Feminist philosophy of science appears to present problems for the ideal of value-free science. These difficulties also challenge a traditional understanding of the objectivity of science. However, feminist philosophers of science have good reasons for desiring to retain some concept of objectivity. The present essay considers several recent and influential feminist approaches to the role of social and political values in science, with particular focus on feminist empiricism and feminist standpoint theory. The similarities and difference, as well as the strengths (...) and weaknesses of these approaches are explored. The essay concludes with suggestions for future research in the area of feminist epistemology and philosophy of science. (shrink)

ABSTRACT What, if anything, should we do when someone says they don’t believe in anthropogenic climate change? Or that they worry that a COVID-19 vaccine might be dangerous? We argue that in general, we face an epistemic duty to object to such assertions, qua instances of science denial and science sceptical discourse, respectively. Our argument builds on recent discussions in social epistemology, specifically surrounding the idea that we ought to speak up against (epistemically) problematic assertions so as to fulfil an (...) important epistemic obligation – namely, preventing epistemic harms in others. We show that both science denial (SD) and vaccine hesitant (VH) discourses are harmful in a distinctively epistemic sense, and as such generate an especially strong duty to voice our disagreement. As we also argue, this obligation is nonetheless defeasible: depending on the situational features of those involved, voicing an objection to VH discourse may actually end up doing more harm than good. We conclude by tracing what seems like a promising path towards restoring well-placed public trust in scientific testifiers. Doing so is key in order to guarantee equitable access to warranted beliefs about important subject matters, such as the safety of vaccines, to all segments of society. (shrink)

The Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission has been mandated to collect testimonies from survivors of the Indian Residential Schools system. The TRC demands survivors of the residential school system to share their personal narratives under the assumption that the sharing of narratives will inform the Canadian public of the residential school legacy and will motivate a transformation of settler identity. I contend, however, that the TRC provides a concrete example of how a politics of recognition fails to transform relationships between (...) Native and settler Canadians not only because it enacts an internalization of colonial recognition, but because it fails to account for what I call “settler ignorance.” Work in epistemologies of ignorance and epistemic oppression gives language to explain sustained denial and provide tools to further understand how settler denial is sustained, and how it can be made visible, and so challenged. For this task, Mills’s articulation of white ignorance should be expanded to a consideration of white settler ignorance. Over and above an account of white ignorance, such an account will have to consider the underlying logics of settler colonialism. This characterization of settler ignorance will show that the denial of past and ongoing violence against Indigenous peoples, through the reconstruction of the past to assert the primacy of settlers, is not explainable in terms of a lack of recognition but is rather structural ignorance. (shrink)

In this article, I discuss cases in which moral grievances, particularly assertions that a moral injury has taken place, are systematically obstructed by received linguistic and epistemic practices. I suggest a social epistemological model for theorizing such cases of moral epistemic injustice. Towards this end, I offer a reconstruction of Lyotard’s concept of the differend, comparing it with Miranda Fricker’s concept of epistemic injustice, and considering it in light of some criticisms posed by Axel Honneth. Through this reconstruction and a (...) series of examples, I demonstrate that a basic formal structure recurs in cases of discursively repressed moral injury, namely, a particular kind of dilemma. I argue that appreciating this dilemma pushes us in the direction of a form of non-ideal ethical theory and I conclude by elaborating a conception of moral reflective judgement that begins from particular experiences of moral injury and moves towards the creation of new moral universals. (shrink)

Recent discussions in critical social epistemology have raised the idea that the concept 'knower' is not only an epistemological concept, but an ethical concept as well. Though this idea plays a central role in these discussions, the theoretical underpinnings of the claim have not received extended scrutiny. This paper explores the idea that 'knower' is an irreducibly ethical concept in an effort to defend its use as a critical concept. In Section 1, I begin with the claim that 'knower' is (...) an irreducibly normative and social concept, drawing from some ideas in Wilfrid Sellars. In Section 2, I argue that one's being a knower involves demands for various sorts of ethically-laden recognition. I develop this thought by arguing that Axel Honneth's threefold typology of recognition—love, respect, and esteem—finds clear expression within the context of socio-epistemic practice. I conclude in Section 3 by arguing that Miranda Fricker's proposed " analogy " between epistemic and moral perception should be modified to indicate a closer relationship than mere analogy. (shrink)

