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

Philosophy and Literature is an internationally renowned refereed journal founded by Denis Dutton at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch. It is now published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. Since its inception in 1976, Philosophy and Literature has been concerned with the relation between literary and philosophical studies, publishing articles on the philosophical interpretation of literature as well as the literary treatment of philosophy. Philosophy and Literature has sometimes been regarded as iconoclastic, in the sense that it repudiates academic pretensions, (...) insidious jargon and institutional vogue. Dutton, who remains the editor, still writes a regular column. A distinctive feature of Philosophy and Literature was the annual Bad Writing Contest, held from 1995–98, which sought to identify (and publish) the ‘most stylistically lamentable passages’ of academic prose, often to great amusement. (shrink)

Intellectual pride is pride about intellectual matters – for example, knowledge about what you know, about your intellectual virtues, or about your intellectual achievements. It is the opposite of intellectual humility (e.g. knowledge about what you don’t know, about your intellectual vices, or about your intellectual failures). In this paper I will advocate for intellectual pride by explaining its importance in the contexts of education (where a lack of pride threatens to undermine motivation), intellectual marginalization (where a lack of pride (...) threatens to facilitate oppression), and collective inquiry (where a lack of pride threatens to undermine public discourse). In these contexts, intellectual humility is problematic and intellectual pride is valuable. I’ll go on to offer a sketch of intellectual pride as a virtue. Just as the virtue of intellectual humility comprises excellence in negative intellectual self-evaluation, the virtue of intellectual pride comprises excellence in positive intellectual self-evaluation. (shrink)

An intuitive conception of objectivity involves an ideal of neutrality—if we’re to engage in objective inquiry, we must try to sideline our prejudices, values, and politics, lest these factors taint inquiry and unduly influence our results. This intuition underlies various “purist” epistemological frameworks, which grant epistemic significance only to “epistemic factors” like evidence or the truth of a belief. Feminist epistemologists typically condemn purist frameworks as inimical to feminist aims. They argue that purist epistemology is divorced from the ineliminably social (...) and value-laden nature of our epistemic practices, and, moreover, that it abstracts away precisely those features that are needed to explain how power shapes knowledge. As they see it, purist frameworks simply lack the conceptual space needed to ask the right kinds of questions. Thus, they go in for “impurist” frameworks, which grant epistemic significance to “non-epistemic” factors, and so shed the confining constraints of purism. I turn the tables on the impurists—where they have connected purist norms with perniciously disengaged epistemology, I connect impurist norms with a creeping anxiety that is diminishing feminist epistemology’s political possibilities. First, I demonstrate that it’s increasingly common for impurist epistemologists to use moral considerations as a means to bypass the evidence, which betrays a lack of faith that the evidence will bear out feminist commitments. Second, I demonstrate that there is needless pessimism about our capacity to understand, as evidenced by the increasingly widespread idea that privileged social positions place robust limits on what people can know about oppression that they don’t personally experience. In both cases, moral and political considerations are invoked to give the illusion of being socially engaged, while in fact they allow people to give up on the difficult project of figuring things out. An extended case study on rape culture illustrates the stakes of doing inquiry that is only superficially socially engaged; I show that the two anxious traps I’ve identified have prevented contemporary feminist theorists from detecting and rooting out racist distortion in their accounts of rape culture because both traps interfere with a genuinely intersectional approach to feminist theorizing. (shrink)

An ad hominem fallacy is committed when an individual employs an irrelevant personal attack against an opponent instead of addressing that opponent’s argument. Many discussions of such fallacies discuss judgments of relevance about such personal attacks, and consider how we might distinguish those that are relevant from those that are not. This paper will argue that the literature on bias and testimony can helpfully contribute to that analysis. This will highlight ways in which biases, particularly unconscious biases, can make ad (...) hominem fallacies seem effective, even when the irrelevance is recognized. (shrink)

Miranda Fricker identifies a specific kind of epistemic harm that comes from assigning diminished credibility to others; when this is the result of identity prejudice it results in testimonial injustice. Fricker argues that this kind of injustice follows only from assigning diminished credibility to a person; assigning inflated credibility is never a testimonial injustice. In this paper I examine and expand arguments to the effect that assigning inflated credibility to one person can epistemically harm another. I extend this argument to (...) self-evaluation. Psychological research on the overconfidence bias reveals ways in which we may systematically assign too much epistemic credibility to ourselves. However, our biases are not simple; they have a complex pattern revealed by the Dunning–Kruger effect. I will argue that we need to develop virtues of self-evaluation help counteract our self-bias. These virtues will be an important tool in helping us to avoid committing epistemic injustice to ourselves and to others. (shrink)

