Digital phenotyping will potentially enable earlier detection and prediction of mental illness by monitoring human interaction with and through digital devices. Notwithstanding its promises, it is certain that a person’s digital phenotype will at times be at odds with their first-person testimony of their psychological states. In this paper, we argue that there are features of digital phenotyping in the context of psychiatry which have the potential to exacerbate the tendency to dismiss patients’ testimony and treatment preferences, which can be (...) instances of epistemic injustice. We first explain what epistemic injustice is, and why it is argued to be an extensive problem in health and disability settings. We then explain why epistemic injustice is more likely to apply with even greater force in psychiatric contexts, and especially where digital phenotyping may be involved. Finally, we offer some tentative suggestions of how epistemic injustice can be minimised in digital psychiatry. (shrink)

Many political philosophers have held that democracy has epistemic benefits. Most commonly, this case is made by arguing that democracies are better able to track the truth than other political arrangements. Truth, however, is not the only epistemic good that is politically valuable. A number of other epistemic goods – goods including evidence, intellectual virtue, epistemic justice, and empathetic understanding – can also have political value, and in ways that go beyond the value of truth. In this paper, I will (...) survey those who have argued that democracy can be valuable because of these other epistemic benefits, considering (1) the ways in which these epistemic goods can be of political value and (2) the challenges that democracies face in producing them. (shrink)

In order to serve their citizens well, democracies must secure a number of epistemic goods. Take the truth, for example. If a democratic government wants to help its impoverished citizens improve their financial position, then elected officials will need to know what policies truly help those living in poverty. Because truth has such an important role in political decision-making, many defenders of democracy have highlighted the ways in which democratic procedures can lead to the truth. But there are also a (...) number of other epistemic goods – goods like evidence, intellectual virtue, epistemic justice, and empathetic understanding – that democracies can benefit from producing as well. In this teaching and learning guide, I chart a course through the literature that considers the importance of truth, along with these other political goods, for the healthy functioning of democracies. (shrink)

Much art is committed to political causes. However, does art contribute something unique to political discourse, or does it merely reflect the insights of political science and political philosophy? Here I argue for indispensability of art to political discourse by building on the debate about artistic cognitivism, the view that art is a source of knowledge. Different artforms, I suggest, make available specific epistemic resources, which allow audiences to overcome epistemic obstacles that obtain in a given ideological situation. My goal (...) is to offer a general model for identifying cognitive advantages for artworks belonging to distinct artforms and genres, in a way that can account for each artwork’s historical and cultural specificity. More speculatively, however, my account also comments on the ancient struggle between philosophy and the arts as competing modes of persuasion, and expands our notion of legitimate political discourse to include a greater plurality of discursive genres. (shrink)

Various sexist and racist beliefs ascribe certain negative qualities to people of a given sex or race. Epistemic allies are people who think that in normal circumstances rationality requires the rejection of such sexist and racist beliefs upon learning of many counter-instances, i.e. members of these groups who lack the target negative quality. Accordingly, epistemic allies think that those who give up their sexist or racist beliefs in such circumstances are rationally responding to their evidence, while those who do not (...) are irrational in failing to respond to their evidence by giving up their belief. This is a common view among philosophers and non-philosophers. But epistemic allies face three problems. First, sexist and racist beliefs often involve generic propositions. These sorts of propositions are notoriously resilient in the face of counter-instances since the truth of generic propositions is typically compatible with the existence of many counter-instances. Second, background beliefs can enable one to explain away counter-instances to one’s beliefs. So even when counter-instances might otherwise constitute strong evidence against the truth of the generic, the ability to explain the counter-instances away with relevant background beliefs can make it rational to retain one’s belief in the generic despite the existence of many counter-instances. The final problem is that the kinds of judgements epistemic allies want to make about the irrationality of sexist and racist beliefs upon encountering many counter-instances is at odds with the judgements that we are inclined to make in seemingly parallel cases about the rationality of non-sexist and non-racist generic beliefs. Thus epistemic allies may end up having to give up on plausible normative supervenience principles. All together, these problems pose a significant prima facie challenge to epistemic allies. In what follows I explain how a Bayesian approach to the relation between evidence and belief can neatly untie these knots. The basic story is one of defeat: Bayesianism explains when one is required to become increasingly confident in chance propositions, and confidence in chance propositions can make belief in corresponding generics irrational. (shrink)