In this paper, I make explicit some implicit commitments to realism and conceptualism in recent work in social epistemology exemplified by Miranda Fricker and Charles Mills. I offer a survey of recent writings at the intersection of social epistemology, feminism, and critical race theory, showing that commitments to realism and conceptualism are at once implied yet undertheorized in the existing literature. I go on to offer an explicit defense of these commitments by drawing from the epistemological framework of John McDowell, (...) demonstrating the relevance of the metaphor of the “space of reasons” for theorizing and criticizing instances of epistemic injustice. I then point out how McDowell’s own view requires expansion and revision in light of Mills' concept of 'epistemologies of ignorance'. I conclude that, when their strengths are used to make up for each others' weaknesses, Mills and McDowell’s positions mutually reinforce one another, producing a powerful model for theorizing instances of systematic ignorance and false belief. (shrink)

This paper develops two related theses concerning resentment. The first, which I label the ‘prior norm requirement’, holds that feelings of resentment are grounded in the resenter’s conviction that some portion of their existing normative expectations has been violated. The second holds that resentments can make a rational contribution to the development of new normative expectations, transforming the resenter’s existing normative outlook. Certain expressions of the prior norm requirement in recent theory clash with the notion of norm-creative resentments, portraying resentment (...) as essentially conservative of existing norms. Against this, I develop the notion of ‘emotional articulation’, according to which emotions like resentment can involve cognitively complex processes of working through the meaning of experiences of wrongdoing, in ways that give rise to genuinely new normative commitments. I develop this through critical comparison with Martha Nussbaum’s cognitive-evaluative theory of emotion and by drawing from Charles Taylor’s notion of articulation. (shrink)

Intellectual humility has attracted attention in both philosophy and psychology. Philosophers have clarified the nature of intellectual humility as an epistemic virtue; and psychologists have developed scales for measuring people’s intellectual humility. Much less attention has been paid to the potential effects of intellectual humility on people’s negative attitudes and to its relationship with prejudice-based epistemic vices. Here we fill these gaps by focusing on the relationship between intellectual humility and prejudice. To clarify this relationship, we conducted four empirical studies. (...) The results of these studies show three things. First, people are systematically prejudiced towards members of groups perceived as dissimilar. Second, intellectual humility weakens the association between perceived dissimilarity and prejudice. Third, more intellectual humility is associated withmoreprejudice overall. We show that this apparently paradoxical pattern of results is consistent with the idea that it is both psychologically and rationally plausible that one person is at the same time intellectually humble, epistemically virtuous and strongly prejudiced. (shrink)

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada made it clear that understanding the historical, social, cultural, and political landscape that shapes the relationships between Indigenous peoples and social institutions, including the health care system, is crucial to achieving social justice. How to translate this recognition into more equitable health policy and practice remains a challenge. In particular, there is limited understanding of ways to respond to situations in which conventional practices mandated by the state and regulated by its legal apparatus (...) come into direct conflict with the values and autonomy of Indigenous individuals, communities, and nations. In this paper, we consider two cases of conflict between Indigenous and biomedical perspectives to clarify some of the competing values. We argue for the importance of person‐ and people‐centered approaches to health care. These value conflicts must be understood at multiple levels to clarify their personal, social, cultural, and political dimensions. Taking into account the divergence between epistemic cultures and communities allows us to understand the multiple narratives deployed in decision‐making processes in clinical, community, and juridical contexts. Recognizing the knowledge claims of Indigenous peoples in health care can help clinicians avoid reinforcing the divides created by the structural and institutional legacy of colonialism. This analysis also provides ways to adjudicate conflicts in health care decision‐making by disentangling cultural, political, medical, and pragmatic issues to allow for respectful dialogue. Insofar as the engagement with cultural pluralism in health care rights is conducted with reciprocal recognition, the medical community and Indigenous peoples can address together the difficult question of how to integrate different epistemic cultures in the health care system. (shrink)

Recent literature on the relationship between knowledge and justice has tended to focus exclusively on the social and ethical dimensions of this relationship (e.g. social injustices related to knowledge and power, etc.). For the purposes of this article, I am interested in examining the virtue of justice and its effects on the cognitive faculties of its possessor (and, correspondingly, the effects of the vice of injustice). Drawing upon Thomas Aquinas’s account of the virtue of justice, I argue that in certain (...) cases justice can be a criterion of epistemic evaluation and that it deserves more attention than it has been given among virtue epistemologists. More precisely, the virtue of justice may become a criterion of epistemic evaluation in cases when a belief is formed on the basis of testimony. It would seem that there are cases when A’s assent to proposition p is something that is owed to B on the basis of B’s testimony; or there may be instances when A is culpable for declining to let B’s testimony have any effect on A’s belief. I briefly sketch four distinct scenarios in which this bears out. (shrink)

