About a week ago, the noble and esteemed @YmirGF asked me, "Why did the straw man argument become so popular?"
I confess I was instantly skeptical that the straw man was anymore popular these days than it had always been. After all, it seems a safe bet we humans have been misrepresenting each other's arguments ever since the days the first propositional calculus was just a gleam in Aristotle's eyes.
And yet...and yet it turns out Ymir was onto something.
As it happens, there is a form of the straw man argument that is these days spreading across the world faster than adolescent's zippers come down on prom night. That fallacy is now called the "nutpicker".
The first time the nutpicker was ever publicly noticed.
The nutpicker is also sometimes called "Drum's Law", after the political commentator -- Kevin Drum -- who on August 10, 2006, published in the Washington Monthly an email he'd received from someone who is to this day anonymous -- all we know is that they were a "he".
Whoever that anonymous person was, he appears to be the first person in history to notice the rising popularity of an especially wicked fallacy of logic that was -- at the time -- so obscure it did not yet have a name, let alone a mention in any textbooks.
The anonymous person described the fallacy to Drum as "cherry picking crazy comments" by a "wackjob" or two, and then claiming the comments represented the mainstream opinions of "liberals" in order to discredit all liberals. He then asked Drum and his readers to come up with a name for the fallacy so that -- by naming it -- people could be made more aware of it.
In response, Drum quickly organized a brief, overnight contest to name the "new" fallacy, which he described as "...the moronic practice of trawling through open comment threads in order to find a few wackjobs who can be held up as evidence that liberals are nuts." Drum made the anonymous person who had first written to him about the fallacy the judge of the contest to name it.
The anonymous person soon announced that the contest winner was someone by the name of "BlueMan", and that "nutpicker" was the winning name.
Tragically, history records that neither the anonymous person, nor BlueMan, got so much as a T-shirt for their efforts. If you wish to weep now at the gross injustice of their fate, that would be alright.
The true form of the fallacy.
Although the nutpicker was originally identified as a fallacious attack on liberals, logic does not pick sides. If the nutpicker is a fallacy of logic -- and it indeed is one -- then it does not matter even one bit who it attacks. Logically, if it is a fallacy when used against one group, it's a fallacy when used against any group. Logic is impartial.
The form of the nutpicker is this: Pick out the nuttiest member(s) of a group, then claim they (or their nutty views) are typical or representative members (or views) of the group in order to discredit the group as a whole.
The fallacy's relation to other fallacies.
It seems the nutpicker is a devil's brew or combination of at least three other fallacies.
For those among us who are real nerds, the nutpicker has been classified by at least one logician as a special case of the weak man fallacy, which itself is a special case of the straw man fallacy, which is one of the fallacies of relevance, which are a category of informal fallacies. No doubt there are other ways to classify it too.
The relation of the nutpicker to the internet:
Some scholars blame the internet for the rapid growth of nutpicking. They point out that search engines make it easy to find quotes by obscure nutcases that can then be misrepresented as the mainstream views of one group or another. Before the internet, it wasn't as easy to find qualified nutters to quote.
In fact, the fallacy was so obscure before the net that -- so far as I've been able to find out -- it wasn't even mentioned in any pre-internet textbooks on logic. Not even in Charles Hamblin’s 1970 book, Fallacies, which examined over 200 fallacies of logic.
So there you have it. For a bit more on nutpicking (as if you aren't bored enough already) see this post: Ask Me Anything About Logical Fallacies! (Help Out a Decrepit Old Man!)
Questions? Comments?
I confess I was instantly skeptical that the straw man was anymore popular these days than it had always been. After all, it seems a safe bet we humans have been misrepresenting each other's arguments ever since the days the first propositional calculus was just a gleam in Aristotle's eyes.
And yet...and yet it turns out Ymir was onto something.
As it happens, there is a form of the straw man argument that is these days spreading across the world faster than adolescent's zippers come down on prom night. That fallacy is now called the "nutpicker".
