## 1. Arguing to Win



Theories about arguing generally assume that arguers disagree, and
sometimes arguing operates as a type of battle among ideas that may be
preferred over physical combat among people. Adversarial orientation
among people arguing may, however, marginalize women's patterns
of communication and discount social norms of "femininity"
(that regularly attach to women and girls but vary across time and
culture). The connection between "masculinity" (understood
also as a social norm, ideal, or role) and adversarial processes for
reasoning may be heightened and even become stylized as a disciplinary
method in contemporary Euro-American philosophy (Moulton 1983; Burrow
2010; Rooney 2010; Alcoff
 2013).[1]
 When reasoners treat arguing as a contest, each aiming to win by
defeating the other's claim, it can become
"eristic", which is to say that the goal of winning takes
over from other purposes that arguing serves. In the same way as
adversarial reasoning and eristics, other discursive norms can
complicate the ways that women may be marginalized and marginalize
other groups of people, including men. Little attention has been given
in Euro-American philosophy to the gendered dimensions of arguing in
other cultures. However, feminists regularly suggest that where
adversarial arguing dominates, non-dominant styles of reasoning can
provide productive alternatives or complements to it, and this often
involves styles gendered as "feminine".



Some feminist philosophers suggest that an aggressive culture
associated with masculinity poorly serves processes of reasoning and
hinders the discipline of philosophy insofar as it sidelines,
downgrades, and even excludes people's non-adversarial
engagement with each other and with each other's reasoning.
Evidence for this problem emerges in various places, beginning with
the prevalence of military and aggressive language to describe
philosophical discourse and rational arguing more generally (Lakoff
& Johnson 1980; Ayim 1988; Cohen 1995).



Janice Moulton (1983) argues that a particular style she calls
"the Adversary Method" dominates the discipline of
philosophy, and this goes beyond a set of attitudes or styles of
interaction to include prioritizing a particular discursive logic.
Further evidence for Moulton's characterization of disciplinary
practices in philosophy comes from Phyllis Rooney (2012) and Catherine
Hundleby (2010).


### 1.1 Metaphors and norms of masculine aggression



The metaphor of argument-as-war provides a central example for George
Lakoff and Mark Johnson's landmark book, *Metaphors We Live
By* (1980). War can operate as "structural metaphor"
for arguing:



> 
> 
> Though there is no physical battle, there is a verbal battle, and the
> structure of an argument--attack, defense, counterattack,
> etc.--reflects this. (1980: 4)
> 
> 
> 



Without that structure, Lakoff and Johnson suggest that we could not
even recognize a piece of discourse as an argument.



Moulton (1983) observes that prioritizing aggression in the practice
of arguing and the association of aggression with certain forms of
masculinity is problematic. If people assume that success requires
aggression, then discussants must appear aggressive in order to appear
competent at arguing. Not only may the assumption be false, but it may
entail a distinct disadvantage for women. Cultures that treat
aggression as a natural quality in men encourage and advantage men in
eristic modes of engagement. When success demands aggression,
contributions to an exchange of reasons made in other
styles--including those that read as feminine--will not
measure up; and they may not even be noticed. At the same time, a
woman can seem to be aggressive merely by asserting her own viewpoint
or by showing competence in some other fashion. She may tend to stand
out in many contexts as behaving inappropriately, even as her actions
become acknowledged, because of her feminine social identity (Moulton
1983: 150; Rancer & Stewart 1985; Hample et al. 2005; Kukla 2014;
Olberding 2014).



Moulton calls attention to ways in which philosophical approaches to
arguing and reasoning in Euro-American culture take on a pronounced
adversarial dynamic that reflects aggressive expectations. Her concern
about the discipline and about models for argumentation is shared by
many feminist philosophers (Ayim 1988; Burrow 2010; Gilbert 1994,
1997; Hundleby 2010, 2013b, Rooney 2003, 2010) and some who are not
specifically feminist (Cohen 1995). Maryann Ayim observes that a
culture of hostility can be viewed in the militaristic, violent,
subjugating, and controlling language used to describe philosophical
arguing, especially the metaphor of argument-as-war:



> 
> 
> Philosophers tend to value their "sharper" students, whom
> they may openly praise for their "penetrating" insights.
> Occasionally they find students of "piercing"
> intelligence, one or two perhaps with minds like "steel
> traps". Philosophers regard such students as important: They
> require "tough-minded" opponents with whom they can
> "parry" in the classroom, so they can exhibit to the
> others what the "thrust" of philosophical argumentation is
> all about. This "battle of wits" is somewhat risky,
> however, and a "combatant" must take care always to
> "have the upper hand", to "win thumbs down",
> to "avoid being hoist by your own petard". If you find
> yourself pressed for time at the end of a lecture, with your
> "back to the wall", or as it is occasionally even more
> colorfully expressed, "between a rock and a hard place",
> you may have to resort to "strong arm tactics", to
> "barbed" comments, to "go for the jugular", to
> "cut an opponent's argument to pieces", or to
> "bring out the big guns or heavy artillery". If caught in
> the throes of a real dilemma, you many even have to "take the
> bull by the horns" or rebut the dilemma by advancing a
> "counter" dilemma. (Ayim 1988: 188)
> 
> 
> 



Martial metaphors and competitive evaluation foster the eristic goal
of defeating others and their views (Cohen 1995), even perhaps, Ayim
suggests, for instructors in regard to their students. While this
attitude may seem obviously inappropriate for instructors to take with
students over whom they have authority, the available range of such
language suggests a general disciplinary culture that enforces
aggression through conflating it with success (Moulton 1983).



Admittedly, aggressive interaction may be comfortable for many women
and uncomfortable for some men, and it may be inflected with class and
race biases with similarly variable effect. Yet these may be merely
exceptions to the "masculine" homosocial culture of
hostility that many feminists maintain prevails in philosophical
arguing. Rooney argues that culture reinforces male status in the
discipline and resonates with narratives of opposition against not
*just* ideas but also against people who present them,
especially women (Rooney 2010: 229). Common ideals of masculinity and
rationality coincide with the association of aggression with success,
power, effectiveness, and vitality; they contrast with emotion,
unreason, body, sexuality, instinct, nature, and
 rhetoric,[2]
 all notions that Euro-American cultures regularly associate with
femininity.



In the history of Euro-American philosophy, Rooney (2010) observes,
masculine reason regularly appears in battle against feminine elements
of unreason, a battle that occurs both within the knower and among
aspects of thought. "Embattled reason" constantly
struggles to subordinate feminine elements of unreason, and the
suppression of perceived negative qualities that are gendered as
"feminine" provides a central means for achieving the
ideals of reason and rationality central to the discipline. That the
discipline functions this way can discourage women's
participation. So, Rooney argues



> 
> 
> that a full feminist accounting of the general cultural problem with
> gender, adversariality, and authority must include consideration of
> philosophy's history and its lingering effects. (2010: 209,
> 217-219)
> 
> 
> 



Otherwise the discipline may continue to perpetuate sexist standards
of reason from the larger culture and its history.



Daniel Cohen (1995) suggests that antagonistic attitudes may not
actually enhance competition and the knowledge it is supposed to
serve, and that imposing the goal of agreement can silence rational
discourse and undermine the goal of philosophy to further inquiry. The
value of information that challenges our own beliefs can always be
hard to recognize, a difficulty described as "confirmation
bias", and this problem can be exacerbated when the focus of
arguing is winning rather than learning or ascertaining truth (Makau
& Marty 2013: 39-40, 167; Linker 2015).


### 1.2 The Adversary Paradigm and the discipline of philosophy



Norms of masculine aggression may help a particular reasoning method
to dominate the discipline of philosophy, Janice Moulton argues in an
early article (1983). She describes the process of competitive
reasoning through deductive refutation--typically by
counter-example--as the "Adversary
 Method".[3]
 According to Moulton, the Method employs opposing views on a topic as
tests for each other--the more severe the opposition, the better,
and surviving the confrontation grants "objectivity" to a
view. Winning at arguing in this fashion depends on defeating
competing positions based on faults identified in them. Defeat of the
opposite position becomes more decisive when the claims are very
specific, as specificity aids deductive refutation.



Philosophy, at least in Moulton's (1983) context of late
twentieth century Anglo-American or "analytic" philosophy,
may be so permeated by the combination of adversarial arguing and
deductive logic that the Adversary Method operates as a disciplinary
"paradigm". Moulton argues that this
"paradigm" for philosophy demands aggressive opposition to
other people's opinions, in the same way that Thomas Kuhn
observed that mature scientific disciplines demand adherence to an
overarching theory, an ideal, and a practice that together constitute
a cultural paradigm. Philosophers' technique of aiming to
falsify each other's claims reflects Karl Popper's
epistemology but adversarial reasoning in philosophy has taken many
different forms and traces back at least to Aristotle. Descartes and
Kant shifted the normative focus of the study of logic from dialogue
to individual cognition, and the logic of opposition became
internalized (Dutilh Novaes 2011, 2015). Yet, arguing as a dialogical
form of reasoning retains the oppositional dynamic.



