We sometimes disagree not only about facts, but also about how best to acquire evidence or justified beliefs within the domain of facts that we disagree about. And sometimes we have no dispute-independent ways of settling what the best ways of acquiring evidence in these domains are. Following Michael Lynch, I call this phenomenon deep disagreement. In the paper, I outline various forms of deep disagreement, following but also in certain respects revising and expanding Lynch’s exposition in (2010, 2012). As (...) is well known, for the externalist about knowledge and epistemic justification deep disagreements may be nothing more than an unfortunate failure of communication. Yet, though he grants this, Lynch argues that deep disagreement points to a sort of practical problem. I agree. In my paper I propose a revised account of the sort of practical problem that deep disagreement may pose. In short, my claim is that deep disagreement may be a problem due to the role that shared factual beliefs may have in common decision-making. I discuss and assess various reactions to the problem of deep disagreement, including the one proposed by Lynch. I argue that none of the solutions discussed in the paper are satisfactory. (shrink)

I shall first briefly revisit the broad idea of ‘epistemic injustice’, explaining how it can take either distributive or discriminatory form, in order to put the concepts of ‘testimonial injustice’ and ‘hermeneutical injustice’ in place. In previous work I have explored how the wrong of both kinds of epistemic injustice has both an ethical and an epistemic significance—someone is wronged in their capacity as a knower. But my present aim is to show that this wrong can also have a political (...) significance in relation to non-domination, and so to freedom. While it is only the republican conception of political freedom that presents nondomination as constitutive of freedom, I shall argue that non-domination is best understood as a thoroughly generic liberal ideal of freedom to which even negative libertarians are implicitly committed, for non-domination is negative liberty as of right—secured non-interference. Crucially on this conception, non-domination requires that the citizen can contest interferences. Pettit specifies three conditions of contestation, each of which protects against a salient risk of the would-be contester not getting a ‘proper hearing’. But I shall argue that missing from this list is anything to protect against a fourth salient threat: the threat that either kind of epistemic injustice might disable contestation by way of an unjust deflation of either credibility or intelligibility. Thus we see that both testimonial and hermeneutical injustice can render a would-be contester dominated. Epistemic justice is thereby revealed as a constitutive condition of non-domination, and thus of a central liberal political ideal of freedom. (shrink)

I distinguish between two senses in which feminists have argued that the knower is social: 1. situated or socially positioned and 2. interdependent. I argue that these two aspects of the knower work in cooperation with each other in a way that can produce willful hermeneutical ignorance, a type of epistemic injustice absent from Miranda Fricker's Epistemic Injustice. Analyzing the limitations of Fricker's analysis of the trial of Tom Robinson in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird with attention to the (...) way in which situatedness and interdependence work in tandem, I develop an understanding of willful hermeneutical ignorance, which occurs when dominantly situated knowers refuse to acknowledge epistemic tools developed from the experienced world of those situated marginally. Such refusals allow dominantly situated knowers to misunderstand, misinterpret, and/or ignore whole parts of the world. (shrink)

My conclusion will be that, more often than we might have thought, suspension of judgment is the epistemically proper attitude. It follows that in such cases we lack reasonable belief and so, at least on standard conceptions, knowledge. This is a kind of contingent real-world skepticism that has not received the attention it deserves. I hope that this paper will help to bring this issue to life.

Fricker shows that virtue epistemology provides a general epistemological idiom in which these issues can be forcefully discussed.

Looking back on it, it seems almost incredible that so many equally educated, equally sincere compatriots and contemporaries, all drawing from the same limited stock of evidence, should have reached so many totally different conclusions---and always with complete certainty.

How should one react when one has a belief, but knows that other people—who have roughly the same evidence as one has, and seem roughly as likely to react to it correctly—disagree? This paper argues that the disagreement of other competent inquirers often requires one to be much less confident in one’s opinions than one would otherwise be.

