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 (...) class='Hi'>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)

​The traditional datum concerning moral testimony is that it is (epistemically or morally) problematic--or at least more problematic--than non-moral testimony. More recently, some have sought to analyze the issue of moral testimony within a narrower lens: instead of questioning whether moral testimony on the whole is (more) problematic or not, they have instead focused on possible conditions under which moral deference would be legitimate or forbidden. In this paper, I consider two such features: that of uncertainty and a belief in (...) the greater reliability of another agent. I argue that under these conditions agents have a moral obligation not to defer. I argue that this is because uncertainty and judgments of others’ reliability covary with social status and are themselves products of oppressive social hierarchies, in which case moral deference under these conditions would result in many harms, the most significant being that it would itself propagate oppression by perpetuating unjust social hierarchies. In this way, this paper focuses on how unjust social facts can affect our moral epistemology, specifically how social and political factors can affect moral testimony, and is thus an exercise in non-ideal moral epistemology. (shrink)

Testimony of oppression is testimony that something constitutes or contributes to a form of oppression, such as, for example, “The stranger’s comment was sexist.” Testimony of oppression that is given by members of the relevant oppressed group has the potential to play an important role in fostering a shared understanding of oppression. Yet, it is frequently dismissed out of hand. Against the background of a recent debate on moral testimony, this paper discusses the following question: How (...) should privileged hearers approach testimony of oppression if they aim to do so in an ethically and epistemically sound way? Should they defer or try to understand? Both strategies constitute ways of learning from testimony of oppression. However, they differ in important respects and exclude each other. Because testimony of oppression is often based on personal experience, empathizing with the speaker can play an important role in trying to understand testimony of oppression. While the fact that empathy can change your mind and the advantages of understanding over knowledge support trying to understand as the right approach to testimony of oppression, considerations of the “limits of empathy” and the value of deference support deferring. I argue that, on balance, these contrasting arguments allow for a limited defense of the role of empathy in learning from testimony of oppression. We should try to understand testimony of oppression by empathizing with the speaker, but not treat our ability to understand as a condition on accepting a speaker’s claim. (shrink)

Hastings Center Report, Volume 52, Issue S1, Page S42-S45, March‐April 2022.

This paper develops a notion of manipulative gaslighting, which is designed to capture something not captured by epistemic gaslighting, namely the intent to undermine women by denying their testimony about harms done to them by men. Manipulative gaslighting, I propose, consists in getting someone to doubt her testimony by challenging its credibility using two tactics: “sidestepping” and “displacing”. I explain how manipulative gaslighting is distinct from reasonable disagreement, with which it is sometimes confused. I also argue for three further claims: (...) that manipulative gaslighting is a method of enacting misogyny, that it is often a collective phenomenon, and, as collective, qualifies as a mode of psychological oppression. (shrink)

Testimony is of epistemic and practical significance. It is of epistemic significance because majority of what we know and believe comes from being told. It is of practical significance because our agency can be undermined, bypassed, or overridden owing to systemic prejudices sustained by oppressive social or cultural practices and subsequently our routes to knowledge are either hindered or distorted. Things get more complicated when we introduce and examine how groups and other collectives testify and are recipients of testimony. For (...) instance, group speakers are typically said to represent and reflect the view of the group they are speaking on behalf of. But sometimes because of these oppressive practices, a group speaker’s assertion may deprive or impair its members’ ability to perform certain actions through speech. This dissertation examines the intersection between testimony, collective phenomena, and epistemic harms. One aim is to argue for a view on the nature of testimony that can accommodate various ways collectives testify and are recipients of testimony. In particular, I argue and present a view of testimony as a norm-governed joint activity involving individual or collective participants that commit themselves to a common aim of collaboration. Another aim is to present an epistemology of testimony that tracks our ordinary testimonial practices. In this regard, I argue for a norm view where we have reason to believe what we’re told because of the rules or norms that govern our communicative exchanges. A final aim is to explore the mechanism by which collective speech ensues in an epistemic harm driven by social identity prejudices. I argue for a form of silencing that is distinctive of groups insofar as the silencing occurs because of group dynamics. I call the mechanism underlying this form of silencing “representational impairment”. This dissertation, I hope, will motivate and inspire others to pursue philosophical projects at these intersections and in this spirit, I end by offering suggestions on areas of further development and future direction. (shrink)

