James Bohman proposes a republican conception of epistemic injustice as an alternative to Miranda Fricker’s virtue theoretical account. The key element in Bohman’s approach is the concept of domination, one of the central concepts in republican political theory more generally. He claims that all cases of epistemic injustice involve forms of domination, and that institutional mechanisms of non-domination are accordingly necessary to remedy epistemic injustice. I agree with Bohman that there are important connections between domination and (...) class='Hi'>epistemic injustice. Nevertheless, I am not persuaded by his characterisation of these connections. I briefly set out Bohman’s account of domination and then critically discuss three interpretations of the relationship between domination and epistemic injustice suggested by his discussion. (shrink)

With her conception of epistemic injustice, Miranda Fricker has opened up new normative dimensions for epistemology; that is, the injustice of denying one?s status as a knower. While her analysis of the remedies for such injustices focuses on the epistemic virtues of agents, I argue for the normative superiority of adapting a broadly republican conception of epistemic injustice. This argument for a republican epistemology has three steps. First, I focus on methodological and explanatory issues of identifying (...) class='Hi'>epistemic injustice and argue, against Fricker, that identity prejudice fails to provide a sufficient explanatory basis for the spread and maintenance of such systematic epistemic injustice. Second, this systemic basis can be found not so much in the psychological attitudes of individual knowers, but in the relations of domination among groups and individuals in a society. Third, if such a presence of domination plays a primary explanatory role in all forms of epistemic injustice, it is likely that those who suffer from epistemic injustice will also suffer other forms of injustice and loss of status via the exercise of other forms of power and exclusion. (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 (...) class='Hi'>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)

This paper examines an application of epistemic injustice not fully explored in the literature. How does epistemic injustice function in broader contexts of relationships within countries between colonizers and colonized? More specifically, what can be learned about the ongoing structural aspects of hermeneutical injustice in Canada’s settler history of the forced assimilation of Indigenous peoples and the resultant erasing and marginalizing of Indigenous histories, languages, laws, traditions, and practices? In this paper, I use insights from Canada’s Truth and (...) Reconciliation Commission report to challenge dominant understandings of reconciliation, reciprocity, respect for agency, and the rule of law in settler nations. In its retrieval of the richness and diversity of Indigenous collective interpretive resources, both past and present, Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission draws on a broad and full account of relationships that have shaped Indigenous lives and communities, non-Indigenous lives and communities, the interactions of Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples and communities, and the relationships of all of these to and through the state. (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)

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Volume 47, Issue 9, Page 1104-1131, November 2021. Contemporary workplaces are mostly hierarchical. Intrinsic and extrinsic bads of workplace hierarchies have been widely discussed in the literature on workplace democracy and workplace republicanism. However, a distinctively intrinsic relational bad, epistemic injustice in the workplace, has largely been neglected by both normative theorists of the workplace and theorists of epistemic injustice. This article, by bringing in the insights of Miranda Fricker’s influential conceptualization of (...) class='Hi'>epistemic injustice, argues that hierarchical workplaces have contributed to and reinforced both testimonial and hermeneutical injustices in a central activity of most people’s daily lives. This article argues that these injustices are moral wrongs and thus moral injury to the workers. The article concludes by demonstrating that traditional hierarchy is the most epistemically unjust form of hierarchy, while contestatory hierarchy, because of its emphasis on granting the right to the workers to be listened, is less unjust epistemically. (shrink)

What form must a theory of epistemic injustice take in order to successfully illuminate the epistemic dimensions of struggles that are primarily political? How can such struggles be understood as involving collective struggles for epistemic recognition and self-determination that seek to improve practices of knowledge production and make lives more liveable? In this paper, I argue that currently dominant, Fricker-inspired approaches to theorizing epistemic wrongs and remedies make it difficult, if not impossible, to understand the (...) class='Hi'>epistemic dimensions of historic and ongoing political struggles. Recent work in the theory of recognition— particularly the work of critical, feminist, and decolonial theorists—can help to identify and correct the shortcomings of these approaches. I offer a critical appraisal of recent conversation concerning epistemic injustice, focusing on three characteristics of Frickerian frameworks that obscure the epistemic dimensions of political struggles. I propose that a theory of epistemic injustice can better illuminate the epistemic dimensions of such struggles by acknowledging and centering the agency of victims in abusive epistemic relations, by conceptualizing the harms and wrongs of epistemic injustice relationally, and by explaining epistemic injustice as rooted in the oppressive and dysfunctional epistemic norms undergirding actual communities and institutions. (shrink)