Disagreement and the implications thereof have emerged as a central preoccupation of recent analytic philosophy. In epistemology, articles on so-called peer disagreement and its implications have burgeoned and now constitute an especially rich subject of discussion in the field. In moral and political philosophy, moral disagreement has of course traditionally been a crucial argumentative lever in meta-ethical debates, and disagreement over conceptions of the good has been the spark for central controversies in political philosophy, such as the limits of legitimate (...) state authority and public reason. Philosophers of language have also been keen to take up disagreement as a tool, for instance in motivating or exploring the merits of contextualist or relativist semantics for certain areas of discourse, such as matters of taste, aesthetic evaluation, and epistemic discourse. (shrink)

I present a challenge to epistemological pragmatic encroachment theories from epistemic injustice. The challenge invokes the idea that a knowing subject may be wronged by being regarded as lacking knowledge due to social identity prejudices. However, in an important class of such cases, pragmatic encroachers appear to be committed to the view that the subject does not know. Hence, pragmatic encroachment theories appear to be incapable of accounting for an important type of injustice – namely, discriminatory epistemic injustice. Consequently, pragmatic (...) encroachment theories run the risk of obscuring or even sanctioning epistemically unjust judgments that arise due to problematic social stereotypes or unjust folk epistemological biases. In contrast, the epistemological view that rejects pragmatic encroachment – namely, strict purist invariantism – is capable of straightforwardly diagnosing the cases of discriminatory epistemic injustice as such. While the challenge is not a conclusive one, it calls for a response. Moreover, it illuminates very different conceptions of epistemology’s role in mitigating epistemic injustice. (shrink)

In this paper, I will argue for a complex of three theses. First, that the problem of deep disagreement is an instance of the regress problem of justification. Second, that the problem of deep disagreement, as a regress problem, depends on a dialecticality requirement for arguments. Third, that the dialecticality requirement is plausible and defensible.

Religious communities often discourage disagreement with religious authorities, on the grounds that allowing it would be epistemically detrimental. I argue that this attitude is mistaken, because any social position in a community—including religious authority—comes with epistemic advantages as well as epistemic limitations. I argue that religious communities stand to benefit epistemically by engaging in disagreement with people occupying other social positions. I focus on those at the community’s margins and argue that religious marginalization is apt to yield religiously important insights; (...) so their disagreement with religious authorities should be encouraged. (shrink)

I call the activity of assessing and developing improvements of our representational devices ‘conceptual engineering’.¹ The aim of this chapter is to present an argument for why conceptual engineering is important for all parts of philosophy (and, more generally, all inquiry). Section I of the chapter provides some background and defines key terms. Section II presents the argument. Section III responds to seven objections. The replies also serve to develop the argument and clarify what conceptual engineering is.

Herman Cappelen investigates how language and other representational devices can go wrong, and how to fix them. We use language to understand and talk about the world, but what if our language has deficiencies that prevent it from playing that role? How can we revise our concepts, and what are the limits on revision?

Epistemic exploitation occurs when privileged persons compel marginalized persons to educate them about the nature of their oppression. I argue that epistemic exploitation is marked by unrecognized, uncompensated, emotionally taxing, coerced epistemic labor. The coercive and exploitative aspects of the phenomenon are exemplified by the unpaid nature of the educational labor and its associated opportunity costs, the double bind that marginalized persons must navigate when faced with the demand to educate, and the need for additional labor created by the default (...) skepticism of the privileged. I explore the connections between epistemic exploitation and the two varieties of epistemic injustice that Fricker (2007) identifies, testimonial and hermeneutical injustice. I situate epistemic exploitation within Dotson’s (2012; 2014) framework of epistemic oppression, and I address the role that epistemic exploitation plays in maintaining active ignorance and upholding dominant epistemic frameworks. (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)

This chapter charts various ways that religious persons and groups can be perpetrators and victims of epistemic injustice. The practices of testifying and interpreting experiences take a range of distinctive forms in religious life, for instance, if the testimonial practices require a special sort of religious accomplishment, such as enlightenment, or if proper understanding of religious experiences is only available to those with authentic faith. But it is also clear that religious communities and traditions have been sources of epistemic injustice, (...) for instance, by conjoining epistemic and spiritual credibility in ways disadvantageous to ‘deviant’ groups. I focus mainly on the major monotheistic religions, culturally dominant in the modern West. (shrink)

