Guys, please don’t turn this into Obama or Bush defending/bashing.
This thread is, per the OP, about what are or have been effective straw man arguments. I think there’s no doubt that all presidents and other powerful politicians and pundits use them all the time, and often quite effectively in terms of creating policy.
I’d argue among the most effective were Reagan’s in arguing for an increased arms race against the Soviet Union.
“Some people think that anybody who is accused of using strawman arguments should have all of their opinions disregarded. I disagree: we all make mistakes now and then.”
That’s a strawman argument in my view, even though it doesn’t reference any particular person. This website appears to agree, as do most general discussions of the fallacy.
To answer your question though, I am not aware of any GWBush statement which falsely ascribed an absurd view to a particular person. But his broad brushed characterizations of opponents to his Iraqi adventure were pretty effective I think. How effective? That’s really a matter for GD. I can only provide cited quotations in GQ, confirming usage of straw man tactics by GWBush. I’ll add that such citations have not been provided for other politicians in this thread.
Then your argument against those statements is itself a straw man.
You seemed to be saying that the statements were straw man arguments because no one in public life had made them. Bush neither said nor implied that he was talking only about public figures. Therefore, you have provided an argument against something he didn’t say - which is pretty much the definition of a straw man argument, as jtgain points out.
Regards,
Shodan
“Some say that if you’re Muslim you can’t be free.”
“There’s some in America who say, ‘Well, this can’t be true there are still people willing to attack.’” That last line was about 911. Shodan believes these are not strawman arguments.
I say nobody sensible would make such arguments and that GWBush was attacking arguments that nobody sensible would make. The key aspect is that the quoted claims grossly misrepresent the arguments of the opposing side. Instead of attacking real arguments, the speaker attacks fake ones.
Now of course much of this turns on definitions. I use the ones in the dictionary: “Strawman: a weak or imaginary opposition (as an argument or adversary) set up only to be easily confuted.” My examples pretty much fit the bill.
It isn’t an easy question, no? I don’t know about everyone else, but I’m not in the habit of categorizing events in this way.
Measure for Measure has the right idea. Insofar as Bush’s strawman rhetoric led to his tax cuts, I’d say that was pretty effective. Extending the Iraq War is big too, though it is hard to pin down how much of that was the rhetoric vs. inertia or special interests or what have you. Surely there are more examples though, so I’ll bump the thread one time and cross my fingers.
For starters, what are the specifics on Knorf’s example?:
All fully accredited strawmenologists[sup]1[/sup] favor Nixon’s Checker’s speech as the most effective implementation of the strawman technique in world history. Naysayers claim that it was actually a red herring, but set that aside.
Let’s review. In 1951, Nixon set up a slush fund allegedly to assist in his 1956 Senatorial Campaign. As this seemed a little early, he was asked about it after a Meet the Press engagement: Nixon said he didn’t know who the donors were. Headlines followed: “Secret Rich Men’s Trust Fund Keeps Nixon in Style Far Beyond His Salary”. Eisenhower was considering Nixon for VP, but didn’t want to run with an accused influence peddler.
So Nixon appeared on National Television and gave The Checker’s speech.
[QUOTE=Richard Nixon]
One other thing I probably should tell you because if we don’t they’ll probably be saying this about me too, we did get something-a gift-after the election. A man down in Texas heard Pat on the radio mention the fact that our two youngsters would like to have a dog. And, believe it or not, the day before we left on this campaign trip we got a message from Union Station in Baltimore saying they had a package for us. We went down to get it. You know what it was.
It was a little cocker spaniel dog in a crate that he’d sent all the way from Texas. Black and white spotted. And our little girl-Tricia, the 6-year old-named it Checkers. And you know, the kids, like all kids, love the dog and I just want to say this right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we’re gonna keep it.
[/QUOTE]
Of course nobody was criticizing Nixon for accepting a pet from a supporter: “…I just want to say this right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we’re gonna keep it.” They? Who is they? Of course “they” were nobody: it was a strawman argument. His critics were concerned about a $16,000 fund ($144,000 in today’s money) at a time when his annual salary was $12,500. (Later the fund would be found to be somewhat larger).
Nixon was despondent after the television address: “Well, we made a hit in the dog world anyway.” He had vastly underestimated the credulity of his supporters. But modern conservatives went wild, Nixon was appointed VP, and he and Eisenhower sailed to victory.