This paper investigates how intuitions about scientific discovery using artificial intelligence can be used to improve our understanding of scientific discovery more generally. Traditional accounts of discovery have been agent-centred: they place emphasis on identifying a specific agent who is responsible for conducting all, or at least the important part, of a discovery process. We argue that these accounts experience difficulties capturing scientific discovery involving AI and that similar issues arise for human discovery. We propose an alternative, collective-centred view as (...) superior for understanding discovery, with and without AI. This view maintains that discovery is performed by a collective of agents and entities, each making contributions that differ in significance and character, and that attributing credit for discovery depends on various finer-grained properties of the contributions made. Detailing its conceptual resources, we argue that this view is considerably more compelling than its agent-centred alternative. Considering and responding to several theoretical and practical challenges, we point to concrete avenues for further developing the view we propose. (shrink)

In Moral philosophy meets social psychology, Gilbert Harman argues that social psychology can educate folk morality to prevent us from committing the ‘fundamental attribution error,’ i.e. ‘the error of ignoring situational factors and overconfidently assuming that distinctive behaviour or patterns of behaviour are due to an agent’s distinctive character traits’ (Harman, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 99, 315–331, 1999). An overview of the literature shows that while situationists unanimously agree with Harman on this point, they disagree on whether we also (...) tend to commit a kind of fundamental attribution error with respect to moral responsibility and blame. Do we also tend to ignore situational factors and overconfidently assume that people are morally responsible and blameworthy for their distinctive patterns of wrongful behaviour? Very few scholars have addressed this issue, and none has ever given a comprehensive account of moral responsibility and blame from a situationist perspective. In this paper, I argue that situationist social psychology impugns subjective theories of responsibility and blame which focus on the agent’s inner states and supports an objective theory—namely, the standard of the reasonable person. I defend this standard as a tool for moral appraisal, and then I refute the common misperception that this approach lets most perpetrators off the hook and poses a threat to society. (shrink)

When we focus on asymmetries of power in our society, we find that blame and praise are unfairly distributed, partly due to cultural narratives that favour and exonerate the privileged. This paper provides a partial explanation for this skewed distribution of blame and praise. I draw on three analyses of disappearance narratives that erase and exonerate privileged perpetrators and therefore skew the responsibility system in their favour. Then I defend an emancipatory theory of responsibility that treats blame and praise as (...) communicative entities that can, and should, be used to debunk and dismantle these disappearance narratives, along with other oppressive ideologies. Blame and praise, on my emancipatory proposal, serve to identify and take a stand against agents of oppression and to recognize and celebrate resisters. (shrink)

This paper argues that diversity and uptake are required for objectivity. In philosophy, women are underrepresented with respect to teaching, publishing, and citations. This undermines the objectivity of our research output. To improve women’s representation and objectivity in philosophy, we should take steps to increase women’s numbers and institute uptake-conducive conditions. In concrete terms, this means fostering an appreciation for diversity, diversifying evaluators, integrating women’s contributions into mainstream discourse, and reducing implicit bias.

In his influential work on critical argumentation, Douglas Walton explains how to judge whether an argumentum ad verecundiam is fallacious or legitimate. He provides six critical questions and a number of ancillary sub-questions to guide the identification of reasonable appeals to authority. While it is common for informal logicians to acknowledge the role of bias in sampling procedures and hypothesis confirmation , there is a conspicuous lack of discourse on the effect of identity prejudice on judgments of authority, even though (...) this is a well-documented factor in attributing credibility, expertise, trustworthiness, and professional competence to oppressed groups. This could result in faulty judgments of ad verecundiam fallacy. Focusing on gender bias, I review recent works in feminist epistemology—particularly those of Miranda Fricker and Helen Longino —to develop three gender-based critical questions to supplement Walton’s original list of six. This addition will help us to identify erroneous dismissals of appeals to authority based on epistemic injustice and epistemic irresponsibility on the part of the speaker or knowledge community. This project promotes the overlapping aims of feminist epistemology and informal logic. (shrink)

This paper explores the intersection between affect, emotion, social imaginaries, and institutions through the lens of epistemic power in the academy. It argues that attending to this intersection is critical for a fuller understanding of how affective and emotional dynamics can assist to entrench, but also disrupt, asymmetries of epistemic privilege that cut across lines of race, sex, and other markers of social difference. As part of this discussion the paper reflects on the possibility of intervening in dominant social imaginaries (...) that become sedimented in the routine operations of the modern university, and which produce affective ecologies that sustain epistemic exclusions within academic institutions. (shrink)

