This paper argues that the concept of care is significant not only for ethics, but for epistemology as well. After elucidating caring as a five-step dyadic relation, I go on to show its epistemic significance within the general framework of virtue epistemology as developed by Ernest Sosa, Alvin Goldman, and Linda Zagzebski. The notions of "care-knowing" and "care-based epistemology" emerge from construing caring (respectively) as a reliabilist and responsibilist virtue.

This paper argues that the concept of care is significant not only for ethics, but for epistemology as well. After elucidating caring as a five-step dyadic relation, I go on to show its epistemic significance within the general framework of virtue epistemology as developed by Ernest Sosa, Alvin Goldman, and Linda Zagzebski. The notions of “care-knowing” and “care-based epistemology” emerge from construing caring as a reliabilist and responsibilist virtue.

This paper is concerned with events that were the subject of an inquest into the deaths of 12 children who died while undergoing or shortly after having undergone cardiac surgery at the Winnipeg Health Sciences Centre, Manitoba, Canada, during 1994. A notable finding of the Sinclair Inquest was that nurses involved with the pediatric cardiac surgery program were concerned about the competence of the surgeon and made sustained efforts throughout 1994 to have these concerns addressed. That the nurses’ concerns were (...) not taken seriously is the central problem of this paper. Essentially, the position articulated is that gendered and gendering discourses constituted a form of power that structured the field of nurses’ possible actions. These discourses constituted a resource to make nurses knowable, to produce them as certain forms of the person, and were therefore part of what governed nurses everyday conduct. Though neither simply good nor bad in themselves, in this case, these discourses had constraining effects on how nurses were able to conduct themselves. (shrink)

"Your confidentiality will be respected. Information that discloses your identity will not be released without your consent unless required by law or regulation." I sat there with Missy, reading the consent form line by line. When I got to the section on confidentiality, I told her she could pick a nickname, or fake name, that I would use in my research notes and later when the research was written up. She wanted to use "Missy." It wasn't exactly a pseudonym—this was (...) the same name that a number of her friends in the neighborhood knew her by. I'd also heard a couple of nurses calling her Missy when I had gone to visit with her in the hospital earlier that winter. I asked her if she was sure she wanted to use that .. (shrink)

This piece comprises short presentations given by contributors to a symposium organized by the journal Ethics & Social Welfare on the theme of global ethics for social work. The contributors offer their reflections on the extent to which universally accepted international statements of ethical principles in social work are possible or useful, engaging with debates about cultural diversity, relativism and the relevance of human rights in non-Western countries.

This paper investigates the influence that social ties can have on behavior. After defining the concept of social ties that we consider, we introduce an original model of social ties. The impact of such ties on social preferences is studied in a coordination game with outside option. We provide a detailed game theoretical analysis of this game while considering various types of players, i.e., self-interest maximizing, inequity averse, and fair agents. In addition to these approaches that require strategic reasoning in (...) order to reach some equilibrium, we also present an alternative hypothesis that relies on the concept of team reasoning. After having discussed the differences between the latter and our model of social ties, we show how an experiment can be designed so as to discriminate among the models presented in the paper. (shrink)

According to insight-oriented psychotherapies, the change clients undergo during therapy results from insights gained into the "true" nature of the self, which entail greater self-knowledge and self-understanding. In this paper, I question such claims through a critical examination of the epistemological and metaphysical values underlying such forms of therapy. I claim that such psychotherapeutic practices are engaged in a process that subtly "absorbs" clients into the therapist's philosophical framework which is characterized by a certain problematic conception of subjectivity, knowledge, and (...) reality. Through mechanisms which are intrinsic to the therapeutic encounter, such as suggestion and power, such therapies construct and reconfigure clients along the lines of socially accepted norms and values. Consequently, insight-oriented psychotherapy results in a deceptive form of social control. (shrink)

According to insight-oriented psychotherapies, the change clients undergo during therapy results from insights gained into the "true" nature of the self, which entail greater self-knowledge and self-understanding. In this paper, I question such claims through a critical examination of the epistemological and metaphysical values underlying such forms of therapy. I claim that such psychotherapeutic practices are engaged in a process that subtly "absorbs" clients into the therapist's philosophical framework which is characterized by a certain problematic conception of subjectivity, knowledge, and (...) reality. Through mechanisms which are intrinsic to the therapeutic encounter, such as suggestion and power, such therapies construct and reconfigure clients along the lines of socially accepted norms and values. Consequently, insight-oriented psychotherapy results in a deceptive form of social control. (shrink)

Gossip is often serious business, not idle chitchat. Gossip allows those oppressed to privately name their oppressors as a warning to others. Of course, gossip can be in error. The speaker may be lying or merely have lacked sufficient evidence. Bias can also make those who hear the gossip more or less likely to believe the gossip. By examining the social functions of gossip and considering the differences in power dynamics in which gossip can occur, we contend that gossip may (...) be not only permissible but virtuous, both as the only reasonable recourse available and as a means of resistance against oppression. (shrink)

Engages and extends the feminist philosopher Lorraine Code's groundbreaking work on epistemology and ethics.

