Straw Man

A straw man, also known in the UK as an Aunt Sally, is a type of argument and is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent's position. To "attack a straw man" is to create the illusion of having refuted a proposition by replacing it with a superficially similar yet unequivalent proposition (the "straw man"), and to refute it, without ever having actually refuted the original position.

Read more about Straw Man:  Origin, Structure, Examples

Famous quotes containing the words straw and/or man:

    That when she essayed
    To drink lemonade,
    She slipped through the straw and fell in.
    —Unknown. There Was a Young Lady of Lynn (l. 3–5)

    A man with a so-called character is often a simple piece of mechanism; he has often only one point of view for the extremely complicated relationships of life.
    J. August Strindberg (1849–1912)