Testimony is an invaluable source of knowledge. We rely on the reports of those around us for everything from the ingredients in our food and medicine to the identity of our family members. Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in the epistemology of testimony. Despite the multitude of views offered, a single thesis is nearly universally accepted: testimonial knowledge is acquired through the process of transmission from speaker to hearer. In this book, Jennifer Lackey shows that this thesis (...) is false and, hence, that the literature on testimony has been shaped at its core by a view that is fundamentally misguided. She then defends a detailed alternative to this conception of testimony: whereas the views currently dominant focus on the epistemic status of what speakers believe, Lackey advances a theory that instead centers on what speakers say. The upshot is that, strictly speaking, we do not learn from one another's beliefs - we learn from one another's words. Once this shift in focus is in place, Lackey goes on to argue that, though positive reasons are necessary for testimonial knowledge, testimony itself is an irreducible epistemic source. This leads to the development of a theory that gives proper credence to testimony's epistemologically dual nature: both the speaker and the hearer must make a positive epistemic contribution to testimonial knowledge. The resulting view not only reveals that testimony has the capacity to generate knowledge, but it also gives appropriate weight to our nature as both socially indebted and individually rational creatures. The approach found in this book will, then, represent a radical departure from the views currently dominating the epistemology of testimony, and thus is intended to reshape our understanding of the deep and ubiquitous reliance we have on the testimony of those around us. (shrink)

Can you disagree with someone without thinking that what they say is false? As we shall see, this is not only possible but quite frequent. Starting with the type of disagreement most familiar from the philosophical literature, we will progressively expand the circle of genuine disagreement until it encompasses even conceptual disagreement, which might sound like a contradiction in terms. For conceptual disagreement necessarily involves the parties' using different concepts, which one might think would preclude genuine disagreement. We shall argue (...) otherwise, adducing three different types of case in order to demonstrate the scope of this phenomenon. (shrink)

ABSTRACTSeveral philosophers have inquired into the metaphysical limits of conceptual engineering: ‘Can we engineer? And if so, to what extent?’. This paper is not concerned with answering these questions. It does concern itself, however, with the limits of conceptual engineering, albeit in a largely unexplored sense: it cares about the normative, rather than about the metaphysical limits thereof. I first defend an optimistic claim: I argue that the ameliorative project has, so far, been too modest; there is little value theoretic (...) reason to restrict the project to remedying deficient representational devices, rather than go on a more ambitious quest: conceptual improvement. That being said, I also identify a limitation to the optimistic claim: I show that the ‘should’ in ameliorative projects suffers from a ‘wrong-kind-of-reasons’ problem. Last but not least, I sketch a proposal of normative constraining meant to address both the above results. The proposal gives primacy to epistemic constraints: accordingly, a concept should be ameliorated only insofar as this does not translate into epistemic loss. (shrink)

What is the nature of deep disagreement? In this paper, I consider two similar albeit seemingly rival answers to this question: the Wittgensteinian theory, according to which deep disagreements are disagreements over hinge propositions, and the fundamental epistemic principle theory, according to which deep disagreements are disagreements over fundamental epistemic principles. I assess these theories against a set of desiderata for a satisfactory theory of deep disagreement, and argue that while the fundamental epistemic principle theory does better than the Wittgensteinian (...) theory on this score, the fundamental epistemic principle theory nevertheless struggles to explain the variety of deep disagreement. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to bring together work on disagreement in both epistemology and argumentation theory in a way that will advance the relevant debates. While these literatures can intersect in many ways, I will explore how some of views pertaining to deep disagreements in argumentation theory can act as an objection to a prominent view of the epistemology of disagreement—the Equal Weight View. To do so, I will explain the Equal Weight View of peer disagreement and show (...) how it entails that deep disagreements between epistemic peers are rationally resolvable. I will then examine a challenge to the Equal Weight View that claims that this consequence is untenable. Having motivated the challenge, I show that there is a viable response to make on behalf of the Equal Weight View. I conclude by considering and responding to several objections to this response. (shrink)

Hermeneutical injustice occurs when there is a gap in the interpretive resources available to members of a society due to the marginalization of members of a social group from sense‐making practices. In this paper, I address two questions about hermeneutical injustice that are undertheorized in the recent literature: (1) what do we mean when we say that someone lacks the interpretive resources for making sense of an experience? and (2) how do marginalized individuals develop interpretive resources? In response to (1), (...) I argue that to lack interpretive resources is to lack conceptual skill or know how. In response to (2), I draw on resources from Gilbert Ryle and Andy Clark and provide a model of how marginalized individuals develop new conceptual skills by naming their shared experience and using it as a tool for scaffolding each other's conceptual performance. At the same time, I draw on the work of Gaile Pohlhaus and Kristie Dotson to show how these practices succeed only through the redistribution of epistemic power across differently situated social groups. (shrink)

This book explores the epistemic side of racial and sexual oppression. It elucidates how social insensitivities and imposed silences prevent members of different groups from listening to each other.