Philosophers have had a lot to say about blame, much less about praise. In this paper, I follow some recent authors in arguing that this is a mistake. However, unlike these recent authors, the reasons I identify for scrutinising praise are to do with the ways in which praise is, systematically, unjustly apportioned. Specifically, drawing on testimony and findings from social psychology, I argue that praise is often apportioned in ways that reflect and entrench existing structures of oppression. Articulating (...) what is going wrong here helps us to see what to do about it. (shrink)

Our collective enthusiasm for empathy reflects a sense that it is deeply valuable. I show that empathy bears a complex and surprisingly problematic relation to another social epistemic phenomenon that we have reason to value, namely testimonial trust. My discussion focuses on empathy with and trust in people who are members of one or more oppressed groups. Empathy for oppressed people can be a powerful tool for engendering a certain form of testimonial trust, because there is a tight (...) connection between empathy and a approval of another's outlook. I then argue that the qualities of empathy that make it such a powerful tool for bridging differences and building trust also have a problematic upshot: they make it the case that reliance on empathy will sometimes have a distorting effect upon the ways we extend testimonial trust. (shrink)

.Deep disagreements are those involving a disagreement about (relatively) fundamental epistemic principles. This paper considers the bearing of testimonial injustice, in Miranda Fricker’s sense, on the depth of disagreements, and what this can teach us about the nature and significance of deep disagreements. I start by re-evaluating T. J. Lagewaard’s recent argument that disagreements about the nature, scope, and impact of oppression will often be deepened by testimonial injustice, since the people best placed to offer relevant testimony (...) will be subject to testimonial injustice, pushing the disagreement into one about the bearing of certain epistemic sources on the original debate. I take issue with this last step, but I build on the argument to bring attention to unappreciated and worrying ways in which prejudices can make a disagreement deep in ways that can be hidden from one or more of the participants and from observers. Finally, I revisit some of the ways that deep disagreement has been thought to be problematic for the proper functioning of a democracy, and I examine whether the kinds of hidden deep disagreements I argue for in the paper make these problems any worse, concluding that they likely do. (shrink)

Motivating reforms to address discrimination and exclusion is important. But what epistemic practices characterize better or worse ways of doing this? Recently, the phenomena of implicit biases have played a large role in motivating reforms. We argue that this strategy risks perpetuating two kinds of epistemic oppression: the vindication dynamic and contributory injustice. We offer positive proposals for avoiding these forms of epistemic oppression when confronting racism.

The hermeneutic resources necessary for understanding Indigenous women’s lives in Latin America have been obscured by the tools of Western feminist philosophical practices and their travel in North-South contexts. Not only have ongoing practices of European colonization disrupted pre-colonial ways of knowing, but colonial lineages create contemporary public policies, institutions, and political structures that reify and solidify colonial epistemologies as the only legitimate forms of knowledge. I argue that understanding this foreclosure of Amerindian linguistic communities’ ability to collectively engage in (...) interpretive processes of culture and be heard and understood as coherent is an essential background condition to conceiving and theorizing the multiplicity of social oppressions and their intersections in contemporary Latin American contexts. Further, the work of disrupting and disobeying colonial interpretive frameworks has long been practiced by Indigenous women in Latin America, whose testimonies and expressions have been made sub-audible by design in colonial systems of meaning-making. This is part of the extensive legacy of the long quillwork of communal alphabets of survival. (shrink)

This chapter analyzes testimonials posted at CANHAD.org: Collective against Nonprofit Harassment and Discrimination: For Social Justice Advocates, a website focused on harassment and discrimination in social justice activism, which was promoted almost exclusively in anymal activist circles. Testimonials from this website align with the work of scholars in the field of social justice activism, demonstrating the problematic nature of need for community, inside-facing loyalty, male leadership, and internal romances. Finally, Chap. 6 reflects on the ongoing discussion revolving around PETA’s naked (...) march. (shrink)