Via wiki: I see that the Democratic candidate had a fund of his own, which was an order of magnitude larger. “Nixon refused to answer further questions about the Fund, and attention turned to Stevenson’s fund, especially as its details became clear. Governor Stevenson’s fund, which proved to total $146,000, had been used for such expenditures as Christmas gifts to reporters, dues for private clubs, and to hire an orchestra for a dance his son was hosting. Taking a leaf from Nixon’s book, the Democrats refused to answer questions about the governor’s fund. Both parties were eager to bury the matter, and the story died.” Checkers speech - Wikipedia
[sup]1[/sup] (Since none exist, I can safely say their opinions are unanimous.)
Smells more like a red herring to me, dude.
Why can’t it be both?
OP: Can I ask what the motivation of this question is? I mean there are all sorts of logical fallacies you could have chosen. Also, tracing causality in this context seems more like a parlor game than a matter for serious argument. After all, claiming any sort of rhetoric as the sole cause for any political event is problematic.
I tend to get stuck on pondering philosophical questions. Prior to this I was thinking about fact vs. bs, how do we know what we know, how do we know that we know what we know, and what is it about objectively false premises that makes people cling so doggedly to them.
If you’re looking at the physical universe, it seems to be a question of mathematics to determine what exists and what doesn’t, so everything flows from positive, true premises (e.g. we have this data, all this math follows, so we’ve said something true about the universe). History doesn’t necessarily follow like that though. There might be some bit of bs that is motivating people, and perhaps it doesn’t get exposed for a long time- maybe centuries- while it runs its course through events and people’s lives.
But nailing down when a false premise is the cause of events is tricky. There is a whole other set of questions here. It is unlike physics where everything that is is simply there waiting for someone to collect data on it. No, trace back an event based on some bs premise and, when you get back to the source, can we ever say for sure that the bs premise really did drive events? Is it necessary that there be something else, or could real history ever flow entirely on the basis of bs?
Since straw man arguments are generally intentional, I thought it’d be interesting to look at some that had a big historical effect and see what I discover. I’m not completely sure what I’m looking for- maybe some kind of similarity in common between events that are generated this way? At the least there is going to be some kind of doubling- there is the liar’s real motives, and then there is the story his suckers swallow and run with, running side by side in the world. How does that unravel, or what keeps it from unravelling?
I chose the straw man because I personally was subjected to it quite a lot when I was young, before I knew what to think of it. I even have a little straw man on my bookshelf to remind me- I’ll post a pic if anyone wants to see it.
History certainly is complicated, largely due the larger set of qualitatively different effects in play, most of which are unmeasured or imperfectly measured. (I’m less concerned with Heisenberg issues.) I think the Checkers speech is a decent example, even if it’s more red herring than straw man.
So how do we evaluate the significance of Nixon’s rhetorical legerdemain? There actually exist some methodologies. The first step is to gather the underlying facts and citations, as opposed to wishful or batty recollections. But the key method involves the counterfactual. When evaluating the historical significance of a person, event or phenomenon ask what would have happened if that person, event or phenomenon was removed. Also, consider the possibility of proximate and underlying causality as well as contributing causality.
The first step is to consider various baselines. What would have happened if nobody gave Nixon that cute cocker spaniel, the one that all kids love? Very little I say, except perhaps we might have known that address as the Cloth Coat Speech. “I should say this—that Pat [Nixon’s wife] doesn’t have a mink coat. But she does have a respectable Republican cloth coat. And I always tell her that she’d look good in anything.” I mean most of the speech was a presentation of Nixon’s allegedly modest lifestyle, which conveniently sidesteps an accounting of what exact sums changed hands. (As wiki notes, the NY Times gave the speech favorable reviews due to Nixon’s “Composure and assurance”. Others weren’t as sympathetic.)
Now consider underlying causes. Prior to the transparency mandated by laws passed after Nixon’s 1974 resignation, there was quite a bit more slush in the political system. And it seems that the Democratic Presidential candidate Stevenson unsurprisingly had a far larger funding mechanism. So neither political party wanted this story in play: it died. If Stevenson didn’t have such an account, I’d conjecture that the Dems would have been all over this story and Checkers would not have helped.
An historian could evaluate the baseline whereby Nixon simply hunkered down and hoped the story would blow over. I’ll speculate that if Nixon appeared on national television and looked nervous and shifty that he would have been toast. So yeah, rhetoric can matter. Or put another way, political players need to possess a certain level of competence. But if the fundamentals are pointing in a given direction, there will typically be some man or woman to fill the role. At the same time, personalities can add a random or quixotic aspect to the historical flow, often substantial.
