right in thinking that the expressin “straw man” refers to the opponent in the discussion in the eye of the person who uses this tactics intentionalily or unintentionarily?