The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice

Ian James Kidd, José Medina, Gaile Pohlhaus, Jr.

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351814492
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

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.

Part 1
Core concepts

1
Varieties of Epistemic Injustice¹

Gaile Pohlhaus, Jr.

The idea of “epistemic injustice” draws together three branches of philosophy – political philosophy, ethics, and epistemology – to consider how epistemic practices and institutions may be deployed and structured in ways that are simultaneously infelicitous toward certain epistemic values (such as truth, aptness, and understanding) and unjust with regard to particular knowers.² Examining the ethics and politics of knowledge practices is, of course, not new; for example, feminist, critical race, and decolonial philosophers have done so for quite some time (Anderson 2017; Babbitt 2017; Collins 2017; Pitts 2017; Tuana 2017). As Patricia Hill Collins notes, where there is oppression, there is also resistance to oppression (1991: 12–13, 2000: 22). Likewise, where there has been epistemic injustice there has also been resistance to epistemic injustice. One form of this resistance has been the explicit identification and analysis of epistemic injustices offered by those experiencing them. For example, as Vivian May notes, Anna Julia Cooper, writing in 1892, highlighted the suppression of Black women’s ideas through epistemic violence and interpretive silencing (May 2014: 97). Sojourner Truth, speaking in 1867, highlighted the denial of Black women as knowers via asymmetries in cognitive authority and via men’s habitually constrained imaginations (May 2014: 98). Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, writing within a (post-)colonial context, identifies what she calls ‘epistemic violence’ in claims to know the interests of subaltern persons that preclude the subaltern from formulating knowledge claims concerning their interests and speaking for themselves (Spivak 1988). These examples are part of a broader history of epistemic resistance through identifying and calling attention to ways in which knowers have been wronged in their capacities as knowers.

Importantly, there is often an implicit sense that these kinds of wrongs are perpetuated from within epistemic practices or are the result of how epistemic institutions are structured. Epistemic injustices can therefore be understood as epistemic in at least three senses. First, they wrong particular knowers as knowers, for example by suppressing a knower’s testimony (Dotson 2011) or by making it difficult for particular knowers to know what it is in their interest to know (Fricker 2007: 147–175). Second, they cause epistemic dysfunction, for example by distorting understanding or stymieing inquiry. Third, they accomplish the aforementioned two harms from within, and sometimes through the use of, our epistemic practices and institutions, for example, when school curricula and academic disciplines are structured in ways that systematically ignore, distort, and/or discredit particular intellectual traditions (Minnich 1990; Mohanty 2004; Outlaw 2007). Consequently, an epistemic injustice not only wrongs a knower as a knower, but also is a wrong that a knower perpetrates as a knower and that an epistemic institution causes in its capacity as an epistemic institution.

Given that epistemic injustices are something that occur within the activities and institutions knowers engage in order to know, and given that a chapter that seeks to convey knowledge concerning the varieties of epistemic injustice does, by definition, engage in epistemic activity, we would do well to consider at the outset the ways in which this essay might itself participate in and perpetuate epistemic injustice. With this concern in mind, I will begin by first considering some specific ways in which a chapter on the varieties of epistemic injustice might perpetuate or contribute to epistemic injustice. In doing so, I provide an argument for why I will not offer readers an exhaustive list of the varieties of epistemic injustice nor prescribe a definitive set of categories with which to classify them, but rather provide some initial examples of epistemic injustices so that readers may begin to understand the grammar of the term ‘epistemic injustice’ for future and new uses. I will then sketch four (although not the only) lenses with which to think about varieties of epistemic injustice. I do so with the aim of giving readers a sense of some ways epistemic injustices can take shape without foreclosing the possibility of thinking about epistemic injustices along other trajectories, and especially along trajectories that may be more readily noticed by those who are differently located than I am.