Moulton criticizes how the operation of the Adversary Method as a
paradigm can hobble the progress of philosophical reasoning by
narrowing the possibilities for discussion. Isolating claims maximizes
their vulnerability and prepares them for Adversarial testing, forcing
proponents to rely on *ad hoc* revisions, and prohibiting the
systematic reconsiderations that encourage theories to evolve. For
instance, *ad hoc* concessions "for the sake of
argument" create common ground for discussion only by
restricting the basis for disagreement; and so, Moulton maintains,
they slow the development of philosophical thought (1983:
154-155).



Moulton (1983) argues that the narrow discourse of the Adversary
Method seriously limits the relevance of philosophy to feminist
concerns. She takes the example of Judith Jarvis Thomson's
classic philosophical defense of the moral permissibility of abortion
that concedes a great deal (that the fetus is a full-fledged person
with a right to life) to show that the right to life does not
supersede the right to bodily autonomy. Moulton's concern is
that even though Thomson's position supports feminist
theoretical views, it employs reasoning so remote from the
circumstances of pregnancy that it provides no guidance for people
seeking to make decisions about actual abortions. Taking the purpose
of arguing to be the defeat of a view limits the practical relevance
of the argumentative exchange.



Moulton makes a further related point that forcing narrow theories to
compete can make philosophy look quite absurd. Moral arguments are
directed at egoists and epistemology is offered to skeptics. Debates
over the existence of the external world and the existence of God
occupy philosophers at the expense of attention to the character of
the world we live in or the role of God in our religions. Philosophers
rarely question the assumption that there must be a supreme moral
principle, Moulton explains, because otherwise there would be little
sense to making different theories compete for recognized supremacy
(1983: 157-158). Losing sight of other reasons for arguing may
have even resulted in the misinterpretation of key figures in the
history of philosophy. Moulton suggests that interpreters often miss
various purposes for which Socrates argued because they assume that
his only goal was refutation (1983: 155-157). The assumption
that the Adversary Method drives philosophical progress may distort
philosophers' understanding of the value of their own
discipline.



The Adversary Method's prevalence and constitution of a Kuhnian
paradigm may be recognized in Rooney's observation that
philosophers tend to engage each other from a "default skeptical
stance". The skeptical stance challenges the quality of the
components of another's arguments, including the basis for
premises, the support premises provide for the conclusion, and the
possibility of counterexamples. The skeptical stance operates as a
default without consideration of the appropriateness of the challenges
for the topic under discussion. Rooney notes in particular,



> 
> 
> skeptical argumentative responses that take necessary truths and valid
> arguments as the ideal poorly serve the variety of arguments and forms
> of argumentation that important philosophical works have presented and
> will continue to present. (2012: 321)
> 
> 
> 



Inappropriate standards undermine the general epistemic aims of truth
and understanding. They create specific problems for discussion of
social justice issues which depends extensively on testimony and
therefore on deft employment of the epistemology of testimony and
sensitivity to the danger of testimonial injustice (see
 Section 4 on *Credibility and argument interpretation*).
 The unsuitability of the Adversary Method for discussions of social
justice will stall social justice projects, Rooney concludes,
including those within the discipline of philosophy.



Hundleby presents as evidence for the paradigmatic operation of the
Adversary Method an analysis of critical thinking textbooks in
philosophy. Twenty-four textbooks of the thirty
examined--four-fifths--revealed in their presentation of
fallacies the norms of the Adversary Method: narrow discourse and
decisive refutation. Most of these textbooks exhibiting the Adversary
Paradigm have authors with no research expertise in argumentation more
specific than doctoral training in philosophy, whereas the much
smaller number of textbooks (six out of thirty) authored by scholars
of argumentation do not show the same signs of the Adversary Method.
Given this evidence that argumentation scholarship differently orients
argument pedagogy, the prevalence of the Adversary Method in so many
other textbooks seems to derive simply from the disciplinary culture
of philosophy (Hundleby 2010).



Some empirical educational studies suggest, too, that while students
learn a great deal from learning eristic practices of argument, it
undermines their progress as learners by emphasizing winning over
gaining understanding (Makau & Marty 2013: 13).
People--including feminists--Moulton (1983) suggests, might
expect more relevant advice from the discipline of philosophy. More
practical philosophies addressing mundane problems also may be found
outside Euro-American cultures (Olberding 2015).


## 2. Other Goals for and Styles of Arguing



Feminist philosophical models of arguing aim either to replace or to
complement arguing practices and norms defined in terms of a contest
between people or reasons. In addition to the goal of defeating an
interlocutor or their reasons, arguments can serve many purposes.
Explanation and explanatory argument (sometimes considered to be the
same thing) already receive attention from argumentation theorists and
philosophers of science. Other functions of arguing, such as educating
the uninitiated or the undecided and discussing matters with
like-minded people, remain neglected by theorists (Goodwin &
Innocenti 2019). None of the alternatives need to take over as a new
"paradigm", but exploring various purposes, methods, and
styles of arguing may help to scrutinize accepted procedures and
purposes (Moulton 1983). Such questioning of methods deters their
dogmatic acceptance.



According to Cohen, more important for the role of arguing in
philosophy and education than to praise or condemn any particular
norms of arguing may be the exploration of multiple approaches.
Philosophers and arguers more generally might find means for
innovation and constructive questioning in many new models and
metaphors. Cohen finds that traffic metaphors seem to work especially
well:



> 
> 
> We can say that arguments are (i) conversational traffic
> jams--(ii) gridlock with a lot of honking and little movement;
> (iii) conversational traffic accidents; (iv) wrong turns, or (v)
> detours, or (vi) dead ends or (vii) roundabouts on the streets of
> discourse; or should we have said that they are (viii) short cuts to
> the truth at the end of the road; maybe (ix) they are long and winding
> roads to nowhere; or, instead, we can conceive of arguments as (x)
> intellectual one way roads to their conclusions although maybe they
> are really (xi) one-lane roads but with two-way traffic. More
> positively, they can be thought of as a case of (xii) a merging
> traffic of ideas or even better as (xiii) conceptual roads under
> construction. (Cohen 1995: 184)
> 
> 
> 



The availability of so many traffic metaphors suggests something
appropriate about this analogy. Another option identified by Keith
Lloyd (2014) lies in perceptual metaphors, especially regarding what
arguers can see. However, visual metaphors have a fraught history in
feminist philosophy because ideal vision tends to be associated with
abstraction, and to lean on a hierarchy of the senses (Keller &
Grontkowski 1983). In any case it is likely that no metaphor or
analogy can capture all the shapes that arguments take and the
purposes they serve (Cohen 1995: 187).



Metaphors, models, and methods that tend to be "gendered"
as feminine may carry connotations of subordination--and so they
may *seem* inferior, yet they may be also especially useful for
women and hence powerful for feminists. These approaches can provide a
potent basis for generating alternatives to eristic standards and an
understanding of the processes that may go alongside or support
arguing as a contest. Metaphors and models based on collaboration fit
with the work of physical and emotional care that regularly
constitutes women's roles and responsibilities. Yet
collaboration also proves quite apt for many other contexts and
functions of arguing such as explanation and deliberation. Rooney
suggests that because people converse *with* rather than
*against* each other, and because arguing is a species of
conversation, we should speak of arguing with rather than against
people and their views (2010: 221). This possibility suggests that the
argument-as-war metaphor may not be so overwhelming as to make
alternatives unimaginable in the way Lakoff and Johnson suggest (1980:
4). Alternative structures for argument can be found in our ordinary
language.



Patterns that might seem to distinguish how women argue may not
express deep cognitive differences between the genders. A range of
communicative styles including gendered norms of polite discourse that
have people constrain their public reasoning may equally serve
cognitive functions common to men and women. Gendered roles may even
complement each other's epistemological operation. The most
aggressive and disruptive behavior will not endure norms of
politeness. However, some feminists consider that politeness can
require conformity to structures of social authority that marginalize
women, people of color, and others belonging to subordinated social
categories.