Social justice demands that we attend carefully to the epistemic terrains we inhabit as well as to the epistemic resources we summon to make our lived experiences tangible to one another. Not all epistemic terrains are hospitable—colonial projects landscaped a good portion of our epistemic terrain long before present generations moved across it. There is no shared epistemicterra firma,no level epistemic common ground where knowers share credibility and where a diversity of hermeneutical resources play together (...) happily. Knowers engage one another on a politically saturated,unlevel knowing fieldwhere members of dominant groups work to forcibly maintain their epistemic home-terrain advantage. I use the metaphor of the unlevel knowing field to capture these oppressive epistemic structures. The unlevel knowing field is a hungry place where all knowledge that fails to nurture and sustain dominant ways knowing risks being dragged onto the dominator's epistemic home turf to be mined, coopted, consumed, or destroyed. Knowledge and willful ignorance circulate with equal vigor in this hungry world. From the standpoint of oppressed/resisting peoples, the unlevel knowing field is a minefield, an epistemic twilight zone, which must be traversed with considerable care and endless attention. The harms epistemic injustice produces are not disembodied harms. Repeated acts of injustice weather our bodies, dull our minds, weaken our hearts, and traumatize the spirit of our communities. They create public-health precarities and invite mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual illness into our being. Epistemic oppression is a cruel thief. It is disorienting, exhausting, and deadly. It triggers anger, anxiety, depression, and resistance. It steals our time, energy, and attention away from more beautiful things. (shrink)

For liberalism, values such as respect, reciprocity, and tolerance should frame cultural encounters in multicultural societies. However, it is easy to disregard that power differences and political domination also influence the cultural sphere and the relations between cultural groups. In this essay, I focus on some challenges for cultural pluralism. In relation to Indian political theorist Rajeev Bhargava, I discuss the meaning of cultural domination and epistemic injustice and their historical and moral implications. Bhargava argued that as a consequence (...) of colonialism, “indigenous cultures” were inferiorized, marginalized, and anonymized. Although cultures are often changing due to external influences, I argue that epistemic injustice implies that a culture is forced to subjection, disrespected, and considered as inferior and that it threatens the dominated people’s epistemic framework, collective identity, and existential security. Finally, I refer to John Rawls’s theory of political liberalism as a constructive approach to avoid parochialism and Western cultural domination -/- . (shrink)

Socially extended knowledge has recently received much attention in mainstream epistemology. Knowledge here is not to be understood as wholly realised within a single individual who manipulates artefacts or tools but as collaboratively realised across plural agents. Because of its focus on the interpersonal dimension, socially extended epistemology appears to be a promising approach for investigating the deeply social nature of epistemic practices. I believe, however, that this line of inquiry could be made more fruitful if it is connected (...) with the critical notion of epistemic responsibility, as developed in feminist responsibilism. According to feminist responsibilists, at the core of epistemic responsibility is a critical disposition toward correcting epistemic injustice. This epistemic idea is highly relevant to the epistemological context of illness, where patient testimony is often disregarded. Hence, though restricted to the epistemological context of the experience of illness, this chapter delves into epistemic injustice and its robust mechanisms. I thus explore what responsible epistemic practices should involve in order to redress that injustice and how epistemic responsibility should be socially extended. The discussion proceeds as follows. First, by relying on Arthur Frank’s innovative work on illness narratives, I focus on chaotic bodily messages from patients overwhelmed by suffering and then explain why these messages should count as genuine narratives or testimonies despite their inarticulateness. Second, I elaborate on how epistemic injustice concerning such narratives (i.e., chaos narratives) is produced and reproduced, in particular how both a dominant sociocultural norm and our inherent vulnerability can contribute to its production and reproduction. Finally, I propose an extended form of epistemic responsibility that ameliorates this aspect. Laying particular emphasis on the epistemic role of mature empathy, I characterise the extended epistemic responsibility in terms of extended empathic knowledge. (shrink)

This paper argues that epistemic errors rooted in group- or identity- based biases, especially those pertaining to disability, are undertheorized in the literature on medical error. After sketching dominant taxonomies of medical error, we turn to the field of social epistemology to understand the role that epistemic schemas play in contributing to medical errors that disproportionately affect patients from marginalized social groups. We examine the effects of this unequal distribution through a detailed case study of ableism. There are (...) four primary mechanisms through which the epistemic schema of ableism distorts communication between nondisabled physicians and disabled patients: testimonial injustice, epistemic overconfidence, epistemic erasure, and epistemic derailing. Measures against epistemic injustices in general and against schema-based medical errors in particular are ultimately issues of justice that must be better addressed at all levels of health care practice. (shrink)