Intellectual humility can be broadly construed as being conscious of the limits of one’s existing knowledge and capable of acquiring more knowledge, which makes it a key virtue of the information age. However, the claim “I am humble” seems paradoxical in that someone who has the disposition in question would not typically volunteer it. Therefore, measuring intellectual humility via self-report may be methodologically unsound. As a consequence, we suggest analyzing intellectual humility semantically, using a psycholexical approach that focuses on both (...) synonyms and antonyms of ‘intellectual humility’. We present a thesaurus-based methodology to map the semantic space of intellectual humility and the vices it opposes as a heuristic to support analysis and diagnosis of this disposition. We performed the mapping both in English and German in order to test for possible cultural differences in the understanding of intellectual humility. In both languages, we find basically the same three semantic dimensions of intellectual humility as well as three dimensions of its related vices. The resulting semantic clusters were validated in an empirical study with English and German participants. We find medium-to-high correlations between thesaurus similarity and perceived similarity, and we can validate the three dimensions identified in the study. But we also find limitations of the thesaurus methodology in terms of cluster plausibility. We conclude by discussing the importance of these findings for constructing psychometric measures of intellectual humility via self-report vs. computer models. (shrink)

This article brings together two sets of insights about deliberative democracy and uses them to develop a novel epistemic justification for the importance of testimony. Some democratic theorists have argued persuasively that a deliberative process limited to formal argumentation is exclusionary and thus undermines democratic legitimacy; they have made a compelling case for testimony on grounds of democratic inclusion. Others have made the case that deliberation has important epistemic benefits. Those theorists emphasize the give and take of reasons as a (...) means to arrive at well-informed collective decisions. The author’s central claim is that there is an important epistemic value to the inclusion of testimony. It can introduce new information into the deliberative process. It can enable deliberators to grasp connections between the particular and the general. And it can invite them to imaginatively engage with the experiences of others. These epistemic benefits provide a new set of reasons for including testimony in democratic deliberation. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider how the discourse on global epistemic justice might be approached differently if some contributions from the African philosophical place are taken seriously. To be specific, I argue that the debate on global justice broadly has not been global. I cite as an example, the exclusion or marginalisation of African philosophy, what it has contributed and what it may yet contribute to the global epistemic edifice. I point out that this exclusion is a case of epistemic (...) injustice. I observe that the absence of a philosophical technique that prevails on philosophers to engage with others from other traditions might be responsible for this epistemic lopsidedness and marginalisation. I go beyond the re-statement of this problem of marginalisation of African philosophy to point out relevant doctrines from the African place. I show how they are united under the methodological and ideological disposition of conversationalism. I argue that this ideology might be a better model for realising the goal of global epistemic justice which is the overcoming of all forms of exclusions and lopsidedness in global epistemic discourses through fair allocation of intellectual spaces. (shrink)

Reluctance to adopt mask-wearing as a preventive measure is widely observed in many Western societies since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemics. This reluctance toward mask adoption, like any other complex social phenomena, will have multiple causes. Plausible explanations have been identified, including political polarization, skepticism about media reports and the authority of public health agencies, and concerns over liberty, amongst others. In this paper, we propose potential explanations hitherto unnoticed, based on the framework of epistemic injustice. We show how (...) testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice may be at work to shape the reluctant mask adoption at both the societal and individual levels. We end by suggesting how overcoming these epistemic injustices can benefit the global community in this challenging situation and in the future. (shrink)

In this paper, I will identify two problems of trust in an AI-relevant context: a theoretical problem and a practical one. I will identify and address a number of skeptical challenges to an AI-relevant theory of trust. In addition, I will identify what I shall term the ‘scope challenge’, which I take to hold for any AI-relevant theory of trust that purports to be representationally adequate to the multifarious forms of trust and AI. Thereafter, I will suggest how trust-engineering, a (...) position that is intermediate between the modified pure rational-choice account and an account that gives rise to trustworthy AI, might allow us to address the practical problem of trust, before identifying and critically evaluating two candidate trust-engineering approaches. (shrink)

Social constructionist analysis of kind terms such as ‘women’ are often criticized as counterintuitive. In response, Haslanger claims that such charges are moot once the distinctions between different types of philosophical analyses and their corresponding concepts are in place. I argue that even with the said distinctions, the Haslangerian definition of ‘women’ is problematic. Drawing on recent discussions on contextualism, metalinguistic negotiation, and the crucial role solidarity plays in politically significant terms, I claim that Haslanger’s replies would lead to consequences (...) contrary to the stated goal of her project. Moreover, I offer a new proposal that takes seriously the aim of ameliorating ‘women.’ My account draws on a dynamic understanding of solidarity based on feminist reconceptualization and makes recourse to Mikkola’s model of trait/norm covariance. Based on the vision that a proper ameliorative analysis in the positive moment should be forward-looking to enhance our coordination in a more just society, my construal elucidates what ‘women’ can and ought to be. (shrink)

