Skewing the debate with disingenuous rhetoric

I teach a developmental level English class at Middlesex County College twice a week and I’ve spent the last couple of classes talking about logical fallacies.

The issue is that the students tend to fall into these errant patterns as they make their arguments in their writing — writing around the debate or mistakenly allowing a single person to stand in for a group.

One of the errors we’ve talked about is called the straw-man fallacy — or one in which a proposition is criticized by distorting the original proposition so that it seems outrageous, weak or dangerous and then knocking down the distortion.

An example — which I included on a quiz today — is this (phrased a bit differently):

Actual argument: We should legalize marijuana for medical purposes.

Distorted argument: Allowing unrestricted access to drugs will lead to crime and drug dependency. Therefore, legalizing medical marijuana is wrong.

The problem here is simple. The argument being disputed is not the argument being offere; it is proposing a far more extensive legalization than the original proposition offers. However, the critic uses the more extreme distortion to win debate points.

I have The Dylan Ratigan Show on in the background as I’m working this afternoon, and he had as guests Jonathan Capehart of The Washingon Post and Mark Tapscott of The Washington Examiner. Capehart echoed something that both former President Bill Clinton and Post columnist E.J. Dionne have said — that the ratcheting up of harsh rhetoric and the use of violent metaphors will create a climate for actual violence.

Tapscott responded with the classic straw-man, accusing Capehart — and Dionne and Clinton and liberals in general — of calling for government to step in to ban speech, asking who would be making the decision on what speech should be permitted.

While I think we have to be careful when we confuse speech with action — we fight the toxic rhetoric of lock-and-load Sarah Palin and the Tea Party crowd with better, more effective speech — it is pretty clear when you listen to Capehart or Clinton or read Dionne that they are not talking about restrictions. They are talking about pushing back against the ugliness and finding ways to tone down the rhetoric, to cool it so that a rational, if not polite political debate can move forward.

Tapscott, however, would have none of that. He’s erected his straw man and felt perfectly comfortable (with what I would characterize as a smug half smile on his face — am I engaging in an ad hominem attack?) in distorting what Capehart had to say so that he could look like the defender of the First Amendment. (The actual video is not yet available; I’ll post as soon as it is.) And Ratigan called it a good back and forth, even though it was anything but.

How can I teach students — and new journalists, for that matter — that they should avoid these logical fallacies if the people running the nation’s editorial pages (Tapscott is the Examiner’s editorial page editor) view them as perfectly legitimate debate tools?

• Send me an e-mail.
• Read poetry at The Subterranean.
• Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie. View all posts by hankkalet