The "Weak Man" Fallacy?

Here's a paper in SciAm on what the authors claim is a newly-identified fallacy, the "weak man" fallacy (on analogy to the straw man fallacy):

Recently, in a 2006 paper co-authored with Scott F. Aikin, one of us (Talisse) documented a twist on the straw man tactic. In what Talisse dubs a weak man argument, a person sets up the opposition’s weakest (or one of its weakest) arguments or proponents for attack, as opposed to misstating a rival’s position as the straw man argument does.

Unfortunately, their lead example of the fallacy isn't actually an instance of it. They write:

In a July 2007 edition of Talking Points, Bill O’Reilly took on a claim by the New York Times that we had lost the war in Iraq by saying that “the New York Times declared defeat in Iraq Sunday on its editorial page, and there’s no question the antiwar movement has momentum.” (The editorial actually said that “some opponents of the Iraq war are toying with the idea of American defeat,” but let us assume that O’Reilly’s characterization was correct.) O’Reilly then offered a weak man explanation for the purported defeat: “The truth is the Iraqi government and many of its citizens are simply not doing enough to defeat the terrorists and corruption. The U.S.A. can’t control that country. No nation could.... Unfortunately, the Iraqi failure to help themselves has come true.” Although Iraq’s failure to aid in fighting terrorism and corruption could be why we are losing the war, the troubles in Iraq could also stem from a host of logistical reasons, some of which may shed a negative light on the current administration. O’Reilly, however, kept any discussion of these reasons offstage, suppressing the various other possible—and possibly more likely—reasons for “defeat” in Iraq. Meanwhile his claims that the “U.S.A. can’t control that country” and that “no nation could” deflected blame from the U.S. government.

This is simply not an example of the type of argument the authors have described. To commit the fallacy, O'Reilly would have to identify a position associated with a number of claims, pick one of the weak claims, argue against it, then claim to have refuted the position as a whole. He does not do that. Rather, he identifies an unlikely explanation of a phenomenon and asserts that it is the correct explanation. That's an error, but it's a completely different kind of error.

If you're going to make rather a big deal about some new category of fallacy, you really ought to make sure that you find a few genuine examples of it for your paper.

(I might have thought that they'd have mentioned the Bush AWOL memo. (Which I'll always, in a rather paranoid bit of the back of my mind, suspect was a Karl Rove set-up.) A particularly suspect piece of evidence, a rather obvious forgery, suddenly shows up and is quickly debunked. Subsequently, all of the rest of the copious evidence of shenanigans is forgotten, and the case is declared closed. But, of course, one bad piece of evidence does not undermine an entire case.

So, right off the top of my head, that seems like it's in the ballpark.

But the O'Reilly thing isn't even close.)

Incidentally:

I've taught critical thinking about twenty times in my life, and on the basis of this experience I've concluded that (a) although fallacies are supposed to be conceptually fairly simple, many of them are, in fact, rather complicated; (b) in many cases, in order to get an argument that is clearly and uncontroversially an instance of a fallacy, you often have to construct an argument that is so absurd that it's rather difficult to believe that anyone would ever find it persuasive; (c) partially as a consequence of (a) and (b), students who actually do come to understand certain fallacies fairly clearly often have to expend enormous amounts of time and energy to determine whether or not a given argument is, technically speaking, an instance of some fallacy or other; (d) partially as a consequence of (a)-(c), teaching students to identify and categorize arguments as specific types of fallacies is less useful than you might think.

Here's just one example, again off the top of my head:

In a well-known and widely-used critical thinking book (note: most such books are just awful, and this one is no exception), there is (or used to be...though I'm sure the book's gone through five more editions in the last five years) the following alleged example of an appeal to pity (from memory, not exact!):

John says: Let's get some ice cream. We can go to Basking Robbins (or whatever).
James says: No, let's go to that little shop on the corner; I feel sorry for the old guy who owns it--he doesn't get much business.

This is not an instance of an appeal to pity fallacy.

You might say that James is, in some sense, appealing to pity--though I might say he's just being humane... But this is not a fallacious appeal to pity--that is it is not an instance of the fallacy which has as the proper name 'appeal to pity.' Appeals to pity are fallacies of relevance, and they fail precisely because the appeal in question is irrelevant to the conclusion. So, for example, if James had said "That old guy's ice cream is better because I feel sorry for him" or somesuch, then it'd be an instance. That the guy is having a hard time is a relevant consideration if you're wondering whether to patronize his store; it's not relevant to the quality of his icecream. A student who comes to your office and says "please give me a higher grade! I need it so much!" is not clearly committing a fallacious appeal to pity (though it might be turned into one depending on what background assumptions about grades are in play). Now, if he came in and said "I deserve a higher grade because I need it so much," then that would be a clear example. But, of course, no one ever says anything like that. They might mix up a collection of different claims, alternating (as a student did in my office yesterday) between (lame) arguments that they deserve a higher grade and attempts to elicit pity...but they rarely say "I deserve it because I need it."

This doesn't apply to all fallacies. It's easy to find clear instances of equivocation, for example.

I often tell students to think of some of the fallacies (like, appeal to pity and ad baculum) as ideal points, paradigms, super-pure instances of terrible reasoning that are often approximated but rarely explicitly committed in real life. As such, they can serve to send you to yellow alert if someone sounds as if he's committing one of them...but after you're at yellow alert, don't worry about whether the reasoning in question is technically an instance of some named fallacy. That's a question only a low-grade logician could be interested in. Instead, just try to determine whether the reasoning is good or bad.

Anyway, I mention all that in part because I'm not sure it's that profitable to think in terms of informal fallacies, and even if it is, I'm not sure that the "weak man" is really going to help us much...especially if the authors here couldn't find more than one instance of it to include in their paper.

And as for their second example, to wit:

Weak man arguments are pervasive. In a 2005 editorial in Denver’s Rocky Mountain News, conservative writer and activist David Horowitz picked on ethnic studies scholar Ward Churchill, formerly at the University of Colorado at Boulder, whose views he described as “hateful and ignorant.” Horowitz then went on to claim that Churchill’s radical “hate America” convictions “represent” those of a “substantial seg­ment of the academic community.” Thus, he used the example of Churchill (the weak man) to argue that “tenured radicals” have made universities into leftist political institutions and subverted the academic enterprise, thereby failing to acknowledge the presence of more highly regarded and politically mainstream scholars in academia.

We're probably better off construing that has an instance of hasty generalization. (The case is, in fact, kind of complicated. The very fact that so many sectors of academia are so tolerant of Ward Churchill types is itself cause for concern...but following out that line of thought would require a different essay, at least...) Of course one argument can be an instance of two or more different types of fallacy...but my point is just that I'm not convinced that the "weak man" is a useful addition to our conceptual toolkit.