Miranda Fricker maintains that testimonial injustice is a matter of credibility deficit, not excess. In this article, I argue that this restricted characterization of testimonial injustice is too narrow. I introduce a type of identity-prejudicial credibility excess that harms its targets qua knowers and transmitters of knowledge. I show how positive stereotyping and prejudicially inflated credibility assessments contribute to the continued epistemic oppression of marginalized knowers. In particular, I examine harms such as typecasting, compulsory representation, and epistemic (...) exploitation and consider what hearers are obligated to do in response to these injustices. I argue that because epistemic harms to marginalized knowers also arise from prejudicially inflated assessments of their credibility, the virtue of testimonial justice must be revised to remedy them. (shrink)

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)

Victims of injustice are prominent protagonists in efforts to resist injustice. I argue that they have a duty to do so. Extant accounts of victims’ duties primarily cast these duties as self-regarding duties or duties based on collective identities and commitments. I provide an account of victims’ duties to resist injustice that is grounded in the duty to assist. I argue that victims are epistemically privileged with respect to injustice and are therefore uniquely positioned to assist fellow victims. Primarily, they (...) discharge this duty through testimony: victims alert other actors to the need for assistance and initiate and coordinate resistance efforts. I briefly provide an account of oppression that ranges from persecution to structural injustice. Through the examples of torture and ‘manterrupting’, I illustrate the duty and its limits. I outline shortcomings in victims’ epistemic privilege and explore means by which these can be overcome. I respond to objections from demandingness and fairness, arguing that victims have an essential, albeit circumscribed, role to play in defeating injustice. (shrink)

Standard accounts of shame characterize shame as an emotion of global negative self-assessment, in which an individual necessarily accepts or assents to a global negative self-evaluation. According to non-standard accounts of shame, experiences of shame need not involve a global negative self-assessment. I argue here in favor of non-standard accounts of shame over standard accounts. First, I begin with a detailed discussion of standard accounts of shame, focusing primarily on Gabriele Taylor’s (1985) standard account. Second, I illustrate how Adrian Piper’s (...) ([1992] 1996) experience of groundless shame can be portrayed as 1) both a rational and an irrational experience of shame, in accordance with Taylor’s account as a paradigm model of standard accounts of shame, and 2) as a rational experience of shame when taken in its own right as a legitimate, rational account of shame. Third, without denying that some experiences of shame either are or can be irrational experiences of shame, I elucidate how standard accounts of shame can act as mechanisms of epistemic injustice, and in doing so can transmute the righteous indignation of the marginalized by recasting them as shameful experiences (i.e., by recasting them as experiences of the righteous shame of the marginalized). (shrink)

ABSTRACTDuring the second Intifada which started in 2000 and ended sometime in mid 2000s, Palestinian male and female martyrs used video testimonies, records and documents of death, using the first person pronoun so as to articulate their missions and justifications for carrying out their acts of martyrdom. This study, which focuses on Palestinian female martyrs’ video-testimonies, investigates the elusive relationship between martyrdom and witness. I contend that the female martyr is a witness to the Israeli occupation of Palestine and to (...) the oppression and dehumanisation to which Palestinians are subject. Palestinian female martyrs are also witnesses to Arab leaders’ weakness and their inability to defend Palestine. The act of martyrdom is a collective one, involving the martyr, the agent of narration and the audience. The audience, who bears witness to the martyr, is necessary for martyrdom to be recognised and to take place. I argue that the end of the martyr’s speech marks out her silence and her tra... (shrink)