Vocal fry is a phonation, or voicing, in which an individual drops their voice below its natural register and consequently emits a low, growly, creaky tone of voice. Media outlets have widely acknowledged it as a generational vocal style characteristic of millennial women. Critics of vocal fry often claim that it is an exclusively female vocal pattern, and some say that the voicing is so distracting that they cannot understand what is being said under the phonation. Claiming that a phonation (...) is so distracting as to prevent uptake of the semantic content of an utterance associated with it is an extreme reaction, especially when accompanied by demands for women to change their phonation. We argue that this reaction limits women's communicative autonomy. We analyze the extreme reaction to female vocal fry, which we characterize as a non-content-based response, from the perspectives of philosophy of language, feminist epistemology, and linguistics. We argue that when fry is heard as annoying and distracting, it is because the hearer interprets the speaker as echoing an utterance from a position of authority to which she is not entitled. We show that this reaction encodes conscious or unconscious sexist attitudes toward women's voices. (shrink)

The paper articulates a new understanding of individual responsibility focused on exercises of agency in reason-giving rather than intentional actions or attitudes towards others. Looking at how agents make sense of their actions, we identify a distinctive but underexplored space for assessing individual responsibility within collective actions. As a case in point, we concentrate on reason-giving for one's own involvement in systemic corruption. We characterize systemic corruption in terms of its public ‘unavowability’ and focus on the redescriptions to which corrupt (...) agents typically resort to vindicate their actions. Through a multidimensional approach to reason-giving, we show that the individual rationalisations these redescriptions point to are necessarily less-than-successful since they keep thedifferent categories of reasons involved in making sense of one’s own conduct misaligned. We argue that this involves a kind of tainted reasoning at the interface between epistemic vice and epistemic disadvantage. We then consider such test cases as self-deception, wilful ignorance, and actions on ‘autopilot’ to show that tainted reasoning is constitutive of systemic corruption, not merely caused by it. On this ground, we expound a new view of responsibility centred on reason-giving as the epistemic core which all responsibility assessments track. To demonstrate the interest of this view, we compare it with existing alternatives revolving around the ideas of accountability and attributability. We conclude by showing how our understanding of responsibility can shed new light on the analysis and normative assessment of an agent’s responsible ignorance. (shrink)

En este texto se analiza la importancia de la construcción o el fortalecimiento de la autoridad y confianza epistémicas desde la perspectiva de primera persona de las mujeres y cómo estas cualidades se pueden explorar en su íntima conexión con la confianza corporizada. Las mujeres, a través de sus experiencias particulares de sí mismas, del mundo y de los otros, asimilan de manera perjudicial la desconfianza epistémica que su comunidad de conocimiento les transmite. Se desarrolla esta tesis con base en (...) la concepción fenomenológica de cuerpo vivido, tal como fue planteada por Merleau-Ponty, pero con un énfasis en los trabajos de Simone de Beauvoir e Iris Young, pues son estos los que permiten comprender cómo las estructuras fundamentales de la experiencia y los modos de ser corporizados de las mujeres recorren una ruta experiencial diferente a la de los hombres en razón del tipo de sociedad en que se encuentran. En la parte final del texto se propone una manera de reconstruir o fortalecer la confianza y autoridad epistémicas de las mujeres a partir de una ruta de autoconocimiento corporizado y del cambio de hábitos. (shrink)

The literature on epistemic injustice currently displays a logocentric or propositional bias that excludes people with intellectual disabilities from the scope of epistemic agency and the demands of epistemic justice. This paper develops an account of epistemic agency and injustice that is inclusive of both people with and people without intellectual disabilities. I begin by specifying the hitherto undertheorized notion of epistemic agency. I develop a broader, pluralist account of epistemic agency, which relies on a conception of knowledge that accounts (...) not only for propositional knowing, but also for other types of knowing that have been largely neglected in debates on epistemic injustice and agency. Based on this pluralist account of epistemic agency, I then show that people with intellectual disabilities qualify as epistemic agents and therefore as subjects of epistemic justice. Finally, I argue that this pluralist account of epistemic agency pushes us to revisit the current conception of epistemic injustice and to expand its taxonomy in two important ways. (shrink)