Huw Price’s subject naturalism has emerged as a leading pragmatist position within recent debates surrounding philosophical naturalism. Unlike orthodox views which tend to be guided by metaphysical questions about the “place” of, for instance, the mind, meaning, and morality within the natural world, subject naturalism focuses philosophical attention on language-users and the functions that certain concepts play within discursive practices. This paper considers two objections to subject naturalism and argues that they can be overcome by looking to the methodological insights (...) of philosophical genealogy. Although Price occasionally characterizes his project as a kind of genealogy, he offers little explanation of what such a methodological orientation is supposed to involve. I suggest that subject naturalists ought to remedy this theoretical lacuna by looking to the work of Bernard Williams. On the one hand, doing so can serve a diagnostic function: Williams’ conception of genealogy affords a perspective from which subject naturalism’s explanatory inadequacies are more clearly understood. On the other hand, Williams’ elaborated conception of genealogy represents a path by which the subject naturalist can overcome the shortcomings discussed in this paper. (shrink)

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)

Implicit in much of the recent literature on conceptual engineering and conceptual ethics is the assumption that when speakers argue that we should talk or think about a concept in a specific way, they are doing so as inquirers—as speakers who are invested in arriving at the correct or best view of this concept. In this paper I question that assumption and argue that philosophers have been too quick to project idealized versions of themselves into the contexts of conceptual articulation (...) and conceptual dispute. Speakers often engage in this activity to further interests of theirs that have nothing to do with inquiry, instead carrying out what I call ‘conceptual domination’. Speakers are engaged in conceptual domination when they aim to bring about and enforce widespread uptake for a view of a concept by exploiting institutions and institutional authority. They do so because this view best serves interests that are either irrelevant to or actively interfere with inquiry concerning this concept—paradigmatically their material interests. I consider sources of evidence for assessing whether speakers are engaging in conceptual domination, analyze two case studies, and consider how to push back against conceptual dominators. (shrink)

How does the monitoring of a testifier's credibility by recipients of testimony bear upon the epistemic licence accruing to a recipient's belief in the testifier's communications? According to an intuitive and philosophically influential conception, licensed acceptance of testimony requires that recipients of testimony monitor testifiers with respect to their credibility. I argue that this conception, however, proves to be untenable when confronted with the wealth of empirical evidence bearing on the ways in which testifiers and their interlocutors actually interact.

As political theorists address the parochial foundations of their field, engagement with the Indigenous traditions of Turtle Island is overdue. This article argues that theorists should approach such engagement with caution. Indigenous nations’ politics of knowledge production may differ from those of de-parochializing political theorists. Some Indigenous communities, in response to violent histories of knowledge extraction, have developed practices of refusal. The contemporary movement of resurgence engages Indigenous traditions of political thought toward the end of promoting Indigenous intellectual and political (...) sovereignty and self-determination. These practices demonstrate a commitment to epistemic justice that is imperfectly aligned with, and potentially opposed to, inclusion-oriented projects like comparative political theory. If political theorists are to de-parochialize political theory by incorporating Indigenous traditions, they must do so in ways that are respectful of Indigenous peoples’ own struggles for epistemic justice. This can be achieved by drawing on and deepening practices of reflexivity exhibited in leading comparative political theory scholarship, and by allowing Indigenous treaty relationships to set the terms of the encounter. (shrink)

This paper addresses epistemic aspects of the phenomenon of obstetric violence—which has been described as a kind of gender violence—mainly from the perspective of recent theories on epistemic injustice. I argue that what is behind the dismissal of women’s voices in labor is mainly how the birthing subject, in general, is conceived. Thus, I develop a link between the phenomenon of testimonial injustice in labor and the marked irrationality that is seen as a core characteristic of birthing subjects: an irrationality (...) that appears to be always at odds with the kind of knowledge that is, wrongly, privileged within medicalized childbirth. I use Miranda Fricker’s analysis to argue that a central part of obstetric violence involves laboring women being “wrongfully undermined specifically in their capacity as knowers” : they are disbelieved in the labor room because of a double prejudice, one deriving simply from their condition as women, the second involving the kind of knowledge that many women find useful in the process of birthing. Women in labor thus suffer from both systematic and incidental kinds of testimonial injustice. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that many women lack the epistemic resources that would allow them to recognise the practice of vaginal examinations during childbirth as violent or as unnecessary and potentially declinable. I address vaginal examinations during childbirth as a special case of obstetric violence, in which women frequently lack the epistemic resources necessary to recognise the practice as violent not only because of the inherent difficulty of recognising violence that happens in an ‘essentially benevolent’ setting such as the (...) medical one, but also, and mainly, due to the pervasive sexual reification of women under patriarchy and the pervasive shame to which women are subjected. My argument is that the practice of vaginal examinations is indeed experienced – bodily apprehended – as violent by many women, but that full epistemic recognition of this violence is frequently obstructed because the experience perfectly coincides with the normal phenomenological situation of women within patriarchy and thus cannot really be framed as violent. A phenomenological analysis presenting the embodied experience of women under patriarchy as always already essentially tied to sexual availability and commodification, and to shame, will explain this epistemological impairment. A phenomenological take on Judith Butler’s distinction between ‘recognition’ and ‘apprehension’ informs my analysis: I deploy it to provide a richer, more nuanced response to the question of why vaginal examinations are not fully recognised and expressed as violent – even when they are, frequently, apprehended as such. Furthermore, Butler’s ideas about the epistemic ‘framings’ through which we make sense of different kinds of lives (grievable versus ungrievable) will help me to explain how the patriarchal sexual reification of women in fact already frames sexual violence as not-violence – which ultimately also prevents labouring women (and obstetrics staff) from recognising vaginal examinations during labour as violence. (shrink)