### 2.1 Gendered Reasoning



The gendered associations of different styles of reasoning suggest
that a source for alternative models of arguing might be found in what
have been seen as "feminine" styles of reasoning. Whether
or not women reason differently from men depends on what we count as
reasoning (Verbiest 1995), and the evidence from psychology and
sociology reveals no significantly gendered differences in the mental
processes of inference and cognition (Fine 2010). Yet women's
communication practices often reflect distinct "values of
intimacy, connection, inclusion, and problem sharing" (Burrow
2010: 247).



Ayim argues that in order to avoid reinforcing patterns of
subordination, we must detect and examine how values and
presuppositions play into the ways that we interpret argumentation
(1988: 185). Rooney adds that cooperative and collaborative
inclinations may involve a tendency to defer, a reluctance to take
responsibility for a position, or a lack of confidence in one's
ideas (2010: 213-214). The need to appease those with greater
power may explain why an open-ended and tentative quality sometimes
distinguishes women's style of arguing and practices of
communication associated with femininity. Sylvia Burrow suggests that
women may give others' interests priority over their own in
order to secure cooperation and connection (2010). This may
characterize subordinate roles more generally, sometimes extending to
marginalized races and ethnicities.



While styles of "femininity" and "masculinity"
are neither wholly good nor bad, they both have inherent dangers. A
danger for masculinity arises from its association with activity and
aggression as apparently natural features of maleness. As a result,
these masculine ideals constrain women's communication, as has
often been noted by feminist theorists, while feminine modes tend to
be dismissed. Because masculine characteristics also operate as ideals
of humanity or personhood (Hundleby 2016), men can over-identify with
them and have no motivation to reflect on or problematize their gender
identity (Bruner 1996).



The strategy of transgressing gender by adopting an aggressive
masculine mode for arguing can seem useful to women and the temptation
may be strongest in "masculine" discourses such as
philosophical discussion, or wherever listeners treat an authoritative
*manner* as valuable. Yet, when women adopt masculine
discursive styles and adversarial techniques, they can garner
criticism for being selfish, cold, and mean, which is criticism that
men would not receive (Burrow 2010). Furthermore, such character
challenges weaken women's authority and their ability to
participate in argumentation (Burrow 2010; Hundleby 2013a). Even when
those challenges are not interpreted as a character fault, the effect
may be to present women as merely requesting permission to
participate, whereas men are not taken to need permission (Kukla 2014;
Olberding 2014). When women decline to offer explanations, they are
considered incompetent, whereas the same behavior reads as strength in
men. Women's attempts to defend their authority can easily
backfire because the very nature of authority depends on not always
having to defend what one says (Hanrahan & Antony 2005).


### 2.2 Caring and coalescent argumentation



The consideration that women may have a "different voice"
in moral reasoning (Gilligan 1982) gave rise to care ethics as a
feminist alternative to traditional accounts of morality. Ayim (1988)
suggests that metaphors of nurturing could also replace violent ones
describing arguing, especially because arguing can help to foster
community (Makau & Marty 2013). Approaches to reasoning that
presume interest in the flourishing of other people and that consider
the needs of others may be common among girls and women in cultures
that press them into practices of motherhood and related caring labor,
such as teaching, nursing, and food service.



Attention to the unique audience and the speakers involved in a
particular discussion forces consideration of its detailed situation.
In one sense, this attention exhibits a bias toward certain sorts of
evidence. That bias does not pretend to value-neutrality. Yet, Karen
Warren argues that attention to detail provides a feminist sense of
"open-mindedness" that enriches feminist reasoning with
data in a way that entails a type of impartiality (1988: 38).
Reasoners operate from specific locations that cannot be adequately
addressed by an epistemology of generic or uniform knowers, as
feminist epistemologist Lorraine Code argues (1991). And feminist
communications scholars Josina M. Makau and Debian L. Marty note that
"taking other people's perspectives seriously is a basic
requirement in peaceful coexistence" (2001: 11; 2013: 51).



Accounting for reasoners' social situations in the way that
Warren and Code advise provides part of the goal for Maureen
Linker's model of "intellectual empathy" (2015).
This involves working to understand the history of social inequality
and how it affects the reasoning and arguing of ourselves and others.
Linker argues that



> 
> 
> reason and understanding must be supplemented with emotion and
> experience so that we can *know* in the fullest possible sense.
> (2015: 13)
> 
> 
> 



Attention to specific personal experiences that historically have been
ignored provides a feminist standpoint with particular empirical and
scientific value, and marks a place where the two general feminist
epistemologies of science, feminist standpoint theory and feminist
empiricism, coincide (Intemann 2010).



The same feminist epistemological concerns motivate Michael
Gilbert's model of "coalescent argumentation", which
treats arguing as communication that involves much more than a generic
expression of a premise-conclusion complex. In coalescent
argumentation, the views of speakers stand in opposition to each other
without the people speaking being opposed to each other.
Arguers' orientation to other people requires that they account
for their interconnection with those in conversation and how their
decisions affect others. In this collaborative model, the defeat
neither of ideas nor of an opponent provides the goal; instead the
goal is to find mutual ground among people, which requires a broad
view of relevant considerations (1994; 1997). The processes of
coalescent argumentation demand more information than required simply
to find fault with others' arguments. The premise-conclusion
complexes that logicians recognize as arguments become understood in
coalescent arguing as standing in for "a
*position-cluster* of attitudes, beliefs, feelings and
intuitions" belonging to the arguer (Gilbert 1994: 96, original
emphasis). Arguers' motivations offer a basis for interpretation
that provides greater room for recognizing middle ground among people
who seem to disagree. Exploring this common territory also suggests
ways in which alternative solutions may be developed. By emphasizing
how divergent positions involve agreement among the proponents'
views and desires, points of disagreement can be distinguished from
points of agreement and minimized. On Gilbert's model,
"one asks not, 'What can I disagree with?' but,
'What must I disagree with?'" (1994: 109).



In light of the general feminist interest in collaborative and
coalescent models of argumentation, Tempest M. Henning (2018) warns
they may reflect certain cultural assumptions, and presumptions of
universal culture. The norms recommended by what she identifies as
"non-adversarial feminist argumentation models", and
attributes especially to Ayim, may run contrary to the cultures and
needs of U.S. Black women. More generally, argumentation theory tends
to prescribe a pleasantness of tone and directness of speech that
connotes respect in some cultures but not others (Henning 2021; see
 Section 2.4 on *Politeness and civility*).
 Some feminist philosophers also value adversarial arguing or even
identify personally as adversarial arguers. So, the resistance to
forms of adversarial arguing that appears to provide a valuable
commonality between some feminist concerns and accepted views in
argumentation theory may reflect only the interests of certain white
women. It may actually work against the interests of other groups of
women and risk reinforcing racial marginalization.


### 2.3 Knowledge and criticism



Even feminists with concerns about adversarial reasoning recognize
that it promotes criticism that may advance the goal of attaining
knowledge and understanding. Knowledge is an important purpose among
those that arguing serves and different styles of arguing can serve
different purposes. Some efforts to build knowledge may benefit from
the adversarial styles and models, especially if arguers can avoid
automatically slipping into hostile, "ancillary" modes of
aggression (Govier 1999). Arguers may also need to avoid reinforcing
other epistemic cultures and subcultures that prioritize men's
interaction with each other (Rooney 2012). So feminists need norms for
arguing that support criticism of such androcentric cultures and
practices and the development of knowledge about how such systems
function.



Non-adversarial models of reasoning such as coalescent argumentation
may aid people's understanding too, especially about others and
their positions. Mutual understanding develops from coalescent arguing
because it demands finding common ground. The remaining opposition
among people and their beliefs constitutes a minimally adversarial
orientation that Trudy Govier (1999) and Rooney (2010) argue may be
valuable for both the development of arguments and the role of arguing
in the processes that generate knowledge. Arguers can aid each other
in achieving knowledge, which is the main goal in academic arguing,
despite the fact that academics sometimes can be side-tracked by
mundane power play.



Because of overarching epistemic purposes, Cohen suggests that the
people whose ideas lose in eristic debate thus may benefit the most
because they learn the most (1995: 182). People may also share an
inquiry (Dutilh Novaes 2015: 598-599), and epistemic benefit may
accrue to communities. The discursive practices in which individual
scientists work together by testing each other's claims may
exhibit certain characteristics that Helen Longino's (1990)
model of scientific reasoning sees as supporting a form of
objectivity. Longino's account of objectivity addresses feminist
concerns with about gender bias in scientific theories and involves
both collaborative and adversarial elements.



