Who Creates Logical Fallacies and Decides What is Fallacious?
By looking at the history of fallacy theory and the modern pedagogy of fallacies, one can see who gets a say in creating and deciding fallacious reasoning and who does not.
Author note: a + sign denotes an external link
Importance of Learning Fallacy History
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Since fallacies have been around for so long, it is easy to forget that they have not always existed, and that they were created by real people, and as Brittney C. Cooper argues, the person is inherently tied to the knowledge they create — it is constructed by these people. Therefore, it's important to acknowledge who created fallacies. Particularly, what's important to note about the people who created fallacies is that they are all educated white men. And while the status of being an educated white man is not necessarily problematic in and of itself, it does show that those who have historically “decided” that logical fallacies exist and what they mean are those who are the most privileged in society.
Impact of Fallacy Pedagogy
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In addition to those who have historically created logical fallacies and deemed how they are defined, logical fallacies are also “decided” by those who continue to deem them as important by teaching them. This includes anyone who is involved with teaching logical fallacies, including professors, teachers, and textbook authors. These people who “decide” what logical fallacies are then pass the foundational knowledge onto students and the general public, who then circulate it even further.
Like the educated white men who conceptualized logical fallacies, those who teach about fallacies are privileged in that they have a great deal of college education, usually the highest degree in their field. Additionally, those who get to learn about logical fallacies are also privileged in that they have access to these resources.
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However, in addition to the privileged demographic that teaches and gets to learn about logical fallacies, another notable part of the pedagogy of fallacies is that in teaching others about what is fallacious versus what is not, those who teach these fallacies do two very important things:
1. They perpetuate the idea of logical fallacies as foundational knowledge, which can be seen very easily in textbooks. Within the chapter on informal fallacies in the textbook THiNK: Critical Thinking and Logic Skills for Everyday Life, for example, Judith A. Boss+ spends her time and energy in the book defining the term “fallacy,” identifying individual fallacies, teaching students to “practice recognizing fallacies in everyday arguments and conversations,” and discussing with students “strategies that can be used for avoiding fallacies” (Boss 134). Similarly, S. Morris Engel+, in the book With Good Reason: An Introduction to Informal Fallacies, only focuses on defining and giving examples of logical fallacies. Both of these books, as well as many others, devote time solely to defining logical fallacies, stating their importance, and how to avoid them (see image on the right).
What is missing from textbooks like Boss or Engel’s is any real criticalness about the foundational knowledge of logical fallacies—no more than an occasional nod to Aristotle in terms of situating the who created these fallacies. Ideally, a logical fallacy textbook that did address these issues would do things such as acknowledging that fallacies are socially constructed and/or acknowledging that it is not okay to use fallacies to shut down an argument or see it as wholly illegitimate or irrelevant, because some “fallacious” reasoning may actually be important to an argument. However, most textbooks usually provide no discussion of ways in which logical fallacies could potentially be problematic.
2. Secondly, in the teaching of logical fallacies, another important thing that those who teach about fallacies often do is perpetuate what Catherine Hundleby+, in her text “The Authority of the Fallacies Approach to Argument Evaluation,” calls the “Adversary Method” (Hundleby 284). According to Hundleby, the Adversary Method considers “two contrasting views beginning with what we may call an ‘oppositional’ position, a contrary view on a particular topic, and assumes the goal of defeating another’s view. It provides objective support to the view that survives, and that continues to survive such opposition” (Hundleby 284).
Within her article, Hundleby critically examines thirty philosophy textbooks and their teachings of logical fallacies, and she uses four different criteria which fall in line with the Adversary Method to examine these textbooks, and all textbooks meet at least one of the criteria. Most importantly, however, she claims that the Adversary Method of teaching logical fallacies “seems mostly to serve to alienate and exclude important forms of reasoning,” particularly those that are not used for argumentation purposes. Hundleby states that these important forms of reasoning, which are excluded by the Adversary Method, include: “to inform the uninitiated, to explain, ‘to figure something out for oneself, to discuss something with like-minded thinkers, [and] to convince the indifferent or the uncommitted’ (Moulton, 1983, p. 159)” (Hundleby 280-281, 296).
Taking a look at textbooks that teach fallacies can provide some interesting information about the impact fallacy pedagogy has. For example, by doing a cluster criticism+ of Chapter 5 of Judith A. Boss's THiNK, one can see the way that words that cluster around the word "fallacy" within the text, and the way these cluster terms help to perpetuate the idea of fallacies as foundational knowledge: all of the words in this word cloud have something to do with defining/identifying fallacies and avoiding them.
