Fallacy: Straw Man
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:
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.
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© The Nizkor Project, 1991-2012
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Description of Straw Man
Examples of Straw Man
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."
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."