On straw-manning – Mary Leng in TLS:

‘Philosophers pride themselves on arguing well. The idea behind the so-called Socratic method is that by offering arguments and counter-arguments, we can collectively converge on something like the truth. We academics teach our students not only to build their own arguments, but also to consider the strongest objections that others can offer. If they have considered the best case against them and are still able to show what is wrong with it, that should bolster their confidence in the strength of their position.
A course in good argument will typically include some consideration of common fallacies: mistakes in reasoning forms that, if one isn’t careful, might make one think one has provided a good argument when one hasn’t. And we can encourage students not to fall into “meta-argumentative fallacies”, such as the straw man fallacy, whereby one constructs a “straw man” of one’s opponent: a weaker and easier-to-refute version of their argument, rather than the stronger case they actually made.’

(…)

‘This, for Aikin and Casey, is the essence of what makes the straw man a fallacy: if we successfully “straw man” our opponent by knocking down a misstated version of their argument, we give the mistaken impression that the issue is closed. Paradoxically, the straw man works particularly well on people well trained in the norms of good argument (the authors call this the “Owl of Minerva problem”: “we, in making our practices more self-reflective … create new opportunities for second-order pathologies that arise out of our corrective reflection”). As the authors explain, “straw-manning” can sometimes be effective in defeating one’s opponent directly (by gaslighting them into believing that their reasons were not as strong as they thought, or simply by silencing them into bored indifference), but the technique is more often successful in persuading an audience. Observers are generally more likely to be taken in by shoddy reasoning if they are already sympathetic to one side, and straw-manning contributes to the polarization of political debate. In today’s political environment it is not uncommon for partisans intuitively to see themselves as being on the right side of history, with their rivals adding nothing of value to the conversation and deserving of intellectual – or even moral – contempt. The prevalence of this fallacy in democratic political debate is thus a matter of significant concern: as Aikin and Casey write, it is “a threat to a properly functioning system of self-government”.’

(…)

‘Suppose, for example, your opponent asks you to clarify your preferred use of a term, as a prelude to showing you what’s wrong with your account. Why not hit them with an ignoratio elenchi? “Bizarre question”, you can retort. “Don’t you know that it’s not possible to define any term, without exceptions, with a complete set of necessary and sufficient conditions? Even a simple term like ‘table’ can’t be so easily defined.”’

(…)

‘This wilful misrepresentation of an opponent’s position is the classic representational form of the straw man. But Aikin and Casey identify variants. Beyond the classic straw man, they identify the “weak man”, where one focuses on one’s opponents’ feeblest arguments while giving the impression that these are their strongest. One can seem to win an argument simply by avoiding one’s opponent’s most robust lines of reasoning, and instead wasting time refuting various definitions of “table”.’

(…)

‘Finally, there is the nuclear option: the move the authors label the “hollow man”. With this, one does not even try to refute the substance of an argument; instead, one claims that whatever one’s opponent has to say in favour of proposition P is in reality a smokescreen for their real (and terrible) reasons for holding P. One can label one’s opponent a “racist”, a “bigot” or a “fascist”, and suggest that an audience is safest by ignoring the arguments altogether, for fear of being duped into bigotry itself.’ Perhaps the best advice for those wishing to avoid being taken in is to hold firm to a serious commitment of truth, preferring the slow dialectic of serious argument to the quick satisfaction of the retweet, even if doing so sometimes requires you to change your mind.’

Read the article here.

The slow dialectic of the serious argument is, at least that’s my experience, quickly derailed, when only one of the participants appears to take part in the act of straw-manning.

If the slow dialectic of a serious argument will take place on Twitter, I’m willing to eat a shoe, as Chaplin did in Gold rush.

And the delight of ridiculing your opponent with his own sentences and questions and thoughts is not to be underestimated.

And yes, maybe, some people are going to change their minds after a serious or less serious argument. Maybe.