2.1 The Straw Man Fallacy and Connectives in Argumentation
While research on fallacies is now established as a core research topic in argumentation studies (Hamblin
1970; van Eemeren and Grootendorst
1992; Hansen and Pinto
1995; Walton
1995; Tindale
2007), the straw man fallacy itself has mostly been studied from one very specific perspective. Along with early pragma-dialectical considerations on the straw man in the 1990s (van Eemeren and Grootendorst
1992; van Eemeren and Houtlosser
1999), most theoretical approaches to this fallacy have explored it from a normative and/or descriptive perspective (Aikin and Casey
2011,
2016; van Eemeren et al.
2002,
2014; Lewiński
2011; and Lewiński and Oswald
2013; Oswald and Lewiński
2014 to a certain extent). Whilst these approaches diverge in their focus, they agree on the core features of the straw man and define it as a misrepresentation of an original position that seeks to weaken this position in order to make it more easily refutable (see e.g. Aikin and Casey
2011,
2016; Lewiński
2011; Oswald and Lewiński
2014). These definitions of the straw man focus on two essential aspects of the fallacy: first, the straw man distorts the original point of view, and second, it does so with the aim of refuting it. The straw man therefore relies on the dichotomy between form, its distorting element, and function, the refutational aim (see Lewiński
2011). When misrepresenting the opponent’s position, the speaker of the straw man attributes the distorted version of the original position to the opponent. In doing so, arguers who perform a straw man distance themselves from a commitment to the misrepresenting version because they indirectly attribute commitment to the fallacious statement to their opponent. The straw man therefore not only qualifies as a misrepresentation of a position, but also as a misattribution of commitment regarding said position (see e.g. Müller
2020; de Saussure and Oswald
2008; Walton
1996). Consequently, the position that is being refuted is a position that is distorted and falsely attributed to the opponent. According to Walton (
1996), the dynamic of attributing a misrepresented version of a position to the opponent and introducing its refutation as a rightful refutation of the original position is an essential characteristic of the straw man’s treacherousness.
The misrepresentational element of the straw man rests on its linguistic features: when committing the fallacy, the interlocutor reformulates the original content in a distorted and often exaggerated way. The straw man aims at creating the impression that the distorted argument is closely related to the original standpoint, where in reality the fallacy uses a new, fictitious position, as a basis for its attack. This weakens the original position and makes it easier to attack, which ultimately can lead to a reversal of the burden of proof (e.g. de Saussure
2018; Walton
1995; Walton et al.
2013). When a straw man fallacy is performed, a quite particular argumentative move happens: the interlocutor uttering the straw man attacks the speaker by misrepresenting their point of view, and as a result, the speaker now finds themselves in a defensive position and has to show that the interlocutor has misreported their speech. This misrepresentation does not only entail an infraction of the burden of proof by shifting the attention to the original speaker (van Eemeren et al.
2002; Walton
1995; Walton et al.
2013), but is, following the pragma-dialectical framework, a violation of the third rule for critical discussion which states that one has to attack the standpoint that has actually been brought forward (e.g. van Eemeren et al.
2002). Any distortion, oversimplification, exaggeration or other type of inaccurate reporting of the original standpoint would therefore be considered to be a fallacious argumentative move from a dialectical perspective. Yet, following de Saussure (
2018), the straw man can remain a winning move from a rhetorical perspective because it shows the oratory skills of the individual producing the fallacy, even if it fails in persuading.
The above-mentioned selection of approaches has brought insights on a variety of observations regarding the straw man fallacy. These perspectives have not yet focused in depth on an empirical approach of the linguistic structure used to perform a straw man, which highlights that there is a need for complementary investigations with a more linguistic-oriented approach to this fallacy that take into consideration the structural elements that play a role for the communication of straw man fallacies. Such approaches provide a detailed understanding on how linguistic choices like the use of connectives, the locus of the misrepresentation, and many other factors, can alter the acceptability of fallacies like the straw man. In addition, such linguistic analysis should rest on empirical findings, as they can specifically target how different linguistic formulations are processed by ordinary arguers. Such studies enable an account of the way subtle changes in the wording of a fallacious argument like the straw man can influence how it is perceived by the interlocutor.
Despite the important body of literature that has discussed the straw man fallacy from a theoretical perspective, experiments on the straw man are still very rare, even though empirical approaches to the study of fallacies in general have increased in recent years (e.g. van Eemeren et al.