In the era of information and communication, issues of misinformation and miscommunication are more pressing than ever. _Epistemic injustice - _one of the most important and ground-breaking subjects to have emerged in philosophy in recent years - refers to those forms of unfair treatment that relate to issues of knowledge, understanding, and participation in communicative practices. The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice is an outstanding reference source to the key topics, problems and debates in this exciting subject. The first collection (...) of its kind, it comprises over thirty chapters by a team of international contributors, divided into five parts: Core Concepts Liberatory Epistemologies and Axes of Oppression Schools of Thought and Subfields within Epistemology Socio-political, Ethical, and Psychological Dimensions of Knowing Case Studies of Epistemic Injustice. As well as fundamental topics such as testimonial and hermeneutic injustice and epistemic trust, the Handbook includes chapters on important issues such as social and virtue epistemology, objectivity and objectification, implicit bias, and gender and race. Also included are chapters on areas in applied ethics and philosophy, such as law, education, and healthcare. The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice is essential reading for students and researchers in ethics, epistemology, political philosophy, feminist theory, and philosophy of race. It will also be very useful for those in related fields, such as cultural studies, sociology, education and law. (shrink)

According to Robert Fogelin, deep disagreements are disagreements about fundamental principles. He argues that deep disagreements cannot be rationally resolved. In this paper I argue against this thesis. A key part of the response depends upon the claim that disagreements can be rationally resolved not only by one participant rationally coming around to the other's point of view, but also by both of them rationally suspending judgment about the disputed proposition. I also claim that suspension of judgment may be the (...) rational response in the examples Fogelin characterizes as deep disagreements. I deny that this result has any troubling implications for critical thinking. (shrink)

In deep disagreements local disagreements are intertwined with more general basic disagreements about the relevant evidence, standards of argument or proper methods of inquiry in that domain. The paper provides a more specific conception of deep disagreement along these lines and argues that while we should generally conciliate in cases of disagreement, this is not so in deep disagreements. The paper offers a general view of disagreement, holding roughly that one should moderate one’s credence towards uncertainty in so far as (...) disagreement with others provides undefeated higher order evidence that one might have made a mistake in one’s appreciation of the first order evidence. When applying this view to deep disagreement we get that in cases of deep disagreement higher order evidence from disagreement is rebutted or undercut by the nature of the disagreement. So, in cases of deep disagreement one should not moderate one’s credence. I finally argue that this gives a better general view of deep disagreement than views appealing to epistemic peers, personal information or independence. (shrink)

Deep disagreements are disagreements wherein the dialectical conditions for fruitful argumentative exchange do not obtain. One view from within these disagreements is that the other side has been duped or is so deeply ignorant of and complacent with some illusion, there is no hope for exchange. The Dark Enlightenment's critique of liberal democracy and progressive politics (which gave rise to the alt‐right movement) proceeds on this premise, calling their critical philosophy ‘the red pill’ and terming the opposition's program ‘the Cathedral’. (...) Despite the depth of their disagreement with progressives, there is evidence for an optimistic program of critical dialogue in this instance of deep disagreement. (shrink)

Looking back on it, it seems almost incredible that so many equally educated, equally sincere compatriots and contemporaries, all drawing from the same limited stock of evidence, should have reached so many totally different conclusions---and always with complete certainty.

The shocking statement made by Robert Fogelin over 20 years ago when he claimed that discourses that are in deep disagreement cannot be resolved rationally, is still causing many problems to argumentation theorists. In this paper, however, I argue that discourses that are in deep disagreement, at least some of them, can be rationally resolved by introducing the concept of “third party” to those particular discourses.