Straw Man Arguments: A Study in Fallacy Theory by Scott Aikin John Casey

Author:Scott Aikin John Casey [John Casey, Scott Aikin]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Tags: Philosophy, Analytic, Logic, Mathematics, History & Philosophy, Movements
ISBN: 9781350065000
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: 2022-02-09T21:00:00+00:00

6

The Puzzles of Dialecticality and Meta-argumentation

At the opening of this book, we posed three puzzles for a theory of the straw man fallacy. The puzzles of effectiveness, dialecticality, and meta-argumentation. The puzzle of effectiveness was: how can straw manning be effective given its core of misrepresentation of what is criticized? Our answer in the previous chapter was that the effectiveness of straw manning depends on the personal form of address for the arguments. If in the third person, the misrepresentation is either not detected by the audience or is, from their perspective, beside the point. If in the second person, the misrepresentation is either a strategy of turning the dialogue into a battle of attrition with the target and thereby silencing them or a form of gaslighting the target so that they do not trust their own judgment of reason quality. The two remaining puzzles come as a piece, since the straw man’s core is the negative misrepresentation of another’s argument and critique of that represented argument to close the critical dialogue. The dialectical puzzle is articulating just what is so wrong with criticizing a bad argument, and the meta-argumentative puzzle is that it is surprising that reasoning about reasoning yields a distinct set of fallacies, with straw man being the most prominent. The key to both, as we see it, is that these two puzzles about straw manning are good ways to capture an important point about argumentation generally—when we argue, we are out to make progress on something controversial, answer a question, address an objection. Arguments are public acts and products of our reasoning, and they not only are supposed to be rooted in our thinking together about the things we think about (the weather, dinner plans, economics, and the Peloponnesian War) but also to make it so that we endorse how we’ve thought about those things.1 That is, arguments not only direct our attention to the things about which we reason but direct our attention to where a worry might be about the conclusion, and if rightly addressed, call attention not only to the quality of the conclusion but how we got there. The words so, therefore, and hence highlight that we’ve made an inference and implicate that we’ve satisfied the scrutiny that the question prompting the reasoning impels and that this should be enough to satisfy us. So arguments generally are dialectical and meta-argumentative—you pick up reasons that are appropriate for the controversy, accessible to those with whom you argue, and of quality for the purposes at hand. And when you finish, you announce your assessment of the job done well. Therefore is not just an endorsement of the conclusion but it is also an endorsement of the reasoning that yielded it and an assessment of it living up to the standards behind the need to argue in the first place. The straw man is where the dialectical and metaargumentative features of argument are clearest with its fallaciousness, since it is the nature of this fallacy that it is clearly a dialogue error of arguing incorrectly about an argument.

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