Tips on Arguing - Straw Man

Inquiry:

The straw man is one of the most common tactics used in arguing. It involves deliberately mischaracterizing your opponent’s position in order to create a weaker argument that can be more easily attacked.

The name “straw man” comes to us from combat training exercises, where a dummy stuffed with straw would be set up for soldiers to attack so that they wouldn’t be harming a real person. One criticism of this training method was that the soldiers weren’t receiving a realistic experience by fighting dummies that couldn’t retaliate (and were therefore weaker). Straw men are still used in modern rodeos, where they serve literally as a distraction for the bull. The hope is that the bull will attack the dummy and miss the rider.

Straw man arguments work in a fashion similar to those rodeo dummies. Let’s say that you are arguing with someone, and you say, “Jobs that involve heavy labor, such as construction, shouldn’t be required to have the same number of female workers as male workers, because men tend to be more powerfully built.”

If your opponent wants to create a straw man out of your statement, he might respond by saying, “Don’t try to protect gender inequality. Any woman who tries can do those jobs just as well.”

Your opponent has just built a straw man. It’s easy for him to discourage gender inequality. But what you were arguing against was something much different: that gender quotas should not be artificially imposed in jobs that depend on a certain body type.

When you encounter such distractions, your best bet is to call it out for what it is, and redirect the discussion back to the original position. In the above case, you’d say something like, “That wasn’t what I said. Women should be allowed to work in those jobs if they have the physical capacity. What I said was that more men tend to be physically qualified.”

Never allow anyone to reshape your own statements. If you do, they’ll take you down faster than a peeved bull.