As the prevalence of conflict and fragility continue to rise around the world, research is increasingly heralded as a solution. However, current ethical guidelines for working in areas suffering from institutional and social fragility, insecurity or violent conflict have been heavily critiqued as highly abstract; focussed only on data collection; detached from the realities of academia in the Global South; and potentially extractive. This article seeks to respond to that assessment by spotlighting some of the most prevalent challenges researchers face (...) in the pursuit of ethical working practices. It explores the material and epistemic injustices that often shape and underpin research structures and relationships in these contexts. The paper draws on the authors’ experiences of research in conflict-affected and fragile contexts over the last fifteen years and on workshop discussions with researchers based in fragile and conflict-affected contexts conducted in Amman, Bogotá and Dhaka in 2019-2020. The paper works from the premise that achieving ethical research in fragile spaces is not dependent solely on activity at the site of research, but also on decisions made across the entire ecosystem of a research project. It therefore interrogates the full research landscape, from funding models, to research design, to dissemination plans and ethical gatekeeping. The paper critically reflects on inequities in the processes of knowledge production about conflict and fragility and the key ethical challenges that researchers encounter. It highlights the need for further guidance, support and accountability to ensure ethical research practices. (shrink)

One of the recent attempts to explore epistemic dimensions of forced displacement focuses on the institution of gender-based asylum and hopes to detect forms of epistemic injustice within assessments of gender related asylum applications. Following this attempt, I aim in this paper to demonstrate how the institution of gender-based asylum is structured to produce epistemic injustice at least in the forms of testimonial injustice and contributory injustice. This structural limit becomes visible when we realize how the institution of asylum is (...) formed to provide legitimacy to the institutional comfort the respective migration courts and boards enjoy. This institutional comfort afforded to migration boards and courts by the existing asylum regimes in the current order of nation-states leads to a systemic prioritization of state actors’ epistemic resources rather than that of applicants, which, in turn, results in epistemic injustice and impacts the determination of applicants’ refugee status. (shrink)

One of the recent attempts to explore epistemic dimensions of forced displacement focuses on the institution of gender-based asylum and hopes to detect forms of epistemic injustice within assessments of gender related asylum applications. Following this attempt, I aim in this paper to demonstrate how the institution of gender-based asylum is structured to produce epistemic injustice at least in the forms of testimonial injustice and contributory injustice. This structural limit becomes visible when we realize how the institution of asylum is (...) formed to provide legitimacy to the institutional comfort the respective migration courts and boards enjoy. This institutional comfort afforded to migration boards and courts by the existing asylum regimes in the current order of nation-states leads to a systemic prioritization of state actors’ epistemic resources rather than that of applicants, which, in turn, results in epistemic injustice and impacts the determination of applicants’ refugee status. (shrink)

This paper aims at providing an epistemic defense of democracy based on John Dewey’s idea that democracies do not only find problems and provide solutions to them but they also articulate problems....