Such shared epistemic projects among people might be understood as
"arguing with" rather than "against" other
reasoners (Rooney 2003). Rooney argues that readily available logical
terms such as "contradictory" and "contrary"
can adequately describe differing opinions without implicating
opposition among the people holding divergent views (2003; 2010: 222).
Such language may help reasoners move away from both the Adversary
Method's dominance as a Paradigm and eristic arguing that may be
otherwise dysfunctional. The negative connotations of
"argument" and "arguing" in the English
language may be part of the
 problem.[4]
 Related words in other Indo-European languages carry no such
implication of verbal fighting (Hitchcock 2017: 449). Avoiding the
English-language connotations is part of the reason theorists often
speak instead of "argumentation" even though that
terminology can be unclear or unnecessarily abstract.



Yet, criticism must be part of feminism, especially to direct it at
sexism, and feminists may be no more skilled than anyone else at
avoiding the pitfalls of arguing such as its tendency to aggravate
conflict. Feminist models of arguing avoid levelling criticism against
people and direct it toward the views they hold so as to better serve
everyone's understanding. Feminist models of arguing and some
ways of arguing used by feminists and non-feminists alike exhibit a
benevolent attentiveness to other arguers in the processes of arguing
and yet they may also subject what other people say to extensive
criticism and opposition.



According to Govier, the characteristic explicitness of reasoning when
people argue enables them to learn from disagreement and doubt (1999).
Explicitness also promotes honesty with ourselves and each other and
respect for interpersonal differences:



> 
> 
> an arguer, in actually or potentially addressing those who differ, is
> committed to the recognition that people may think differently and
> that what they think and why they think it matters. (1999: 8, 50)
> 
> 
> 



Feminist criticism often involves anger, an emotion also regularly
associated with arguing. Anger can be a distracting or even
destructive influence on reasoning and it can signify harmful
arrogance (Tanesini 2018). Moira Howes and Catherine Hundleby make a
case that arguing can help derive cognitive benefit from anger because
arguing encourages reasoners to express and to articulate their
reasons (2018). It can reveal aspects of reasoning that otherwise
would remain unconscious, a feature of arguing processes that Douglas
Walton identifies as the "maieutic effect" (1992).



Styles for communicating and sharing reasons often distinguished as
"feminine" also play roles in feminist epistemologies of
argumentation: Gilbert assigns a fundamental role in coalescent
argumentation to the values of attention to the speaker and seeking
agreement, while Linker characterizes empathetic intellectuals as
having the skills of cooperation and accepting vulnerability. Feminist
ethical goals of accountability to women thus can benefit from the
pursuit of knowledge. Not only for feminists but for all reasoners,
the ethical value of understanding other people can enhance the
standard philosophical treatment of arguments as logical
premise-conclusion complexes. Coalescent and intellectually empathic
reasoning complement critical analysis once we distinguish criticism
from the eristic culture of aggressive fault-finding (Miller
1995).


### 2.4 Politeness and civility



As a remedy for some of the problems that women and other arguers
face, some feminists champion politeness, while others stress that
expecting etiquette to address abuses of power belies the realities of
women and others who are socially marginalized. Norms of politeness
function to minimize conflict and so can hold people in subordinate
positions (Mayo 2001). Like "ideal theory" in philosophy
(Mills 2005), politeness can exacerbate the oppression it
ignores--in this case, discursive marginalization.



Govier argues that the discursive norm of politeness limits the
problem of overt interpersonal aggression in arguing (1999). Respect
for other people and careful consideration of their views ought to be
part of *persuasion*, including rational persuasion, which
scholars often take to be the central or even the sole purpose for
arguing (1999: 58-59). On this view, aggressive styles of
communication or "ancillary adversariality" can be
dismissed as simple rudeness or hostility. These ought not to be
tolerated in any context and may not impact much on the beliefs and
attitudes of the audience (Govier 1999; Miller 1995).



The main difficulty with this ideal arises because norms of politeness
tend to be gendered in ways that undermine women's authority
when people argue, affirming power and status for men but not for
women. This dynamic can receive reinforcement when women adopt
cooperative strategies that play into norms of
"femininity", according to Burrow (2010) and Hundleby
(2013a). Securing cooperation and connection with other people
provides the very purpose for politeness. Both "masculine"
and "feminine" forms of politeness can reflect this
purpose. However, the gendered dynamics of politeness in many cultures
may entail that cooperative or collaborative argumentation serves
women poorly. It contributes to their subordination and perhaps also
the subordination of other people with marginalized social identities.
For women, cooperating and connecting with others may entail deferring
one's interests and promoting dialogue through hedging,
questioning intonation, and use of tag questions, for example,
"You know?" "Right?" "Don't you
think?" These strategies generally imply powerlessness or
conflict avoidance. In contrast, masculine norms of polite connection
facilitate shared competition and encourage joint autonomy along with
regard for each other's needs (Burrow 2010).



Burrow argues that women often have no easy options for conforming
with the etiquette demands that reinforce power differences among
speakers. Deferential styles of dialogue are part of most subordinate
positions and, for women, other aspects of social rank do not mitigate
this much. Therefore, to negotiate politeness and to argue
effectively, women need complex strategies tailored to their
circumstances (2010).



Henning (2021) observes that what many feminist and
not-specifically-feminist argumentation theorists count as rudeness
may actually belong to politeness strategies in African-American
Vernacular English (AAVE). In particular, "signifying" or
"signification" within AAVE "utilizes exaggeration,
irony, and indirection to partake in coded messages, riddled with
insults". To refuse to participate in signification is rude and
politeness demands participation in speech that on the surface
suggests disrespect. In some cultures, arguing not only performs
pro-social functions, it provides such an important form of
sociability that superficial or even insincere arguing may be an
essential part of interaction and social bonding (Schiffrin 1984).



Because of the range of conflicting politeness strategies across
different communities, it may serve better to seek an alternative to
politeness as a norm and that may lie in an inclusive practice and
ethic of civility in dialogue. Civility tends to be understood as
deeper than politeness, sometimes considered itself to be a virtue or
as involving such virtues as respect for other people (Calhoun 2000:
253; Bone et al. 2008; Laverty 2009; Reiheld 2013). Respecting others
requires trying to understand them "as they wish to be known and
understood" in the cooperative argumentation model developed by
Makau and Marty (2013: 69). Others suggest that civil respect be
parsed in ethical frameworks, such as deontology or consequentialism,
because simple deference to existing social standards may be
oppressive in assigning more restrictive practices to certain groups
of people. Practices of respect may involve people's adherence
to oppressive social roles, just as they do for politeness, if common
practice determines them. Ethically rich interpretations of civility
must be shared among interlocutors in order that civility can fulfill
its function to regulate disagreement. Such shared norms of civility
not only aid the articulation of understandings that prejudiced and
oppressive behavior are intolerable, they also aid people's
ability to challenge broader social problems (Calhoun 2000).



Civility may be distinguished from other virtues as "an
essentially communicative form of moral conduct", a display and
expression of how one regards others (Calhoun 2000: 260). However,
this virtue has limits and incivility can also perform important
argumentative functions. Uncivil communication can create space for
new forms of meaning and value:



> 
> 
> The disruption entailed by incivility provides room for concerted
> reconstruction of social practices, identities, and spaces. (Mayo
> 2001: 79)
> 
> 
> 



Uncivil communication and arguing may even be necessary for some
social change (Lozano-Reich & Cloud 2009: 223-224). Because
certain practices viewed as "civil" may depoliticize
disagreement, incivility that highlights these political problems can
prove to be as necessary as civility is to democratic decision-making
(Mayo 2001). Which moral and political demands justify incivility
remains, however, a complicated question that demands analysis of the
discursive norms in operation in a particular context for their
ability to sustain interpersonal respect.


## 3. Informal Logic and Argument Interpretation



Feminist philosophical work on argumentation as it emerged in the
early 1980s coincides with the rise of informal logic, an approach
that encompasses much of contemporary philosophical work done in
argumentation theory (Johnson 1996 [2014: 12]). Many feminists and
informal logicians share both a resistance to the idealization by some
philosophers of formal deductive methods for reasoning and a desire to
provide better tools for addressing real world contexts of reasoning
and arguing (Govier 1999: 52).



Any interpretation or analysis of an argument omits some aspects of
the reasoning involved in the surrounding discourse while it attends
to others, and different forms of abstraction suit different purposes
(Rooney 2001). Interpretations become problematic for feminists when
they leave out salient details that would make possible other
interpretations that account for social bias. For instance,
interpreting an argument as a deductive inference may not allow for
the sorts of analysis of social situation that a standard informal
logic interpretation of *ad hominem* makes possible.