The traditional blackface character Black Pete has been at the center of an intense controversy in the Netherlands, with most black citizens denouncing the tradition as racist and most white citizens endorsing it as harmless fun. I analyze the controversy as an utter failure, on the part of white citizens, of what Alison Jaggar has called multicultural literacy. This article aims to identify both the causes of this failure of multicultural literacy and the conditions required for multicultural literacy to be (...) possible. I argue that this failure of multicultural literacy is due to hermeneutical injustice and to white ignorance. I close by considering possible avenues for fostering multicultural literacy. (shrink)

The contrast between third- and first-personal accounts of the experiences of autistic persons has much to teach us about epistemic injustice and epistemic agency. This paper argues that bringing about greater epistemic justice for autistic people requires developing a relational account of epistemic agency. We begin by systematically identifying the many types of epistemic injustice autistic people face, specifically with regard to general assumptions regarding autistic people’s sociability or lack thereof, and by locating the source of these epistemic injustices in (...) neuronormativity and neurotypical ignorance. We then argue that this systematic identification pushes us to construe epistemic agency as resulting from a fundamentally relational and dynamic process between an individual, others around them, and their social, cultural, or institutional environment, rather than as a fixed and inherent property of individuals. Finally, we show how our relational account of epistemic agency allows us to introduce the novel concepts of epistemic disablement and epistemic enablement. We argue that these two concepts allow us to more accurately track the mechanisms that undermine or facilitate epistemic agency, and thereby to better understand how epistemic injustice arises and to design more effective interventions to foster greater epistemic justice for autistic people. (shrink)

Vice epistemology is the philosophical study of the nature, identity, and epistemological significance of intellectual vices. Such vices include gullibility, dogmatism, prejudice, closed-mindedness, and negligence. These are intellectual character vices, that is, intellectual vices that are also character traits. I ask how the notion of an intellectual character vice should be understood, whether such vices exist, and how they might be epistemologically significant. The proposal is that intellectual character vices are intellectual character traits that impede effective and responsible inquiry. I (...) argue that situationist critiques of virtue epistemology pose no significant threat to this proposal. Studies by social psychologists of belief in conspiracy theories suggest that it is sometimes appropriate to explain questionable beliefs by reference to intellectual character vices. Neither ‘regulative’ nor ‘analytic’ epistemology has any good reason to question the epistemological significance of such vices. (shrink)

Epistemic injustice occurs when we fail to appropriately respect others as epistemic agents. Philosophers building on the work of Miranda Fricker, who introduced the concept, have focused on epistemic injustices involving certain social categories, particularly race and gender. Can there be epistemic injustice attached to political conviction and affiliation? I argue yes: politics can be a salient social category that draws epistemic injustice. Epistemic injustices might also be intersectional, based on the overlap of politics and some other identity category like (...) race or sex. Further, and more provocatively, I argue that political minorities in academia, in particular conservatives and libertarians, are most likely the victims of epistemic injustice on the basis of their politics. Such epistemic injustices might even be routine. Although more limited in scope and severity than other forms of epistemic injustice, political epistemic injustices in academia ought to be of special concern from a standpoint of social justice because of the academy’s central role in knowledge production and dissemination. (shrink)

This paper argues that vice-charging, the practice of charging other persons with epistemic vice, can itself be epistemically vicious. It identifies some potential vices of vice-charging and identifies knowledge of other people as a type of knowledge that is obstructed by epistemically vicious attributions of epistemic vice. The hazards of vice-charging are illustrated by reference to the accusation that parents who hesitate to give their children the MMR triple vaccine are guilty of gullibility and dogmatism. Ethnographic and sociological research is (...) used to make the case that this charge is, in a significant range of cases, epistemically unjust and hinders attempts to make sense of vaccine hesitancy. This epistemic injustice consists in the representation of vaccine hesitant parents as less than full epistemic agents. A case is made for a more tolerant and inclusive approach, not only to vaccine hesitancy but also to other forms of unorthodoxy or non-compliance. The primary objective in these cases should be to achieve Verstehen of seemingly alien outlooks and practices so that policy makers and practitioners in public services can more effectively educate a sceptical public about the risks of vaccine hesitancy. (shrink)

In my article, I want to focus on the critique Cristina Lafont makes to expertocracy and epistocracy, mainly through the institution of judicial review, to which she dedicates chapter 7 and part of...

