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Ah, you may be right. I've always heard it described as a kind of straw man because you are discrediting an argument by discrediting your opponent in a specifi
by theevocater 14y ago
Ah, you may be right. I've always heard it described as a kind of straw man because you are discrediting an argument by discrediting your opponent in a specific way.
- nollidge 14y agoThat's probably ad hominem you're thinking of. "Straw man" is probably best described as putting words in someone's mouth - it's when you attack an argument that your opponent hasn't actually made instead of attacking their actual arguments. Fallacyfiles.org is a really good resource for this stuff as well as wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Logical_fallacies http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Logical_fallacies Anyway I hope I'm not being too pedantic. I think logical fallacies are like programming anti-patterns - the terminology's less important than being familiar with the sketchy patterns so you can sniff them out.