Even informal logicians may assume an equality among arguers that is
more ideal than real and that may obstruct political progress. The
problems that feminists find with assumed equality may be most visible
in accounts of *ad hominem* arguing. Both feminist (Janack
& Adams 1999; Yap 2013, 2015) and not-specifically feminist
(Walton 1995) argumentation theorists recognize that appeals to the
person may or may not be fallacious. The difference is that while the
informal logic analysis informs an audience about the irrelevance of a
personal attack, a feminist analysis also maintains that the line of
reasoning may still succeed because of unconscious biases such as
implicit sexism and racism that feminists find unacceptable. For this
reason, feminist critiques of *ad hominem* arguments require
more than logical analysis and also consider the epistemology of
testimony (Yap 2013).



Addressing women's more general concerns about arguing and
assessing feminist arguments about women's marginalization
requires a richer and more diverse analysis than a logical analysis of
inferences provides. Andrea Nye (1990) suggests ways that the language
of logic, including both the artificial language of abstract ideals
and the surrounding discourse of logicians, might convey the interests
and purposes of people who hold social power. Logical models for
argument, especially formal ones, are developed, according to Nye, to
prioritize some people's interests over others and to hide that
prioritization by claiming generality and the dominance of such models
can lead to systematic misinterpretations of women's
arguments.



Other feminists maintain that abstract interpretation causes trouble
only when reasoners mistake it for a uniform authority. The trouble
with abstract analysis, Ayim suggests, lies not in the models
themselves, but in how people use them (1995: 806). Logical or
argumentative ideals that involve abstract models may be partial in
representing some people's preferred inference forms without
these models having an intrinsically universalizing character that
makes them false. Ayim believes that any such problems in the
disciplines of logic result from the practitioners' failure to
be realistic and humble. She says that



> 
> 
> It is only when logic is seen as the *exclusive* avenue to
> truth and reason that problems arise--not when it is seen as
> *an* avenue to truth and reason. (Ayim 1995: 810, emphasis
> added)
> 
> 
> 



Gilbert suggests that the practical concerns and interdisciplinary
considerations of informal logic must be expanded and become more
attuned to the specific social situations from which arguments arise
(2007). Neglected aspects of argumentation may include the identities
of speakers (Code 1991), the power relationships between speakers
(Bondy 2010; Linker 2011, 2015; Rooney 2012), the emotions involved
(Nye 1990; Gilbert 1994; Linker 2015), the social consequences of
argumentation (Code 1991; Rooney 2012), and intersectional identities
(Henning 2018, 2021). When feminine speech and writing styles are
poorly received and misinterpreted, women will encounter difficulties
getting their arguments heard or to taken seriously, let alone
recognized as good reasoning. The demand from feminist philosophers to
situate argumentative reasoning and to evaluate it in the larger
discursive contexts (Burrow 2010; Lang 2010) can be met at least in
part by the recent revival of rhetorical accounts of argumentation
that address the role of audience (Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca
1958 [1969]; Perelman 1977 [1982]; Tindale 1999, 2007).


### 3.1 Formal logic



Formal logic employs artificial abstract languages generally
understood to address particular types of inference. Formal symbolism
is also used to interpret arguments from natural language so as to
assess the strength of an argument's inference, in particular,
whether the argument has deductive validity. So, the argument,
"It is icy outside and therefore I will not travel today"
might fail to be translatable into a deductively valid form, although
people easily recognize its good reasoning. ("Missing
premises" might be added to make the argument deductive but that
requires more than formal interpretation.)



Nye's work on formal logic, especially *Words of Power: A
Feminist Reading of the History of Logic* (1990), provides the
point of departure for many of the initial feminist philosophical
discussions of argument and arguing. Nye considers certain historical
points when deductive logic's operation as the default
interpretive mechanism for arguments may have had an oppressive
influence. Rather than arguing for this interpretation, she adopts a
practice of "reading" that includes attention, listening,
understanding, and responding (1990, 183), approaches that are
traditionally associated with rhetoric (Keith 1993). Her feminist
"reading" of episodes in the history of Euro-American
logic suggests ways in which abstract logical systems may have helped
to justify social dominance at different moments in time. Her
"reading" purposefully aims to consider the personal and
political desires behind logic that might motivate its prescription of
rules for thought (Nye 1990: 9).



Nye begins her study with Parmenides' logic of "what
is", what exists beyond sensuous existence and human
communities. The ensuing silence among the ancient Greeks was broken
by Plato who addressed "what is not" through using
rational discussion to reveal the existence of differences. For
Aristotle, this dialectic involved only men from the upper classes,
making the exclusive nature of the logic most explicit. As a result,
in Nye's view, a silence regarding a lot of reasoning surrounds
logic. Nye notes that



> 
> 
> once rationality is defined as what is not emotional, and emotionality
> established as the characteristic of women understood as what is only
> a body, there could be no discussion of institutions of slavery and
> sexism. (1990: 50)
> 
> 
> 



She traces through medieval formulations of logic ways in which the
claims of logic's universal application may have discouraged
criticism of social institutions that authorized those accounts of
logic. These institutions include patriarchy in general, sometimes
underwritten by God, the Roman Empire, and the Catholic Church.



Logical restriction on what counts as reasoning culminates, on
Nye's reading, when Gottlob Frege moves logic out of human
discourse to formulate it in a symbolic language. Frege's
functionalist notation promises to express all forms of truth with the
aim, Nye suggests, "that thought will be unified and logical
errors in science, mathematics, and philosophy exposed" (1990:
131). Using Frege's approach, how a concept refers to the world
becomes "an objective fact:...one cannot invent its
value" (1990: 135). As a result, the institutions that render
concepts meaningful, including the social institution of language,
stand beyond question, creating a new form of muteness that harkens
back to Parmenides. The surrounding silence breaks again when the
Vienna Circle adds empirical input in place of the concepts on which
the Fregean functions work. Nye indicates that this theoretical
development places science above meaningful criticism, and so allows
scientific reasoning to be co-opted by authoritarian regimes (1990:
163-171).



As an alternative to logic, Nye suggests building confidence for women
and developing new concepts aided by a concrete (natural, not
artificial) "women's language". Discourse that is
for or about women might provide inclusion, bonding, and ways to share
power. Women have relied historically on the skills needed for
reading:



> 
> 
> We have listened and read to survive, we have read to predict the
> maneuvers of those in power over us, to seduce those who might help
> us, to pacify bullies, to care for children, to nurse the sick and the
> wounded. (1990: 184)
> 
> 
> 



The next step lies in developing the language to respond.



Nye's experiment in avoiding argument falters in two ways
observed by feminists and other scholars who have not been convinced
by her socio-historical reading. Some cite errors in her historical
interpretation (Keith 1993; Weiner 1994). Others find that in
*Words of* Power, Nye does argue, but fails to persuade and so
fails to provide the alternative to logic she seeks (Gilbert 1994;
Ayim 1995).



Gilbert offers a related but distinct criticism of formal logic for
its role in the "Critical-Logical" approach that he
characterizes as extracting text from utterances for the purposes of
applying a competitive or eristic process to the stylized text (1994).
He suggests, like Moulton (1983), that such abstraction serves the
competitive functions and standard practice of Euro-American academic
philosophy. Because arguing need not adhere to the Critical-Logical
model, it remains possible that feminine styles of reasoning may
ground effective interpretive practices for arguers. Arguing also may
find natural corollaries in other styles of communication and other
values that operate within communication.



Reasoners appeal to logic and to other abstract accounts of what other
arguers say partly so they might avoid bias as they interpret natural
language. Yet such abstract interpretation may favor forms of argument
evaluation unsuited to the context of utterance. For instance, if the
Critical-Logical model of argument evaluation provides the basis for
legal procedures, then it may compromise access to justice for people
who are socially marginalized based on gender, race, class, and
education. Gilbert echoes Nye's concern that logical systems can
reflect the *lingua franca* of the ruling class that captures
their own interests (1994: 105). Applying it to other contexts risks
distorting and disenfranchising other people and their modes of
communication.



Nye concedes that a women's language cannot stand up to the
power and authority of logic but believes that perhaps reasoners may
gain something different from a replacement for logic. It may be
that



> 
> 
> her notion of reading teaches that the circumstances in which
> something is said and the person who says it are relevant
> considerations. (Tindale 1999: 196)
> 
> 
> 



The appeal of Nye's "reading" may be that



> 
> 
> currently popular theories of reading, unlike traditional logic,
> highlight rather than diminish the interests, personality, and motives
> that the reader brings to the task of reading. (Ayim 1995: 807)
> 
> 
> 



Arguers can emphasize the moral goals behind an argument through their
emotional language. Likewise, an explanatory purpose for an argument
would mean that the speaker offers it up as a truthful description
rather than as a subject for debate (Gilbert 1994). Such purposes and
values can fall away with the abstraction of a premise-conclusion
complex from its context of utterance. When the Critical-Logical model
grounds decision-making processes, the authority it carries creates
problems for anyone using other styles of reasoning and
communication.