ABSTRACT It is a common contention that education done uncritically and unreflectively may serve to sustain and justify the status quo, in terms of mechanisms of cultural or racial privileging and marginalization. This article explores an argument made from within anti-oppressive education theory and advocated by theorist Kevin Kumashiro, namely that transformative education must entail altering harmful citational practices. I see two shortcomings in relation to this argument: first, its focus on discursive practice entails a prerequisite of high discursive literacy. (...) Second, it may lead to a failure to give credit to people’s intentions, risking a conflation of honest mistakes and wilful ignorance, and depriving us of theoretical nuance. While a well-argued and important call, I argue in this article that both shortcomings lead to the risk of a polarized conversation. Focusing on cultural, ethnic, and racial categorization, and using social studies as an illustration, it is suggested that applying notions from the theoretical concept of epistemic injustice may open up a space for granting nuanced credit to people’s intentions, thereby mitigating the risk of polarization. Rather than viewing attention to outcome and attention to intention as oppositional to one another, it is argued that both theoretical perspectives may benefit from the insights of the other. By applying needed context-specificity and nuance to categorizations of dominance and marginalization in individual discursive exchange, this can be done without granting priority to the experience of dominantly situated knowers. (shrink)

I argue that resistance violence is physical force carried out by members of politically vulnerable groups. It is not reducible to self-defense because it does not always involve protecting the life of the actor but, instead, is an expression of establishing one’s dignity and humanity. Applied to women as a vulnerable class in the face of sexual violence, this article looks at a case study of an enslaved teenager named Celia who killed her owner in order to end his sexual (...) abuse. Various philosophies of epistemic injustices (including Fricker, Pohlhaus, Medina, Dotson, Mills, and Card) establish that socially/politically dominant groups help create a context in which compartmentalization, active ignorance, and inconsistencies contribute to the conditions in which marginalized groups reside in spaces of little to no protection from the state. As such, resistance violence emerges as a legitimate option. Selective epistemic attention that fails to contextualize resistance violence supports unjust systems. (shrink)

In this article I analyse two complaints of white vilification, which are increasingly occurring in Australia. I argue that, though the complainants (and white people generally) are not harmed by such racialized speech, the complainants in fact harm Australians of colour through these utterances. These complaints can both cause and constitute at least two forms of epistemic injustice (willful hermeneutical ignorance and comparative credibility excess). Further, I argue that the complaints are grounded in a dual misrecognition: the complainants misrecognize (...) themselves in their own privileged racial specificity, and they misrecognize others in their own marginal racial specificity. Such misrecognition preserves the cultural imperialism of Australia’s dominant social imaginary—a means of oppression that perpetuates epistemic insensitivity.Bringing this dual misrecognition to light best captures the indignity that is suffered by the victims of the aforementioned epistemic injustices. I argue that it is only when we truly recognize difference in its own terms, shifting the dominant social imaginary, that “mainstream Australians”can do their part in bringing about a just society. (shrink)

I argue that resistance violence is physical force carried out by members of politically vulnerable groups. It is not reducible to self-defense because it does not always involve protecting the life of the actor but, instead, is an expression of establishing one’s dignity and humanity. Applied to women as a vulnerable class in the face of sexual violence, this article looks at a case study of an enslaved teenager named Celia who killed her owner in order to end his sexual (...) abuse. Various philosophies of epistemic injustices (including Fricker, Pohlhaus, Medina, Dotson, Mills, and Card) establish that socially/politically dominant groups help create a context in which compartmentalization, active ignorance, and inconsistencies contribute to the conditions in which marginalized groups reside in spaces of little to no protection from the state. As such, resistance violence emerges as a legitimate option. Selective epistemic attention that fails to contextualize resistance violence supports unjust systems. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss rape myths and mythologies, their negative effects on rape and sexual assault complainants, and how they prejudicially construct women qua women. The backdrop for the analysis is the Belfast Rugby Rape Trial, which took place in 2018. Four men, two of whom were well-known rugby players, were acquitted of rape and sexual assault in a nine-week criminal trial that dominated local, national and international attention. The acquittal resulted in ‘I Believe Her’ rallies and protests across (...) Northern Ireland. Of concern were the deeply sexist and misogynistic text exchanges among the acquitted about the complainant and women more generally. One month after the trial, the Criminal Justice Board of Northern Ireland commissioned an independent review of the arrangements to deliver justice in cases of serious sexual offences. The Gillen Review proposed 16 key recommendations, among them measures to dispel rape myths and the role that Relationship and Sex Education in schools could play in combatting these myths. I will explore these issues using Miranda Fricker's construction of epistemic injustice. I argue that there is little appreciation of the profound impact that routine testimonial injustice—where the credibility of a speaker is deflated or undermined on account of her social identity—can have on the wellbeing of speakers and how it ramifies with other forms of injustice. To illustrate, I draw on neurological explanations to show why attributions of sexual consent are unjustly sustained in cases of rape and sexual assault. (shrink)

