Building the Straw Man: Refuting the Argument Nobody Made

Scott Aikin and John Casey did something useful in 2011: they separated a family of related moves that are usually lumped together as straw-manning, and showed that they work differently.

The classic straw man is distortion. You take your opponent's position and restate it in an exaggerated or simplified form that is easier to defeat, then defeat it. The audience, who does not have the original in front of them, sees a position refuted.

The weak man is selection. Here nothing is distorted. You accurately quote the least defensible version of the position that anyone actually holds — the worst argument from the least careful proponent — and treat it as representative. This is harder to counter than distortion, because every individual claim is true. The dishonesty is in the sampling.

The hollow man is invention. You attribute a position to an unnamed opponent who does not exist. Some people say. There are those who believe. The modern internet version is the screenshot of an anonymous account with four followers, presented as a movement.

The mechanism common to all three is that audiences do not hold the original position in working memory. Once a version has been stated, it becomes the anchor against which everything subsequent is measured, exactly as chapter 14 describes, and the availability of the stated version crowds out the unstated real one.

The hollow man carries an additional payload. An invented opponent can be given any characteristics the speaker finds useful, cannot correct the record, and functions as an out-group for the audience to define itself against. This is why it is so common in commentary: it manufactures an enemy with no risk of the enemy replying.

What makes all three so difficult to counter is a structural asymmetry in how corrections are heard. When you restate your actual position after it has been misrepresented, it sounds like retreat. That is not you have misrepresented me, it is you are backing down now that your real view has been exposed. The correction costs you credibility even when it is entirely accurate, which means the technique imposes a penalty whether or not it succeeds.

Two responses have some traction.

The first is to correct once, briefly and specifically, and then continue with your actual argument rather than litigating the misrepresentation. Extended argument about what you said is argument you are not spending on what you think, and it is the terrain the other side chose.

The second is a discipline to apply to yourself, which is the reason this chapter earns its place in a guide meant to be usable. Steelmanning — stating the opposing position in its strongest form, ideally in terms its holders would endorse, before responding to it — is not merely good manners. It is a check on your own comprehension. If you cannot state a position well enough that someone who holds it would say yes, that is right, then you do not yet know what you are arguing against, and any refutation you produce will be aimed at something you built.