Rationality matters. Epistemology matters. Morality matters. We live in a society that discounts such claims. But we also live in times that highlight, on a daily basis, their importance. Every day it seems we find new forms of political bifurcation, extremism, ultra-nationalism, xenophobia, racism, sexism, and homophobia. The intellectual fashion that wasāthat all is simply cultural criticism and that truth is ultimately relativeāhas become far too dangerous for those of us concerned with justice . Advocates of patriarchy and racism have figured out that if facts are malleable, if signs are infinitely plastic, if all is differenceāif all these things are true, then their interpretation of reality is just as good as any other.
Reliance on increasingly worrisome rhetoric, especially political rhetoric, concerning truth or the lack thereof is simply not enough to counteract injustice and oppression , patriarchy and racism. To be concerned with justice is, thus, to be concerned also with epistemology and with rationality. We need these concepts. And, we need these concepts to carry some measure of objectivity and normativity so that claims about justice are true for more than just me or my community. This is no small task. For one thing, objectivity carries with it modern connotations that are simply not endorsed by most philosophers concerned with social justice . Sure, we want to say that injustice is real and that it is wrong, but it seems that if we take our epistemic and ontological concepts from the Enlightenment, then we are simply perpetuating past exclusions and oppressions . After all, the objectivity and impartiality of the Enlightenment provided grounds for denying the personhood of many who were neither male nor white. To take our cue from this time is to perpetuate inequality. Furthermore, traditional grounds provided by the Enlightenment, grounds of the sort that have politically and ethically held together Western liberal democracies these past several centuries, these grounds have been ripped apart. And not just in philosophy but in our everyday lives. Cultural relativity is so pervasive that we frequently find people hedging their truth claims with the weasler āfor me.ā In fact, many people today espouse the belief that something can be ātrue for themā without necessarily being true for everyone.
How, then, to ground claims of justice? How do we arrive at some measure of objectivity and normativity for ethical and epistemic claims? We live in a world where we have come to recognize great cultural variability. We have also come to realize the great relativity of truth . Not so for the Enlightenment philosophers whose views we reject. For them, truth was Truth, provided one followed the correct epistemological method. But we no longer believe that. Like the culture around us that rejects absolutist methodologies, philosophers today have increasingly come to reject Enlightenment ways of thinking. Within philosophy broadly, we find a decided and effective undermining of Cartesianism and of the Enlightenment ideals that were built upon it. Within feminist theory and race theory more specifically, we find an even more decided and effective undermining of Cartesianism . These latter philosophers have been especially keen to demonstrate how the foundations of the Enlightenment, the very same foundations that were supposed to establish equality , were mostly a farce that codified exclusionary moral and epistemic principles. Much less decidedly and effectively have philosophers replaced these foundations. Such a replacement is far from a simple task. It is nonetheless a task worth pursuing. And it is the task I pursue here.
The foundations that we need, in part, depend on the problem to be solved. I believe the problem is both deeply epistemic and deeply moral. So much so that it is quite difficult to tease apart the epistemic from the moral aspects of the problem. Ultimately, however, the problem is fundamentally a moral one because our epistemology has created injustice that needs to be resolved. In other words, the results of modernist epistemologies may not have been so in intention but in practice they are narrow and exclusionary assessments of epistemic agency that in turn allow for very real oppression . What we need to do in order to overcome the ignorance of modern approaches is to recognize diversity ābut to do so in a way that allows normativity. The problem is, of course, an ancient oneānamely, how to account for diversity within a unified whole. This is a variation on Platoās concern with the one and the many, but it is, in its epistemological form, also the same difficulty the moderns dealt with when navigating between objectivism and relativism. Unlike the moderns, we are much more inclined to embrace diversity , but embracing diversity comes with the very real threat of a cultural relativism . How is it that we can embrace multiplicity without giving into relativism? Answering this question requires finding a unity capable of allowing for multiplicity. This is, again, no small task.
On the one hand, our acceptance of cultural relativism runs deep, even for philosophers. We all admit a certain multiplicity of belief systems that are difficult to navigate without metanarratives and transcendental constraints. On the other hand, we also have to cope with the fact that however much our societies embrace multiplicity and diversity , we also reject it. Our world is one full of unrepentant racism and sexism, xenophobia and homophobia, transphobia and ableism. People donāt want to accept cultural diversity . Intolerance is widespread. Some peopleāparticularly those with epistemic and social power āalso do not wish to accept that injustice is very much a part of our everyday lives. In one very telling instance, African-Americans often point to how white America is numb to much of the social reality of black America. In a damning criticism, James Baldwin accused white America of a crime āwhich neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know itā [italics added] (Baldwin 1963, 19).1 Baldwin may well be right, especially the part about we in white American not knowing what it is we are doing. This sort of ānot-knowingā of which Baldwin speaks is a form of socially constructed ignorance. Unlike the often morally unobjectionable ignorance in which we simply lack information, socially constructed ignorance is, as Charles Mills and Alison Bailey argue, something that reinforces power structures and perpetuates oppression and marginalization āand all without many of us seeing what is before our eyes. Socially constructed ignorance is a special sort of epistemic crime, one full of moral lapses, but it is not one we are condemned to repeatāprovided we understand what it is we are doing and how to correct for it. What I want to do is not just identify the difficulties with ignorance but to offer a path for overcoming those difficulties. I want an epistemology that can do some actual work in the world. I hope for a liberatory epistemology.
From what has been thus far argued, it would appear that an inclusive and liberatory epistemology is, first, radically non-Cartesian and, second, fundamentally ethical. What makes it necessarily non-Cartesian is the fact that oppression is intrinsic to Cartesian ways of thinking, at least as we have inherited them. Hume and Kant offer two of the most successful epistemological models, but each of their views is highly restrictive of who gets to count as an epistemic and moral agent. Those restrictions bleed through to contemporary S-knows-that-p epistemologies in which knowers are denied the material conditions of their livesāunless, that is, those knowers happen to be male and white. What makes it fundamentally ethical is that the overarching concern of any liberatory epistemology will be liberation and, presumably, a more just world.
As I proceed, I will start by laying out the general terrain of the argument before developing a deeper account of ignorance and the two concepts that I believe can help us overcome it: understanding and reasonableness. What the concepts of understanding and reasonableness offer that the concepts of knowledge and reason cannot is a more holistic and substantive approach to what we are doing epistemically. Reason , in particular, has been treated methodologically and often instrumentally throughout the past several hundred years of philosophy. Knowledge, as feminists and virtue epistemologists have pointed out, often seems hopelessly stuck analyzing merely factual matters like āsnow is whiteā or āgrass is green.ā It has frequently failed to address the larger picture of how these bits of information hang together to offer a full picture of the world and of the people we supposedly know. Reasonableness and understanding speak to the contextual aspects of what it is we do when we interact with and grasp the world around us. This contextuality can, I argue, help us see more clearly what it is we miss when we engage in actively, socially constructed forms of ignorance. Yet it is also the case that the contextuality makes it much more difficult to say exactly what it is to be reasonable or to say exactly what it is we do when we understand. If we must grasp the context āand indeed we mustāthere is no saying in advance what is the reasonable belief or action; there is no saying in advance what it means to understand. There are no necessary and sufficient conditions for these concepts because they always exist in a specific situations. This does not, however, mean that there is not some unity to what it is we do when we are reasonable or what it is we do when we understand. We can say...