Some disagreements seem to be persistent: they are, pretty much, immune to persuasive argumentation. If that is the case, how can they be overcome? Can argumentation help us? I propose that to overcome persistent disagreements through argumentation, we need a dynamic and pluralistic version of argumentation. Therefore, I propose that argumentation, more than a tool that uses persuasion to change the mind of the counterpart, is a toolbox that contains persuasion, deliberation, negotiation, and other dialogical strategies that can be used (...) to reach an agreement. (shrink)

The phenomenological method has been fruitfully used to study the experience of illness in recent years. However, the role of illness is not merely that of a passive object for phenomenological scrutiny. I propose that illness, and pathology more generally, can be developed into a phenomenological method in their own right. I claim that studying cases of pathology, breakdown, and illness offer illumination not only of these experiences, but also of normal function and the tacit background that underpins it. In (...) particular, I claim that the study of embodiment can be greatly enhanced, and indeed would be incomplete, without attending to bodily breakdown and what I term bodily doubt. I offer an analogy between illness and Husserl’s epoché, suggesting that both are a source of distancing, and therefore motivate a reflective stance. (shrink)

In this paper, I will discuss the relevance of epistemology of disagreement to political disagreement. The two major positions in the epistemology of disagreement literature are the steadfast and the conciliationist approaches: while the conciliationist says that disagreement with one’s epistemic equals should compel one to epistemically “split the difference” with those peers, the steadfast approach claims that one can maintain one’s antecedent position even in the face of such peer disagreement. Martin Ebeling applies a conciliationist approach to democratic deliberations, (...) arguing that deliberative participants ought to pursue full epistemic conciliation when disagreeing with their peers on political questions. I argue that this epistemic “splitting the difference” could make participants vulnerable to certain cognitive biases. We might avoid these biases by paying more attention to the deliberative environment in which disagreement takes place. (shrink)

Chronic fatigue syndrome or myalgic encephalomyelitis remains a controversial illness category. This paper surveys the state of knowledge and attitudes about this illness and proposes that epistemic concerns about the testimonial credibility of patients can be articulated using Miranda Fricker’s concept of epistemic injustice. While there is consensus within mainstream medical guidelines that there is no known cause of CFS/ME, there is continued debate about how best to conceive of CFS/ME, including disagreement about how to interpret clinical studies of treatments. (...) Against this background, robust qualitative and quantitative research from a range of countries has found that many doctors display uncertainty about whether CFS/ME is real, which may result in delays in diagnosis and treatment for patients. Strikingly, qualitative research evinces that patients with CFS/ME often experience suspicion by health professionals, and many patients vocally oppose the effectiveness, and the conceptualization, of their illness as psychologically treatable. We address the intersection of these issues and healthcare ethics, and claim that this state of affairs can be explained as a case of epistemic injustice. We find evidence that healthcare consultations are fora where patients with CFS/ME may be particularly vulnerable to epistemic injustice. We argue that the marginalization of many patients is a professional failure that may lead to further ethical and practical consequences both for progressive research into CFS/ME, and for ethical care and delivery of current treatments among individuals suffering from this debilitating illness. (shrink)

A recurring concern within contemporary philosophy of language has been with the ways in which speakers can be illocutionarily silenced, i.e. hindered in their capacity to do things with words. Moving beyond the traditional conception of silencing as uptake failure, Mary Kate McGowan has recently claimed that silencing may also involve other forms of recognition failure. In this paper I first offer a supportive elaboration of McGowan’s claims by developing a social account of speech act performance, according to which the (...) success of an illocutionary act is not only a function of the intentions of and the conventions deployed by the speaker, but partly depends on how the act is recognized or taken up by the hearer. I then provide a comprehensive definition of illocutionary silencing and spell out what it means for it to occur in a systematic manner. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss the intrinsic value of truth from the perspective of the emotion studies in virtue epistemology. The strategy is the one that looks at epistemic emotions as driving forces towards truth as the most valuable epistemic good. But in doing so, a puzzle arises: how can the value of truth be intrinsic and instrumental? My answer lies in the difference established by Duncan Pritchard between epistemic value and the value of the epistemic applied to the case (...) of subjective motivations to knowing. I argue that the value of truth is intrinsic as epistemic value and that this is not only compatible with the idea that truth can have different kinds of instrumental values but also that the subjective value of truth, disclosed by epistemic emotions, can make the value of truth stronger if regulated within patterns of virtuous enquiry. (shrink)

This paper discusses the virtue epistemology literature on epistemic emotions and challenges the individualist, unworldly account of epistemic emotions. It argues that epistemic emotions can be truth-motivating if embedded in co-inquiry epistemic cultures, namely virtuous epistemic cultures that valorise participatory processes of inquiry as truth-conducive. Co-inquiry epistemic cultures are seen as playing a constitutive role in shaping, developing, and regulating epistemic emotions. Using key references to classical Pragmatism, the paper describes the bridge between epistemic emotions and co-inquiry culture in terms (...) of habits of co-inquiry that act as the scaffolding of epistemic emotions. The result is a context-sensitive and practice-oriented approach to epistemic emotions that conceives of those emotions as being shaped by co-inquiry epistemic cultures. (shrink)

