An experimental investigation of perceived disagreement in straw man fallacies

Schumann, Jennifer; Zufferey, Sandrine; Oswald, Steve (2 July 2021). An experimental investigation of perceived disagreement in straw man fallacies (Unpublished). In: 17th International Pragmatics Conference. Zurich University of Applied Sciences, Winterthur. 27.06.21 - 02.07.21.

In this paper, we investigate whether participants perceive the disagreement between interlocutors when one of them performs a straw man fallacy on the other. In the literature (see e.g. Aikin & Casey, 2016; de Saussure, 2018; Oswald & Lewiński, 2014), the straw man is generally defined based on two core characteristics: the form (i.e. its misrepresenting nature) and the function (i.e. its refutational aim). In previous experiments (Schumann, Zufferey & Oswald, 2019, 2020) we focused on the misrepresentational aspect of the straw man fallacy, demonstrating that its acceptability can vary depending on the linguistic elements that are used to formulate it. The effects we found already contribute to a more fine-grained picture of the fallacy but one question was only partially answered: do participants perceive that the person uttering a straw man attack disagrees with the victim of the fallacy?
To answer this question, we used the same experimental design but this time with measures specifically targeting the refutational aspect of the straw man. We tested 75 people separated in two groups: one group evaluated the perceived agreement between the speakers, the other group evaluated their perceived disagreement. The participants read 40 dialogues on various topics. For each dialogue, the participants had to evaluate Alexander’s response to Barbara by answering one question targeting Alexander’s agreement/disagreement with Barbara’s standpoint and another question targeting Alexander’s agreement/disagreement with Barbara’s argument.
Our results indicate that statements with a straw man fallacy systematically yielded lower acceptability rates, showing that participants intuitively perceive the disagreement between the interlocutors. Furthermore, our results show that participants discriminate between agreements/disagreements with standpoints and arguments. The results also confirm that the formulation of the question (agreement vs. disagreement) makes a difference. Overall our experiments demonstrate that participants are not only sensitive to manipulations that target the form of the fallacy, but also to the factors that target the function of the fallacy.

References:
Aikin, S. F. & Casey, J. P. (2016). Straw men, iron men and argumentative virtue. Topoi 35, 431-440. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-015-9308-5
Oswald, S. & Lewiński, M. (2014). Pragmatics, cognitive heuristics and the straw man fallacy. In T. Herman & S. Oswald (eds.), Rhétorique et cognition: perspectives théoriques et stratégies persuasives (pp. 313-343). Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang.
Saussure, L. de (2018). The straw man fallacy as a prestige-gaining device. In S. Oswald, T. Herman & J. Jacquin (eds.), Argumentation and Language – Linguistic, Cognitive and Discursive Explorations (pp. 171-190). Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer.
Schumann, J., Zufferey, S. & Oswald, S. (2019). What makes a straw man acceptable? Three experiments investigating linguistic factors. Journal of Pragmatics 141, 1-15. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2018.12.009
Schumann, J., Zufferey, S. & Oswald, S. (2020). The linguistic formulation of fallacies matters: The case of causal connectives. Argumentation. Advance online publication: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-020-09540-0

Item Type:

Conference or Workshop Item (Speech)

Division/Institute:

06 Faculty of Humanities > Department of Linguistics and Literary Studies > Institute of French Language and Literature
06 Faculty of Humanities > Other Institutions > Walter Benjamin Kolleg (WBKolleg) > Center for the Study of Language and Society (CSLS)

Graduate School:

Graduate School of the Humanities (GSH)

UniBE Contributor:

Schumann, Jennifer, Zufferey, Sandrine

Subjects:

400 Language > 410 Linguistics
400 Language > 440 French & related languages

Language:

English

Submitter:

Jennifer Schumann

Date Deposited:

09 Aug 2021 17:05

Last Modified:

05 Dec 2022 15:51

URI:

https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/157428

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