Straw man

A straw man is a form of argument and an informal fallacy based on giving the impression of refuting an opponent's argument, while actually refuting an argument that was not presented by that opponent. One who engages in this fallacy is said to be 'attacking a straw man'.I submit to you that if you can't take this evidence and find these defendants guilty on this evidence then we might as well open all the banks and say, 'Come on and get the money, boys,' because we'll never be able to convict them.It was a little cocker spaniel dog, in a crate he had sent all the way from Texas, black and white, spotted, and our little girl Tricia, six years old, named it Checkers. And, you know, the kids, like all kids, loved the dog, and I just want to say this right now, that, regardless of what they say about it, we are going to keep it.Whereas, the writings of Charles Darwin, the father of evolution, promoted the justification of racism, and his books On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man postulate a hierarchy of superior and inferior races. . . . A straw man is a form of argument and an informal fallacy based on giving the impression of refuting an opponent's argument, while actually refuting an argument that was not presented by that opponent. One who engages in this fallacy is said to be 'attacking a straw man'. The typical straw man argument creates the illusion of having completely refuted or defeated an opponent's proposition through the covert replacement of it with a different proposition (i.e., 'stand up a straw man') and the subsequent refutation of that false argument ('knock down a straw man') instead of the opponent's proposition. Straw man arguments have been used throughout history in polemical debate, particularly regarding highly charged emotional subjects. Straw man tactics in the United Kingdom can be known as an Aunt Sally, after a pub game of the same name, where patrons threw sticks or battens at a post to knock off a skittle balanced on top. As a fallacy, the identification and name of straw man arguments are of relatively recent date, although Aristotle makes remarks that suggest a similar concern; Douglas Walton identified 'the first inclusion of it we can find in a textbook as an informal fallacy' in Stuart Chase's Guides to Straight Thinking from 1956 (p. 40). However, Hamblin's classic text Fallacies (1970) neither mentions it as a distinct type, nor even as a historical term. The term's origins are a matter of debate, though the usage of the term in rhetoric suggests a human figure made of straw that is easy to knock down or destroy—such as a military training dummy, scarecrow, or effigy. A common but false etymology is that it refers to men who stood outside courthouses with a straw in their shoe to signal their willingness to be a false witness. The Online Etymology Dictionary states that the term “man of straw” can be traced back to 1620 as “an easily refuted imaginary opponent in an argument.” The straw man fallacy occurs in the following pattern of argument: This reasoning is a fallacy of relevance: it fails to address the proposition in question by misrepresenting the opposing position.