This paper aims at providing an epistemic defense of democracy based on John Dewey’s idea that democracies do not only find problems and provide solutions to them but they also articulate problems. According to this view, when citizens inquire about collective issues, they also partially shape them. This view contrasts with the standard account of democracy’s epistemic defense, according to which democracy’s is good at tracking and finding solutions that are independent of political will-formation and decision-making. It is also less (...) vulnerable to the criticisms that have been raised against the standard account. To show this, the paper develops a theory of expressive domination and argues that problem-articulation works best when it is inclusive and domination-free. It also shows that democratic conflict represents a fundamental element for problem-articulation. (shrink)

The concepts of disease, illness and sickness capture fundamentally different aspects of phenomena related to human ailments and healthcare. The philosophy and theory of medicine are making manifold efforts to capture the essence and normative implications of these concepts. In parallel, socio-empirical studies on patients’ understanding of their situation have yielded a comprehensive body of knowledge regarding subjective perspectives on health-related statuses. Although both scientific fields provide varied valuable insights, they have not been strongly linked to each other. Therefore, the (...) article aims to scrutinise the normative-ethical implications of patient perspectives in building a bridge to the empirical ethics debates. Three potential fields of tension between the illness and the disease perspective are presented. Consequently, findings from empirical research examining patient perspectives on illness are displayed and the practical implications and associated ethical issues which arise are discussed. This leads to the conclusion that an explicit and elaborate empirical-ethical methodology is needed to deal appropriately with the complex interaction between patients’ views and the medico-professional view of disease. Kon’s four-stage model of normative-empirical collaboration is then applied against the background of empirical data on patient perceptions. Starting from this exemplary approach, the article suggests employing empirical-ethical frameworks for further research on the conceptual and normative issues, as they help to integrate perspectives from the philosophy of medicine with socio-empirical research. The combination of theoretical and empirical perspectives suggested contributes to a more nuanced discussion of the normative impact of patients’ actual understanding of illness. Further empirical research in this area would profit from explicitly considering potential ethical issues to avoid naturalistic fallacies or crypto-normative conclusions that may compromise healthcare practice. Vice versa, medico-theoretical debates could be enriched by integrating subjective views of those people who are immediately affected. (shrink)

This article introduces readers to the special issue on Selected Issues in the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence. In this paper, I make a case for a wider outlook on the ethics of AI. So far, much of the engagements with the subject have come from Euro-American scholars with obvious influences from Western epistemic traditions. I demonstrate that socio-cultural features influence our conceptions of ethics and in this case the ethics of AI. The goal of this special issue is to entertain (...) more diverse views, particularly those from Africa; it brings together six articles addressing pertinent issues in the ethics of AI. These articles address topics around artificial moral agency, patiency, personhood, social robotics, and the principle of explicability. These works offer unique contributions for and from an African perspective. I contend that a wider engagement with the ethics of AI is worthwhile as we anticipate a global deployment of artificial intelligence systems. (shrink)

Zeugenschaft ist heute wichtiger denn je – und das nicht trotz, sondern vielmehr gerade wegen der gewachsenen Möglichkeiten, jederzeit und überall das Geschehen technisch aufzunehmen und einer breiten Öffentlichkeit zugänglich zu machen. Zeugenschaft ist jedoch nicht nur eine epistemische Praxis, sondern auch eine Form sozialen Engagements, wie die sozialen Protestbewegungen der letzten Jahre gezeigt haben. In den aktuellen Debatten um Zeugenschaft ist allerdings eine gewisse Verengung hin auf die epistemischen Aspekte des Zeugnisgebens zu beobachten. Dagegen versucht der Artikel, Praktiken der (...) Zeugenschaft auf ihre ethischen und politischen Implikationen hin zu befragen. Dabei gilt es, kritisch auf die Normen zu reflektieren, die Zeugenschaft ermöglichen oder verhindern. Zugleich impliziert jedes Zeugnis ein politisches Moment, insofern sich das Wahrsprechen des Zeugen bzw. der Zeugin selbst als politischer Akt interpretieren lässt. Zeugnisgeben erweist sich damit, so die These, nicht nur als eine epistemische, sondern auch als eine ethische und politische Praxis, ohne dass diese Elemente aufeinander reduzierbar wären. (shrink)

Gerade in Ausnahmesituationen rücken Menschen zusammen – eigentlich. Das ist in Zeiten des Coronavirus anders, denn hier gilt das Gebot des „Social Distancing“. Ich möchte die Ambivalenz, die nicht nur in dieser paradoxen Wortkombination zum Ausdruck kommt, sondern auch in der Erfahrung von vielen Menschen, mit Hilfe eines leibphänomenologischen Zugangs näher beleuchten. Dabei untersuche ich, wie sich das spannungsreiche Verhältnis von Nähe und Distanz in Zeiten der Corona-Pandemie in Alltagssituationen sowie in Bildungskontexten zeigt. Darüber hinaus gehe ich der Frage nach, (...) was die Erfahrung des „Social Distancing“ für die Philosophie – nicht nur in Ausnahmesituationen – bedeuten kann, und plädiere dafür, sie als eine Übungsmöglichkeit des Philosophierens zwischen Nähe und Distanz, Körper und Geist, Eigenem und Fremdem sowie Natur und Kultur zu sehen, um auf diese Weise problematischen Extremen auf beiden Seiten zu entgehen. (shrink)

