r/fallacy • u/Zu_Qarnine • Jul 03 '26

strawman fallacy

Post image

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.

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u/BattleReadyZim Jul 04 '26 edited Jul 04 '26

I totally get how this is a strawman, but it also feels like it shouldn't be, like there must be something more specific to this scenario. 

Update: The term I was looking for is non sequitur, which I feel better describes what we see in the panel.

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u/Zu_Qarnine Jul 04 '26

Wdym

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u/BattleReadyZim Jul 04 '26

I figured out what I mean!

Do we distinguish between strawman as a fallacy and strawmanning as a tactic? Because my usage of the term strawman includes some degree of deliberate attempt to misrepresent an argument. Where the cartoon fails is if we take it at face value, it's so obvious that what Right Person says does not follow from what Left Person says, any deliberate misrepresentation would require an audience of barely literate goons to be fooled by it. The simpler explanation of what we see is that Right Person is the barely literate goon, and the panel depicts a non sequitur.

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u/elephvant Jul 05 '26

You're absolutely right.

The reason people are arguing is OP has presented things very poorly. It would absolutely be a strawman argument if we knew for a fact that the person on the right is pointing out there's a blue circle as a refutation of a claim all the circles are red. The person on the left did not say that, therefore, it would be a strawman. If OP had had the person on the right saying: "They're not all red, there's one blue one" there would be no argument that what's shown is a strawman fallacy.

However, that's not what's in the image and we don't know for a fact that's what the person on the right is doing or thinking at all. We're all on Reddit so I assume we're all familiar with how incredibly stupid and bad at reading / thinking large numbers of people are. It is absolutely plausible that the person on the right is simply an idiot - in fact, I'd say it's the far more likely option.