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 fine-grained 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.
Highlights
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
This paper aims at applying the fine-grained method of pragmatics and psycholinguistics to analyze the role of causal connectives in argumentative contexts, in the case of the straw man fallacy
More important for the argument of this paper: the results we obtained for the connective puisque begged the question of whether other causal connectives could influence the acceptability of straw man fallacies and if the effects we found for puisque are related to this causal connective, or if other causal connectives that convey attributive meaning as well lead to similar effects
Summary
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 (see e.g. Aikin and Casey 2011, 2016; van Eemeren et al 2014; Oswald and Lewiński 2014). 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. Linguistic elements like connectives, in particular, play an important role for the interpretation of discourse because they can encode procedural meaning which provides indications on the way the conceptual information has to be processed Connectives can be considered to be an important aspect in the study of argumentative discourse
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