So far, recognition theory has focused its attention on modern capitalism and its formation in richer Western societies and has neglected issues of global poverty. A brief sketch of Axel Honneth's recognition theory precedes an examination of how the theory can contribute to a better understanding of global poverty, and justice in relation to poverty. I wish to highlight five ways in which recognition theory can enrich our inventory of theories dealing with global poverty and justice: It emphasizes the importance (...) of giving victims of poverty due weight in theorizing about poverty. It provides a vocabulary to conceptualize the experiences of suffering by poverty in terms of misrecognition. It highlights the importance of legal recognition and of actually having certain rights in order to be respected. It bases its critique of poverty on a particular idea of justice and how it should unfold. Finally, recognition theory demands that the poor must be involved in decision-making processes and their agency has .. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider what one might call a negative-critical turn in egalitarian political theorizing, according to which egalitarians should not begin with a positive account of how a society...

Current and past pandemics have several aspects in common. It is expected that all members of society contribute to beat it. But it is also clear that the risks associated with the pandemic are different for different groups. This makes that appeals to solidarity based on technocratic risk calculations are only partially successful. Objective ‘risks of transmission’ may, for example, be trumped by risks of letting down people in need of help or by missing out certain opportunities in life. In (...) this paper we argue that a rapprochement of the insights of standpoint epistemology with pandemic science and pandemic policy making may be an important step toward making pandemic science more accurate and pandemic calls for solidarity more effective. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungIn diesem Text werde ich zwei Thesen entfalten: Erstens, dass romantische Liebe Teil einer guten Jugend ist. Liebe als Teil einer guten Jugend hat mehrere Bestandteile: Jugendliche sollten romantische Liebe erleben können, wenn sie es wollen. Sie sollten das Wissen und die Fähigkeiten erlangen, romantische Liebe zu verstehen und adäquat mit den positiven Potentialen und auch den Risiken umgehen zu können. Jugendliche sollten lernen, die möglichen Enttäuschungen, die mit romantischer Liebe verbunden sein können, adäquat zu verarbeiten und darin gegebenenfalls Unterstützung (...) erfahren. Jugendliche sollten darin befähigt werden, die sozialen und kulturellen Normen und Praktiken, die die Vorstellungen romantischer Liebe prägen, zu reflektieren und zu hinterfragen. Zweitens ist zu klären, welche moralischen Rechte und Pflichten die Eltern und staatliche Institutionen haben. Ich plädiere dafür, diese so zu verstehen, dass sie Jugendliche in der Erlangung und adäquaten Auslebung romantischer Liebe unterstützen und ihnen bei der Entwicklung dieser Fähigkeiten die notwendigen Ressourcen zur Verfügung stellen sollten. (shrink)

A number of philosophers have become interested in the ways that individuals are subject to harm as the performers of illocutionary acts. This paper offers an account of the underlying structure of such harms: I argue that speakers are the subjects of illocutionary harm when there is interference in the entitlement structure of their linguistic activities. This interference comes in two forms: denial and incapacitation. In cases of denial, a speaker is prevented from achieving the outcomes to which they are (...) entitled by their speech. In cases of incapacitation, a speaker’s standing to expect certain outcomes is itself undermined. I also discuss how individual speakers are subject to interference along two dimensions: as exercisers of certain non-linguistic capacities, and as producers of meaningful speech. (shrink)

According to relational egalitarians, equality is not primarily about the distribution of some good but about people relating to one another as equals. However, compared with other theorists in political philosophy – including other egalitarians – relational egalitarians have said relatively little on what role personal responsibility should play in their theories. For example, is equality compatible with responsibility? Should economic distributions be responsibility-sensitive? This article fills this gap. I develop a relational egalitarian framework for personal responsibility and show that (...) relational equality commits us to responsibility. I develop two sets of arguments. First, I draw on relational theories of moral responsibility – particularly Strawsonian views – to show that valuable egalitarian relationships require responsibility. Second, I show why relational equality sometimes requires that economic distributions be sensitive to responsibility and choice. I also defend a seemingly paradoxical result: being committed to responsibility, relational egalitarianism not only justifies some distributive inequalities but some relational inequalities too. Overall, relational egalitarianism gives a nuanced and coherent answer as to why and how responsibility matters from within egalitarianism. That it does should be an important argument in its favour. (shrink)