Note that Nye is the only feminist philosopher to date suggesting a
substitute for arguing and logic. Ayim (1995) and Gilbert (1994)
stress that different styles of communication and value-systems can be
natural corollaries for each other. Govier (1993) further suggests
that the power of universal logic may be indispensable, and that
feminist concerns can be addressed through a better understanding of
the interpretation and application of logical norms.


### 3.2 Rhetorical approaches and power differences



Rhetorical studies attend to argument audiences in a way that can help
to address feminist concerns about the emotional and gendered aspects
of argument (Tindale 1999: 201). They may also help to resolve a
dilemma of feminist arguing practice by demonstrating how the
advancement of feminist affirmative projects, such as acknowledging
the significance of women's experience, may require adversarial
forms of argumentation often associated with masculinity.
Communication styles identified as rhetoric create both problematic
and constructive aspects of social identity, including feminine
identity. Rhetorical analysis of the situational specifics can reveal
how communication helps to produce social identities and can suggest
ways to address particular power differences among reasoners (Bruner
1996; Palczewski 2016).



M. Lane Bruner argues that some aspects of gender stereotypes make it
harder to argue, while other aspects make it easier (1996).
Distinguishing the empowering from the disempowering aspects of social
identity depends on examining the ways in which
"masculine" identity is tied up with ideals of arguing and
the ways in which identity politics can counteract the power of
dominant identities. Although speakers must suppress each of their
unique differences from others in order to communicate explicitly in
regard to their own social positions, the resulting feminine and
masculine identifications do not become fixed. Because identities are
created, they must be maintained and they remain subject to
transformation. That flux in identity gives feminists strategic
opportunities for developing women's argumentation and giving
credit to it.



Rooney notes that an artificial severing of arguing from narrative and
rhetorical practices helps to dissociate arguments from femininity and
frustrates feminist practices of philosophical arguing (2010; Le
Doeuff 1980 [1989]). Research that attends to rhetoric and its
influences may go under the name of "rhetorical studies"
(often in English or literature departments) but may also be found in
communications studies, psychology, and interdisciplinary fields such
as women's and gender studies or argumentation studies.
Rhetorical studies give attention to the perspective of a particular
audience and that concern with the audience and the various interests
audiences may have challenges the view--especially in the
discipline of philosophy--that reasoning and argumentation must
be a constant battle. Rooney argues that philosophical practice itself
involves rhetoric and narrative through myths, thought experiments,
and metaphors. These rhetorical practices make theories more
attractive to specific audiences. Philosophers commonly portray reason
as in battle against feminine forces which "primarily makes
sense to men among men in cultural contexts where sexism or misogyny
is a cultural given" (2010: 227).



Rhetorical studies of speakers, audiences, their purposes, and their
social contexts were revived in twentieth century argumentation theory
by Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca (1958 [1969]). Perelman,
writing on his own, advocates that instead of appealing to "the
rational" as a standard for argumentation, scholars should
consider a "reasonable" person in terms of the standards
of a particular community (1977 [1982]).



The discipline of rhetorical studies typically takes persuasion to be
the goal of arguing. Some feminists resist this assumption. Concern
that persuasion may be intrinsically an act of domination of one
person over another and even an act of violence (Gearhart 1979) led
feminist rhetoricians to develop an alternative in "invitational
rhetoric" that makes understanding the goal of arguing (Foss
& Griffin 1995; Bone et al. 2008). This approach resonates with
rhetoric's Aristotelian history, Christopher Tindale observes,
which does not involve intentions to change another person that some
feminists consider violent, because Aristotle conceives change as an
internal process. On Tindale's model of "rhetorical
argumentation",



> 
> 
> the audience, when persuaded, is persuaded by its own deliberations,
> after reflection on reasoning that it has understood in its own terms
> and may even have had a hand in completing. (1999: 191)
> 
> 
> 



However, at the same time, invitational rhetoric demands a civility
that may presume social equality (Lozano-Reich & Cloud 2009) and
thus it faces the same problems as politeness (addressed in
 Section 2).



Linker suggests that reasoning across power differences can be aided
by speakers employing a process of "intellectual empathy";
other people's claims, especially if these people are relatively
disadvantaged, can help reflect on one's own interpretive
assumptions in order to move past unreflective bias (2011; 2015).
Relatedly, an attitude of playfulness may facilitate consideration of
another's perspective, that is, "travelling" to the
person's "world" as described by Maria Lugones
(1987). Perhaps this attitude will help philosophers appreciate the
viewpoints presented in feminist epistemology (Lang 2010). However,
Mariana Ortega (2006) warns that the radical potential of playfulness
demands a deep engagement with work by women of color. Superficial
citation of women of color by white feminists only replicates
oppressive gatekeeping in philosophical argumentation.



Assuming the goal of arguing to be persuasion invokes a limited
context and one that poses problems for some feminists, especially
regarding power differences among speakers. Nevertheless, rhetorical
analysis offers many resources for feminist analysis because its
attention to the audience provides valuable details about the
situations in which people argue. As we will see next, recent work in
philosophy concerning credibility and developing the concept of
"argumentative injustice" articulates persistent concerns
for feminists about arguing, as does both regular and feminist
philosophical scholarship about fallacies and critical thinking
education.


## 4. Credibility and Argumentative Injustice



Credibility granted to speakers and their testimony affects processes
of arguing and may adhere to social categories following lines of
gender and other axes of oppression (Govier 1993). Miranda Fricker
(2007) describes the case of testimonial injustice, which is a species
of epistemic injustice, and identifies when a listener gives
diminished credibility or epistemic authority to a speaker based on
that speaker's social identity. Patrick Bondy (2010) defines
analogous "argumentative injustice" as consisting in a
related harm done to the processes of arguing when people wrongly
assess an arguer's credibility. We can underestimate or
overestimate an arguer's credibility by using social stereotypes
to assess it (2010). Bondy explains that both overestimation and
underestimation can result from viewing testifiers through social
stereotypes--typically men's credibility becomes
overestimated whereas women's becomes underestimated.
Additionally, testimony from people with social identities different
from our own may be difficult to accept simply because their
experiences contrast with our own and those experiences with which we
identify. This second problem when considered as a fallacy goes by the
name of "provincialism" (Kahane & Cavender
2001) and is sometimes attributed to the psychology of in-group
bias (Brewer 1979; Rudman & Goodman 2004). Whether due to
stereotypes or to in-group bias, being discounted as a participant in
discussion amounts to an epistemic injustice that Christopher Hookway
(2010) describes as "participant injustice".



Bondy argues that an underestimated testifier loses at least some
capacity for critical engagement with other people. This capacity
might progressively deteriorate, or the person might internalize its
diminished form. Underestimating a testifier undermines the
rationality of arguing processes with the result that the audience
tends to lose potentially valuable information and insight. On the
other hand, an overestimated testifier also can fail to gain valuable
information from others, derailing the argumentative exchange by
preventing the success of the better line of reasoning. After the
particular discussion, the overestimated person can come to be viewed
as beyond scrutiny, thus losing (at least on occasion) the benefits of
engaging in discursive argumentation. By contrast, Fricker's
original conception of testimonial injustice accounts for the harmful
effects on knowers only when their testimony is underestimated, and
she argues that epistemic injustice does not accrue from
overestimating credibility.



The solution to argumentative injustice might be simply for the
listener to take care to treat arguers on their own terms. This would
avoid viewing people in terms of group membership, a practice that
leaves reasoners vulnerable to stereotype-thinking (Govier 1993,
1999). However, sometimes people's social identities are
relevant to the credibility of what they say, when, for instance, it
concerns their personal experience of discrimination. Also, social
stereotypes influence our thinking unconsciously, in a way that earns
the label "implicit bias". This bias differs from in-group
bias but works alongside it, sometimes reinforcing it and sometimes
conflicting with it. As a result, women often hold prejudices against
other women (and even themselves) just as men do, and people of color
may hold unconscious biases against their own ethnicity. When such
bias persists despite conscious beliefs to the contrary, psychologists
describe it as "aversive bias" (Greenwald & Banaji
1995; Jost, Banaji, & Nosek 2004; Kay & Zanna 2009).



