Science Forums 2

[lemit]

Mr. Straw Man and I go way back. Trust me.

I first met the Straw Man in therapy some 40 years ago. He was introduced to me as psychological. I'm not sure the social or political context works. Straw-man by proxy? Okay, maybe. But I still prefer to think of the Straw Man as the adult equivalent of the monster under the bed. (We could do a whole thread on things we expect children to grow out of, although we as adults never do.)

Assuming Straw-Man-by-proxy works, I notice that Wiki's folk etymologies omit an obvious one: the scarecrow. "The Wizard of Oz" aside, I can't think of a better example of a straw-based artifice designed to scare.

But I still think the Straw Man works best as a self-realized psychological construct, a particular type of self-fulfilling prophecy that the Wiki examples illustrate pretty well. If it is externalized, it still should be fully believed by the creator of the construct. It can't be cynically created for the purpose of manipulation. That's something else.

Demonizing, witch-hunting, and red-baiting aren't Straw-Man arguments. The Straw Man is both more and less real than those artifices: more real to the person creating him; less real to everyone else.

Does that make sense? Or am I turning the difficulty of explaining this into a Straw Man?

--lemit

p.s. I just noticed some straw under my bed. I wonder what that could mean.