2009,
2012; Hahn and Hornikx
2016; Harris et al.
2016; Lillo-Unglaube et al.
2014; Ozols et al.
2016). Among all these studies, only the one by Bizer et al. (
2009) focused on the straw man. In their experiments (Bizer et al.
2009), they assessed the elements that influence the persuasiveness of the straw man and tested whether personal relevance plays a role on the fallacy’s effectiveness. In a first experiment, they compared two political statements that were either placed in a high-relevance context (i.e. the content was important to the hearer) or a low-relevance context (i.e. the content was of no particular importance to the hearer). Their results showed that participants in the low-relevance condition were more likely to be persuaded by the straw man fallacy. In the second experiment, Bizer et al. (
2009) assessed whether the effectiveness of a straw man was affected by individual differences in personality traits, like the need for cognitive closure, which is related to decisiveness and need for structure. Bizer et al. (
2009) found that participants who had a low need for cognitive closure, in other words who were not in a hurry to get to a conclusion, were more influenced by straw man fallacies than participants with a high need for cognitive closure. These experiments have therefore demonstrated that there are indeed individual differences that influence the persuasiveness of straw man fallacies. This begged the question whether elements other than the cognitive features investigated by Bizer et al. (
2009), especially linguistic elements pertaining to the formulation of the fallacy, can have an impact on its effectiveness as well.
In previous work (Schumann etal.
2019), we tackled this question and identified several linguistic factors that play a role on the acceptability of arguments containing a straw man fallacy in French. We defined the acceptability of the straw man based on the participants’ ability to detect the fallacy: the lower the acceptability for a fallacious argument, the higher the likelihood that it was implicitly detected. In the first experiment, we investigated whether straw man fallacies were more acceptable (i.e., were more likely to remain undetected) when they targeted the opponent’s standpoint or when they targeted the opponent’s argument. Our results clearly indicated that the straw man was better accepted when it targeted the argument rather than the standpoint. We concluded that the straw man was less visible when it targeted the argument because it involved a lower-level disagreement. Indeed, it is possible to disagree with one specific argument but still agree with the general standpoint. In contrast, disagreement with the standpoint itself involves a global disagreement between speakers. The second experiment assessed the difference between a misrepresented content introduced explicitly by the French causal connective
puisque (roughly equivalent to the English
since) or implicitly, through the simple juxtaposition of the two segments. In both cases, the formulation of the fallacious argument remained identical, the only element that changed was the presence or absence of
puisque. Results showed that the straw man was better accepted when the fallacious content was juxtaposed to the previous segment rather than introduced by the connective
puisque. We concluded that because of its attributive meaning (i.e. the fact of presenting the content as attributed to the opponent), the connective
puisque acted as a signpost alerting participants to the possible presence of misattributed content. In the third experiment, we tested for the difference between misrepresentations that were based on an explicit reformulation of the original speaker’s argument and distortions that were grounded on an implicit reformulation. In the case of the explicit variant, the wording of the argument containing a straw man was kept as close as possible to the original, only exaggerating one noun phrase. For example, in the original argument it was stated that ‘having a child means a lot of financial charges’ and the distorted version stated that ‘having a child means financial ruin’. For the implicit reformulation, the wording was more radically different and the reformulation relied on an implicit conclusion that could be drawn from the speaker’s meaning—i.e. ‘having a child means a lot of financial charges’ resulting in ‘it only is about the money’. We found that the straw man fallacies were more likely to be accepted when the misrepresented content was reformulated in an explicit rather than implicit way. We concluded that explicit reformulations created a sense of familiarity leading to a shallower processing of linguistic content. Taken together, the effects that we found in these experiments confirmed that the acceptability of the straw man fallacy, measured by hearers’ propensity to find them to be proportionate and coherent responses and to agree with the speaker who uttered them, can be increased or decreased by tweaking different linguistic factors. More important for the argument of this paper: the results we obtained for the connective
puisque begged the question of whether other causal connectives could also influence the acceptability of straw man fallacies and if the effects we found for
puisque are related specifically to this causal connective, or if other causal connectives that convey attributive meaning as well lead to similar effects.