On the dangers of defining the field of epistemic injustice

In her essay, “A Cautionary Tale,” Kristie Dotson warns that “when addressing and identifying forms of epistemic oppression one needs to endeavor not to perpetuate epistemic oppression” (2012a: 24). For Dotson, epistemic oppression occurs when exclusions produce deficiencies in social knowledge that unjustly infringe upon particular knowers’ “ability to utilize persuasively shared epistemic resources within a given epistemic community in order to participate in knowledge production and, if required, the revision of those same resources” (2012a: 24). In other words, epistemic oppression occurs when particular knowers are precluded from making an impact, not just with shared epistemic resources, but also on shared epistemic resources. The danger of perpetuating epistemic oppression in this manner seems significant in a discipline that seeks to define concepts of concern to all knowers (such as “truth,” “knowledge,” and “reality”), but is oriented by a culture of justification. Following the work of Gayle Salamon, Dotson defines a culture of justification as one that “requires the practice of making congruent one’s own ideas … with some ‘traditional’ conception of philosophical engagement” (2012b: 6), and argues that this kind of culture is pervasive in philosophy. To this I would add that while one is encouraged in philosophy to make one’s own ideas congruent with those that have already dominated the field, the “best” kind of philosophy is often defined as establishing and preserving norms to which others must now make themselves congruent, where those persons regarded as capable of establishing norms worth preserving have historically been dominantly situated (Cherry and Schwitzgebel 2016).³ As Amy Olberding points out, this dynamic, as it is embedded in philosophical institutions, puts non-dominant philosophers and non-dominant philosophical traditions in a double-bind: if their philosophical contributions conform to what is already established, they appear to be an unnecessary addition to philosophy as typically conceived, but if they do not conform to what is already established, they are deemed un-or less than philosophical (Olberding 2015: 14–15). Either scenario frames European and Euro-American philosophical traditions as wholly representative of experienced reality toward which all other experiences of reality must bend – surely a kind of epistemic injustice insofar as it simultaneously hierarchizes without warrant what is epistemically significant or worthy of epistemic attention (i.e. the world as experienced by this particular set of knowers and not another) and who counts as an ideal epistemic agent (i.e. those who experience the world in this particular way, not another).⁴

With these initial cautions in mind, there are at least two dangers I should like to avoid in introducing the reader to particular varieties of epistemic injustice. First is the danger of participating in what Kristie Dotson calls a “rhetoric of beginnings” (2014b: 3). The second danger is of generating what David Owen calls “aspectival captivity” (2003: 88). These two dangers, which I will explain below, are related insofar as engaging a rhetoric of beginnings is one way of generating aspectival captivity. Nonetheless, it is not the only way. Both dangers carry the risk of wronging particular knowers as well as distorting epistemic activity. Explaining how will help to illustrate some of the ways epistemic injustices can manifest.

In her introduction to the special issue of Hypatia on Interstices: Inheriting Women of Color Feminist Philosophy, Dotson challenges the notion that the issue represents a beginning or entry of women of color into philosophy, indicating that to frame the intellectual work contained in the volume as a beginning would ignore (and encourage readers to ignore) the history of women of color thought that precedes its publication and upon which authors within the volume draw (Dotson 2014b: 3).⁵ Moreover, to frame the issue as an epistemic beginning would treat an historically white epistemic institution (i.e. the journal) as that which confers legitimacy to women of color philosophers, a move that Dotson actively resists in her introduction. A “rhetoric of beginnings” also carries the pitfalls associated with “coinage” discussed by Patricia Hill Collins in this volume. For example, when epistemic practices and resources honed within communities resistant to social oppression move from those communities into institutions that have been shaped to serve the interests of those with social power, they can become distorted and made to serve dominant interests in these distortions (Collins 2017).

The danger of “beginnings,” then, is that in offering an account of the varieties of epistemic injustice I might proceed by, or be taken as, offering an “origin” story that represents a “new” development in philosophy beginning to be explored. Proceeding in this manner disrespects and perpetuates harm against particular knowers in ways that can be considered epistemically unjust. First, it perpetuates ignorance regarding the prior existence, as well as the resilience and creativity, of those who have historically experienced and called attention to epistemic injustices, thereby disrespecting whole groups of knowers and encouraging habits of attention that disregard certain knowers as knowers. Second, in failing to acknowledge the epistemic labor that precedes me, I would encourage habits of mind that deflect attention away from the interdependence of knowers, while simultaneously relying upon that interdependence, thereby exploiting the epistemic labor of others to perpetuate the appearance of my own epistemic labor as singular. I can only think and communicate the thoughts I offer here owing to the epistemic labor of those who have worked so hard before me to call attention to injustices in our practices of knowing. Finally, an “origin” story would likely distort understanding of at least some epistemic injustices insofar as it would encourage readers to view all epistemic injustice solely in relation to the account given here, thereby establishing my own account as primary or central. There is a presumption in thinking that the wide range and long history of various groups of marginalized knowers’ resistances and protestations concerning epistemic injustices could be captured in one essay or by one sort of person or within one particular frame. Instead, I encourage readers to read this essay alongside the multiple accounts of epistemic injustices offered in the section on liberatory epistemologies with the knowledge that even these accounts are not the final word on the forms that epistemic injustices might take (Anderson 2017; Collins 2017; Hall 2017; McKinnon 2017; Pitts 2017; Tremain 2017; Tuana 2017).

