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