The role of discourse markers, a notion including—but not limited to—discourse connectives, has long been acknowledged and discussed in several argumentative frameworks. Connectives like the French
mais (closest to
but in English), have been studied from a very early stage by Anscombre and Ducrot (
1977), and they are still an object of inquiry today as Uzelgun et al. (
2015) illustrate in their corpus analysis of "yes,but..." constructions in climate change debates and Rocci et al. (
2020) demonstrate in their recent cross-linguistic investigation on the use of adversative connectives like
mais in young children’s argumentation, showing that even the youngest amongst arguers resort to linguistic resources like argumentative indicators to structure discourse. Various collaborations in the field of argumentation and language (e.g. Herman, Jacquin and Oswald
2018; Oswald et al.
2018) highlight that research on linguistic markers in argumentation has mostly been analyzed from two perspectives. The first approach follows the French tradition (e.g. Anscombre and Ducrot
1983; Ducrot et al.
1980) which theorizes that discourse markers or, following their terminology, words of discourse (
les mots du discours, see Ducrot et al.
1980) have distinct functions in argumentative contexts: they indicate discursive relations between the segments of the utterance they link together, and shape the way the utterance is oriented or interpreted (Anscombre and Ducrot
1983). They therefore opt for a more language-oriented approach—an argumentation-within-language perspective (
l’argumentation dans la langue)—because argumentation simply cannot be isolated from its discursive intentions and argumentative orientations. This approach has been discussed and developed further by Anscombre and Ducrot themselves (e.g. Anscombre
2001; Anscombre et al.
2013; Ducrot
1993) and many other researchers in similar fields of investigation (Carel
1999; Moeschler
1989; Roulet
1984).
The second approach, put forward by pragma-dialecticians (e.g. van Eemeren et al.
2007a,
b), focuses on argumentative indicators in a broader sense, including any form of linguistic marker that serves as an indicator of the argumentative move that has been made within the four stages of a critical discussion. When resolving a difference of opinion, the ideal model postulates four stages that the arguers are going through: the confrontation stage during which the interlocutors acknowledge that there is a difference of opinion, the opening stage during which the interlocutors set up the rules for resolving the difference of opinion, the argumentation stage during which the interlocutors defend their respective standpoints, and the concluding stage during which the interlocutors evaluate if their difference of opinion has been solved or not (van Eemeren and Grootendorst
1992). Pragma-dialecticians argue that the role of argumentative indicators is related to the type of argumentative move which is being carried out, meaning that not every expression, or marker, or connective, or other type of indicator is used at the same stage when resolving a difference of opinion. If we look at the connective
since for example, the pragma-dialectical framework (van Eemeren et al.
2007b, p.119) describes it as an indicator of a starting point of a discussion, because it implicitly conveys the meaning that all the parties involved in the discussion have agreed on the content of the segment following the connective.
Even if the argumentation-within-language approach and the pragma-dialectical approach differ in the way they tackle the subject, they both agree on the importance of linguistic markers, such as connectives, for argumentation. Nevertheless, the first approach is not sufficiently detailed in describing the distinct roles of the different words of discourse and pragma-dialecticians are more focused on a top-down process, first identifying the argumentative move within a discussion and only then shifting the attention towards the indicators used to carry out the argumentative move. In order to get a more fine-grained understanding on how these markers work in specific argumentative situations, empirical research in the form of corpus studies (see e.g. Uzelgun et al.
2015) and experimental studies (see e.g. Schumann et al.
2019) have to be conducted to investigate the role of connectives within argumentation. In this paper, we take a bottom-up perspective, and first perform a corpus study in order to define the core characteristics of each causal connective that can typically be used to introduce a straw man in the discourse segment following the connective. In turn, this empirically grounded description of the semantic profile of each connective will enable us to assess their role in experiments focusing on a specific argumentative situation. Taken together, these studies will both deepen our understanding of the functions of these connectives and show a link between their uses in corpus data and their role in an argumentative context. Before turning to our corpus study in Sect.
3, we present studies that have assessed the roles of connectives for discourse processing and comprehension in the next section.
2.2 The Function of Connectives from a (psycho-) Linguistic Perspective
Discourse connectives are linguistic elements used to structure discourse and increase textual coherence by establishing coherence relations between discourse segments (Halliday and Hasan
1976; Knott and Dale
1994; Mann and Thompson
1988). Applied to an argumentative context, this means that connectives are used to indicate relations between standpoints and arguments, and the different positions held by the interlocutors. In addition, connectives are non-truth-conditional, more precisely, the semantic meaning of a proposition is not influenced by their presence. Sentences (1) and (2) below express the same informational content, which illustrates the fact that the meaning in (2) is not affected by the absence of the causal connective
as:
(1)
The Earth is round, as it has been proven by empirical data.
