Page 67 - Mike Ratner CC - WISR Complete Dissertation - v6

Historically, dialogues that power civic engagement have been limited to the elite classes

of society. Public discussion and dialogue gatherings have traditionally been limited to certain

classes and genders, particularly men, property owners, and in the Western world Caucasians.

Public gatherings as far back as the Greek city-state and the bourgeois public sphere

(Habermas, 1989) were places that hosted “private people who come together as a public” (p. 27).

Access to the public sphere was inclusive in theory, however, in practice the composition of the

public sphere was subject to bias, including the exclusion of women, the poor, non-whites, and the

less educated (Habermas, 1992). Only in the modern era has the public sphere become inclusive.

In the United States, the inclusion of all women and racial minorities into the electoral process

ushered in greater inclusion and access by constituent groups who were traditionally not thought

of as equal participants in public dialogue and debate, however this powerbase is highly threatened.

Ad hominem which is Latin for "to the man" or "to the person" is short for argumentum

ad hominem which stands for a fallacious argumentative strategy whereby genuine discussion of

the topic at hand is avoided by instead attacking the character, motive, or other attribute of the

person making the argument, or persons associated with the argument, rather than attacking the

substance of the argument itself. (Labossiere, 2010) The terms ad mulierem (Olivesi, 2010) and

ad feminam (Sommers, 1991) have been used when the person receiving the criticism is a woman.

However, its original meaning was an argument "calculated to appeal to the person addressed more

than to impartial reason".

Doug Walton, Canadian academic and author, has argued that ad hominem reasoning is

not always fallacious, and that in some instances, questions of personal conduct, character,

motives, etc., are legitimate and relevant to the issue, as when it directly involves hypocrisy, or

actions contradicting the subject's words. The philosopher Charles Taylor has argued that ad

48