Miranda Fricker’s insightful work on epistemic injustice discusses two forms of epistemic injustice—testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice. Hermeneutical injustice occurs when the victim lacks the interpretative resources to make sense of her experience, and this lacuna can be traced down to a structural injustice. In this paper, I provide one model of how to fill the conceptual gap in hermeneutical injustice. First, I argue that the victims possess conceptual resources to make sense of their experiences, namely phenomenal concepts. (...) Second, I show how one might work the way up in a two-step process from a subjective, phenomenal concept to a novel, public concept. Finally, I discuss the conditions that have to be met for this process to be successful. The resulting model shows a way how the victims might alleviate hermeneutical injustice by developing novel concepts, given that the dominant group does not care about their predicament. (shrink)

The dominant discourse in chronic disease management centres on the ideal of person-centred healthcare, with an empowered patient taking an active role in decision-making with their healthcare provider. Despite these encouraging developments toward healthcare democracy, many person-centred conceptions of healthcare and programming continue to focus on the healthcare institution’s perspective and priorities. In these debates, the patient’s voice has largely been absent. This article takes the example of patient empowerment to show how the concept has been influenced by a variety (...) of competing and shifting influences that have led to conceptualisations and programming designed for the patient, but developed without the patient. The framework of epistemic injustice is proposed to unravel the complexity of these omissions. The concept can be defined as a wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower. It occurs when a person is ignored or not believed due to a prejudice of some kind. It has been applied to healthcare in order to better understand barriers for patient participation and will be used to better understand the problems with current empowerment definitions and implementation strategies. The article will end by proposing some methodologies to facilitate patient-developed concepts of empowerment. (shrink)

We are in the midst of a global crisis of climate change and environmental degradation to which the healthcare sector directly contributes. Yet conceptions of health justice have little to say about the environment. They purport societies should ensure adequate health for their populations but fail to require doing so in ways that avoid environmental harm or injustice. We need to expand our understanding of health justice to consider the environment and do so without reinforcing the epistemic injustice inherent (...) in the field of bioethics. This paper considers what work in philosophy related to the environment should be applied to help build that understanding and develops ideas about the healthcare sector’s responsibilities of justice to the environment. It first introduces the dominant multivalent environmental and ecological justice (EJ) concept in philosophy and each of its dimensions: distribution, participation, recognition and well-being. It then shows why applying that conception alone to broaden our understanding of health justice will reinforce epistemic injustice within bioethics. Drawing on EJ literature from the global South, the paper demonstrates that different ontological and experiential starting points identify additional EJ dimensions—power and harmony—and give rise to a nuanced understanding of the recognition dimension relative to the dominant EJ conception. The paper concludes by applying them to articulate healthcare sector responsibilities of justice to the environment, demonstrating they ground responsibilities beyond reducing its carbon emissions. (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)

Literature on epistemic injustice has grown tremendously as an increasingly rich and diverse body of work in recent years. From the point of view of intercultural and anticolonial discussions, contemporary contributions have also helped to illuminate how epistemic injustice and other forms of cultural domination might be related to essential processes within the structures of colonial and racial supremacy. -/- This proposal aims to contribute to such relevant and illuminating discussions by focusing on the role that language and (...) culture might have in phenomena of epistemic injustice, particularly, hermeneutical injustice. Despite the central role played by semantics in epistemic injustice studies, the question about whether certain languages could also themselves be the recipients of epistemic injustice has been rather undertheorized. Simultaneously, recent movements to advocate for minority language rights, such as the Linguistic Human Rights Movement (LHR), raise important questions in this connection. -/- In the present paper, I argue that attending to the intercultural context reveals a new sort of hermeneutical injustice, one that, surprisingly, has never been articulated before. In particular, I am referring to a kind of HI that is essentially “linguistic” and “culture-specific”. I will be presenting two different subtypes for this kind of hermeneutical injustice: The first concerns the possibility of considering certain languages themselves as genuine objects of hermeneutical injustice, while the second has to do with certain specific culturally-established expressions or forms of talking. (shrink)

It is well known that AI-based language technology—large language models, machine translation systems, multilingual dictionaries, and corpora—is currently limited to three percent of the world’s most widely spoken, financially and politically backed languages. In response, recent efforts have sought to address the “digital language divide” by extending the reach of large language models to “underserved languages.” We show how some of these efforts tend to produce flawed solutions that adhere to a hard-wired representational preference for certain languages, which we call (...) language modeling bias. Language modeling bias is a specific and under-studied form of linguistic bias were language technology by design favors certain languages, dialects, or sociolects with respect to others. We show that language modeling bias can result in systems that, while being precise regarding languages and cultures of dominant powers, are limited in the expression of socio-culturally relevant notions of other communities. We further argue that at the root of this problem lies a systematic tendency of technology developer communities to apply a simplistic understanding of diversity which does not do justice to the more profound differences that languages, and ultimately the communities that speak them, embody. Drawing on the concept of epistemic injustice, we point to the broader ethico-political implications and show how it can lead not only to a disregard for valuable aspects of diversity but also to an under-representation of the needs of marginalized language communities. Finally, we present an alternative socio-technical approach that is designed to tackle some of the analyzed problems. (shrink)