Cet article introduit l’hypothèse de l’oppression nécropolitique des sans-abris. Nous partons d’une analyse métaphorologique de propos tenus par les sans-abris sur leurs conditions d’existence, souvent décrites comme impliquant l’expérience vécue paradoxale d’une indifférenciation tendancielle entre la vie et la mort. Nous essayons de conceptualiser le contenu de ces descriptions en faisant appel au concept de nécropolitique développé par Norman Ajari dans le contexte des études critiques de la race. La nécropolitique sera comprise ici comme un idéal-type de gouvernance de (...) la vie ne se réduisant ni à la biopolitique, ni à la thanatopolitique, mais visant plutôt à brouiller les frontières qui séparent la mort de la vie. La nécropolitique est ce qui rend la vie quotidienne des sans-abris proprement invivable, aboutissant à cette vie vécue sous forme-de-mort dont font état les témoignages de certaines personnes sans-abri.This article introduces the hypothesis of the necropolitical oppression of the homeless. We begin with a metaphorological analysis of the discourses held by certain homeless persons regarding their conditions of existence, often described as involving the paradoxical experience of a tendential undifferentiation of life and death. We then build on the concept of necropolitics elaborated by Norman Ajari in the context of critical race theory. Necropolitics will be understood here as an ideal-type of the governance of life reducible neither to biopolitics nor to thanatopolitics. Instead, the rationality of necropolitics as a form of oppression consists in constantly blurring the frontiers of life and death. In the case of the homeless, necropolitics is rendering their everyday life literally unlivable, an experience reflected in the analyzed testimonies of homeless persons. (shrink)

Social dimension of moral responsibility has started to gain more attention in moral philosophy, be it within the network of action theory, or any other meta-ethical domain. Although there are many social acts and therefore social dimensions of responsibility, I aim to indicate one aspect of sociality in our thinking and practice, particularly in our moral thinking, that is the thick concepts. In this work, I consider Vargas’s concept moral ecology (2015, 2018) as a tool to understand certain social aspects (...) of moral responsibility, while claiming to extend his line of thinking in moral ecology by giving a more active role to the individual agent within the ecology that she is engaged in. I claim that when we understand the relationships between the agent and her surrounding ecology in a more complex, and under certain circumstances in a rather reciprocal way, we can have a better and more nuanced understanding of non-ideal moral landscapes that we are engaged in, while maintaining a certain kind of responsibility to the agents in their social environments. I will use the term niche construction and niche selection – concept that are already at use within the similar biological line of thought within action – to refer to such situations where agents are actively shaping their environments. (shrink)

Over the course of her career, Jean Harvey contributed many invaluable insights that help to make sense of both injustice and resistance. Specifically, she developed an account of what she called “civilized oppression,” which is pernicious in part because it can be difficult to perceive. One way that we ought to pursue what she calls a “life of moral endeavor” is by increasing our perceptual awareness of civilized oppression and ourselves as its agents. In this article I argue (...) that one noxious form of civilized oppression is what Miranda Fricker calls “testimonial injustice.” I then follow Harvey in arguing that one of the methods by which we should work to avoid perpetrating testimonial injustice is by empathizing with others. This is true for two reasons. The first is that in order to manifest what Fricker calls the virtue of testimonial justice, we must have a method by which we “correct” our prejudices or implicit biases, and empathy serves as such a corrective. The second is that there are cases where the virtue of testimonial justice wouldn't in fact correct for testimonial injustice in the way that Fricker suggests, but that actively working to empathize would. (shrink)

Cultural code-switching concerns how we adjust our overall behaviours, manners of speaking, and appearance in response to a perceived change in our social environment. We defend the need to investigate cultural code-switching capacities in artificial intelligence systems. We explore a series of ethical and epistemic issues that arise when bringing cultural code-switching to bear on artificial intelligence. Building upon Dotson’s (2014) analysis of testimonial smothering, we discuss how emerging technologies in AI can give rise to epistemic oppression, and (...) specifically, a form of self-silencing that we call “cultural smothering.” By leaving the sociodynamic features of cultural code-switching unaddressed, AI systems risk negatively impacting already-marginalised social groups by widening opportunity gaps and further entrenching social inequalities. (shrink)

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)

Scientists, philosophers, and policymakers disagree about how to define microaggression. Here, we offer a taxonomy of existing definitions, clustering around (a) the psychological motives of perpetrators, (b) the experience of victims, and (c) the functional role of microaggression in oppressive social structures. We consider conceptual and epistemic challenges to each and suggest that progress may come from developing novel hybrid accounts of microaggression, combining empirically tractable features with sensitivity to the testimony of victims.

