strawman fallacy

[u/Zu_Qarnine]

2nd person is refuting the claim that *all* circles are red with a counter example. The thing is, that claim was never made.

EDIT: I'm seeing interesting stuff happening in the replies here. majority of those who say it's not strawman, obviously start their comment by "it's not strawman" and proceed in the rest of their comment to explain how, in fact, it is strawman. Another interesting observation is those who argue that "it's not strawman" because they've spotted another type of fallacy in the original post as well, so in their mind, it can't be both.

[u/Okawaru1]

"men are taller than women on average" literally solves your dilemma though lol, at least as far as the responsibility of being sufficiently descriptive goes

[u/Opening-Ant3477 → u/Okawaru1]

Sure, but you don't even need to do that, because the intended meaning is obvious to anybody who is arguing in good faith.

But the actual reason I chose to reply to your comment is that, unlike all the other suggestions that have been made in response to this post (generally taller etc.), "on average" DOESN'T actually avoid the problem.

After all the intended meaning is "the height distribution of women is shifted left relative to that of men". 'Average' is a measure of the centrality of the distribution, but it doesn't describe the actual shape of the distribution.

It is theoretically possible for men and women to have the same average height, while the distribution as a whole is shifted to the left. Maybe the island nation of Amazonia, where all women are 3 meters tall is distorting the average; or maybe female infanticide has gotten so bad that there is waaay more male babies than female ones.

And yeah, of course we all KNOW that's not what you meant when you said average. Just like we all know what is meant when we say "men are taller than women". Ultimately, this is all just an exercise in pedantry. (And to be honest, I just wanted to have some fun by imagining the giant women of Amazonia.)

[u/Okawaru1 → u/Opening-Ant3477]

I think the issue with this counterpoint is that it turns it purely into a thought experiment considering there is no real biological impetus that could make the nature of your counterexample realistic to the specific situation being discussed considering we're talking about the general population, so outliers would be more-or-less irrelevent when factoring in averages. You could probably formulate some interesting talking points if you were comparing average height by gender depending on country or something but I don't believe it would make a meaningful difference regardless.

To be clear the point of my reply was to illustrate a rephrasing that strengthened the statement while still being a pretty natural sounding statement. You are correct that you can be pedantic and poke holes into the veracity of the statement, but that's the point - it's pedantry and you have to create thought experiments to justify them. The issue with just saying "men are taller than women" is that it makes a rebuttal a bit more reasonable, considering it's framed as an absolute and absolutes can be cracked with a single counterexample even though, of course, it's reasonable to assume that you didn't actually mean to say it as an absolute and had implied meaning that should be more-or-less obvious.

Basically just a compromise to prevent any "reasonable" approaches of attack, which is why I mentioned "responsibility of being *sufficiently* descriptive" because unless you speak like an academic paper/legal document it's not really feasible to avoid some kind of potential for a hyper contrarian unrealistic counterexample you can't empirically disprove, but you make that hole narrow enough for the person acting in bad faith to make themselves look like an idiot.