The first time the nutpicker was ever publicly noticed.
The nutpicker is also sometimes called "Drum's Law", after the political commentator -- Kevin Drum -- who on August 10, 2006, published in the Washington Monthly an email he'd received from someone who is to this day anonymous -- all we know is that they were a "he".
Whoever that anonymous person was, he appears to be the first person in history to notice the rising popularity of an especially wicked fallacy of logic that was -- at the time -- so obscure it did not yet have a name, let alone a mention in any textbooks.
The anonymous person described the fallacy to Drum as "cherry picking crazy comments" by a "wackjob" or two, and then claiming the comments represented the mainstream opinions of "liberals" in order to discredit all liberals. He then asked Drum and his readers to come up with a name for the fallacy so that -- by naming it -- people could be made more aware of it.
In response, Drum quickly organized a brief, overnight contest to name the "new" fallacy, which he described as "...the moronic practice of trawling through open comment threads in order to find a few wackjobs who can be held up as evidence that liberals are nuts." Drum made the anonymous person who had first written to him about the fallacy the judge of the contest to name it.
The anonymous person soon announced that the contest winner was someone by the name of "BlueMan", and that "nutpicker" was the winning name.
Tragically, history records that neither the anonymous person, nor BlueMan, got so much as a T-shirt for their efforts. If you wish to weep now at the gross injustice of their fate, that would be alright.
The true form of the fallacy.
Although the nutpicker was originally identified as a fallacious attack on liberals, logic does not pick sides. If the nutpicker is a fallacy of logic -- and it indeed is one -- then it does not matter even one bit who it attacks. Logically, if it is a fallacy when used against one group, it's a fallacy when used against any group. Logic is impartial.
The form of the nutpicker is this: Pick out the nuttiest member(s) of a group, then claim they (or their nutty views) are typical or representative members (or views) of the group in order to discredit the group as a whole.
The fallacy's relation to other fallacies.
It seems the nutpicker is a devil's brew or combination of at least three other fallacies.
First, it relies on cherry picking -- the fallacy of selectively picking out from a body of information only that information that confirms your position. In the case of the nutpicker, the nutjobs (and their nutty views) are cherry picked from the whole of the group they belong to.
Second, it relies on the ad hominem -- the fallacy of making an irrelevant attack on a person or group in order to discredit their position. In this case, the attack is irrelevant because the nutters do not represent the whole group.
Last, it relies on the fallacy of composition -- the fallacy of falsely ascribing some characteristic or trait of a small part of something to the whole of it. In this case, the views of the nutters are falsely claimed to be the views of the whole group to which they belong.
Second, it relies on the ad hominem -- the fallacy of making an irrelevant attack on a person or group in order to discredit their position. In this case, the attack is irrelevant because the nutters do not represent the whole group.
Last, it relies on the fallacy of composition -- the fallacy of falsely ascribing some characteristic or trait of a small part of something to the whole of it. In this case, the views of the nutters are falsely claimed to be the views of the whole group to which they belong.
For those among us who are real nerds, the nutpicker has been classified by at least one logician as a special case of the weak man fallacy, which itself is a special case of the straw man fallacy, which is one of the fallacies of relevance, which are a category of informal fallacies. No doubt there are other ways to classify it too.
The relation of the nutpicker to the internet:
Some scholars blame the internet for the rapid growth of nutpicking. They point out that search engines make it easy to find quotes by obscure nutcases that can then be misrepresented as the mainstream views of one group or another. Before the internet, it wasn't as easy to find qualified nutters to quote.
In fact, the fallacy was so obscure before the net that -- so far as I've been able to find out -- it wasn't even mentioned in any pre-internet textbooks on logic. Not even in Charles Hamblin’s 1970 book, Fallacies, which examined over 200 fallacies of logic.
So there you have it. For a bit more on nutpicking (as if you aren't bored enough already) see this post: Ask Me Anything About Logical Fallacies! (Help Out a Decrepit Old Man!)
Questions? Comments?
