Re:Amazon founder Jeff Bezos calls for governments to end pa...
by theevocater on Wednesday October 17, 2012 @05:24PM
(#4666505)
Ah, you may be right. I've always heard it described as a kind of straw man because you are discrediting an argument by discrediting your opponent in a specific way.
Re:Amazon founder Jeff Bezos calls for governments to end pa...
by nollidge on Wednesday October 17, 2012 @09:50PM
(#4667149)
That's probably ad hominem you're thinking of. "Straw man" is probably best described as putting words in someone's mouth - it's when you attack an argument that your opponent hasn't actually made instead of attacking their actual arguments.
Fallacyfiles.org is a really good resource for this stuff as well as wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Logical_fallacies
Anyway I hope I'm not being too pedantic. I think logical fallacies are like programming anti-patterns - the terminology's less important than being familiar with the sketchy patterns so you can sniff them out.
I think you mean "logical fallacy", not "strawman". Strawman is another, unrelated logical fallacy.