Abstract 1 This paper makes a preliminary case for a central and radical claim. I begin with Bernard Williams? seldom-faced argument that integrity cannot be a moral virtue because it lacks two key ingredients of moral virtues, namely a characteristic thought and motivation. Whereas, for example, generosity involves the thought that another could use assistance, and the motivation to actually give assistance, integrity lacks these two things essential to morally excellent responses. I show that several maneuvers aimed at avoiding Williams? (...) challenge fail and that others are likely to remain unpersuasive. The paper concludes by offering an argument to the best explanation: Williams? important insight is best explained by the supposition that integrity is an epistemic virtue, and an epistemic virtue of a practical sort. (shrink)

This paper defends the claim that pragmatic encroachment—the idea that knowledge is sensitive to the practical stakes of believing—can explain a distinctive kind of epistemic injustice: the injustice that occurs when prejudice causes someone to know less than they otherwise would. This encroachment injustice, as we call it, occurs when the threat of being met with prejudice raises the stakes for someone to rely on her belief when acting, by raising the level of evidential support required for knowledge. We explain (...) this notion of encroachment injustice, connect it to the empirical literature on implicit bias, and defend it against important objections. (shrink)

According to the Maxim of Quality, rational agents tend to speak honestly. Due to the influence of Grice, a connection between linguistic rationality and honesty is often taken for granted. However, the connection is not obvious: structural rationality in language use does not require honesty, any more than it requires dishonesty. In particular, Quality does not follow from the Cooperative Principle and structural rationality. But then what is honest rational speech? I propose to move the discussion in the context of (...) Stalnaker's theory of assertion. From this perspective, although there is no most rational way to behave, Quality follows from the structure of Stalnakerian conversations if interlocutors are sensitive to credibility. In this case, honesty is built on the expectation of reciprocity, and cooperativity is an outcome and not a precondition of rational communication. A benefit of my discussion is that the account of linguistic rationality falls under the more general view of interactive rationality familiar from theoretical economics. (shrink)

Narrative ethics taps into an inherent human need to tell our own stories centred on our own moral values and to have those stories heard and acknowledged. However, not everyone’s words are afforded equal power. The use of narrative ethics in bioethical decision-making is problematized by a disparity in whose stories are told, whose stories are heard, and whose stories are believed. Here, I conduct an analysis of narrative ethics through a critical theory lens to show how entrenched patterns of (...) narrative neglect in medicine are harming not only our capacity to make use of narrative ethics but also our capacity to deliver effective healthcare. To illustrate this point, I use three examples where the patient’s gender affects how their stories unfold: autism, weight, and pain management. From these, I argue that the use of narrative ethics without the application of a critical theory lens risks the exacerbation of what Miranda Fricker refers to as “testimonial injustice,” the prima facie harm experienced by individuals whose credibility is undermined by others’ prejudices. Finally, I suggest that narrative ethics can be a powerful tool for mitigating oppressive practices in medicine if we couple it with critical analysis that enables us to understand the power dynamics at play in storytelling. (shrink)

Saul_Jennifer, Scepticism and Implicit Bias.

Standard evolutionary explanations seem unable to account for inclusivist shifts that expand the circle of moral concern beyond strategically relevant cooperators. Recently, Allen Buchanan and Russell Powell have argued that this shows that that evolutionary conservatism – the view that our inherited psychology imposes significant feasibility constraints on how much inclusivist moral progress can be achieved – is unjustified. Secondly, they hold that inclusivist gains can be sustained, and exclusivist tendencies curbed, under certain favorable socio-economic conditions. I argue that Buchanan (...) and Powell concede too much to the evolutionary conservative, because their second point shows that conservatives are right about the first: inclusivist shifts are unrealistic where it matters most, namely under harsh social, political and economic conditions. I suggest two promising strategies for solving this problem. One is to focus on different forms of moral progress to secure the same moral gains. The other is to look beyond possible extensions of our psychological capacities altogether, by providing institutional support that renders them irrelevant. We should bypass, rather than further stretch, the constraints of our evolved psychology to make moral progress possible. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that recent evidence regarding the psychological basis of moral cognition supports a form of (moderate) moral abolitionism. I identify three main problems undermining the epistemic quality of our moral judgments – contamination, reliability, and bad incentives – and reject three possible responses: neither moral expertise, nor moral learning, nor the possibility of moral progress succeed in solving the aforementioned epistemic problems. The result is a moderate form of moral abolitionism, according to which we should make (...) fewer moral judgments much more carefully. (shrink)