Implicit social biases work like other cognitive biases, such as those
that encourage us to generalize from small samples and personal
experience and can affect many of our best intentions in reasoning and
argumentation. Insofar as these biases undermine our ability to manage
our own confidence, they frustrate the virtue of intellectual humility
that otherwise might offset adversarial inclinations and momentum when
people argue (Kidd 2016; Aberdein 2016). Ian James Kidd considers ways
in which arguing can foster humility, and suggests that ideally,
arguing



> 
> 
> is also a route to other intellectual and ethical goods such as truth,
> knowledge, and enlightenment, as the ancient philosophers maintained.
> (2016: 399)
> 
> 
> 



The challenge remains to bridge the real and the ideal.



Bondy argues that because social bias may be inevitable in
people's perception of speakers' credibility, we need to
counteract it actively. He recommends that we adopt a general attitude
of "metadistrust" in which we exercise skepticism about
our credibility judgments regarding testimony from people belonging to
marginalized social groups.



Alternatively, we might try "intellectual empathy" based
on mutual compassion, which is the approach that Linker develops. She
argues that compassion must involve consciousness of how oppression
operates through specific intersecting social matrices, including
social privileges that can be very difficult to recognize. Such
intersectional intellectual empathy may especially help us realize
that it is *our own* biases or limited experiences that lead us
to dismiss others' testimony by interpreting them as whining,
complaining, or "playing the gender (or race, etc.) card"
(Linker 2011, 2015).



Achieving epistemic justice when we argue requires some sort of
accounting for the identities of arguers, and might include appeal to
the "epistemic privilege" described in feminist standpoint
epistemology. Some standpoint theorists maintain that epistemic
privilege can accrue to people who oppose oppression. Their engagement
with the lives of oppressed people and their resistance to the
oppression structuring those lives provides a unique and valuable
awareness of the social structures of power. Thus a "feminist
standpoint" and those who achieve it may gain epistemic
advantage from fighting the oppressed condition of women's
lives. Although it is not necessary to be a woman to achieve this
standpoint and its advantage, women themselves may most easily achieve
it (Harding 1991; Intemann 2010).



One way that arguers might try to address the effects of social
position on arguing is through meta-debate--a background argument
may address arguers' biases operating in the central discussion
(Kotzee 2010). However, Linker (2014) argues that regardless of what
the meta-debate yields, the person with social privilege will continue
to benefit from debates that are adversarial. Arguers have difficulty
recognizing when their biases reflect their own social privilege at
any level of debate because social identity frequently affects
testimonial authority unconsciously.



Linker suggests that we treat epistemic privilege as a form of
expertise about arguing. This allows feminists and other
anti-oppression advocates to set the bounds for ending inquiry (2014).
Such advocates operate as the *authority* and determine the
place where explanation stops (Hanrahan & Antony 2005). Rooney
argues that this kind of expertise should be accorded to women
philosophers whose lived experience tends to ground their feminist
philosophy. Arguers should recognize expertise in situations



> 
> 
> where *A*'s minority status relative to *B* (with
> respect to some locally salient status or power differential) makes it
> likely that *A* has insights and understandings relating to
> *P* that are less available to *B*. (2012: 322)
> 
> 
> 



Rooney says that speaking from personal experience becomes important
for arguing because of the "hermeneutical injustices"
(Fricker 2007) facing women. Hermeneutical injustice, according to
Fricker, means that women's experiences may not receive adequate
consideration because the language to describe them is underdeveloped.
Men may therefore have trouble recognizing evidence that women
provide, and they



> 
> 
> are not in the same position as women to confidently assert whether
> they find it plausible or not because they do not have access to the
> evidence in the way women are likely to have. (Rooney 2012: 328)
> 
> 
> 


## 5. The Fallacies Approach to Argument Evaluation



Argumentation theory has a tradition of taking fallacies as an
operational concept for identifying problems with arguments. The types
of deficiency identified as fallacies emerge from disparate points in
the history of philosophy, and, as Charles Hamblin (1970) first
recognized, the fallacies approach to argument evaluation tends to
lack consensus regarding what constitutes a fallacy. Further, many
theorists find that "fallacy" fails as both an analytic
category (Massey 1995) and a pedagogical tool (Hitchcock 1995), and
yet the scholarly controversy has not put a stop to the regular use of
fallacies for evaluating arguments and for teaching reasoning.
Feminists share the ambivalence of other philosophers regarding
fallacies, adding their own criticisms and developments, but a
specific controversy emerges in regard to the adversarial nature of
fallacies.



Some feminists decry the inadequacy of traditional fallacies for
addressing problems women face in argument exchanges (Al Tamimi 2011)
and others point out how some philosophers use fallacy labels to
dismiss and silence feminist
 philosophers.[5]
 In particular, when feminist philosophers employ arguments concerning
the history of philosophy, they have been charged with committing the
genetic fallacy (e.g., Levin 1988). That fallacy results from taking
the significance of a claim or theory to depend on its origin and
history--its genesis--and thereby dismissing that view
without attention to its current meaning and context. Feminist
philosophers consider how the fact that mostly men developed certain
theories, including many philosophical theories, may undermine the
justification for applying these theories to women. In doing so,
feminists also attend to how those theories currently operate.



The difficulty some philosophers have in recognizing the
sophistication of feminist historical criticism regarding
philosophical theories may be due, first, to feminist use of certain
theories that were the target for philosophers who developed the
category "genetic fallacy". Margaret Crouch explains that
the concept of the genetic fallacy was developed only in the early
twentieth century by some philosophers in the analytic tradition with
the explicit intention of discounting the scientific status of Marxist
and Freudian accounts. Given that Marxist and Freudian accounts from
the continental European tradition have influenced a good deal of
feminist theory, Crouch argues that it is unsurprising that feminist
analysis might seem at first glance to commit the genetic fallacy
(1991; 1993).



Moreover, Crouch argues, employing the label of "genetic
fallacy" against feminist criticisms of the historically
masculine sources for popular views in the discipline of philosophy
relies on a misunderstanding of what constitutes a fallacy at a point
where reasonable consensus has emerged: not every instance of a
pattern of reasoning associated with a fallacy label--here
genetic appeals--constitutes that fallacy; there may be
exceptions and even highly reasonable practices that employ the same
pattern. So, some appeals to personal characteristics are relevant and
do not commit the *ad hominem* fallacy and some appeals to
authority are perfectly reasonable and not cases of the *ad
verecundiam* fallacy (Walton 1995). Scholarship on the genetic
fallacy likewise recognizes that the way a theory developed
historically *only*sometimes affects the value of the
reasoning now supporting it. In particular, Crouch explains that the
genesis of a claim affects its justification when testimony provides
its only support, or when a claim involves the speaker as a subject,
and whenever the source of information has an objective connection
supporting the statement's truth or falsity (1991; 1993).



The charge that feminist epistemology commits the genetic fallacy in
asking such questions about the origins of the canon not only depends
on a misunderstanding of that fallacy, the criticism itself also
commits the fallacy of begging the question. Critics of some feminist
philosophy make the epistemological assumption that the origins of a
belief are *irrelevant* to its justification, which is the very
claim that these feminists reject (see Crouch 1991). For instance,
standpoint theorists argue that women's material situation
affects and can advantage the types of understanding that women and
feminists have (Harding 1991). Critics of feminist epistemology cannot
simply assume that the use of a certain type of premise makes a line
of reasoning unjustified.



This kind of exchange between feminists and their critics--one
that involves each party accusing the other of committing
fallacies--illustrates how arguers may use fallacy labels to
characterize their disagreements. Some feminists advocate fallacy
analysis as a contextualized form of epistemology (Janack & Adams
1999) and some suggest the development of new fallacy labels to help
address feminist epistemological concerns. Code suggests a counterpart
for *ad hominem* be known as *ad feminam* to address how
listeners and audiences discount women's testimony (1995:
58-82). Also, androcentrism, the assumption of a masculine
standard, can be named as a typical problem arising in argumentation
by using the fallacies approach. More generally, Hundleby (2016)
argues that assuming the desirability of stereotypic qualities of
people who tend to be systematically granted social authority, such as
men and white people, may be identified as the "status quo
fallacy". Better education about fallacies in argumentation may
help to address the implicit bias that can underlie the "status
quo fallacy". The proposal of new fallacy labels, for example,
*ad stuprum* or the appeal to sex (Anger & Hundleby 2016),
is by no means unique to feminism, but it offers special power for
social justice projects in providing language to account for socially
marginalized experience, thus addressing hermeneutical injustices.



