What makes a straw man acceptable? Three experiments assessing linguistic factors

Schumann, Jennifer; Zufferey, Sandrine; Oswald, Steve (2019). What makes a straw man acceptable? Three experiments assessing linguistic factors. Journal of pragmatics, 141, pp. 1-15. Elsevier 10.1016/j.pragma.2018.12.009

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A straw man is a form of fallacious argument that involves the distortion of an opponent’s view in order to make it more extreme and therefore less acceptable, thus easier to attack. In three experiments, we assess linguistic factors that may influence the acceptability of straw men for addressees. In Experiment 1, we demonstrate that a straw man is more acceptable when the speaker’s argument is attacked rather than his standpoint. In Experiment 2, we show that a straw man is more acceptable when it contains two arguments that are simply juxtaposed rather than linked by a causal connective indicating attributed content (i.e. the French puisque). In Experiment 3, we find that a straw man is more acceptable when it echoes the speaker’s explicit rather than implicit meaning. Taken together, these experiments strongly indicate that the formulation of a straw man has an impact on its perceived acceptability. Our results thus open a new avenue of inquiry for studies assessing the role of linguistic factors on the acceptability of fallacies.

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