El presente artículo intenta retomar el tema de la injusticia social con el fin de poder construir una caracterización útil para la filosofía política. La hipótesis principal es que el tema de la injusticia es tan importante como el de la justicia —de la cual hay ilustres teorías filosóficas— pero que no puede ser comprendido cabalmente si se le considera solamente como el polo opuesto de esta. En apoyo de esta idea se desarrollan tres dimensiones de la injusticia social: mala (...) distribución de bienes y servicios, exclusión y desempoderamiento, las que se ponen a prueba en un caso particular. De otra parte, se señala la importancia de distinguir a la injusticia de la mala suerte o el infortunio. Estas consideraciones conducen, en la parte final del texto, a tratar el tema de las víctimas y de la posibilidad del cambio. (shrink)

Iris Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good—especially the first essay, “The Idea of Perfection”—is often associated with a critique of a certain picture of agency and its proper place in ethical thought. There is implicit in this critique, however, an alternative, much richer one. I propose a reading of Murdochian agency in terms of the continuous activity of cultivating and refining a distinctive practical standpoint, and I apply this reading to her account of moral progress. For Murdoch moral progress depends on (...) transcending egoism and achieving clear perception of a normatively-saturated reality, but it would be a mistake to think of egoism in terms of selfishness, or clarity in terms of altruism. Rather, I argue, Murdochian moral progress requires overcoming socially-conditioned and often ideological forms of alienation, and making the social conditions that inform our practical standpoints self-conscious. (shrink)

The dominant conception of delusion in psychiatry (in textbooks, research papers, diagnostic manuals, etc.) is predominantly epistemic. Delusions are almost always characterized in terms of their epistemic defects, i.e., defects with respect to evidence, reasoning, judgment, etc. However, there is an individualistic bias in the epistemic conception; the alleged epistemic defects and abnormalities in delusions relate to individualistic epistemic processes rather than social epistemic processes. We endorse the social epistemological turn in recent philosophical epistemology, and claim that a corresponding turn (...) is needed in the study of delusions. It is a turn from the (purely) individualistic conception, which characterizes delusions only by individualistic epistemic defects and abnormalities, to the (partially) social epistemic conception, which characterizes delusions by individualistic as well as social epistemic defects and abnormalities. This paper is intended as an initial step toward such a social epistemological turn. In particular, we will develop a new model of the development of delusions according to which testimonial abnormalities, including testimonial isolation and testimonial discount, are a causal factor in the development of delusions. (shrink)

Among the deeper strata of Rorty’s philosophy is what I call his aversion to normative violence. Normative violence occurs when some specific group presents itself as having a privileged relation to reality. The alternative to normative violence is recognizing that cultural politics has priority over ontology. I trace this Rortyan idea to its origins in Nietzsche and Sellars. Rorty’s contribution is to combine Nietzsche on the death of God and Sellars on the Myth of the Given. However, I conclude with (...) a suggestion that Rorty ultimately goes too far in thinking that avoiding normative violence requires abstaining from metaphysics and epistemology as such. (shrink)

This essay frames systemic patterns of mental abuse against women of color and Indigenous women on Turtle Island (North America) in terms of larger design-of-distribution strategies in settler colonial societies, as these societies use various forms of social power to distribute, reproduce, and automate social inequalities (including public health precarities and mortality disadvantages) that skew socio-economic gain continuously toward white settler populations and their descendants. It departs from traditional studies in gender-based violence research that frame mental abuses such as gaslighting--commonly (...) understood as mental manipulation through lying or deceit--stochastically, as chance-driven interpersonal phenomena. Building on structural analyses of knowledge in political epistemology (Dotson 2012, Berenstain 2016), political theory (Davis and Ernst 2017), and Indigenous social theory (Tuck and Yang 2012), I develop the notion of cultural gaslighting to refer to the social and historical infrastructural support mechanisms that disproportionately produce abusive mental ambients in settler colonial cultures in order to further the ends of cultural genocide and dispossession. I conclude by proposing a social epidemiological account of gaslighting that a) highlights the public health harms of abusive ambients for minority populations, b) illuminates the hidden rules of social structure in settler colonial societies, and c) amplifies the corresponding need for structural reparations. (shrink)