This paper defends a contextualist approach to epistemic injustice according to which instances of such injustice should be looked at as temporally extended phenomena (having developmental and historical trajectories) and socially extended phenomena (being rooted in patterns of social relations). Within this contextualist framework, credibility excesses appear as a form of undeserved epistemic privilege that is crucially relevant for matters of testimonial justice. While drawing on Miranda Fricker's proportional view of epistemic justice, I take issue with its lack of (...) attention to the role that credibility excesses play in testimonial injustices. I depart from Fricker's view of the relation between credibility excesses and credibility deficits, and I offer an alternative account of the contributions that undeserved epistemic privileges make to epistemic injustices. Then, through the detailed analysis of To kill a mockingbird, I elucidate the crucial role played by the social imaginary in creating and sustaining epistemic injustices, developing an analysis of the kind of social blindness produced by an oppressive social imaginary that establishes unjust patterns of credibility excesses and deficits. (shrink)

Ethical loneliness is the experience of being abandoned by humanity, compounded by the cruelty of wrongs not being heard. It is the result of multiple lapses on the part of human beings and political institutions that, in failing to listen well to survivors, deny them redress by negating their testimony and thwarting their claims for justice. Jill Stauffer examines the root causes of ethical loneliness and how those in power revise history to serve their own ends rather than the needs (...) of the abandoned. Out of this discussion, difficult truths about the desire and potential for political forgiveness, transitional justice, and political reconciliation emerge. Moving beyond a singular focus on truth commissions and legal trials, she considers more closely what is lost in the wake of oppression and violence, how selves and worlds are built and demolished, and who is responsible for re-creating lives after they are destroyed. Stauffer boldly argues that rebuilding worlds and just institutions after violence is a broad obligation and that those who care about justice must first confront their own assumptions about autonomy, liberty, and responsibility before an effective response to violence can take place. In building her claims, Stauffer draws on the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Jean Améry, Eve Sedgwick, and Friedrich Nietzsche, as well as concrete cases of justice and injustice across the world. (shrink)

Ignorance of one’s privileges and prejudices is an epistemic problem. While the sources of ignorance of privilege and prejudice are increasingly understood, less clarity exists about how to remedy ignorance. In fact, the various causes of ignorance can seem so powerful, various, and mutually reinforcing that studying the epistemology of ignorance can inspire pessimism about combatting socially constructed ignorance. I argue that this pessimism is unwarranted. The testimony of members of oppressed groups can often help members of privileged groups overcome (...) their ignorance. This paper argues that a particular type of speaker’s trust—hopeful trust—can motivate hearers to become cognizant of their privilege and prejudice. I argue that hopeful trust is a powerful way of eliciting trust-responsiveness that can be an effective mechanism for challenging privilege and prejudice. To make this case, I draw on case studies of online attempts to challenge ignorance. While the problems of testimonial injustice, defensi... (shrink)

Members of oppressed groups are often silenced. One form of silencing is what Kristie Dotson calls “testimonial smothering”. Testimonial smothering occurs when a speaker limits her testimony in virtue of the reasonable risk of it being misunderstood or misapplied by the audience. Testimonial smothering is thus a form of epistemic paternalism since the speaker is interfering with the audience’s inquiry for their benefit without first consulting them. In this paper, we explore the connections between epistemic injustice and (...) epistemic paternalism through the phenomenon of silencing. We argue that when you silence your testimony as a result of epistemic injustice it is an act of epistemic paternalism and that it is epistemically permissible. In fact, self-silencing resulting from epistemic injustice is a particularly clear example of permissible epistemic paternalism. (shrink)

