The Strawman Persuasive Essay - Daniel Rosemarin.
Variants of the straw man include the hollow-man argument, which involves inventing a fictitious position and attributing it to the opposition, the iron-man argument, which involves distorting your own stance in order to make it easier for you to defend, and the steel-man argument, which involves distorting your opponent’s stance in order to make it harder for you to attack.
Straw Man Fallacy. A straw man fallacy occurs when someone takes another person’s argument or point, distorts it or exaggerates it in some kind of extreme way, and then attacks the extreme distortion, as if that is really the claim the first person is making.
When an argument has flawed logic it would be considered to have a logical fallacy. The use of a logical fallacy might be to distract someone from understanding the true issue of an argument, or it might be used because the arguer is has an imperfect argument. The first logical fallacy we will look at is the Straw Man fallacy.
The Straw Man argument is a form of an argument based on a failure to address the presented proposition initially, instead opting for a similar, misrepresented proposition. A figure made of straw that is easy to destroy, in a similar fashion that is easy to dismantle such an argument. Imagine you are in a heated discussion with a friend of yours.
The straw man argument, in this way, is an example of a red herring. It's meant to distract from the real issue being discussed and is not a logically valid argument. The best way to understand this phenomenon is with some straw man fallacy examples. The War on Christmas.
In a Straw Man fallacy, a proponent intentionally misrepresents the opponent’s argument to facilitate the process of discrediting it. Analogously, it is much easier to defeat an individual made of straw than it is to defeat one made of flesh and blood (Copi, 113). In similar fashion, in a Straw Man, the proponent will use morally questionable.
The “straw man” approach is to attack a particularly weak argument on the other side, and knock it down so hard that it makes your side look rhetorically stronger. Is it a true fallacy or merely a psychological tactic? I would tend to lean toward.