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.
Famous quotes containing the words straw and/or man:
“Farm boys wild to couple
With anything with soft-wooded trees
With mounds of earthmounds
Of pine straw will keep themselves off
Animals by legends of their own:”
—James Dickey (b. 1923)
“There’s man all over for you, blaming on his boots the faults of his feet.”
—Samuel Beckett (1906–1989)
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