Fooling the Victim: Of Straw Men and Those Who Fall for Them

Philosophy & Rhetoric Jun 2021

Fooling the Victim: Of Straw Men and Those Who Fall for Them

Katharina Stevens University of Lethbridge

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper contributes to the debate about the strawman fallacy. It is the received view that strawmen are employed to fool not the arguer whose argument they distort, but instead a third party, an audience. I argue that strawmen that fool their victims exist and are an important variation of the strawman fallacy because of their special perniciousness. I show that those who are subject to hermeneutical lacunae or who have since forgotten parts of justifications they have provided earlier are especially vulnerable to falling for strawmen aimed at their own positions or arguments. Adversarial argumentation provides especially fertile ground for strawmen that fool their own victims, but cooperative argumentation is no fail-safe protection from them either.

Journal: Philosophy & Rhetoric
Published: 2021-06-15
DOI: 10.5325/philrhet.54.2.0109
Open Access: Closed
Topics: argument

Citation Context

Cited by in this index (1)

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Cites in this index (0)

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