No abstract

While the role of discourse connectives has long been acknowledged in argumentative frameworks, these approaches often take a coarse-grained approach to connectives, treating them as a unified group having similar effects on argumentation. Based on an empirical study of the straw man fallacy, we argue that a more fine-grained approach is needed to explain the role of each connective and illustrate their specificities. We first present an original corpus study detailing the main features of four causal connectives in French that speakers routinely use to attribute meaning to another speaker (puisque, étant donné que, vu que and comme), which is a key element of straw man fallacies. We then assess the influence of each of these connectives in a series of controlled experiments. Our results indicate each connective has different effects for the persuasiveness of straw man fallacies, and that these effects can be explained by differences in their semantic profile, as evidenced in our corpus study. Taken together, our results demonstrate that connectives are important for argumentation but should be analyzed individually, and that the study of fallacies should include a fine-grained analysis of the linguistic elements typically used in their formulation.

So far, experimental studies on the straw man have targeted the misrepresentational dimension of this fallacy. In order to provide a more detailed understanding of the way the straw man is perceived, the focus of this paper lies on the refutational dimension. In two experiments, I will assess (1) if people are sensitive to the underlying disagreement expressed through the use of a straw man and (2) if question wording plays a role for the perception of disagreement. The results of the experiment show that participants indeed notice easily that the person performing a straw man disagrees with his opponent. It also emerges from the experiment that the difference between a positive or negative formulation of the experimental questions does not affect the perception of disagreement in the straw man. The underlying disagreement in the straw man is thus perceived either way.