This last concern is connected to the second danger, generating what David Owen calls “aspectival captivity,” by which he means the tendency to repress alternate ways of reflecting on a given topic (2003: 85–88). Calling attention to particular epistemic activities and institutions, necessarily downplays and omits others.⁶ Doing so, even in the service of identifying particular epistemic injustices, has the potential of fixating attention in ways that might render inconceivable other epistemic injustices as yet unarticulated and best understood by attending to altogether different aspects of epistemic life. For example, if focusing on epistemic injustices that pertain to propositional knowing, I might neglect those that pertain to knowing how (Hawley 2011) and other forms of non-propositional knowing (Shotwell 2011, 2017). Or, if focusing on the acquisition and transfer of knowledge, I might draw attention away from injustices that pertain to other sorts of epistemic activities such as attending, perceiving, questioning, imagining, and acknowledging (Hookway 2010). As Kristie Dotson has argued, one way of navigating these sorts of difficulties is to utilize open conceptual structures “that signify without absolute foreclosure” (Dotson 2012a: 25). Still even adding the proviso, “and there may be other forms, too,” leaves the possibility that other forms of epistemic injustice may be misperceived if rendered in the terms established by my own account (Lugones 2003: 68–69), particularly given the homogenizing tendencies often operative when regarding multiple resistances to dominance (Roshanravan 2014: 41–42). Any account of the varieties of epistemic injustices must, therefore, be rendered polyvocally or with what José Medina calls a kaleidoscopic sensibility (Medina 2013: 297–308).

This need not, however, lead to an epistemic relativism where an injustice is only an injustice if one cares to envision our epistemic lives one particular way and not another. Attending to these difficulties does call attention to the situatedness of the philosopher and to the fact that her accounts will be useful in some ways while not at all useful in others. Even so, the very idea of epistemic injustice entails the notion that knowers can be harmed or wronged in their capacity as knowers, suggesting that knowers owe and ought to be able to reasonably expect some things from one another insofar as they are knowers. In other words, our epistemic lives are fundamentally intertwined with one another such that one cannot simply ignore other knowers and know well. Hence my attempt to avoid establishing a set of definitive categories of epistemic injustice is motivated precisely by a desire to leave my account open to other knowers with the understanding that as finite temporal beings, “we simply do not have the capacity to track all the implications of our positions on any given issue” (Dotson 2012a: 24–25). Whether any given knower engages in epistemic activities (such as knowing, inquiring, imagining, and considering) well is not up for grabs, but rather navigated and evaluated within the thick of our epistemic lives together.

Holding onto both concerns (that we ought to attend to epistemic injustices and that we ought not consider any one approach to understanding epistemic injustice as foundational or definitive of all), I instead discuss varieties of epistemic injustice through four possible lenses. Each lens provides a way to distinguish and trace relations among ways that epistemic agents and institutions can simultaneously harm knowers and distort epistemic values. However, these four lenses are not the only way to do so.⁷ In addition, it should be noted that some epistemic injustices appear within more than one lens; however the light shed on them will refract differently depending upon the lens with which they are viewed.

Social contract and coordinated ignorance

One lens with which to think about varieties of epistemic injustice is to consider how persons may be systematically subject to injustice generally speaking and to understand epistemic injustices as intertwined with (and reinforcing) relations of dominance and oppression. Charles Mills’ analysis of the nonideal conditions that maintain white supremacy in the United States as a racial cont...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction to The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice
• PART 1 Core concepts
• PART 2 Liberatory epistemologies and axes of oppression
• PART 3 Schools of thought and subfields within epistemology
• PART 4 Socio-political, ethical, and psychological dimensions of knowing
• PART 5 Case studies of epistemic injustice
• Index