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? (shrink)

Wem wird geglaubt und wem nicht? Wessen Wissen wird weitergegeben und wessen nicht? Wer hat eine Stimme und wer nicht? Theorien der epistemischen Ungerechtigkeit befassen sich mit dem breiten Feld der ungerechten oder unfairen Behandlung, die mit Fragen des Wissens, Verstehens und Kommunizierens zusammenhängen, wie z.B. die Möglichkeit, vom Wissen oder von kommunikativen Praktiken ausgeschlossen zu werden oder zum Schweigen gebracht zu werden, aber auch Kontexte, in denen die Bedeutungen mancher systematisch verzerrt oder falsch gehört und falsch dargestellt werden, in (...) denen manchen misstraut wird oder es an epistemischer Handlungsfähigkeit mangelt. In diesem Buch wird eine Übersicht über die breite Debatte epistemischer Ungerechtigkeit, epistemischer Unterdrückung und epistemischer Gewalt gegeben, in dem unterschiedliche Theorien, die sich auf der Schnittstelle von Gerechtigkeitstheorie und epistemischen Fragen befinden, systematisch und kritisch diskutiert sowie theoretische Vorgänger dieser Theorien beleuchtet werden. (shrink)

"Analyzes the value of using case-based methodologies to address contemporary social justice issues in philosophy"--.

The crucial problem in the philosophy of psychiatry is to determine under which conditions certain behaviors, mental states, and personality traits should be regarded as symptoms of mental illnesses. Participants in the debate can be placed on a continuum of positions. On the one side of the continuum, there are naturalists who maintain that the concept of mental illness can be explained by relying on the conceptual apparatus of the natural sciences, such as biology and neuroscience. On the other side (...) of the continuum, there are normativists who maintain that the appropriate characterization of the concept of mental illness cannot avoid reference to epistemic, moral and other social values. Although, this article is primarily an introduction to the debate, we stress the importance of the normativist positions. (shrink)

The article focuses on the narratives of women secretaries regarding their work experiences in private business in Latvia, and aims at understanding the barriers that prevent the formation of women’s political subjectivity in Latvia, by looking at why sexual harassment does not become a political issue for working women in Latvia. Using Hayden White’s theory of trope analysis, the article analyses the dominant tropes and the political results of their use in secretaries’ articulations and narratives about their experiences of sexual (...) harassment. Additionally, the article provides a critical trope analysis of Western feminist theories of sexual harassment, thus pointing out their usefulness for women’s politics in Latvia. Finally, the article outlines the discursive strategies that women in Latvia could use in order to claim their own distinct and transformative political subjectivity in the newly independent, capitalist and highly nationalist post-Soviet Latvia. (shrink)

Since at least the 1938 publication of Hans Reichenbach’s Experience and Predication , there has been widespread agreement that, when discussing the beliefs that people have, it is important to distinguish contexts of discovery and contexts of justification. Traditionally, when one conflates the two contexts, the result is a “genetic fallacy”. This paper examines genealogical critiques and addresses the question of whether such critiques are fallacious and, if so, whether this vitiates their usefulness. The paper concludes that while there may (...) be one or more senses in which genealogical critiques are fallacious, this does not vitiate their value. (shrink)

Surgery is an important part of contemporary health care, but currently much of surgery lacks a strong evidence base. Uptake of evidence-based medicine (EBM) methods within surgical research and among practitioners has been slow compared with other areas of medicine. Although this is often viewed as arising from practical and cultural barriers, it also reflects a lack of epistemic fit between EBM research methods and surgical practice. In this paper we discuss some epistemic challenges in surgery relating to this lack (...) of fit, and investigate how resources from feminist epistemology can help to characterize them. We point to ways in which these epistemic challenges may be addressed by gathering and disseminating evidence about what works in surgery using methods that are contextual, pluralistic, and sensitive to hierarchies. (shrink)

Anna Julia Cooper's 1892 A Voice from the South is a hybrid text that speaks provocatively to contemporary feminist philosophy. Negotiating exclusionary categories of being and knowing and writing herself into intellectual traditions meant to exclude her, Cooper's narrative methods are politically tactical and epistemologically significant. Cooper inserts subjectivity into objective analysis and underscores knowledge as located and embodied. By speaking from spaces of exclusion, Cooper fully articulates the promise of intersectional approaches to liberation.