Proficiency with the fallacies approach can be empowering even though
any claim that a fallacy has been committed makes disagreement
explicit and that involves an adversarial quality which can make it
difficult for socially marginalized people to use. It entails at least
a minimal level of adversariality of the sort described by Govier
(1999): "minimal adversariality" is opposition to another
person's *view* but not to the person. The involvement of
even this minimal level of adversariality may make the fallacies
approach a form of argument analysis difficult for members of
subordinated classes to employ in contexts where socialization and
norms of politeness discourage subordinates from expressing dissent
(Rooney 2003). Yet, some individual women find success in adversarial
engagement, some take pleasure in the heightened opposition of debate,
and adversarial conversation is key to some women's culture and
identity (Schiffrin 1984; Henning 2018, 2021). Moreover, opposition is
necessary for feminist resistance, struggle, and change. In these
ways, women, feminists, and others with related liberatory projects
can find unique resources in the adversariality of the fallacies
approach.


## 6. Critical Thinking and Argument Pedagogy



Fallacies remain a popular way to teach reasoning, as does argument
analysis more generally. Both play central roles in the content of
Canadian, US, and UK post-secondary education as part of the set of
skills regularly taught under the name "critical thinking"
in philosophy departments. Education allows cultures of reasoning to
reinforce and reproduce themselves and these cultures affect the
prospects for feminist transformation of the larger society.
Educational institutions have authority and grant authority to systems
of thought and to individuals and in this way critical thinking
education provides opportunities for conformity or for social
transformation, starting at the level of individual reasoning and
interpersonal discourse. In many ways, the ideal and practice of
critical thinking serves social progress but in other ways it needs
reform.



The way that argument education works its way from the academy into
ordinary reasoning practices may be rather indirect and slow but
academic philosophy is not merely one discourse among others and it
has a central role in validating or authorizing other discourses
(Alcoff 1993), especially in the epistemological assumptions conveyed
through critical thinking pedagogy. Courses in critical thinking
became stock components of the undergraduate curriculum during the
late twentieth century and so the standards for reasoning implicit in
"critical thinking" as an educational goal for students
directly impact on countless students every year. Critical thinking
operates as a specifically Western practice and ideal that provides
alternatives to patterns of reasoning that enforce male dominance in
various cultures, Western culture included (Norris 1995). The appeals
to individual rationality and independent reasoning in the critical
thinking curriculum contrast with appeals to tradition and with
prioritizing community and personal relationships.



Systems of thinking, such as theories or logics, and speech acts, such
as arguments, can hold authority that is not attached to a specific
speaker or type of speaker, even though people may be paradigmatic
holders of authority. The authority of social institutions, especially
in their claims to be objective, Code argues (1995: 21, 181), may be
likewise justified or not justified. Granting the justification of
depersonalized authorities that include institutions of postsecondary
education becomes second nature in a technological society, while
those who lack social status and expertise have heightened dependence
on the authority of expertise. This authority actually lies in the
hands of people who have social privilege and yet people who are
socially marginalized have a serious stake in the institutions that
develop knowledge, from the legal system and the media to the pedagogy
of argumentation in the form of "critical thinking"
education (Hundleby 2013b).



Hundleby makes a case that critical thinking courses provided by
philosophy departments currently tend to reinforce disciplinary biases
because they invoke an authority that lacks the monitoring and
evaluation that justifies authority (Hanrahan & Antony 2005). The
typical way that textbooks present fallacies exhibits ignorance of the
current informal logic scholarship, which would provide the
appropriate source of expertise. There are few textbooks written by
scholars who have published even one article in argumentation or logic
and these same textbooks written by non-specialists are most likely to
evince the Adversary Method described by Moulton (1983). The
unreflective nature of dependence on that Method suggests that it
remains authoritative--as well as
"paradigmatic"--in philosophy (Hundleby 2010).



Gilbert argues that critical thinking education ought to affirm a
range of considerations that do not enter into traditional logic
(Gilbert 1994: 111). Contemporary philosophical theorizing tends to
treat arguments as premise-conclusion complexes, merely as
"products" of the discourse that generates them (Wenzel
1980 [1992]), without considering the processes that give rise to
them. The focus on premise-conclusion complexes obscures factors
relevant to the feminist goal of preventing harm (Lang 2010) and such
a lack of appropriate "rhetorical spaces" or conceptual
frameworks in philosophy impedes the education of people about the
problems that women face (Code 1995). The standard Euro-American
philosophical practices of the Adversary Paradigm or the
Critical-Logical model sideline important aspects of arguing that
indicate the significance and cogency of feminist claims about things
like the social identities of arguers. Argument has a testimonial
dimension, as Audrey Yap explains (2013; 2015). Consciousness of such
situational aspects of reasoning and philosophical argumentation
facilitates the appreciation of feminist perspectives. It also
provides for more rigorous analysis and more thoroughly critical
thinking.



Bucking the large trend of textbooks that fail to reflect the
argumentation scholarship, Linker (2015) follows in a minor tradition
of textbooks by expert authors that also advance scholarly theorizing
about argumentation (e.g., Govier 1985; Johnson & Blair 1977;
Makau & Marty 2001, 2013). Her *Intellectual Empathy* aims
to provide reasoners with skills for understanding how social
inequalities affect people's lives and how those structures are
maintained. The first three skills involved in "intellectual
empathy" are: (i) understanding the invisibility of privilege;
(ii) knowing that social identity is
 intersectional;[6]
 and (iii) using models of cooperative reasoning. Linker argues that
social identity lies at the center of what Quine calls the "web
of
 belief",[7]
 which is to say it is deeply connected with many of a person's
beliefs; and for Linker that involves it in their self-esteem. The
personal stake people have in their social identities means that
discussion that engages our identities can be emotionally fraught. We
"take it personally". When people are arguing about
aspects of social identity, they often fall into feelings of blame or
guilt. Linker suggests that reasoners can find alternatives to such
destructive responses by consideration of the complexities of
everyone's individual situation regarding social privilege.
Attending to the specificities of each other's perspectives
allows us to better understand each other and set up reasoners for
more cooperative and less adversarial arguing (Linker 2015: 98).



According to Linker, intellectual empathy also requires that when
encountering a view that seems biased or stereotypical reasoners (iv)
apply a principle of conditional trust, treating the person holding
the view as reasonable and well-intentioned. This assumption allows us
better to learn about the real reasons the person holds the view, and
generally improves the audience's ability to gather and share
evidence (2015: 156-158).



Finally, Linker advises (v) recognizing our mutual vulnerability to
bias and stereotype, while at the same time allowing ourselves to be
responsive and accommodating to new information. This demands courage
and strength. Linker's five skills thus provide a way to address
the testimonial dimensions of arguing with special attention to their
operation when people argue from very different social locations. This
vision of critical thinking steps forward in addressing feminist
concerns with the cultures and practices of argumentation.


## 7. Feminism, the Discipline of Philosophy, and Argumentation Scholarship



In conclusion, as we see especially in the discussions of fallacies
and argument pedagogy as well as in the dominance of the Adversary
Method, feminist philosophical work on argumentation reveals a need
for philosophers to attend to argumentation scholarship. Outdated or
unscholarly conceptions of how different modes and styles of arguing
serve the advancement of knowledge can undermine the value of
philosophical reasoning and specifically how philosophers respond to
feminist philosophy. Yet, the work by interdisciplinary argumentation
scholars and feminist philosophers to explore these tensions receives
little uptake in the discipline of philosophy.



Among the feminist topics in argumentation scholarship that remain in
need of philosophical attention are: the range and complexity of
values that arguing can serve, including social justice, social
bonding, dispute resolution, and knowledge; and more thorough
representations of arguing practices that account for how discursive
norms code power and privilege, such as through politeness and
testimonial authority. Feminist research on these topics will be
important for scholarship on argumentation and also for the discipline
of philosophy, given the centrality of arguing to its practice.
Interdisciplinary vantage points on argumentation provide resources
useful for feminist purposes and promise a broader perspective that
might unify different feminist concerns; at the same time, other
disciplines can face their own challenges from a feminist perspective,
as rhetorical studies does for taking persuasion to provide the only
purpose for arguing.



Feminist concerns about argumentation pull in different directions and
create a great deal of room for further research. Feminists regularly
oppose practices and theories central to the discipline of philosophy
and some such form of opposition is intrinsic to feminist work. Yet
feminists criticize overemphasis on the opposition that occurs in the
default adoption of adversarial styles of reasoning in philosophy and
in the assumption that arguers must oppose each other or that they
must have contrary beliefs. Appeals to politeness do not provide the
easy resolution to these concerns that some argumentation theorists
often presume. In addition, although some of the worst tendencies in
argumentation scholarship may be passed on generation to generation in
critical thinking classes taught by philosophers, these classes have
potential to create progress toward social justice. Let us note that,
overall, feminist perspectives on argumentation challenge broad social
and epistemological norms as well as attend to the ways the norms play
out in the culture of critical thinking, academic philosophy, and
other accepted standards for shared reasoning.