The Linguistic Formulation of Fallacies Matters: The Case of Causal Connectives
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The Linguistic Formulation of Fallacies Matters: The Case of Causal Connectives Jennifer Schumann1 · Sandrine Zufferey1 · Steve Oswald2 Accepted: 19 September 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract While the role of discourse connectives has long been acknowledged in argumentative frameworks, these approaches often take a coarse-grained approach to connectives, treating them as a unified group having similar effects on argumentation. Based on an empirical study of the straw man fallacy, we argue that a more finegrained approach is needed to explain the role of each connective and illustrate their specificities. We first present an original corpus study detailing the main features of four causal connectives in French that speakers routinely use to attribute meaning to another speaker (puisque, étant donné que, vu que and comme), which is a key element of straw man fallacies. We then assess the influence of each of these connectives in a series of controlled experiments. Our results indicate each connective has different effects for the persuasiveness of straw man fallacies, and that these effects can be explained by differences in their semantic profile, as evidenced in our corpus study. Taken together, our results demonstrate that connectives are important for argumentation but should be analyzed individually, and that the study of fallacies should include a fine-grained analysis of the linguistic elements typically used in their formulation. Keywords Straw man fallacy · Connectives · Subjectivity · Causality · Speaker attitude · Empirical validation
* Jennifer Schumann [email protected] Sandrine Zufferey [email protected] Steve Oswald [email protected] 1
Institut de Langue et de Littérature françaises, University of Bern, Länggassstrasse 49, 3012 Bern, Switzerland
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English Department, University of Fribourg, Domaine Anglais, Av. de l’Europe 20, 1700 Fribourg, Switzerland
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1 Introduction The straw man fallacy is commonly defined as a refutational move which operates by misrepresenting the content put forward by the opponent in order to attack it more easily (see e.g. Aikin and Casey 2011, 2016; van Eemeren et al. 2014; Oswald and Lewiński 2014). As such, it typically involves an unfaithful representation of the content put forward by the interlocutor, meaning that there has to be a discrepancy between what has been said by the speaker and what has been reported by the person uttering a straw man. What makes the straw man a complex fallacy to analyze is that the distortion oftentimes operates by hiding behind a resemblance, giving it the appearance of a legitimate representation. The misrepresentational aspect can be related to different elements of the content and take many different forms, as described by Aikin and Casey (2011, 2016). However, the acceptability of an argument does not only depend on its content, but also on the linguistic elements and structures chosen to convey the informational content, as these formal cues h
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