Whether in the form of testimonial injustice, hermeneutical injustice, or contributory injustice, epistemic injustice is characterised an injustice rather than simply an epistemic harm because it is often motivated by an identity prejudice and exacerbates existing social disadvantages and inequalities. I argue that epistemic injustice can also be utlised against some members of privileged social identity groups in order to preserve the dominant status of the group as a whole. As a case-study, I analyze how the harms (...) to male victims of sexual violence is exacerbated by the failure of the law to recognise the rape of men as a crime and the failure of other people to recognise the testimony of male rape victims as credible. Analyzing shifts in the legal concept of rape and examples from Project Unbreakable, I uncover how these failures of recognition undermine the victims’ status as legal, moral, and epistemic subjects and inflict epistemic injustice against them. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss accounts of agency, participation, and self-determination by David Crocker and Stacy Kosko because they acknowledge that relationships of power can determine who gets to participate and when. Kosko usefully applies the concept of agency vulnerability to the case of the self-determination of indigenous peoples. I examine the specific context of Canada’s history as a settler nation, a history that reflects attempts to denigrate, dismiss and erase Indigenous laws, practices, languages, and traditions. I argue that this (...) history displays epistemic injustice in that the dominant collective interpretative resources of non-Indigenous Canadians have allowed the dismissal of the collective interpretative resources of Canada’s Indigenous peoples. This gap in collective interpretative resources can explain that Canada’s constitution, institutions, laws, and structures reflect the dominant collective interpretative resources of a colonizing nation, ones that have delineated and restricted the agency, participation, and self-determination of Indigenous Canadians. One important outcome of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and of its National Inquiry into Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls is bringing the rich history of Indigenous collective interpretative resources and the networks of relationships shaped by them to light. By discussing examples from these reports, I give substance to the argument that foundational and structural injustices in settler nations are at bottom epistemic injustices, ones that have implications for accounts of agency, participation, and self-determination. (shrink)

A Theory of Freedom and Government has provided a systematic basis for republican theory in the idea of freedom as non-domination. Can a pure republican view, which confines itself to the normative resources thus afforded, adequately address the full range of issues of social justice? This article argues that while there are many sorts of structural injustice with which a pure republican view can well cope, unfair disparities in political influence, of the kind that Rawls labeled failures of the ‘fair (...) value’ of the equal political liberties, cannot be well addressed by a pure republican view. In arguing the point, the article assesses the reach not only of the core ideal of freedom as non-domination itself, but also of three further layers in Pettit’s republican theory: its suggestion that domination is to be minimized, its account of a set of institutions needed to restrict domination, and its requirement that, to prevent governments from having the power to act arbitrarily and so to dominate, they be made responsive to the common good. Some of these further conceptual resources are shown to be of no help in addressing unfair disparities in political influence, while the ones that are promising are so only because they rely on distinctively liberal ideals, and so depart from a pure republican basis. Key Words: republicanism • liberalism • justice • common good • non-domination • fair value • Philip Pettit • John Rawls. (shrink)

There is not one but many ways to picture the world--Australian "x-ray" pictures, cubish collages, Amerindian split-style figures, and pictures in two-point perspective each draw attention to different features of what they represent. Understanding Pictures argues that this diversity is the central fact with which a theory of figurative pictures must reckon. Lopes advances the theory that identifying pictures' subjects is akin to recognizing objects whose appearances have changed over time. He develops a schema for categorizing the different ways pictures (...) represent--the different kinds of meaning they have--and argues that that depiction's epistemic value lies in its representational diversity. He also offers a novel account of the phenomenology of pictorial experience, comparing pictures to visual prostheses like mirrors and binoculars. (shrink)

The urgency of climate change has never been greater, nor the moral case for responding to it more compelling. This review essay critically compares Darrel Moellendorf's Mobilizing Hope and Catriona McKinnon's Climate Change and Political Theory. Moellendorf's book defends the moral importance of poverty alleviation through sustainable economic growth and argues for a mass climate movement based on the promise of a more prosperous future. By contrast, McKinnon provides a political vocabulary to articulate the many faces of climate injustice, and (...) to critically examine proposed policy solutions—notably including the indefinite pursuit of economic growth. While both find reasons to be hopeful, their wide-ranging accounts reflect different visions of what a just and sustainable future might look like. They reflect different understandings of sustainable development and the significance of environmental values; the scope of permissible climate activism; and the ethics of geoengineering. Building upon them, I argue in favor of a more pluralistic vision of a just climate future, one that is capable of speaking to the range of moral interests bearing upon the climate and biodiversity crises, and that supports sustainable development that is inclusive of diverse human-nature relationships. (shrink)