Shani Mootoo's Cereus Blooms at Night demonstrates how willful and strategic epistemologies of ignorance interwine. By rejecting a compartmentalized approach to domination, Mootoo highlights the disjuncture between idealized images of family, home, love, and the Caribbean and traumatic events of personal and cultural history. Mootoo not only asks readers to take up resistant questioning, argues May, but also to recognize that epistemology must acknowledge unspeakable and silenced stories to adequately account for multiple ways of knowing.

While scientific pluralism enjoys widespread popularity within the philosophy of science, a related position, epistemic relativism, does not have much traction. Defenders of scientific pluralism, however, dread the question of whether scientific pluralism entails epistemic relativism. It is often argued that if a scientific pluralist accepts epistemic relativism, she will be unable to pass judgment because she believes that “anything goes”. In this article, I will show this concern to be unnecessary. I will also argue that common strategies to differentiate (...) relativism and pluralism fail. Building upon this analysis, I will propose a new way of looking at both positions’ relations. This article aims to understand what explains the friction between scientific pluralism and epistemic relativism. I will demonstrate that conceptualizing both epistemic relativism and scientific pluralism as “stances” sheds better light on their relation and demonstrates that it is, in principle, possible to support both positions at the same time. Preferred policies and levels of analysis, however, cause friction in practice. (shrink)

Spatial metaphors abound in feminist theory. The modest goal of this paper is to reassert the importance of temporal dimensions in thought for feminist thinking. In order to establish this general claim, several kinds of current thinking about time that are problematic for feminists are explored. First, the postmodern compression of time and space is considered from the standpoint of the changes it brings in the nature of care. Second, the privileging of the future over the past is considered in (...) light of the problems it creates for thinking about justice for historical wrongdoing. Forgiveness and remembrance require an attention to the past. (shrink)

This article uses Peirce's Critical Common-sensism to conduct social critical inquiry into racism and “colorblindness” in the U.S. I argue that “colorblindness” discourse - in its sincere, but naïve form - is an enactment of paper-doubt, where racist common-sense beliefs are supposedly eradicated, but still function unintentionally. I offer a Peircean challenge to the common dismissal of people of color's testimony regarding the prevalence of racism. Since people of color experience racism-based secondness often not experienced by whites, their testimony must (...) be embraced as indispensable to the elimination of racist belief-habits. (shrink)

How do we know which institutions provide good care? Some scholars argue that the best way to think about care institutions is to model them upon the family or the market. This paper argues, on the contrary, that when we make explicit some background conditions of good family care, we can apply what we know to better institutionalized caring. After considering elements of bad and good care, from an institutional perspective, the paper argues that good care in an institutional context (...) has three central foci: the purpose of care, a recognition of power relations, and the need for pluralistic, particular tailoring of care to meet individuals? needs. These elements further require political space within institutions to address such concerns. (shrink)

: The development of nonoppressive ways of knowing other persons, often across significantly different social positions, is an important project within feminism. An account of epistemic responsibility attentive to feminist concerns is developed here through a critique of epistemophilia—the love of knowledge to the point of myopia and its concurrent ignoring of ignorance. Identifying a positive role for ignorance yields an enhanced understanding of responsible knowledge practices.

Within the last decade, burgeoning interest in the intersection of epistemology and social issues has generated a new set of research questions. These questions range from the relevance of social identity, to peer disagreement, to debates on the significance of moral considerations to epistemic evaluations, to discussions of our epistemic practices and how those practices exclude certain agents and certain bodies of knowledge. Central in this new and emerging body of work is the realization that epistemology has more to do (...) than simply answer questions about what knowledge consists in; it must also acknowledge that our answers to these questions might be influenced by features we have previously failed to make space for. It is in this respect that we are witnessing a renewed interest in a theoretical approach long consigned to the margins of epistemology – that of standpoint epistemology. (shrink)

Standpoint epistemology, the view that social identity is relevant to knowledge-acquisition, has been consigned to the margins of mainstream philosophy. In part, this is because the principles of standpoint epistemology are taken to be in opposition to those which guide traditional epistemology. One goal of this paper is to tease out the characterization of traditional epistemology that is at odds with standpoint epistemology. The characterization of traditional epistemology that I put forth is one which endorses the thesis of intellectualism, the (...) view that knowledge does not depend on non-epistemic features. I then suggest that two further components – the atomistic view of knowers and aperspectivalism – can be usefully interpreted as supporting features of intellectualism. A further goal of this paper is to show that we ought to resist this characterization of traditional epistemology. I use pragmatic encroachment as a dialectical tool to motivate the denial of intellectualism, and consequently, the denial of both supporting components. I then attempt to show how it is possible to have a view, similar to pragmatic encroachment, that takes social identity, rather than stakes, to be the feature that makes a difference to what a person is in a position to know. (shrink)

Merleau-Ponty's claim in Phenomenology of Perception that the anonymous body guarantees an intersubjective world is problematic because it omits the particularities of bodies. This omission produces an account of “dialogue” with another in which I solipsistically hear only myself and dominate others with my intentionality. This essay develops an alternative to projective intentionality called “hypothetical construction,” in which meaning is socially constructed through an appreciation of the differences of others.

