A straw man doesn't necessarily have to be obvious and weak looking.
In the hands of a disingenuous and skilled person, the straw man can be incognito and compelling. You have to really understand the context, pay careful attention, and think things through to detect the skilled handiwork of a well crafted stealth straw man.
straw man
Dictionary result for straw man/ˌstrô ˈman/
noun
noun: straw man; plural noun: straw men; noun: strawman; plural noun: strawmen
1.
an intentionally misrepresented proposition that is set up because it is easier to defeat than an opponent's real argument.
"her familiar procedure of creating a straw man by exaggerating their approach"
2.
a person regarded as having no substance or integrity.
"a photogenic straw man gets inserted into office and advisers dictate policy"
noun: polysemy
the coexistence of many possible meanings for a word or phrase.From a forum discussion thread debating Bhikkhu Sujato's translation of (V&V💭) vitakka & vicāra, directed-thought & evaluation:
(Bhikkhu Sujato translates as "placing the mind & keeping it connected").
The author is supporting B. Sujato with a stealth strawman:
It’s also obvious to bilingual people that there is no one-to-one function between the words of two languages which preserves meaning.
Part of my job is giving feedback on students’ academic papers which they write in English, but their native language is not English. Almost always the genuinely funny English bloopers come from a naive direct translation which makes sense in their native language, but makes no sense in English.
If there was a one-to-one function between the words of languages that preserved meaning, there would be no translators or academic fields like natural language processing or machine translation; we would just have to find the function and we could make a computer do the translation for us.
The idea that you have to translate according to a one-to-one correspondence between pāḷi and English words is an incredibly naive approach to translation. To me, this approach only makes sense from the perspective of someone who 1) is fluent only in English and 2) has never been exposed to the academic ideas behind translation.
When I read the academic writing of someone who is translating word-for-word their native language into English – this is how I can tell they are not good at English.
Like, the fact that Ven. Sujato is able to go beyond a mere dictionary lookup is actually a sign that he knows pāḷi really well.
To be clear, there's nothing wrong with the argument itself. It's a compelling story from real life experience which makes valid points.
And perhaps the writer did not intentionally misrepresent the argument of the other side.
But intentional or not, this is a straw man argument.
Because it argues against a weak case (strawman) which does not accurately reflect the actual position of the other side.
The issue in question is Bhikkhu Sujato's translation of (V&V💭) vitakka & vicāra, directed-thought & evaluation, which suddenly changes between two different meanings from one line to the next (such as MN 19 before and after first jhāna, and many other passages).
Many words in pāḷi are polysemous. The issue here is not that (V&V💭) vitakka & vicāra, can't have fine shades of meaning and different legitimate ways of translating the pāḷi idea of 'thinking'. The issue is that in the cases such as MN 19 and AN 8.30, there is absolutely no evidence that (V&V💭) vitakka & vicāra, directed-thought & evaluation is polysemous in those contexts.
Therefore Bhikkhu Sujato would need to translate (V&V💭) exactly the same in first jhāna formula with the same translation he uses in the line right before. Whatever his translation is, it needs to be consistent in those cases.
The strawman here misrepresents the argument as: one has to always translate word for word across languages consistently.
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