Reply #61: That is not what "straw man" means. [View All]

[eomer]

A straw man is putting words into your opponents mouth -- falsely attributing an argument to your opponent.

Clearly in my "weighs the same as a duck" comment I was saying what I think about your argument. I was not falsely attributing any argument to you.

And I reiterate that your argument is about as sound as the "weighs the same as a duck" argument in the Holy Grail. Using the principle that you developed from your paper experiment I can conclude that repeatedly chilling water will make it more susceptible to freezing, a result that is obviously false.

So your paper experiment clearly cannot be used to demonstrate that heating any and every substance will always make it more susceptible to combustion.

In fact, I'm pretty sure that there are substances in the overall universe that will fall into all three of the following categories:

1. Heating some substances will make them more susceptible to combustion
   
2. Heating some substances will make them less susceptible to combustion
   
3. Heating some substances will not affect their susceptibility to combustion

I claim that there will likely be substances that fall into each one of those three categories.

You claim that all substances will always fall into category (1).

You cannot resolve this controversy by conducting an experiment involving folding a piece of paper and finding that it becomes more susceptible to tearing. In saying that you can, the level of your science is in fact no better than the "if it weighs the same as a duck" science of Sir Bedevere the Wise (an ironic title).

The experiments you would need in order to resolve that controversy would clearly be experiments where you heat different substances and test their combustibility both before and after heating.

To attempt to bring such a ridiculously invalid type of "science" to bear on the question must surely be disingenuous on your part. Surely you can't think that your paper experiment can answer the question about combustibility. Because you brought such a disingenuous argument that you hoped no one would notice was completely bogus, you are clearly guilty of hand waving.