This paper will highlight how the existing approaches to the Strawman Fallacy and the Principle of Charity are unable to fully accommodate the problems of interpreting children’s arguments. A lack of charity is as problematic as an excess of charity when arguing with children, and can contribute to misinterpretation of arguments. An application of moderate charity avoids the pitfalls of misrepresenting children. However, interpreting children’s arguments with the appropriate amount of charity is a challenging task. The argumentative context is relevant (...) in determining the interpretive approach and the extent of charity that can be justified. The context of arguing with children necessitates an Ethics of Care-based approach to interpretation. Michael Gilbert’s concept of coalescent argumentation exemplifies how Ethics of Care can be realized during argumentative exchanges involving children. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

Fallacy theory has three significant challenges to it: the generality, scope, and negativity problems. To the generality problem, the connection between general types of bad arguments and tokens is a matter of refining the use of the vocabulary. To the scope problem, the breadth of fallacy’s instances is cause for development. To the negativity problem, fallacy theory must be coordinated with a program of adversariality-management.

The straw man fallacy consists in inappropriately constructing or selecting weak versions of the opposition’s arguments. We will survey the three forms of straw men recognized in the literature, the straw, weak, and hollow man. We will then make the case that there are examples of inappropriately reconstructing stronger versions of the opposition’s arguments. Such cases we will call iron man fallacies. The difference between appropriate and inappropriate iron manning clarifies the limits of the virtue of open-mindedness.

In this article I address the following question: When are reformulations in argumentative criticisms reasonable and when do they become fallacious straw men? Following ideas developed in the integrated version of pragma-dialectics, I approach argumentation as an element of agonistic exchanges permeated by arguers’ strategic manoeuvring aimed at effectively defeating the opponent with reasonable means. I propose two basic context-sensitive criteria for deciding on the reasonableness of reformulations: precision of the rules for interpretation (precise vs. loose) and general expectation of (...) cooperativeness (critical vs. constructive). On the basis of analysis of examples taken from online political discussions, I argue that in some contexts, especially those that are critical and loose, what might easily be classified as a straw man following conventional treatment should be taken as a harsh, yet reasonable, strategic argumentative criticism. (shrink)

Three forms of the straw man fallacy are posed: the straw, weak, and hollow man. Additionally, there can be non-fallacious cases of any of these species of straw man arguments.