While much has been said on the connection between dominant rationality standards and systemic oppression, the specific role of logic in supporting epistemic injustice has not received much explicit attention. In this paper I highlight several ways in which it is possible for logic – as a discipline, as a particular system and as a gloss for rational common sense – to be implicated in epistemic injustice. Concrete examples are given for testimonial, content-based, hermeneutical and contributory injustices. I (...) conclude by elaborating on how the need to address these injustices affects the attitudes we should carry toward logic. (shrink)

This paper explores the relation between victims’ stories and normativity. As a contribution to understanding how the stories of those who have been abused or oppressed can advance moral understanding, catalyze moral innovation, and guide social change, this paper focuses on narrative as a variegated form of representation and asks whether personal narratives of victimization play any distinctive role in human rights discourse. In view of the fact that a number of prominent students of narrative build normativity into their accounts, (...) it might seem obvious that there is a connection between victims’ stories and moral insight. However, the category of victims’ stories spans an enormous variety of texts – private diaries, memoirs written for publication, interviews with journalists or social scientists, depositions prepared by human rights workers, stories shared with like-minded activists or with support groups, stories told to medical professionals, and testimony in courts, truth commissions and asylum hearings, to mention just some of the possibilities. The different contexts of elicitation and the different rules governing expression in these sites should make us wary of ready generalizations about the nature of victims’ narratives. Moreover, I doubt that existing explications of the way in which norms figure in narratives yield satisfactory theories of the contribution victims’ stories can make to discovering and defending just policies and practices. I consider two of the most prominent accounts of the relation between narrative and normativity. For different reasons, the account Anthony Amsterdam and Jerome Bruner present in their work on narrative and law and the account Hayden White presents in his work on narrative and history fail to appreciate the capacity of victims’ stories of abuse to advance understanding of and increase respect for human rights. In defense of the value of victims’ stories, I propose an account of the relation between normativity and a salient type of victim’s narrative that seems especially resistant to integration into human rights discourse. -/- . (shrink)

There is a growing awareness that there are many subtle forms of exclusion and partiality that affect the correct workings of a judicial system. The concept of epistemic injustice, introduced by the philosopher Miranda Fricker, is a useful conceptual tool to understand forms of judicial partiality that often go undetected. In this paper, we present Fricker’s original theory and some of the applications of the concept of epistemic injustice in legal processes. In particular, we want to show that the seed (...) planted by Fricker has flourished into a rich field of study in which the concept is used to analyze many different phenomena in law, not always following the original characterization provided by her. This has led to a distinction between what we will call the narrow version of the concept, which is closer to Fricker’s original account, and the wider version of epistemic injustice, which is a more controversial notion because it is always on the verge of morphing into other well-known concepts like sexism, racial discrimination, oppression, silencing, and gaslighting. We will show that the value of the narrow version is mostly theoretical, and that in order to use the concept of epistemic injustice one must adopt a more liberal understanding of it. (shrink)

The first argument that Hume offers against believing in miracle stories in Part 2 of his essay on miracles relies on social context in a way that makes it difficult to follow. Hume says that there’s never been a miracle story that’s well enough attested with respect to certain criteria of testimonial strength. A little later in the essay, he cites recent miracle stories coming from that Saint Médard cemetery as meeting the criteria to an exceptionally high degree, but (...) even so, he claims that we can dismiss the stories out of hand. The hidden background assumption is that his Protestant readers wouldn’t have been tempted to believe in miracle stories coming from an oppressed Catholic sect. Other examples in Part 2 of the essay work in the same way. Hume praises to the skies the quality of the evidence for an earlier Jansenist miracle, for a miracle involving the restoration of a leg through holy water at a Catholic cathedral, and a miracle at a temple of Serapis knowing that his readers won’t be inclined to believe in any of them. The point is that these miracles are better attested than the miracle stories in the Bible, and if we shouldn’t believe in the better attested stories, then we shouldn’t believe in the worse. This can seem like an appeal to prejudice, but really Hume is doing something subtler. He knows that it’s easier to criticize the irrational beliefs of others, but sees that once we turn the same standards that we use on others on our own beliefs, epistemic progress is possible. (shrink)