Abstract“Patient-centred care” is the recent response to the malaise produced in the field of health care from the point of view both of a technical mentality and the paternalistic model. The interest in the story-telling approach shown by both the humanities and the social sciences has favoured a “narrative turn” in medicine too, where the new ethics of therapeutic relationship consider the hermeneutic method a means by which to integrate evidence and subjectivity, scientific data and patient experience. The aim of (...) this paper is to show how Ricoeur’s theory of “threefold mimesis” makes a conceptual contribution to the use of narrative interviews in nursing and also be successfully transferred into and applied in the field of healthcare in general. First, the paper examines how this narrative approach might open up new possibilities for the acquisition of in-depth knowledge of patients’ life experiences, a condition indispensable for the improvement of the quality of care. Secondly, it highlights how this Ricoeurian method seems capable of provide an opportunity for healthcare professionals to review their own understanding of the caregiver-patient therapeutic relationship, beginning with their confrontation with the patient’s world as revealed by the narrative they provide. (shrink)

In ordinary conversation, speakers disagree not only about worldly facts, but also about how to use language to describe the world. For example, disagreement about whether Buffalo is in the American Midwest, whether Pluto is a planet, or whether someone has been canceled, can persist even with agreement about all the relevant facts. The speakers may still engage in “metalinguistic negotiation”—disputing what to mean by “Midwest”, “planet”, or “cancel”. I first motivate an approach to metalinguistic negotiation that generalizes a Stalnakerian (...) theory of communication by including linguistic commitments in the conversational common ground. Then, I turn to cases where the very status of a disagreement as metalinguistic or factual is unclear or contested. For example, after the publication of the New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project, some responses claimed to identify factual errors, while others took those same “errors” to be matters of interpretation. I’ll consider how to extend our theorizing about metalinguistic negotiation to this type of (even more) “meta” disagreement, using the discussion following the 1619 Project as a case study. On my view, in most such cases, there will be a metalinguistic negotiation going on. Still, I explain several ways in which, despite a dispute being metalinguistic, the factualist side can sometimes receive important vindication. I also discuss why it can make sense for speakers to contest the status of a dispute. (shrink)

Is it necessary and is it possible to develop and justify a meaningful concept of women’s solidarity? In this contribution, I will answer both of these questions in the affirmative. Starting by developing a concept of solidarity, I then move on to discussing the intricate question of a consistent and meaningful concept of ‘woman’. After suggesting a solution to the semantic as well as ontological problems, I turn to the idea of collective experiences of oppression as a possible basis or (...) at least a starting point for women’s solidarity. The idea of collective experiences has tobe enriched, however, by referring to the idea of political imagination in order to demonstrate a way of providing convincing interpretations of shared experiences. In a last step, I discuss – following Habermas – the relation between solidarity and justice, since it is solely the idea of justice which can motivate as well as justify claims to solidarity. I end by having a brief look at conflicting claims of solidarity and the problem of intersectionality. (shrink)

Thought insertion is a condition characterized by the impression that one's thoughts are not one’s own and have been inserted by others. Some have explained the condition as resulting, in part, from impaired or defective self-knowledge, or knowledge of one’s mental states. I argue that such models do not shed light on the most puzzling feature of thought insertion: the patient’s experience that an introspected thought does not feel like her own. After examining ways in which existing versions of the (...) model might address this worry, I propose a significant modification. I argue that the experience of disownership consists in a rational indifference that one feels towards one’s inserted thought. I further contend that the experience is generated by an underlying absence of an expectation of rational authority towards the inserted thought, such that the patient does not expect her thought to reflect, or be shaped by, her own rational considerations. I defend my proposal using empirical studies from cognitive and social psychology which suggest that we ordinarily have and experience an expectation of rational authority towards a certain subset of our thoughts, and direct analysis of patient reports, which strongly suggest that it is this expectation and the corresponding experience that thought insertion patients lack. (shrink)

Wikipedia has become increasingly prominent in online search results, serving as an initial path for the public to access “facts,” and lending plausibility to its autobiographical claim to be “the sum of all human knowledge.” However, this self-conception elides Wikipedia’s role as the world’s largest online site of encyclopedic knowledge production. A repository for established facts, Wikipedia is also a social space in which the facts themselves are decided. As a community, Wikipedia is guided by the five pillars—principles that inform (...) and undergird the prevailing epistemic and social norms and practices for Wikipedia participation and contributions. We contend these pillars lend structural support to and help entrench Wikipedia’s gender gap as well as its lack of diversity in both participation and content. In upholding these pillars, Wikipedians may unknowingly undermine otherwise reasonable calls for inclusivity, subsequently reproducing systemic biases. We propose an alternative set of pillars developed through the lens of feminist epistemology, drawing on Lorraine Code’s notion of epistemic responsibility and Helen Longino’s notion of procedural objectivity. Our aim is not only to reduce bias, but also to make Wikipedia a more robust, reliable, and transparent site for knowledge production. (shrink)