Digitally deconstructing 'straw man' and 'wicker man' arguments: A software-aided pedagogy

Abstract

This article models a software-based pedagogy, targetted at undergraduates, for assisting with detection and deconstruction of straw man arguments. The pedagogy is useful particularly where the student is unfamiliar with the standpoint attacked in the argument, where the text describing the standpoint is large and where the argument is lengthy too. I use a digital text analysis tool - Sketch Engine - to help reveal and deconstruct a straw man argument which misrepresents one specific aspect of a book. I then go on to use this tool in combination with another digital text analysis tool - WMatrix - to demonstrate too how the book's wider standpoints conflict with the argument's framing. I thus also show the argument to be a much bigger straw man, what I refer to as a wicker man. Advantages of using the digital tools are that (i) they efficiently set the student up to judge whether or not central topics in a large text being attacked are relevant absences from the argument attacking that text; (ii) the potential for arbitrariness in judging whether or not the argument is a straw man or a wicker man is significantly reduced, making in principle for scrupulous evaluation.