This paper is broadly concerned with the question of what epistemic decolonization might involve. It is divided into two parts. The first part begins by explaining the specifically epistemic problem to which calls for epistemic decolonization respond. I suggest that calls for decolonization are motivated by a perceived epistemic crisis consisting in the inadequacy of the dominant Eurocentric paradigm to properly theorize our modern world. I then discuss two general proposals, radical and moderate, for what (...) class='Hi'>epistemic decolonization might involve. In the second part, I argue that the inadequacy of Eurocentric epistemic resources constitutes a hermeneutical injustice caused by an irreducible form of epistemic oppression. I then argue that addressing this form of epistemic oppression requires thinking ‘outside’ of the Eurocentric paradigm because the paradigm might fail to reveal and address the epistemic oppression sustaining it. This lends further plausibility to the radical proposal that epistemic decolonization must involve thinking from ‘outside’ the Eurocentric paradigm, but also accommodates the moderate proposal that adopting critical perspectives on Eurocentric thought is an important part of epistemic decolonization. (shrink)

We observed that despite international declarations on child-rights, outsourced domestic girl-child labour still persists. Raising the question whether outsourced domestic girl-child labour constitutes hermeneutical injustice, we respond affirmatively. Relying on two indigenous victimology-narratives that are newspaper reports, we expose some of the horrors that the victims of outsourced domestic girl-child labour suffer. Comparing these reports with other victimology-narratives of hermeneutical injustice as reported by Miranda Fricker and Hilkje Hänel, we argue that the victims of outsourced domestic girl-child labour suffer a (...) hermeneutical gap and hermeneutical interference; and that the perpetuators of this practice, help to foster what we call ‘hermeneutical obstruction’. We recommend different counteracting measures such as: a radical feminization of educational curricula, which will allow for the introduction of the relevant hermeneutical resources that female children need in making sense of their experiences, into the classrooms and other places of learning; establishing feminist liberation agencies in all schools, religious institutions and hospitals, as ways of increasing the level of awareness about the rights of the girl-child in children and adults; feminizing legislation and legislative processes, to allow for the enactment of laws to protect the rights of the girl-child; and campaigning for a more rigorous enforcement of child-rights laws. (shrink)

Who is responsible for fighting domination? Answering this question, I argue, requires taking the structural dimension of domination seriously to avoid unwillingly reproducing domination in the nam...

This article offers a prolegomenon for an African feminist philosophy. The prompt for this as an interrogation of Oluwole’s claim that an African feminist philosophy cannot develop until identifiable African worldviews that guide the relationship between men and women have been established. She argues that until there is general agreement about the nature of African philosophy itself, African feminist philosophy will remain impoverished. I critique this claim, unpacking Oluwole’s argument, and examine the contested nature of both African and Western philosophy. (...) Drawing from the work of Mignolo and decolonial thinking, I then argue for the possibility of “epistemic disobedience” concerning the emergence of an African feminist philosophy. Engaging with precolonial African examples which disrupt modern normative gender assumptions and looking at the project of decoloniality, I issue a call for an African feminist philosophy unfettered by the falsely universal claims of modernity/coloniality. My call is for an African feminist philosophy from African loci of enunciation, rooted in the epistemes and experiences of African women. (shrink)

The paper explores the question of the relationship between science and religion today in light of its modern origin in the Galileo affair. After first presenting Ian Barbour’s four standard models for the possible relationships between science and religion, it then draws on the work of Richard Blackwell and Ernan McMullin to consider the Augustinian principles at work in Galileo’s understanding of science and religion. In light of this the paper proposes a fifth, hybrid model, “dialogical convergence,” as a more (...) adequate model of the relationship in-between science and religion because it is epistemically just in its coherence with the last fifty years of philosophy of science by which it affords more than the mere tolerance of an independence view which leaves no space for the possibility of a theological understanding of nature. (shrink)

The paper explores the question of the relationship between science and religion today in light of its modern origin in the Galileo affair. After first presenting Ian Barbour’s four standard models for the possible relationships between science and religion, it then draws on the work of Richard Blackwell and Ernan McMullin to consider the Augustinian principles at work in Galileo’s understanding of science and religion. In light of this the paper proposes a fifth, hybrid model, “dialogical convergence,” as a more (...) adequate model of the relationship in-between science and religion because it is epistemically just in its coherence with the last fifty years of philosophy of science by which it affords more than the mere tolerance of an independence view which leaves no space for the possibility of a theological understanding of nature. (shrink)

Interpreters of Hume on causation consider that an advantage of the ‘quasi-realist’ reading is that it does not commit him to scepticism or to an error theory about causal reasoning. It is unique to quasi-realism that it maintains this positive epistemic result together with a rejection of metaphysical realism about causation: the quasi-realist supplies an appropriate semantic theory in order to justify the practice of talking ‘as if’ there were causal powers in the world. In this paper, I problematise (...) the quasi-realist reading of Hume on causation by showing how quasi-realism does not speak to inductive scepticism. I also offer evidence that Hume takes inductive scepticism to result from his theory of causation, and that his scepticism is tied to his rejection of metaphysical causal realism. (shrink)

If good taste is a virtue, then an account of good taste might be modelled on existing accounts of moral or epistemic virtue. One good reason to develop such an account is that it helps solve otherwise intractable problems in aesthetics. This paper proposes an alternative to neo-Aristotelian models of good taste. It then contrasts the neo-Aristotelian models with the proposed model, assessing them for their potential to contend with otherwise intractable problems in aesthetics.

