An experimental investigation of perceived disagreement in straw man fallacies

In this paper, we investigate whether participants perceive the disagreement between interlocutors when one of them performs a straw man fallacy on the other. In the literature (see e.g. Aikin & Casey, 2016; de Saussure, 2018; Oswald & Lewinski, 2014), the straw man is generally defined based on two core characteristics: the form (i.e. its misrepresenting nature) and the function (i.e. its refutational aim). In previous experiments (Schumann, Zufferey & Oswald, 2019, 2020) we focused on the misrepresentational aspect of the straw man fallacy, demonstrating that its acceptability can vary depending on the linguistic elements that are used to formulate it. The effects we found already contribute to a more fine-grained picture of the fallacy but one question was only partially answered: do participants perceive that the person uttering a straw man attack disagrees with the victim of the fallacy? To answer this question, we used the same experimental design but this time with measures specifically targeting the refutational aspect of the straw man. We tested 75 people separated in two groups: one group evaluated the perceived agreement between the speakers, the other group evaluated their perceived disagreement. The participants read 40 dialogues on various topics. For each dialogue, the participants had to evaluate Alexander’s response to Barbara by answering one question targeting Alexander’s agreement/disagreement with Barbara’s standpoint and another question targeting Alexander’s agreement/disagreement with Barbara’s argument. Our results indicate that statements with a straw man fallacy systematically yielded lower acceptability rates, showing that participants intuitively perceive the disagreement between the interlocutors. Furthermore, our results show that participants discriminate between agreements/disagreements with standpoints and arguments. The results also confirm that the formulation of the question (agreement vs. disagreement) makes a difference. Overall our experiments demonstrate that participants are not only sensitive to manipulations that target the form of the fallacy, but also to the factors that target the function of the fallacy. References: Aikin, S. F. & Casey, J. P. (2016). Straw men, iron men and argumentative virtue. Topoi 35, 431-440. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-015-9308-5 Oswald, S. & Lewinski, M. (2014). Pragmatics, cognitive heuristics and the straw man fallacy. In T. Herman & S. Oswald (eds.), Rhetorique et cognition: perspectives theoriques et strategies persuasives (pp. 313-343). Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang. Saussure, L. de (2018). The straw man fallacy as a prestige-gaining device. In S. Oswald, T. Herman & J. Jacquin (eds.), Argumentation and Language – Linguistic, Cognitive and Discursive Explorations (pp. 171-190). Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer. Schumann, J., Zufferey, S. & Oswald, S. (2019). What makes a straw man acceptable? Three experiments investigating linguistic factors. Journal of Pragmatics 141, 1-15. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2018.12.009 Schumann, J., Zufferey, S. & Oswald, S. (2020). The linguistic formulation of fallacies matters: The case of causal connectives. Argumentation. Advance online publication: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-020-09540-0