Catherine Elisabeth Hundleby

Feminists note an association of arguing with aggression and masculinity and question the necessity of this connection. Arguing also seems to some to identify a central method of philosophical reasoning, and gendered assumptions and standards would pose problems for the discipline. Can feminine modes of reasoning provide an alternative or supplement? Can overarching epistemological standards account for the benefits of different approaches to arguing? These are some of the prospects for argumentation inside and outside of philosophy that feminists consider. The further concern is that the academic study of argumentation – in philosophy and other disciplines – has failed to account for the type of reasoning needed for social justice movements. What resources for addressing these concerns can be found in informal logic and interdisciplinary argumentation theory? Since part of the perceived problem derives from assuming that arguing is a contest, are more collaborative epistemological frameworks better? Can regular politeness or civility hedge against undesirable tendencies of argumentation? Can “critical thinking” pedagogy involving argument educations answer the needs of social justice?

The deep operation of androcentrism in scientific argumentation demands recognition as a form of fallacy. On Walton’s account, fallacies are serious mistakes in argumentation that employ presumptions acceptable in other circumstances. There are only isolated cases in which androcentric pre-sumptions are acceptable, and I argue that androcentrism affects an overarching theme of generalization in science rather than an isolated scheme. Androcentrism is related to other ways of treating privileged people as exemplary humans, whose negative impact on processes of argumentation can be described as the fallacy of “appeal to the standard.”

This special issue of Informal Logic brings together two important areas of philosophy that have shown significant development in the last three decades: informal logic and feminist philosophy. A significant innovation they both share is new thinking about practices of argumentation and related practices of reasoning. Feminist theorizing supporting social and political change foregrounds “reasoning for change” in a way that draws attention to the contextual and rhetorical dimensions of argument and thus connects with significant developments in informal logic

Moira Kloster suggests the frailty of argument across differences in circumstances of disagreement. My aim is to take a step back and consider what she takes to be the purpose of argumentative bridges. I explain my understanding of Kloster’s position that we must attend to the variable places that cooperation and trust have in argumentation, especially how these attitudes are sometimes institutionalized in such a way that a cooperative individual disposition becomes dysfunctional. Kloster’s considerations are quite sound for arguments in the institutional contexts that concern her; her observation about the dependence of an argument’s value on the purpose of its institutional context is considered in light of further purposes that argumentation serves inside and outside of institutions. I agree that we need to consider how social contexts and institutions affect the various successes of argumentation, but I think we need to consider also the range of purposes that arguments and argument forums may have, what values they may support, and what interests they may serve.

In this dissertation I argue that naturalist epistemology would benefit if it were recognized to include feminist standpoint theory, a theory of knowledge that is based on the feminist critiques of science. Naturalists such as W. O. Quine argue that normative epistemology can be developed on the basis of science. However, they have mostly rested content with descriptions of how knowledge seems to work. Naturalists need to evaluate our epistemic practices against competing alternatives if they are to justify our knowledge claims. For this reason, they can benefit from taking up the feminist challenges to science. The feminist critiques of science challenge the warrant of many scientific claims but also are based on science. Even feminist standpoint theory, which is usually associated with Marxism, can be viewed as a form of naturalist epistemology because of its reliance on these scientific studies, especially those by Dorothy Smith and Patricia Hill Collins. So naturalists would benefit from addressing the claims of feminist standpoint theorists. ;Characterizing feminist standpoint theory as a naturalist epistemology reveals how an apparent weakness of both feminist standpoint theory and naturalist epistemology is really a strength: it shows that attending to the way beliefs are developed can be epistemically advantageous. The normative claim of feminist standpoint theorists that people ought to involve feminists and feminist values in their inquiries builds on descriptions of how gender politics affects knowledge. Feminist standpoint theory builds on the observations that feminism encourages the generation of competing alternative points of view about knowledge that can challenge scientific knowledge claims. The generation of alternative perspectives facilitates testing. In this way feminist standpoint theory actually demonstrates how naturalism can be normative epistemology. Other feminists who advocate naturalism have described the operation of gender in cognition but they have not recognized the importance of feminism as a source of critique within science. In this way, feminist standpoint theory is a better exemplar of naturalism than any accounts of knowledge that have previously been identified as naturalist