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<p>Frank (et al.) -</p>
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<div dir="auto">I have *never* heard or read "strawman" to mean
anything other than a specious argument meant to show the
absurdity of a position. A kind of reductio ad absurdum.<br>
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<p>It is very likely that my experience was with an ideosyncratic
adoption within a small circle (LANL High Performance Computing
Community circa 1985-1995) and/or perhaps the DOE
peers/program-managers we interacted with daily. It was just part
of the air we breathed as we negotiated various projects and
programs. I thought it was both apt, and truly universal. Maybe
explains many misunderstandings I held after I left that
domain/era! <br>
</p>
<p>I would claim (and maybe this was your intent) that your (Frank)
apprehension contradicts Glen's partially... as I think HE puts
"Strawman" up as something contrived to be weak so as to be easy
to knock down and used as a proxy for your adversary's *real*
position. I think my apprehension has your element of <i>reductio
ad absurdum</i> in it, in that said "Strawman Argument" is
contrived to be so absurd that nobody in the conversation would
take as anything *but* a placeholder to form a real construction
to replace it with. Or as I said, having only the barest hint of
the shape of the evolving argument to be a bit of an armature for
a more proper construction.<br>
</p>
<p>In either case, I claim it is no coincidence that the use of
"straw" vs "steel" appeals to the metaphorical source domain of
"robustness of materials and construction", if we switched the
two terms, we could possibly learn to do the crossover decoding as
well as Glen apparently can/does, but whyever would we choose that
mapping? And with that I will suggest to this crowd that many of
my propositions here are neither "straw" nor "steel", but rather
"silly putty". Glen may insist that my invoking explicitly a
"character of materials and construction" as a source domain is
wrong at best and empty at worst, but I think many here can take
away a *rich* if not precise apprehension of what we might all
mean when we compare, for example arguments "variously of straw,
steel, and silly putty".<br>
</p>
<p>I am a blatant metaphorist as I've declared many times here, but
I agree with the less extreme parts of Glen's observations which
is that metaphors get misused/misapplied all the time. In my
absurdist but not empty (IMO) example above, the smell of silly
putty (most of us over 50 probably know it well, the way it can be
used to lift and transfer newsprint, the way it "snaps" when
pulled apart quickly, etc. may well be *excess meaning*, but the
way it can be formed into just about anything, can be done very
informally with just the tools at hand (your hands) and if left
unbothered will eventually "slump" back into a rough puddle with
only the barest memory of the shape imposed on it by the blind
puttysmith.</p>
<p>A good example that I *think* spans Glen's position and my own is
that of "standard" hue ramps used to encode scientific data...
in the colloquial "heatmap" of popular Viz... the practice is to
treat *red* as hot and *blue* as cold. It maps onto our everyday
experience of the color of flame and the color of ice, or the
quality of light in the equatorial regions vs the quality of light
in the (ant)arctic regions. red hot, blue cold. yet, my
synaesthesia example followed the model of blackbody radiation.
Red is lower energy than Blue and most physicists have no problem
"seeing" blue as hot and red as cool... in my *strawman* of
Glen's position, any palette would do... "just give me the legend
and I'll decode it"... which (IMO) is why many infographics (for
example those found in USAToday) are almost unreadable, albeit
"easy on the eyes"... a nice pastel palette running from a
toffee-pink through an adobe brown to a seafoam green might be
very pleasant and non-confrontational the eyes, but be *very* hard
to make sense of.</p>
<p>The Asian inversion of our Western convention of
Red==Stop/Danger/Death and Green==Go/Good/Life is another example
of two conflicting but equally internally consistent source
domains for a metaphor.</p>
<p>- Steve<br>
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