The very rules of our language games contain mechanisms of disregard. Philosophy of language tends to treat speakers as peers with equal discursive authority, but this is rare in real, lived speech situations. This paper explores the mechanisms of discursive inclusion and exclusion governing our speech practices, with a special focus on the role of gender attribution in undermining women’s authority as speakers. Taking seriously the metaphor of language games, we must ask who gets in the game and whose moves (...) can score. To do this, I develop an eclectic analysis of language games using basic inferential role theory and the concept of a semantic index, and develop the distinction between positional authority and expertise authority, which often conflict for members of oppressed groups. Introducing the concepts of master switches and sub-switches that attach to the index and change scorekeeping practices, I argue that women’s gender status conflicts with our status as authoritative speakers because sex marking in semantics functions as a master switch—“the F-switch”—on the semantic index, which, once thrown, changes the very game. An advantage of using inferentialism for understanding disregard of women’s discursive authority is that it locates the problem in the sanctioned moves, in the deontic structure of norms and practices of scorekeeping, and not primarily in the individual intentions of particular people. (shrink)

There is an undeniable tendency to dismiss women’s sexual assault allegations out of hand. However, this tendency is not monolithic—allegations that black men have raped white women are often met with deadly seriousness. I argue that contemporary rape culture is characterized by the interplay between rape myths that minimize rape, and myths that catastrophize rape. Together, these two sets of rape myths distort the epistemic resources that people use when assessing rape allegations. These distortions result in the unjust exoneration of (...) people we cannot conceive of as monstrous, while making it too easy to believe that some marginalized people could be rapists. I also argue that rape myths enable a novel kind of epistemic injustice. This injustice concerns how our assessments of trustworthiness and our assessments of plausibility interact. I argue that rape myths can result in runaway credibility deflations that can explain both why people fail to believe most women, and also why people may unjustly believe false allegations that white women have been raped by black men. (shrink)

This paper argues that underlying social biases are able to affect the processes underlying linguistic interpretation. The result is a series of harms systematically inflicted on marginalised speakers. It is also argued that the role of biases and stereotypes in interpretation complicates Miranda Fricker's proposed solution to epistemic injustice.

Recent philosophy has paid considerable attention to the way our biases are liable to encroach upon our cognitive lives, diminishing our capacity to know and unjustly denigrating the knowledge of others. The extent of the bias, and the range of domains to which it applies, has struck some as so great as to license talk of a new form of skepticism. I argue that these depressing consequences are real and, in some ways, even more intractable than has previously been recognized. (...) For the difficulties we face in this domain are fueled not only by implicit biases but by various other sorts of entrenched cognitive attitudes we bear toward others, whether or not we judge them to be our peers. Inasmuch as the epistemic standing of this broader set of attitudes is itself quite dubious, the problem of epistemic injustice turns out to be just one special case—albeit of a particularly nasty kind—from a broader domain of cases where the collaborative character of knowledge clashes with tendencies that make collaboration difficult. This makes the threat of skepticism all the greater, and at the same time makes it harder to see what path of escape there might be. (shrink)

There's been a great deal of interest in epistemology regarding what it takes for a hearer to come to know on the basis of a speaker's say-so. That is, there's been much work on the epistemology of testimony. However, what about when hearers don't believe speakers when they should? In other words, what are we to make of when testimony goes wrong? A recent topic of interest in epistemology and feminist philosophy is how we sometimes fail to believe speakers due (...) to inappropriate prejudices – implicit or explicit. This is known as epistemic injustice. In this article, I discuss Miranda Fricker's groundbreaking work on epistemic injustice, as well as more recent developments that both offer critique and expansion on the nature and extent of epistemic injustice. (shrink)

Conciliationism—the thesis that when epistemic peers discover that they disagree about a proposition, both should reduce their confidence—faces a major objection: it seems to require us to significantly reduce our confidence in our central moral and political commitments. In this paper, I develop a typology of disagreement cases and a diagnosis of the source and force of the pressure to conciliate. Building on Vavova’s work, I argue that ordinary and extreme disagreements are surprising, and for this reason, they carry information (...) about the likelihood of error. But deep disagreement is not surprising at all, and token deep disagreements do not put pressure on us to conciliate. However, a pattern of deep disagreements points to a different concern: not the problem of disagreement but the problem of irrelevant influences. Deep disagreement constitutes some pressure to examine the foundations from which we reason, rather than to conciliate on our central moral and political claims. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore whether there is a need for a multiplicity of norms governing belief due to differences in the objects of those beliefs, particularly the difference between persons and nonpersons. I call the view according to which there is a single epistemic norm governing belief monism, and the view that there is more than one such norm pluralism. I consider three different kinds of objections to monism that stem specifically from considerations unique to assessing the credibility of (...) persons, along with corresponding pluralist proposals. I argue not only that all of the criticisms of monism fail, but also that the proposed pluralist norms face significant problems of their own. In so doing, the aim of the paper is to clear the path for there being a single epistemic norm governing belief, despite there being important epistemic differences between how we ought to treat persons and nonpersons. (shrink)

