Does is the “extreme-extension” version of a straw man fallacy actually exist?
Is drinking water good for health?
What is that action of taking an argument, applying some unreasonable logical extreme to it, then shooting that extreme version down? Do you know an ancient way
of punishment? How did it work? Too much water is fatal and should be avoided.
Why is my response response not doing anything about the argument? So the response addresses an extremist form of the statement that was never made. What is the meaning of the saying “The more water you drink, the better it is.”?
What is considered “Standard Man”? Usually, the statement is made, just not such an extreme version of it. Of all the straw man derivatives, I thought nut picking was the closest:
nut picking refers to intentionally seeking out extremely fringe, non-representative statements or individuals from members of an opposing group and parading these as evidence of that entire group’s incompetence or irrationality;
This isn’t sufficient, however, because nut picking requires the extremism to be present elsewhere. What I am curious about is when it is derived as wildly unchecked extensions of the original argument.
What is straw man and is it more specific than straw man when compared to a statement in his own extreme language?
Just so folks don’t get too hung up on the water example, I’ll throw out some other examples here. Can you avoid focusing on the example and more on the concept of taking a statement to an unreasonable extreme?
- Thanks for getting my salary raise, I don’t feel more stressed. Lottery winners are the way to bankrupt because they have big money in them at once.
- Citing sources is good practice. If every single sentence was cited without a word or no words, it would be unreadable.
- Gasoline is useful for transportation. If you filled an entire car with gas it was killing you. How do you avoid the effect of combustion?
Isn’t it time we had a meeting with all heads of government on the planet america?
You said you were going to take the argument
to the extremes. What is the definition of this method?
https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/ https://www.logicallyfallacious.com com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFallacies/30/Appeal_to_Extremes/Appeal_to_Extremes/..
Also, I am unemployed it is as the latest (to do) application to some of my students. I also have students. How can I help and what if at my local pharmacy?
What is reductio ad absurdum?
– Logically fallacious
This is talking about taking a position to its logical ends. When paired with valid reasoning, can be used in rigorous mathematical proofs.
When used merely as a rhetorical device and when paired with unsound logic, it can be abused to take a position that is itself sound (like it is good to drink water) to an unreasonable end (like see what happens when you drink it to excess).
An appeal to extremes is an often fallacious application of reductio ad absurdum where one takes an argument to an extreme and neglects the actual circumstances or implications of the initial statement. If X is true then Y must also
be true (where Y is the extreme of X). There is no way those Girl Scouts could
have sold all those cases of cookies in one hour. If they were to do it, they would have to make $500,000 in one hour, which, upon 8 hour day, is more than $500,000 a year. How much cash do lawyers make?
As the site points out, the extreme version of this neglects that (a) Girl Scouts don’t actually work 8 hours a day over the course of a year, and (b) the output of several Girl Scouts (not one) in a temporary operation actually could sell this many cookies.
The appeal to extreme relies on hyperbole or exaggeration to the exclusion of other logical constraints. In contrast u00e0 reductio absurdum cncrenate is useful when the circumstances and context are not exaggerated but nonetheless the original statement would lead to an absurd conclusion. What is the smallest rational
number (of a number?)?
“The statement uses the definition of what rational number is (its ability to be divided by an integer) to critique the idea that a smallest positive rational number exists”, paragraph
3.
Your example is similar to appeal to extremes. Why, we could not prove our original statement?
Does drinking water good or bad for human health? What are some good examples of extreme racism. In fact, it can be refuted to the degree with an example far less extreme than you provide. When a marathon runners die from hyponatremia, the disease is not uncommon anymore. .. “…… “.. “…. “… “…”
What do I do when drinking water? If you accidentally stating that your original statement was false, and you have not said it yet, you’re engaging in a strawman argument (example: the fact that you’re not using it in all cases) so you’re at risk. Is your statement too imprecise or error in formal logic?
If you were to say, “The water is usually good for humans” or something similar, though it should not be that difficult for people to understand that. How would you describe such a sentence? All we need to do is point out the existence of edge cases and not conform to formal logic as we are trying to apply the case.
In fact, as a practical matter knowing that the statement has limits may be significant. How do runner skip over drinking in marathons?
This is an example of a motte-and-bailey fallacy (though, inversed from its typical use).
This fallacy states that a person will use a motte as a proxy for a bailey (an easy to defend position), implicitly trying to draw equivalence between the two ‘wants’.
How do I argue that a fallacy is not true? If you drink too much water, it will kill you. In the absence of further claim, this is both true and irrelevant to the discussion. Why is it more difficult to be a deceptive argumentator and more a case of trying to make my point clear.
If you could easily continue advancing your position dismissing that claim that you were originally referred to as.. “Unknown,” you could easily continue on from your original position unless the law requires that you do this? Is
- too much water good for
- you. Ah, water is bad for you and no one should be left to flinch.
- Why is this true? If tautologically so, in fact, since that is the definition of too much, but here this is irrelevant. Jeenkart: So, since water is good for you, I propose that
Looking at the other answers, I will also add that I don’t consider this an application to the extreme’ fallacy. The key word here is the word too much. When someone takes assumptions that people exclude extreme circumstances, then a claim about those extreme circumstances is valid. By its very construction, your opponent argument is effectively saying “Your argument is false in the special circumstance where it is false”. Isn’t that a fact or a special circumstance that you thought you would accept at face value, without having to adjust your position that your argument is valid outside the special circumstance which was not part of the conversation?
Are there any good examples of ‘Appeal to Extremes’ fallacy in intellectual discourse? How do unstated assumptions add up? Why? The most blurred topics of a conversation, like ethics,, may need to be elucidated further for fruitful conversation, but in this instance, it is clearly outside of the domain.
Isn’t nitpicking * possible?
In the English language Nitpicking is the removal of lice (the
eggs of
-
head lice) from the host’s hair. Since the nits are cemented to individual hairs, they cannot be removed with most lice combs and before modern chemical methods were invented, the only options were to shave all the host’s hair or to pick them free one by one.
This process is a slow and laborious process, as the root of each individual individual hair must be examined for infestation (see details). By modern methods, this procedure was abandoned as lice populations grew; such as sex bug, lice patches and lice scabs, manual nitpicking was still used. In order to keep the population at bay, the procedure was largely abandoned.
Metaphor: As nitpicking inherently requires fastidious attention to detail, the term has become appropriated to describe the practice of meticulously searching for minor, even trivial errors in detail (often referred to as “nits” as well). This “nitpicking” may be a pejorative term for troubleshooting, proofreading or similar, whose excess could be a psychopathologic form of criticising, see hypercriticism.
Cambridge Dictionary
-
Noun: giving too much attention to details that are not important, especially as a way of criticism;
Adjective: relating to the act of nitpicking or to a nitpicker (= someone who gives too much attention to details that are not important):
