Fabrizio Macagno, Douglas Walton Interpreting Straw Man Argumentation. The Pragmatics of Quotation and Reporting

The interdisciplinary field of pragmatics and argumentation proves to be a very thought-provoking area . One of the latest achievements of the domain is a book authored by two distinguished scholars in language philosophy, pragmatics, and argumentation theory, Fabrizio Macagno and Douglas Walton, and is entitled Interpreting Straw Man Argumentation. The Pragmatics of Quotation and Reporting . The volume addresses one of the most current topics of our age, the issue of applying a special kind of strategy in political arguments . In recent political debates, it is frequently very difficult to decide whether the opposing candidates’ position is correctly interpreted and presented, or it is distorted and manipulated . Due to the fact that the latest US presidential debates were often characterized by “misquotations, attacks based on incorrect quotations, and accusations of misquotations” (Macagno–Walton 2017: xiii), the authors of the book propose to analyse these linguistic and argumentative issues, especially concentrating on a strategy called in the literature “the straw man fallacy”, which best illustrates the wilful alteration of one’s opponent’s words or communicative intentions . The “straw man fallacy” was originally referred to as the Aristotelian sophism, a clever but false argument called ignoratio elenchi, i .e . ignorance of what must be proved against one’s adversary, proving something other than what is at issue. As the authors define it, “the straw man in the attack on (or refutation of) a view that the speaker attributes to his adversary, but that does not correspond to the adversary’s actual position, but rather to a distorted (misrepresented) version of it” (Macagno & Walton 2017: xiii) . Attacking a view that only resembles the one advocated by the adversary presupposes several ActA UniversitAtis sApientiAe, philologicA, 9, 2 (2017) 147–150