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)

Jennifer Radden argues that delusions play an important role in modernist epistemology, which is preoccupied with the justification and evaluation of beliefs. Another theme running through the book is the importance of culture for attribution of delusion. Beliefs that look delusional will not be treated as pathological if they are expressions of religious views or other culturally acceptable forms of life. It is hard to see why cultural acceptability should play a role in the modernist project of justification. I suggest (...) that we think less about a philosophical project of justification and turn our attention instead to commonsense judgements of the circumstances in which we see a belief as evidence of underlying pathology. I discuss cases in which unjustified beliefs are nonetheless treated as phenomena that are consistent with our views of how healthy human beings act, and suggest that alongside folk psychology we should acknowledge a folk epistemology that embraces such instances. I suggest that delusions are beliefs that folk epistemology treats as inexplicable, and that this approach solves some of the puzzles that Radden identifies as growing out of the modernist epistemic project. (shrink)

Predictions of poor prognosis for critically ill patients may become self-fulfilling if life-sustaining treatment or resuscitation is subsequently withheld on the basis of that prediction. This paper outlines the epistemic and normative problems raised by self-fulfilling prophecies (SFPs) in intensive care. Where predictions affect outcome, it can be extremely difficult to ascertain the mortality rate for patients if all treatment were provided. SFPs may lead to an increase in mortality for cohorts of patients predicted to have poor prognosis, they (...) may lead doctors to feel causally responsible for the deaths of their patients, and they may compromise honest communication with patients and families about prognosis. However, I argue that the self-fulfilling prophecy is inevitable when life-sustaining treatment is withheld or withdrawn in the face of uncertainty. SFPs do not necessarily make treatment limitation decisions problematic. To minimize the effects of SFPs, it is essential to carefully collect and appraise evidence about prognosis. Doctors need to be honest with themselves and with patients and their families about uncertainty and the limits of knowledge. (shrink)

Precautionary Principles are often said to be appropriate for decision-making in contexts of uncertainty such as climate policy. Contexts of uncertainty are contrasted to contexts of risk depending on whether we have probabilities or not. Against this view, I argue that the risk-uncertainty distinction is practically irrelevant. I start by noting that the history of the distinction between risk and uncertainty is more varied than is sometimes assumed. In order to examine the distinction, I unpack the idea of having probabilities, (...) in particular by distinguishing three interpretations of probability: objective, epistemic, and subjective probability. I then claim that if we are concerned with whether we have probabilities at all—regardless of how low their epistemic credentials are—then we almost always have probabilities for policy-making. The reason is that subjective and epistemic probability are the relevant interpretations of probability and we almost always have subjective and epistemic probabilities. In contrast, if we are only concerned with probabilities that have sufficiently high epistemic credentials, then we obviously do not always have probabilities. Climate policy, for example, would then be a case of decision-making under uncertainty. But, so I argue, we should not dismiss probabilities with low epistemic credentials. Rather, when they are the best available probabilities our decision principles should make use of them. And, since they are almost always available, the risk-uncertainty distinction remains irrelevant. (shrink)

Scientific images represent types or particulars. According to a standard history and epistemology of scientific images, drawings are fit to represent types and machine-made images are fit to represent particulars. The fact that archaeologists use drawings of particulars challenges this standard history and epistemology. It also suggests an account of the epistemic quality of archaeological drawings. This account stresses how images integrate non-conceptual and interepretive content.

This paper examines a form of pictorial realism that has epistemic import. Gombrich and Schier claim that some pictures are realistic because they convey accurate information. The difficulty is that judgments of realism vary across cultural and historical contexts. Goodman counters that pictures belong to different systems and realistic pictures belong to familiar systems. However, this does not explain the revelatory realism' of pictures in novel systems. I propose that two views can be combined: a realistic picture is one (...) which belongs to a system that conveys the kind of information that suits the needs of users in a context. (shrink)