Too often, identifying practices of silencing is a seemingly impossible exercise. Here I claim that attempting to give a conceptual reading of the epistemic violence present when silencing occurs can help distinguish the different ways members of oppressed groups are silenced with respect to testimony. I offer an account of epistemic violence as the failure, owing to pernicious ignorance, of hearers to meet the vulnerabilities of speakers in linguistic exchanges. Ultimately, I illustrate that by focusing on the ways in which (...) hearers fail to meet speaker dependency in a linguistic exchange, efforts can be made to demarcate the different types of silencing people face when attempting to testify from oppressed positions in society. (shrink)

This book explores the epistemic side of oppression, focusing on racial and sexual oppression and their interconnections. It elucidates how social insensitivities and imposed silences prevent members of different groups from interacting epistemically in fruitful ways--from listening to each other, learning from each other, and mutually enriching each other's perspectives. Medina's epistemology of resistance offers a contextualist theory of our complicity with epistemic injustices and a social connection model of shared responsibility for improving epistemic conditions of participation in (...) social practices. Through the articulation of a new interactionism and polyphonic contextualism, the book develops a sustained argument about the role of the imagination in mediating social perceptions and interactions. It concludes that only through the cultivation of practices of resistance can we develop a social imagination that can help us become sensitive to the suffering of excluded and stigmatized subjects. Drawing on Feminist Standpoint Theory and Critical Race Theory, this book makes contributions to social epistemology and to recent discussions of testimonial and hermeneutical injustice, epistemic responsibility, counter-performativity, and solidarity in the fight against racism and sexism. (shrink)

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)

This volume deploys recent feminist epistemological frameworks to analyze how concepts like knowledge, authority, rationality, objectivity and testimony were constructed in Greece and Rome. The introduction serves as a field guide to feminist epistemological interpretations of classical sources, and the following sixteen chapters treat a variety of genres and time periods, from Greek poetry, tragedy, philosophy, oratory, historiography and material culture to Roman comedy, epic, oratory, letters, law and their reception. By using an intersectional approach to demonstrate how epistemic systems (...) exclude and pathologize the experiences of ancient women and other oppressed groups, these contributions aid in the recovery of non-dominant narratives and reveal issues of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, sexual identity, religion, age, class, familial status and citizenship in the ancient and modern world. The volume contributes to a more inclusive and equitable study of classical antiquity and builds transhistorical connections capable of exposing similar injustices in our own time. (shrink)

Political philosopher Noelle McAfee proposes a powerful new political theory for our post-9/11 world, in which an old pathology-the repetition compulsion-has manifested itself in a seemingly endless war on terror. McAfee argues that the quintessentially human desire to participate in a world with others is the key to understanding the public sphere and to creating a more democratic society, a world that all members can have a hand in shaping. But when some are effectively denied this participation, whether through trauma (...) or terror, instead of democratic politics, there arises a political unconscious, an effect of desires unarticulated, failures to sublimate, voices kept silent, and repression reenacted. Not only is this condition undemocratic and unjust, it may lead to further trauma. Unless its troubles are worked through, a political community risks continual repetition and even self-destruction. McAfee deftly weaves together her experience as an observer of democratic life with an array of intellectual schemas, from poststructural psychoanalysis to Rawlsian and Habermasian democratic theories, as well as semiotics, civic republicanism, and American pragmatism. She begins with an analysis of the traumatic effects of silencing members of a political community. Then she explores the potential of deliberative dialogue and other "talking cures" and public testimonies, such as the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to help societies work through, rather than continually act out, their conflicts. _Democracy and the Political Unconscious_ is rich in theoretical insights, but it is also grounded in the practical problems of those who are trying to process the traumas of oppression, terror, and brutality and create more decent and democratic societies. Drawing on a breathtaking range of theoretical frameworks and empirical observations, _Democracy and the Political Unconscious_ charts a course for democratic transformation in a world sorely lacking in democratic practice. (shrink)

