Two doxastically significant demands of friendship have been discussed in recent literature, a demand to be epistemically partial and a demand to take our friends seriously. Though less discussed than epistemic partialism, I suggest that the demand to take our friends seriously is motivated by similar cases and considerations, and can avoid key objections to epistemic partialism that have been raised. I further suggest that it does justice to what we care about in friendship, and thus is to be preferred.

In this paper, I analyze the role of phenomenal knowledge in understanding the experiences of the victims of hermeneutical injustice. In particular, I argue that understanding that is enriched by phenomenal knowledge is a powerful tool to mitigate hermeneutical injustice. I proceed as follows: Firstly, I investigate the requirements for a full understanding of the experiences at the center of hermeneutical injustice and I argue that phenomenal knowledge is key to full understanding. Secondly, I distinguish between direct phenomenal knowledge and (...) imaginative phenomenal knowledge. Thirdly, I investigate whether one can gain imaginative phenomenal knowledge of the experiences of members of social groups other than one´s own. I consider reasons for pessimism in this regard and show that they are not conclusive. Then, I provide a model of how outgroup members can acquire imaginative knowledge of the experiences of the victims of hermeneutical injustice. Finally, I connect the varieties of phenomenal knowledge with different grades of understanding an experience and I outline how understanding that involves imaginative phenomenal knowledge helps to overcome various forms of hermeneutical injustice. (shrink)

Philosophy strives to give us a firmer hold on our concepts. But what about their hold on us? Why place ourselves under the sway of a concept and grant it the authority to shape our thought and conduct? Another conceptualization would carry different implications. What makes one way of thinking better than another? This book develops a framework for concept appraisal. Its guiding idea is that to question the authority of concepts is to ask for reasons of a special kind: (...) reasons for concept use, which tell us which concepts to adopt, adhere to, or abandon, thereby shoring up—or undercutting—the reasons for action and belief that guide our deliberations. Traditionally, reasons for concept use have been sought either in timeless rational foundations or in concepts’ inherent virtues, such as precision and consistency. Against this, the book advances two main claims: that we find reasons for concept use in the conceptual needs we discover when we critically distance ourselves from a concept by viewing it from the autoethnographic stance; and that sometimes, concepts that conflict, or exhibit other vices such as vagueness or superficiality, are just what we need. By considering not what concepts are absolutely best, but what concepts we now need, we can reconcile ourselves to the contingency of our concepts, determine the proper place of efforts to tidy up thought, and adjudicate between competing conceptions of things—even things as contested as liberty or free will. A needs-based approach separates helpful clarification from hobbling tidy-mindedness, and authoritative definition from conceptual gerrymandering. (shrink)

Sometimes, a form of discrimination is hard to register, understand, and articulate. A rich precedent demonstrates how victim testimonies have been key in uncovering such “hidden” forms of discrimination, from sexual harassment to microaggressions. I reflect on how this plausibly goes too for “attentional discrimination”, referring to cases where the more meaningful attributes of one social group are made salient in attention in contrast to the less meaningful attributes of another. Victim testimonies understandably dominate the “context-of-discovery” stage of research into (...) these initially opaque forms of discrimination; a victim’s encounter with the gap between their experience and dominant conceptual frameworks for understanding it is what provides an initial foothold for analysis to begin. Some object, however, to this methodology continuing to dominate the later “context-of-justification” stage, where the hypothesis is rigorously challenged. I argue that this objection underestimates not just how other methodologies are more likely to inherit the various mechanisms of invisibility hiding the discrimination in question, but also how victim testimonies are distinctively well-suited to recognize and challenge those mechanisms. Victim testimonies, then, ought to continue playing a dominant role into these later stages of research regarding hidden forms of discrimination. (shrink)

Responsibility gaps occur when autonomous machines cause harms for which nobody can be justifiably held morally responsible. The debate around responsibility gaps has focused primarily on the question of responsibility, but other approaches focus on the victims of the associated harms. In this paper I consider how the victims of ‘AI-harm’—by which I mean harms implicated in responsibility gap cases and caused by AI-agents—can make sense of what has happened to them. The reactive attitudes have an important role here. I (...) argue that regulating our reactive attitudes—withdrawing or sustaining them as our understanding of the actions, motives, status, and character of others develops—is an important part of the way in which we make sense of the harms we suffer. But, I argue, AI-agents can disrupt standard practices of regulating the reactive attitudes. This can lead victims of AI-harm to suffer a secondary hermeneutic harm (in addition to the primary AI-harm). This harm, which the responsibility gap and AI ethics literatures have neglected, can occur whether responsibility gaps are real or not. (shrink)

What is conceptual injustice, and how can it supplement hermeneutical injustice? By bringing feminist epistemology, in particular Miranda Fricker’s notion of hermeneutical injustice, into dialogue with conceptual ethics and conceptual engineering, this article sheds light on what conceptual injustice is and how it can supplement hermeneutical injustice. What needs to be understood is how concepts can be advantageous to some and disadvantageous to others. For this, I propose approaching language in its relationship with ethics: something I call the ethics of (...) attention to language. By combining a Wittgenstein-Murdochian approach to concepts with the ethics of attention, I try to demonstrate how an ethics of attention to language can counter cognitive disabilities or forms of cognitive blockages constituting experiences of oppression and how it can be an antidote to conceptual injustice. I argue that this ethics of attention to language can be especially beneficial to feminism. (shrink)