In Creating Fallacies, Who Gets Excluded? Who Is Silenced?

Within feminist rhetoric, there is significant scholarship not only on contesting foundational knowledge and asking who creates that knowledge, but also on the ways in which traditional ways of “knowing” can silence others, and how feminists try to legitimate those “others” who are silenced.

 

Sandra Harding+, in “Introduction: Is There A Feminist Method?” acknowledges this within her discussion of epistemologies, which she defines as “a theory of knowledge” (Harding 3). Harding says, “Feminists have argued that traditional epistemologies, whether intentionally or unintentionally, systematically exclude the possibility that women could be ‘knowers’ or agents of knowledge; they claim that the voice of science is a masculine one; that history is written from only the point of view of men (of the dominant class and race); that the subject of a traditional sociological sentence is always assumed to be a man. They have proposed alternative theories of knowledge that legitimate women as knowers” (Harding 3). In this case, Harding argues that traditional knowledge and ways of knowing, such as foundational knowledge, have been created by men and have excluded and oppressed women. She also acknowledges that as a result of this, feminists have been trying to propose alternative theories of knowledge, such as situated knowledge, to legitimate themselves as a result of being silenced. 

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In line with what Harding discusses, an example of one feminist rhetorical scholar who shows how traditional ways of “knowing” can silence and alienate others is bell hooks+. In her text “Theory as Liberatory Practice,” hooks maintains that the definition of what “theory” is has been decided by white women academics and their white male peers, and that “the only work deemed truly theoretical is work that is highly abstract, jargonistic, difficult to read, and containing obscure references” (hooks 64). She says that this type of theory often silences and alienates women of color, and outside of the academy, this type of theory can be “not only seen as useless, but as politically nonprogressive, a kind of narcissistic, self-indulgent practice that most seeks to create a gap between theory and practice so as to perpetuate class elitism” (hooks 64).

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Within the use of knowledge of logical fallacies, one can often see the same silencing and exclusion that Harding and hooks describe taking place. Earlier in my research, I stated that feminist rhetoric asks who gets to create and define logical fallacies, but now I will ask who doesn’t get a say in creating or defining logical fallacies—thus, they and the knowledge they have are left out of the conversation. Furthermore, the way in which knowledge about logical fallacies is used and practiced serves to further exclude these “others” in the form of alienating and silencing them. This exclusion through practice of logical fallacies can be seen in two primary ways: through the call-out culture it creates, and through the confusing names of many of the fallacies.