@neologist,
neologist wrote:
FBM wrote:It would be more productive, I think, to address the specific ideas that I convey, rather than my chosen manner of conveying them. Not everyone shares your phobia of offsite links.
Generally, you go after Patches with straw men. If I torch the straw men, Patches will think I defend him. And I must say his spurious doctrine is hugely more destructive to the truth than are your sophomoric straw men.
Well, I may slip up every now and again, but it may be less often than you think. I was hoping you'd be more specific and point out one or more particular instances.
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/straw-man.html
Quote:Description of Straw Man
The Straw Man fallacy is committed when a person simply ignores a person's actual position and substitutes a distorted, exaggerated or misrepresented version of that position. This sort of "reasoning" has the following pattern:
Person A has position X.
Person B presents position Y (which is a distorted version of X).
Person B attacks position Y.
Therefore X is false/incorrect/flawed.
This sort of "reasoning" is fallacious because attacking a distorted version of a position simply does not constitute an attack on the position itself. One might as well expect an attack on a poor drawing of a person to hurt the person.
Can you point out a specific intance in which I've taken a caricature of Patches' and then attacked it
as if it were Patches' original position? For example, I point out the institutionalized pedophilia enabling that goes on in his chosen denomination. BUT, I also point out that I don't think Patches himself endorses either pedophilia or the enabling that goes on. Saying that he passively supports it by paying tithes, etc, is an accurate description of the situation as far as I can see.
Now, when I post an image that points out an embarrassing aspect of
his faith, that's not a straw man unless it's a caricature that I present as if it were Patches' position. I may slip up from time to time, but I tend to parse terms pretty closely when I'm on my game. If you read very carefully and literally, you might see that I'm much less guilty of straw man fallacies than you may be thinking.