Just as testimony is affected by unjust social relations, so too is intellectual self-trust. I defend an account of intellectual self-trust that explains both why it is properly thought of as trust and why it is directed at the self, and explore its relationship to social power. Intellectual self-trust is neither a matter of having dispositions to rely on one?s epistemic methods and mechanisms, nor having a set of beliefs about which ones are reliable. Instead, it is a stance that (...) an agent takes towards her own cognitive methods and mechanisms, comprising both cognitive and affective elements. Our intellectual self-trust is created and sustained socially and is thus porous to social power. Unjust social relations cause epistemic injustice, which undermines self-trust among the underprivileged; unjust social relations cause excessive self-trust among the privileged, which perpetuates epistemic injustice, which further undermines the self-trust of the disadvantaged in a vicious feedback loop. I conclude by exploring ways in which socially distorted intellectual self-trust can become better calibrated. (shrink)

In A Moral Theory of Political Reconciliation Colleen Murphy develops a rich and potentially transformative account of political reconciliation. The potential of this account is not fully realized because of limitations in how Murphy conceptualizes political relationships. For example, group-differentiated integration into states opens up important questions about partial legality and group-differentiated experiences of repression that Murphy does not address. Murphy’s framework is well-suited to take up these questions, once they are acknowledged. But doing so requires a revised understanding of (...) how states’ relationships with individuals structure individuals’ relationships with one another. (shrink)

I outline a number of parallels between trust and distrust, emphasising the significance of situations in which both trust and distrust would be an imposition upon the (dis)trustee. I develop an account of both trust and distrust in terms of commitment, and argue that this enables us to understand the nature of trustworthiness. Note that this article is available open access on the journal website.

Feminism is an antiauthoritarian movement that has sought to unmask many traditional “authorities” as ungrounded. Given this, it might seem as if feminists are required to abandon the concept of authority altogether. But, we argue, the exercise of authority enables us to coordinate our efforts to achieve larger social goods and, hence, should be preserved. Instead, what is needed and what we provide for here is a way to distinguish legitimate authority from objectionable authoritarianism.

Feminism is an antiauthoritarian movement that has sought to unmask many traditional “authorities” as ungrounded. Given this, it might seem as if feminists are required to abandon the concept of authority altogether. But, we argue, the exercise of authority enables us to coordinate our efforts to achieve larger social goods and, hence, should be preserved. Instead, what is needed and what we provide for here is a way to distinguish legitimate authority from objectionable authoritarianism.

Feminist philosophers of science have been prominent amongst social epistemologists who draw attention to communal aspects of knowing. As part of this work, I focus on the need to examine the relations between scientific communities and lay communities, particularly marginalized communities, for understanding the epistemic merit of scientific practices. I draw on Naomi Scheman's argument (2001) that science earns epistemic merit by rationally grounding trust across social locations. Following this view, more turns out to be relevant to epistemic assessment than (...) simply following the standards of "normal science". On such an account, philosophers of science need to attend to the relations between scientific communities and various lay communities, especially marginalized communities, to understand how scientific practices can rationally ground trust and thus earn their status as "good ways of knowing". Trust turns out to involve a wide set of expectations on behalf of lay communities. In this paper I focus on expectations of knowledge sharing, using examples of "knowledge-sharing whistleblowers" to illustrate how failures in knowledge sharing with lay communities can erode epistemic trust in scientific communities, particularly in the case of marginalized communities. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to articulate and defend a particular role for ethico-political values in social epistemology research. I begin by describing a research programme in social epistemology—one which I have introduced and defended elsewhere. I go on to argue that by the lights of this research programme, there is an important role to be played by ethico-political values in knowledge communities, and an important role in social epistemological research in describing the values inhering in particular knowledge communities. (...) I conclude by noting how, even as it expands its focus beyond the traditional one to include descriptions of our “knowledge practices,” this sort of project relates to some of the core questions that have been pursued by traditional epistemology. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to draw attention to a currently underdeveloped notion of pain and alienation, in order to sketch an account of the harms of ‘discursive abuse’. This form of abuse comprises systemic practices of violating a person’s vulnerable integrity as a knowing agent. Discursive abuse results in, what I would like to call, ‘agential alienation’. This particular genus of alienation, whose broad conceptual origins lie in the respective works of Hegel and the early Marx, involves an (...) agent being robbed of their self-conception as a rational inquirer and participant in a deliberative public sphere. Such alienation causes a particular kind of pain for an agent that often has harrowing material effects. (shrink)