Feminist theorists have crafted diverse accounts of implicit knowing that exceed the purview of epistemology conventionally understood. I characterize this field as through examining thematic clusters of feminist work on implicit knowledge: phenomenological and foucauldian theories of embodiment; theories of affect and emotion; other forms of implicit knowledge. Within these areas, the umbrella concept of implicit knowledge (or understanding, depending on how it's framed) names either contingently unspoken or fundamentally nonpropositional but epistemically salient content in our experience. I make a (...) case for distinguishing implicit knowledge from lively conversations about ‘implicit bias’, as well as from the ‘know-how/know-that’ debates, and I explore key ways the notion of implicit knowledge is currently formulated in feminist philosophy. (shrink)

Merleau-Ponty's claim in Phenomenology of Perception (1962) that the anonymous body guarantees an intersubjective world is problematic because it omits the particularities of bodies. This omission produces an account of "dialogue" with another in which I solipsistically hear only myself and dominate others with my intentionality. This essay develops an alternative to projective intentionality called "hypothetical construction," in which meaning is socially constructed through an appreciation of the differences of others.

Although the STS literature on boundary-work recognizes that such work unfolds within a “terrain of uneven advantage” vis-à-vis gender, race, and other inequalities, reflection about that uneven advantage has been strikingly underdeveloped. This article calls for a retheorizing of boundary-work that engages more actively with feminist, critical race, and postcolonial scholarship and examines more systematically the relation between scientific boundary-work, broader structures of sociopolitical inequality, and boundary-workers’ positionality. To demonstrate the need for this retheorization, I analyze ethnographic and interview data (...) on scientific boundary-work in the natural and social sciences in Portugal, showing that scholars’ gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and nationality affect the success of their boundary-work. I suggest, therefore, that in unequal societies where credibility is unevenly distributed, the conditions are not in place for some scholars’ boundary-work to work. I draw on Sara Ahmed to argue that we must conceptualize scientific boundary-work as always potentially performative, but not always successfully so, and explicitly interrogate the actual conditions of performativity. Recognizing the links between inequality, embodiment, and non-performativity in scientific boundary-work will enable STS to better understand, and hopefully transform, the relations between contingent struggles over scientificity and entrenched structures of power. (shrink)

The essential premise of #MeToo is that, while large numbers of women are subject to sexual harassment and assault, this reality is not known to or understood by unnamed others. This article interrogates the subject of non-knowing that #MeToo points to but does not name, asking: who exactly does not know, and why? These questions provide the starting point to elaborate the concept of male ignorance. While this lexicon has been fleetingly deployed in canonical feminist works – where it denotes (...) something so obvious that it does not require explanation, functioning instead as a kind of feminist common sense – I develop it here so it might be put to greater use as a dedicated analytic. The work of Charles Mills, particularly his writings on white ignorance, provides a critical precedent in this regard. Following Mills in foregrounding the ideological operations of not knowing, I conceive male ignorance as a structure of concerted if unconscious epistemic occlusion which both stems from and serves to protect male privilege. As such, it plays a crucial role in securing the overall relation of domination and oppression within which gendered lives are lived. While male ignorance is itself multiple and has a variety of stakeholders, I argue that the non-knowing that surrounds sexual harassment and assault – which #MeToo draws attention to and seeks to undo – constitutes a paradigmatic manifestation, one in which cisgender heterosexual men have a particular stake. (shrink)

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provide insight into the reciprocal relations between the caregiving imparted by immigration centre managers and the role of the researcher in responding to the care that is given by managerial caregivers. To enable this, we draw on a feminist theory of care ethics that considers individuals as relationally interdependent. Design/methodology/approach The analysis draws on a semi-structured interview study involving 20 Finnish immigration reception centre managers. Findings Insight is generated by reflecting on moments (...) of care that arise between research participants and the researcher in a study of immigration centre management. We emphasise the importance of mature care, receptivity and engrossment in building caring relationships with research participants by acknowledging the care they give to others. Our findings draw attention to the moral and epistemological responsibility to practice care in organizational research. Originality/value The paper highlights the relationality between practicing care in immigration centre management and doing qualitative organizational research, both of which rely on mature care, receptivity and engrossment in order to meet the other morally. We draw attention to the moral responsibility to care which characterises researcher–researched relationships and emphasise the importance of challenging methodological discourses that problematise or dismiss care in qualitative organizational research. (shrink)