“Public Trust in Expert Knowledge: Narrative, Ethics, and Engagement” examines the social, cultural, and ethical ramifications of changing public trust in the expert biomedical knowledge systems of emergent and complex global societies. This symposium was conceived as an interdisciplinary project, drawing on bioethics, the social sciences, and the medical humanities. We settled on public trust as a topic for our work together because its problematization cuts across our fields and substantive research interests. For us, trust is simultaneously a matter of (...) ethics, social relations, and the cultural organization of meaning. We share a commitment to narrative inquiry across our fields of expertise in the bioethics of transformative health technologies, public communications on health threats, and narrative medicine. The contributions to this symposium have applied, in different ways and with different effects, this interdisciplinary mode of inquiry, supplying new reflections on public trust, expertise, and biomedical knowledge. (shrink)

Alongside clinical practice, medical schools now confront mounting reasons to examine nontraditional approaches to ethics. Increasing awareness of systems of oppression and their effects on the experiences of trainees, patients, professionals, and generally on medical care, is pushing medical curriculum into an unfamiliar territory. While there is room throughout medical school to take up these concerns, ethics curricula are well-positioned to explore new pedagogical approaches. Feminist ethics has long addressed systems of oppression and broader structures of power. Some of its (...) established concepts can offer distinct value as medical climates change and adapt in response to increased awareness of the experiences of marginalized individuals and populations. In this essay, we offer a set of concepts from feminist ethics that have a fundamental role to play in medical school curriculum: relationality, relational autonomy, and epistemic justice. Though these concepts are not exhaustive, they can be taught in tandem with the concepts that have historically grounded ethics education in medical school, such as autonomy and beneficence. Ultimately, we contend that these concepts hold particular value in ethics curriculum insofar as they diversify mainstream ethical approaches, directly address the pervasiveness of systems of oppression in medicine, and recognize the voices and concerns that may be marginalized in standard approaches. (shrink)

This Bioethics and Biopolitics: Presents and Futures of Reproduction symposium draws together a series of articles that were each submitted independently by their authors to the JBI and which explore the biopower axis in the externalization of reproduction in four contexts: artificial gestation, PGD for sex selection, women’s rights, and testicular cryopreservation. While one contribution explores a “future” of reproduction, the other three explore a “present,” or better, explore different “presents.” What may counts as “present,” and what may count as (...) “future,” has dramatically different connotations depending on the geographical declination of the tense. (shrink)

The author analyses how debate over the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders has tended to privilege certain conceptions of psychiatric diagnosis over others, as well as to polarise positions regarding psychiatric diagnosis. The article aims to muddy the black and white tenor of many discussions regarding psychiatric diagnosis by moving away from the preoccupation with diagnosis as classification and refocusing attention on diagnosis as a temporally and spatially complex, as well as highly mediated process. (...) The article draws on historical, sociological and first-person perspectives regarding psychiatric diagnosis in order to emphasise the conceptual—and potentially ethical—benefits of ambivalence vis-à-vis the achievements and problems of psychiatric diagnosis. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

Integrating local knowledge about environmental and socioeconomic circumstances is necessary in order for development efforts to be responsive to local realities and needs. However, knowledge-integ...

Indigenous peoples are disproportionally vulnerable to climate change. At the same time, they possess valuable knowledge for fair and sustainable climate adaptation planning and policymaking. Yet Indigenous peoples and knowledges are often excluded from or underrepresented within adaptation plans and policies. In this paper we ask whether the concept of epistemic injustice can be applied to the context of climate adaptation and the underrepresentation of Indigenous knowledges within adaptation policies and strategies. In recent years, the concept of epistemic injustice has (...) gained prominence, indicating that someone has been unfairly discriminated against in their capacity as a knower. We argue that many climate adaptation policies are epistemically unjust towards Indigenous peoples because of the underrepresentation of Indigenous knowledges by showing how the case of Indigenous knowledges in climate adaptation planning and policy satisfies five conditions of epistemic injustice. We further consider what challenges there are to integrating local and Indigenous knowledges within development in general, and climate adaptation strategies in particular and how these can be addressed. Whether the lack of Indigenous knowledges in climate adaptation policies constitutes an epistemic injustice matters because an injustice denotes an unfair advantage to one group – whether by design or default – that ought to be remedied and redressed. (shrink)