My aim in this article is to propose that an insightful way of articulating the feminist concept of epistemic injustice can be provided by paying significant attention to recognition theory. The article intends to provide an account for diagnosing epistemic injustice as a social pathology and also attempts to paint a picture of some social cure of structural forms of epistemic injustice. While there are many virtues to the literature on epistemic injustice, epistemic exclusion and silencing, current discourse on diagnosing (...) as well as explicating and overcoming these social pathologies can be improved and enriched by bringing recognition theory into the conversation: under recognition theory, social normative standards are constructed out of the moral grammar of recognition attributions. I shall argue that the failure to properly recognize and afford somebody or a social group the epistemic respect they merit is an act of injustice in the sense of depriving individuals of a progressive social environment i... (shrink)

I provide an account of the cognitive attitude of trust that explains the role trust plays in the planning of rational agents. Many authors have dismissed choosing to trust as either impossible or irrational; however, this fails to account for the role of trust in practical reasoning. A can have therapeutic, coping, or corrective reasons to trust B to ${\phi}$ , even in the absence of evidence that B will ${\phi}$ . One can choose to engage in therapeutic trust to (...) inspire trustworthiness, coping trust to simplify one’s planning, or corrective trust to avoid doing a testimonial injustice. To accommodate such types of trust, without accepting doxastic voluntarism, requires an account of the cognitive attitude of trust broader than belief alone. I argue that trust involves taking the proposition that someone will do something as a premise in one’s practical reasoning, which can be a matter of believing or accepting the proposition. I defend this account against objections that it (i) provides insufficient rational constraints on trust, (ii) conflates trust and pretense of trust, and (iii) cannot account for the rationality of back-up planning. (shrink)

The dual aim of this article is to reveal and explain a certain phenomenon of epistemic injustice as manifested in testimonial practice, and to arrive at a characterisation of the anti–prejudicial intellectual virtue that is such as to counteract it. This sort of injustice occurs when prejudice on the part of the hearer leads to the speaker receiving less credibility than he or she deserves. It is suggested that where this phenomenon is systematic it constitutes an important form of oppression. (...) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]. (shrink)

Novices face a problem when it comes to forming true beliefs about controversial issues that they cannot assess themselves: Who are the trustworthy experts? Elizabeth Anderson offers a set of criteria intended to allow novices to form reliable assessments of expert trustworthiness. All they need to assess experts is a high-school education and access to the internet. In this paper, I argue that novices face a much harder time using her criteria effectively than we would expect or hope. This problem (...) is amplified when novices hold the wrong opinions. Such novices need her criteria the most and are the least likely to use them correctly. Such novices lack knowledge necessary for using the criteria accurately, and are likely to resist correction of their wrong opinions due to cognitive biases. After providing reasons to be skeptical of the effectiveness of her criteria, I propose some supplemental criteria to increase their effectiveness: metacognitive reliability conditions aimed at getting novices to assess themselves in the way that they assess experts. Although these additional criteria show promise, we should be reserved in our optimism. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to adapt Miranda Fricker’s concept of testimonial injustice to cases of what I call “argumentative injustice”: those cases where an arguer’s social identity brings listeners to place too much or little credibility in an argument. My recommendation is to adopt a stance of “metadistrust”—we ought to distrust our inclinations to trust or distrust members of stereotyped groups.

This is the introduction to the special issue "Themes from Testimonial Injustice and Trust" for the International Journal of Philosophical Studies.

Genocide remembrance is a complex epistemological/ethical achievement, whereby survivors and descendants give meaning to the past in the quest for both personal-historical and social-historical truth. This paper offers an argument of epistemic injustice specifically as it occurs in relation to practices of (individual and collective) genocide remembrance. In particular, I argue that under conditions of genocide denialism, understood as collective genocide misremembrance and memory distortion, genocide survivors and descendants are confronted with hermeneutical oppression. Drawing on Sue Campbell’s relational, reconstructive account (...) of remembering, I argue that genocide denialism involves disrespectful challenges to memory, which systematically misrecognize rememberers. Adopting the case of Turkey’s denialism of the Armenian genocide, I discuss two interrelated mechanisms through which this can happen: i) through the systematic portrayal of survivors and descendants as vicious rememberers, and ii) through distortions of the very concept of ‘genocide’. Based on this, I show how hermeneutical and testimonial injustice are crucially interrelated when it comes to “contested” memories of historical injustice and the biographical testimony it gives rise to. (shrink)

