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> In Straw Man Arguments Aikin and Casey introduce a wealth of concepts for getting to grips with the dark art of the straw man. Indeed, they propose a further
by vgel 4y ago
> In Straw Man Arguments Aikin and Casey introduce a wealth of concepts for getting to grips with the dark art of the straw man. Indeed, they propose a further notion: a fascinating inversion called the “iron man”, where one responds to a maximally strengthened form of one’s opponent’s argument and explains how even this move – which is sometimes seen as dialectical best practice – can sometimes be fallacious.
I wish they expanded on why the "iron man" (which I usually see called the steelman) can be fallacious. The only thing I can imagine is an "armored strawman" where you claim you're steelmanning but your changes to the argument actually make it weaker? Guess I'll have to buy the book...
- dataduck 4y agoThe most common form I've seen is often not malicious: "thing you actually said is a weak form of this argument, the strongest form is in fact mostly agreeing with me"
- amalcon 4y agoThe problem is that the strength or weakness of an argument is not objective. Usually steelmanning is fallacious when you don't first seek agreement with the counterparty that the new version of the argument is stronger. This comes up a lot when your counterparty is operating from different premises than you are. E.g. attacking a utilitarian version of your conterparty's argument when the counterparty is not a utilitarian is fallacious, even if the utilitarian version of the argument seems stronger to you. They will see the argument as obviously flawed from the start, because they do not believe the utilitarian premise.