Learn English – Term for the “extreme-extension” version of a straw man fallacy

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Take the most obvious, unimpeachable statement imaginable:

Drinking water is good for humans.

I am looking for a word that describes the action of taking the argument, applying some unreasonable logical extreme to it, then shooting that extreme version down. An example of such a response:

There was an ancient torture practice of using a hose to force a person to drink so much water that their belly would explode and kill them. Too much water is deadly and should be avoided.

Of course the problem is the response doesn't address the argument. The response addresses an extremist form of the statement that was never made. The implication is the original statement was The more water a person drinks the better or something similar.

My first thought was this falls in the class of a straw man argument, because it is shooting down a statement that was never made. Generally, the statement is made, just not such an extreme version of it. Of all the straw man derivatives, I thought nut picking was the closest:

nut picking refers to intentionally seeking out extremely fringe, non-representative statements or individuals from members of an opposing group and parading these as evidence of that entire group's incompetence or irrationality

This isn't adequate, however, because nut picking requires the extremism to be present elsewhere. What I am curious about is when it is derived as some wildly unchecked extensions of the original argument.

Is there a term more specific than straw man that describes this action of taking a statement to an unreasonable extreme and responding to that extreme version?

Just so folks don't get too hung up on the water example, I'll throw out some others here. Try to avoid focusing on the example and more on the concept of taking a statement to an unreasonable extreme.

  • If I got a raise I would feel less financial stress. Lottery winners get lots of money at once and are significantly more likely to file for bankruptcy.
  • Citing your sources is good practice. If every single sentence was cited the paper would be unreadable.
  • Gasoline is helpful for modern transportation. If you filled an entire car with gas not only would the driver pass out from the fumes, but the whole car would explode and kill everybody.

Best Answer

An appeal to extremes is an often fallacious application of reductio ad absurdum where one takes an argument to an extreme and neglects the actual circumstances or implications of the initial statement. As the website Logically Fallacious describes it:

If X is true, then Y must also be true (where Y is the extreme of X).

There is no way those Girl Scouts could have sold all those cases of cookies in one hour. If they did, they would have to make $500 in one hour, which, based on an 8 hour day is over a million dollars a year. That is more than most lawyers, doctors, and successful business people make!

As the site then points out, the extreme version of this neglects that (a) Girl Scouts don't actually work 8 hours a day over the course of a year, and (b) the output of several Girl Scouts (not one) in a temporary operation actually could sell this many cookies.

The appeal to extremes relies on hyperbole or exaggeration to the exclusion of other logical constraints. In contrast, a reductio ad absurdum is valid when the circumstances and context are not exaggerated but nonetheless the original statement would lead to an absurd conclusion. An example from Wikipedia:

There is no smallest positive rational number because, if there were, then it could be divided by two to get a smaller one.

That statement uses the definition of what a rational number is (its ability to be divided by an integer) to critique the idea that a smallest positive rational number exists.

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