(2)
The Earth is round. It has been proven by empirical data.
When they are used however, connectives facilitate the processing and comprehension of discourse (Caron et al.
1988; Cozijn et al.
2011; Sanders and Noordman
2000; Sanders et al.
2007; Zufferey and Gygax
2016). In example (1), the connective
as instructs the reader to process the content following the causal connective as an argument in support of the preceding statement. Causal connectives, as referred to in this paper, are to be understood as a subcategory of connectives that encode coherence relations based on a cause, an argument or a reason (see e.g. Pit
2003; Stukker and Sanders
2012). The causality has therefore more of a semantic and less of a material or physical orientation.
Another specificity of connectives is that they are polyfunctional, in other words they are used to express different relations depending on the context. The connective
as, for example, can introduce a cause or a reason like in (1), but it can also be used to express a relation of temporal simultaneity as in (3):
(3)
The rest of the group arrived as we were leaving.
The absence of a biunivocal relation between connectives and discourse relations can also be approached from the other side: in the majority of the cases, the same discourse relation can be expressed by different connectives. For example, a cause or a reason can be conveyed by several connectives like
because,
since,
as,
given that, etc. Yet, corpus studies have shown that these connectives are not interchangeable, as each of them has specific nuances of meanings (e.g. Pit
2007; Zufferey and Cartoni
2012). In this paper, we compare the role of four French causal connectives that convey attributive meaning, in other words that can be used to introduce an argument implicitly attributed by the speaker to an external source, as these connectives can be used to introduce straw man fallacies.
So far, most studies that have assessed the roles of connectives empirically in pragmatics and psycholinguistics have made use of very short expository texts, or even no text at all but only sentences presented in isolation. To the best of our knowledge, only one empirical study has conclusively demonstrated that connectives play a specific role in persuasive texts. Kamalski et al. (
2008) uncovered an important difference in the role played by objective causal connectives, namely connectives used to link facts and events in the world (4), and subjective connectives, namely connectives that are used to link claims or arguments and conclusions drawn in the mind of the speaker (5).
(4)
Henry was late for work because he missed his train.
(5)
Henry must have missed his train, since he still hasn’t arrived.
1
They found that in persuasive texts, the presence of subjective causal connectives created a
forewarning effect, alerting readers to the persuasive intention of the writer and decreasing their willingness to accept its content. In a first experiment, Kamalski et al. (
2008) included offline measures of persuasion targeting the readers’ beliefs, attitudes and intentions following reading. They found that texts containing subjective connectives were less persuasive compared to texts containing objective connectives. This effect was in addition related to participants’ perception of the writer’s intention. With subjective connectives, the intention of the writer was perceived to be more strongly persuasive compared to the version containing objective connectives. It seems, therefore, that when participants encounter subjective connectives, it forewarns them to the persuasive intention of the writer and this may create resistance and lower acceptance of textual content. In this experiment, Kamalski et al. (
2008) did not find a difference between texts containing almost no connectives and texts containing subjective connectives. It seems therefore that the most persuasive version of a text is one that specifically contains objective connectives. In a second experiment, Kamalski et al. (
2008) investigated the role of the forewarning effect even further. In an online reading task, they tested the processing of short texts containing an explicit formulation of the causal connection with either subjective connective or no connective and another version with either an objective connective or no connective. In this second experiment, they found that the short texts containing subjective connectives were less convincing compared to the implicit version, thus providing further evidence for the existence of a forewarning effect linked to the use of subjective connectives.
In sum, Kamalski et al.’s was the first study to uncover a forewarning effect linked to the use of subjective connectives. In our paper, we pursue this line of investigation further by assessing the role of subjective connectives in a specific type of argumentative context, namely the acceptability of fallacious arguments. In addition, Kamalski et al. considered subjective connectives only as a global category in which many different connectives are included. Yet, subjectivity is a scalar notion (Degand and Pander Maat
2003) and some connectives are more strongly subjective than others (Pit
2007; Zufferey and Cartoni
2012). In this paper, we will assess the way specific connectives differing in their degree of subjectivity create a forewarning effect in argumentative contexts. We will also show that subjectivity is not the only relevant criterion that separates causal connectives, and that other semantic factors such as the speaker’s attitude towards the attributed meaning and the type of information that is introduced—given or new—also play a role in argumentative contexts.