Contextualist treatments of clashes of intuitions can allow that two claims, apparently in conflict, can both be true. But making true utterances is far from the only thing that matters — there are often substantive normative questions about what contextual parameters are appropriate to a given conversational situation. This paper foregrounds the importance of the social power to set contextual standards, and how it relates to injustice and oppression, introducing a phenomenon I call "contextual injustice," which has to do (...) with the unjust manipulation of conversational parameters in context-sensitive discourse. My central example applies contextualism about knowledge ascriptions to questions about knowledge regarding sexual assault allegations, but I will also discuss parallel dynamics in other examples of context-sensitive language involving politically significant terms, including gender terms. The central upshot is that the connections between language, epistemology, and social justice are very deeply interlinked. (shrink)

From a close reading of Frantz Fanon's “The North African Syndrome” (1952), this article draws out Fanon's understanding of “death in life” to suggest that a concept of unlivability in the present must account for the temporal duration of racialized and colonized experiences of pain and trauma. It is thus critical of Judith Butler's and Frédéric Worms's discussion of unlivability in The Livable and The Unlivable (2023) for not centering a phenomenological study of the testimonies of the oppressed. I argue (...) for a greater engagement with Fanon on the longue durée of racial and colonial violence enacted on the bodies, psyches, and histories of racialized and colonized peoples. This article concludes by pointing to possibilities for a shared unlivability in a shared temporality, with potential to move beyond refusal and toward resistance to the colonial control over time. (shrink)

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

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)

This paper identifies the phenomenon of conceptual competence injustice, a form of epistemic injustice that occurs when a marginalized epistemic agent makes a conceptual claim and is illegitimately regarded as having failed to grasp one or more of the concepts expressed in her testimony. The notion of a conceptual claim is given a deflationary account that is coextensive with the class of a priori knowable claims. This study reveals a form of oppression that severely hinders marginalized epistemic agents who (...) seek to create or communicate conceptual knowledge. Conceptual competence injustice is compared and contrasted with three other forms of epistemic injustice: testimonial injustice, hermeneutical injustice, and contributory injustice. The final section investigates a number of damaging effects that conceptual competence injustice has on marginalized persons pursuing a career in academic philosophy. (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)

How should we think about the ways search engines can go wrong? Following the publication of Safiya Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression (Noble 2018), a view has emerged that racist, sexist, and other problematic results should be thought of as indicative of algorithmic bias. In this paper, I offer an alternative angle on these results, building on Noble’s suggestion that search engines are complicit in a racial contract (Mills 1990). I argue that racist and sexist results should be thought of (...) as part of the workings of the social system of white ignorance. Along the way, I will argue that we should think about search engines not as sources of testimony, but as information-classification systems, and make a preliminary case for the importance of the social epistemology of technology. (shrink)

Evil remains a primary source of inquiry in contemporary literature of French expression, even among its most secular writers. In considering French-speaking authors from France, Belgium, the United States, the Maghreb, and Sub-Saharan Africa, this collection delineates a rich international perspective on some of the most disturbing events of our time. Each essay testifies to the urgency expressed in works of fiction to give an account of human catastrophes, from the Shoah and the Rwandan genocide to the terrorist attacks of (...) September 11, and the ongoing oppression of women in Islamic nations. Themes underlying this volume include an investigation into the origins of evil, its representations in writing, and the ethical responsibilities of authors who write on human suffering. Contemporary fiction on evil confronts us with fundamental questions: Can evil be attributed to intentionality, is evil "subconscious," or is it the result of impersonal forces? Which styles of writing are ethically appropriate or effective for depicting evil? Can we speak of a veritable "poetics of evil" shared by contemporary authors? When does a literary text on evil become "evil"? In providing informed and nuanced answers to these important questions, the scholars engage in crucial theories of psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, and post-modernism, address a number of issues raised by trauma and genocide studies, and draw from critical frameworks in literary theory on testimony, the limits of representing the extreme, and "transgressive" writing. (shrink)