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:
“And then finally there’s your grandmother
Sweeping the dust of the nineteenth century
Into the twentieth, and your grandfather plucking
A straw out of the broom to pick his teeth.”
—Charles Simic (b. 1938)
“For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead,
I look where he lies white-faced and still in the
coffin—I draw near,
Bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the
coffin.”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)