Executive Summary
When evaluating the significance of something in history, use the counterfactual approach.
Argument from ignorance (manipulative half truths and hiding contrary data) works pretty well.
The link to the wiki for counterfactual is apt and I thank you for it, but my first reaction was that I don’t want to reduce the question to a grammatical level. Yes, there may have been a pluperfect subjunctive tense in my language, but what I’m really about is analyzing history, hopefully to identify some signature common to events that proceed from straw men. One mode of the question: is it possible at all for history to proceed from something false, or ‘from’ something that isn’t there at all?
If I were to give a flip answer in these terms to the Nixon example, I’d say that the public’s attention was deflected away from something that could have cost him political power, and he gained political power instead. Is the straw man about acquiring power, then?
Sorry, this link is more apt. Admittedly it isn’t especially sharp. Counterfactual history - Wikipedia
This treatment looks better, judging from the first 4 paragraphs. [.doc!] http://www.schoolhistory.co.uk/forum/index.php?app=core&module=attach§ion=attach&attach_id=1972 [/.doc!]
Lots of straw man arguments affecting our laws (and our lives) in the Philippines. Examples:
Would you care to explain how any of these involve straw man arguments? As you present them, 1, 3 and 4 look like their conclusions are based on fairly cogent arguments. Even if the arguments involved are in fact weak and misleading, and their conclusions are false (and even if you can show this) it does not follow that they are straw man arguments. There are many other sorts of fallacious argument, and, come to that, you can reach a false conclusion without committing any fallacy if you are relying on unreliable information.
Your #2 does not seem to present any argument at all. It is just a bunch of loosely related, undefended assertions (and I am not even sure whether you are saying you agree or disagree with them).
Correct me if I’m wrong but a straw man argument need not be wholly fallacious. They may be based on an aspect of truth regarding the original argument but they are far from being cogent.
Take #1. A patch of denuded ground will liquefy for a given amount of rainfall and stay solid had there been trees. This is just one and somewhat rare instance of mass wastage. If you consider factors like slope angle, permeability of the top soil, saturation point, stability of the bed rock, and holding capacity/stabilizing action of tree roots, you will know that slides in most cases are not due to lack of tree cover. Every time we are visited by a “wet” typhoon and you have the inevitable killer land slide, people start howling about illegal logging and the gross incompetence of the national government from preventing that. The argument is so universal that I’ve stopped joining discussions on flooding and mass wastage because people simply will not listen to scientists if they imply that logging had nothing to do with it (heck, at times there’s not even a shred of evidence that logging was going on in that area.)
#3 Mining. Per Philippine law, all mineral resources inside the country belong to the state. Therefore, anyone who mines the mineral does so under contract with the Government. So for every tonne of ore you extract, the Government collects it’s rightful share. This is sliced off right from the top, whether you mine profitably or not. The high cost of extraction, processing, and transport makes sure you end up with only a minor percentage of gross revenue for your net profit. If you’re a foreign mining company, you might appear to be pocketing money that should stay inside the Philippines. But what about the Government’s share that was taken from the gross? What about all the inputs that went into mining (nearly all of which are locally sourced, and salaries paid to local hires often accounting for the the biggest component)? So if the Philippines gets upset over you salting away the residual income for all your troubles, then you might as well pull out. Foreign companies usually do the mining since local corporations usually do not have the technical expertise and capitalists do not like the risks that mining entails.
I’ll discuss #2 and 4 later.
I am still not seeing any sign of straw-man arguments being made here (unless, possibly, you are committing them against those you disagree with). I am not saying that your own arguments are wrong or that those of the people you are disagreeing with are correct (I do not konw enough about the facts to judge), but, to repeat, an argument can be faulty, lead to a wrong conclusion, and can be fallacious in some way, without committing the straw man fallacy in particular. The straw man fallacy, by definition, involves misrepresenting someone else’s argument, and then arguing against the misrepresentation instead of against their true position. Unless you can tell us whose arguments or which arguments the people in your examples are misrepresenting, then you have no evidence for a straw man being committed. In fact, however, you have given no evidence that they are responding to anyone else’s arguments at all, let alone misrepresenting them.
It looks to me as though you are simply saying that the people you describe are wrong because they are ignoring a lot of the relevant facts. That may be so, but that is not to commit a straw man fallacy. They may well be committing the fallacy of hasty generalization, and perhaps others too, but nothing in your account suggests that they are committing the straw man fallacy (or even that they are in an argumentative situation in which they could commit it).
Ok, you learn something new everyday.