While this silencing can happen to anyone, it serves most often to recreate systems of privilege and oppression that already exist—thus effectively silencing and alienating those who have already been silenced and alienated in other ways. As Hundleby says, “Authority, in whatever form, provides the power to wield rhetorical silence,” but the idea of “logic” specifically is one way in which this can be done (Hundleby 298). In particular, there are some people who are more likely to be scrutinized and called out for logical fallacies than others, namely those who are already oppressed by various social structures. Hundleby writes, for example, that “women, people of color, or those with only basic education face special difficulties with the Adversary Method” that is often used in teaching and identifying logical fallacies, in that they are more likely to face hostility and be called out for using logical fallacies than educated white men. 

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Additionally, logic and logical fallacies are not just used against those who are already oppressed, but are used to silence and alienate those who fight against oppression, too.

 

Within a piece written for the popular online feminist magazine Everyday Feminism, called “3 Reasons It's Irrational to Demand 'Rationalism' in Social Justice Activism"+, one of their writers describes how those who participate in conversations or activism surrounding social justice are often told that their goals are “irrational,” in such a way that shuts down ideas, and discourages, and often leads to internalized oppression that obstructs social justice pursuits (pham). As of December 7th, 2018, the article has approximately 7,700 shares on both Facebook and Twitter—showing that there are many people in the world who feel as though the ideas of “logic” and “rationality” are being used to obstruct social equality.

 

As an example more specific to logical fallacies, Hundleby writes in her article about how “accusations of the genetic fallacy were leveled summarily at feminist philosophy from the 1970s through the 1990s,” which is a fallacy that “assumes that a statement, position, or idea must be flawed if the source of the statement, position, or idea is flawed (or believed to be flawed)” (Hundleby 300; Van Vleet 23). These feminists: "appealed to gender as a salient factor in the history of philosophy and philosophical theorizing, a factor that constituted an exception to the prohibition by the genetic fallacy (at least as popularly understood) against considering the sources of ideas. Yet fallacy allegation enforced this prohibition by narrowing philosophical discussion, and facilitating dismissal of feminist philosophy"(Hundleby 300). In this example, then, a logical fallacy was used in order to call out and silence feminist philosophers, a minority in the field trying to fight for social justice, by delegitimizing their work and thus excluding and alienating them from philosophical canon.

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Using logical fallacies in certain ways, particularly through calling-out, can alienate or silence certain groups of people, but it can also alienate and silence certain types of logic as well, types of logic that are not created or deemed worthy by the dominant group.

 

As Cynthia Selfe and Richard Selfe write when talking about rationalism and logocentric privilege in computer interfaces, the ideas of “rationalism” and “logic” “exclude other ways of knowing, such as association, intuition, or bricolage” (Selfe and Selfe 491). As discussed earlier in my research, most logical fallacies are conceptualized and spread by those with privilege — often white, educated men — and therefore, what they think about logical fallacies is what gets spread, because they are in a position in which their voice can be heard and people will listen. Thus, in using these logical fallacies in such an oppositional, calling-out sort of way, those with privilege are able to do what Hundleby discusses in her text: they are able to shut down an argument without listening to all of it, without acknowledging that the lines of logical fallacies are not only blurry, but socially constructed. They are able to change logical fallacies to suit their needs. In doing so, the allegers obstruct what could be good arguments or more creative ways of meaning-making. 

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An example of this silencing of certain types of logic could be found in the problems with the logical fallacy, Argumentum Ad Verecundiam, also known as “the fallacy of appeal to authority” (Engel 123). This fallacy supposedly “relies on a false authority figure as support for a particular claim. A false authority figure is one who has little or no expertise in the particular context in which he/she is being used” (Van Vleet 22). However, this fallacy makes it unclear as to what makes an authority figure “false” or what gives someone “little or no expertise” in the field, and thus can create a problematic situation in that this fallacy can be leveled towards just about any argument in which an authority figure is used as evidence, because the individual making the call-out is the one who decides. For example, in citing Brittney C. Cooper in my research, I could be called out for Argumentum Ad Verecundiam if an individual did not consider her a true authority figure with expertise in the field of feminist rhetoric, and thus, my logic and reasoning would be silenced. 

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