This article offers an argument of genocide denial as an injustice perpetrated not only against direct victims and survivors of genocide, but also against future members of the victim group. In particular, I argue that in cases of persistent and systematic denial, i.e. denialism, it perpetrates an epistemic injustice against them: testimonial oppression. First, I offer an account of testimonial oppression and introduce Kristie Dotson’s notion of testimonial smothering as one form of testimonial oppression, a mechanism of coerced silencing particularly (...) pertinent to genocide denialism. Secondly, I turn to the epistemology of genocide denialism and, using the example of Turkey’s denialism of the Armenian genocide, show how it presents what Linda Martín Alcoff calls a substantive practice of ignorance. Thirdly, I apply these considerations to individual practices of genocide denial and analyse the particular characteristics of testimony on genocide, the speaker vulnerabilities involved and the conditions under which hearers will reliably fail to meet the dependencies of a speaker testifying to genocide. Finally, I explore the harms that testimonial oppression perpetrates on members of the victim group, insofar as it systematically deprives them of epistemic recognition. (shrink)

Research on the status and experience of women in academia in the last 30 years has challenged conventional explanations of persistent gender inequality, bringing into sharp focus the cumulative impact of small scale, often unintentional differences in recognition and response: the patterns of 'post-civil rights era' dis­crimination made famous by the 1999 report on the status of women in the MIT School of Science. I argue that feminist standpoint theory is a useful resource for understanding how this sea change in (...) understanding gender inequity was realized. At the same time, close attention to activist research on workplace environment issues suggests ways in which our understanding of standpoint theory can fruitfully be refined. I focus on the implications of two sets of distinctions: between types of epistemic injustice (and correlative advantage) that may affect marginalized knowers; and between the resources of situated knowledge and those of a critical standpoint on knowledge production. (shrink)

We consider the complex interactions between rape culture and epistemology. A central case study is the consideration of a deferential attitude about the epistemology of sexual assault testimony. According to the deferential attitude, individuals and institutions should decline to act on allegations of sexual assault unless and until they are proven in a formal setting, i.e., a criminal court. We attack this deference from several angles, including the pervasiveness of rape culture in the criminal justice system, the epistemology of testimony (...) and norms connecting knowledge and action, the harms of tacit idealizations away from important contextual factors, and a contextualist semantics for 'knows' ascriptions. (shrink)

This dissertation addresses the following questions: How should epistemologists conceptualize testimony? What do people use testimony to do? And why does ‘what people do’ with testimony matter epistemically? In response to these questions I both define and characterize testimony. While doing so I argue for the following answers, given here very briefly: What do people do when they testify? They tell each other things and avow that those things are true, offering their statements to others as reasons to believe. More (...) importantly, they interact with each other in order to negotiate about significance. Why do these activities matter epistemically? Because by engaging in them people generate understanding, as well as knowledge, that no one involved may have had prior to negotiation. Not only that, but they generate collective hermeneutic resources—conceptual tools with which to interpret and understand. In so doing, they not only learn, they create significance and (re)construct social worlds, living together as epistemic, moral, and political agents. So, how should epistemologists conceptualize testimony? They should treat it as a particular speech act that most often occurs as part of a testimonial exchange—an interactive, interpretive, dialogical activity that people use in order to negotiate about significance and generate understanding. This characterization of testimony is an important contribution because it: reveals some of the distinctively social aspects of testimonial knowledge and understanding; suggests better answers to epistemic questions about testimony than those based on typical characterizations in the literature; leads discussion on the topic in a number of new directions; and it lays a foundation for an ethics of testimony that cannot be separated from epistemic concerns. Neither can those concerns be separated from social, moral, and political considerations. The position thus pushes epistemologists to investigate the intertwining of epistemic, moral, and political agency. (shrink)

Those who commit sexual assault are rarely brought to justice: for every 1000 rapes, only seven will result in a felony conviction. There are numerous factors that contribute to the fact that sexual assault goes largely unpunished, and legal reform alone is not a sufficient solution—but it is an important part of the solution. In this paper, I develop an account of the epistemic injustice that rape victims face in criminal trials, and I argue that this, at least in part, (...) helps to explain not only why conviction rates are so low, but why previous feminist legal reform has not helped to improve conviction rates. I then argue that more radical legal reform is necessary, and that we ought to consider lowering the standard of evidence in sexual assault cases. (shrink)