Issues with Fallacy Names
How do names of fallacies create confusion, thus causing alienation and silencing?
While the main way in which logical fallacies create alienation or silencing is through the practice of “call-out” culture they create, logical fallacies can also be alienating and silencing, both when they are taught and when they are practiced, as a result of the names they are given. Part of the issue is that the name of a fallacy itself is supposed to have immediate meaning, and those who are in a privileged position expect it to. As much as call-out culture, Catherine Hundleby writes that “any labels or jargon can be used for bullying,” such as the names of these fallacies, just as much as ideas of foundational knowledge can be (Hundleby 299).
Logical fallacy names, especially Latin ones, can put people who are unfamiliar with them into a literal cloud of confusion.
How Latin names of fallacies can be especially problematic
In particular, one thing that is notable about the names of individual fallacies is that many of them — such as Argumentum Ad Hominem— are referred to in Latin, as opposed to English. While fallacy names like “begging the question” are already confusing, and those three words show no true inherent meaning, add in the fact that people often refer to them in what is traditionally considered a “dead language” that only the Pope speaks regularly, and you’ve got a whole new level of exclusion.
Within S. Morris Engel’s book With Good Reason: An Introduction to Informal Fallacies, for example, 9 of the 20 descriptions of informal fallacies in the book include or are listed by their Latin names. But more than just the fact that Latin is a dead language that “nobody speaks,” what is interesting is the status that those who do speak it, get. In an article from Forbes magazine, Ava Seave writes about a new app called the “Latin-O-Meter,” which “‘gives you a reading on how others read you’ because people sound more pretentious the more Latinate-derived words that are used.” The app’s goal, as described by Seave, is thus to “help writers remove snobbishness or insert higher social status within their content.” As described by the content creator, the Latin language is associated with higher social status, snobbishness, or pretentiousness — thus, power or privilege. In using Latin words to denote logical fallacies, then, those who use them without explanation are inherently creating a divide between themselves and others, thus alienating them. ​