Philosophy of psychiatry has boomed in the last few years. We are now seeing a growing literature on the nature of psychiatric explanation, including work that makes contact with longstanding disputes in the philosophy of science as well as more specific work on mental disorders. This paper looks at some recent work on both representing and explaining mental illness. An emerging picture sees explanation of mental disorder as first constructing causal-statistical networks that represent disease pathways as they unfold in time, (...) and then choosing strategies for causal explanation. The epistemic problems in psychiatry are huge, and they arise from the extreme variety in the causes and trajectories of mental disorders across patients. Existing concepts of levels of explanation and mechanism may seem like an obvious epistemic armoury, but they may not fit psychiatry very well, and philosophical theories of psychiatric explanation stress different ways of trying to understand robust patterns amid the individual variation. (shrink)

I analyze the relation between deliberative democracy and trust through the lens of epistemic justice. I argue for three main claims: (i) the deliberative impasse dividing majority and minority groups in many democracies is due to a particular type of epistemic injustice, which I call ‘hermeneutical domination’; (ii) undoing hermeneutical domination requires epistemic trust; and (iii) this epistemic trust is supported by the three deliberative democratic requirements of equality, legitimacy, and accountability. In arguing for those claims, (...) I contribute to the conceptualization of both epistemic injustice and domination, as well as to discussions of trust and deliberative democracy. (shrink)

Our awareness of the boundedness of the spatial sensory field—a paradigmatic structural feature of visual experience—possesses a distinctive epistemic role. Properly understood, this result undermines a widely assumed picture of how visual experience permits us to learn about the world. This paper defends an alternative picture in which visual experience provides at least two kinds of non-inferential justification for beliefs about the external world. Accommodating this justification in turn requires recognising a new way for visual experience to encode information (...) about the world. Reflection upon the epistemic contribution of sensory experience's structural features thus forces us to revise our understanding of how perception, cognition, and the world fit together. (shrink)

This article develops a new approach for theorizing about hermeneutical injustice. According to a dominant view, hermeneutical injustice results from a hermeneutical gap: one lacks the conceptual tools needed to make sense of, or to communicate, important social experience, where this lack is a result of an injustice in the background social methods used to determine hermeneutical resources. I argue that this approach is incomplete. It fails to capture an important species of hermeneutical injustice which doesn’t result from a lack (...) of hermeneutical resources, but from the overabundance of distorting and oppressive concepts which function to crowd-out, defeat, or preempt the application of a more accurate hermeneutical resource. I propose a broader analysis that better respects the dynamic relationship between hermeneutical resources and the social and political contexts in which they are implemented. (shrink)

This paper will reflect on the possibility of epistemic decolonization, particularly in terms of curriculum, as a transformative educational process in the context of the South African university, and with respect to my own positionality. The argument will centre around two difficult interdependent positions. On the one hand I will argue for the university’s task as transformational, even offering, via Cornel West, the ‘salvific’ possibility that knowledge offers those who seek it. To develop this claim, I will draw on (...) and develop the notion of paideia though the work of Plato and Heidegger.On the other hand, within the postcolonial African university, the question of decolonization in the tertiary space cannot be elided, particularly since the 2015 #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall movements. The university is a powerful colonial relic, and it can be used to reinforce and perpetuate epistemic violence through unreflective or unconscious pedagogical and curriculum decisions. Here I draw on decolonial thinkers such as Santos, Mignolo, Maldonado-Torres, and Mbembe: I argue for a reckoning with the forces of coloniality, and advocate for epistemic justice and criticality, as part of the decolonizing project. In conclusion, working with ideas from Cornel West, I argue to reconcile paideia, as the ‘turning of the soul’, with the decolonizing African university. (shrink)

It is sometimes argued that contemporary media technologies push individuals into collective action on an industrial scale, without them necessarily being aware of it. Yet what if the problem is not that we are all synchronized to the same affective networks and moments, but rather dispersed into countless different networks and moments? What if the effect of so-called social media is to calibrate the interactive spectacle so that we never fully feel the same way as other potential allies at the (...) same moment? While one person is fuming about economic injustice or climate change denial, another is giggling at a cute cat video, and, two hours late, vice versa. The nebulous indignation which constitutes the very fuel of true social change can be redirected safely around the network, avoiding any dangerous surges of radical activity In this short and provocative book Dominic Pettman examines the deliberate deployment of what he calls ‘asynchronous hypermodulation’, as a key strategy encoded into the contemporary media environment. By focusing on ‘we, the mediated’, this radical intervention challenges the narratives that portray the new media environment as a monolithic media apparatus, rendering us all into the same libidinal grey glue, subsequently channelled at will through the pleasure palace of the internet. The unprecedented power of the Internet requires us to rethink the potential for infinite distractions that accompany it. (shrink)

Pautz has argued that the most prominent naive realist account of hallucination—negative epistemic disjunctivism—cannot explain how hallucinations enable us to form beliefs about perceptually presented properties. He takes this as grounds to reject both negative epistemic disjunctivism and naive realism. Our aims are two: First, to show that this objection is dialectically ineffective against naive realism, and second, to draw morals from the failure of this objection for the dispute over the nature of perceptual experience at large.