What makes a straw man acceptable? Three experiments assessing linguistic factors

The Linguistic Formulation of Fallacies Matters: The Case of Causal Connectives

“…In sum, the experiments described in this paper show that connectives do play a role for the communication of fallacious arguments. The results found in our research lend further support to our previous work (Schumann et al 2019) and the conclusions put forward by Kamalski et al (2008), namely the idea that argumentative texts with subjective connectives are less persuasive than their objective counterparts. According to our results, the connectives that are more marked not only on the subjectivity feature, but also on givenness and speaker attitude, like puisque, vu que and étant donné que, lead to lower acceptability scores for arguments, be they fallacious or non-fallacious.…”

“…This is due to the fact that responses given on this question were not expected to be influenced by the manipulated variables as the first three questions, but by their personal opinions and preferences. We find, across all our studies, previous (Schumann et al 2019) and present, that people are usually better at detecting fallacies than at not detecting them. This result also reflects the findings from van Eemeren et al (2009) which showed that people generally prefer sound arguments over arguments that derail into unreasonableness and violate the norms for critical discussion.…”

“…In four similar experiments, we investigated the role of four causal connectives in French that encode attributive meaning, using the same experimental framework as in (Schumann et al 2019). The first connective we tested was puisque, which can roughly be translated by the English since, even though these connectives are not fully equivalent (Zufferey and Cartoni 2012).…”

“…The first connective we tested was puisque, which can roughly be translated by the English since, even though these connectives are not fully equivalent (Zufferey and Cartoni 2012). As puisque was already tested in experiment 2 from (Schumann et al 2019), we simply replicated this experiment for the current paper with new participants in order to further assess the existence of the reported effect. The experiments on the other connectives, namely étant donné que (closest to English given that), vu que (closest to English seeing that) and comme (closest to English as), are based on the same experimental design.…”

Give the Standard Treatment of Fallacies a Chance! Cognitive and Rhetorical Insights into Fallacy Processing

“…In some dialectically-inspired accounts, research on strategic manoeuvring, which incorporates a rhetorical component in the extended pragmadialectical model of argumentation (van Eemeren, 2010), points to this very idea in its discussion of the notion of presentational devices, which are linguistic choices made to enhance the persuasiveness of the message. Very recently, Schumann and her colleagues (Schumann, Zufferey, & Oswald, 2019) offered the first experimental study of the straw man fallacy to specifically cater for some linguistic and pragmatic criteria which influence its acceptability, i.e., its undetectability, showing decisive links between linguistic formulation and argumentative evaluation. All in all, there is overwhelming consensus in argumentation scholarship around the role of language and interpretation on persuasiveness, and thus indirectly on argument evaluation.…”