Political Conviction and Epistemic Injustice

Philosophia - Epistemic injustice occurs when we fail to appropriately respect others as epistemic agents. Philosophers building on the work of Miranda Fricker, who introduced the concept, have...     

Narrative Fiction and Epistemic Injustice

This article looks at the role that narrative fiction—film, television, and literature—can play in countering and mitigating epistemic injustice. The notion of epistemic injustice is explicated by Miranda Fricker as a distinctive kind of injustice done to a knower in her role as a knower and is identified in two forms: testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice. The operation of both types of epistemic injustice depend upon the social imagination and the shared concepts of social identity within it—what it is to be a man, woman, straight, black, gay, transgender. It is here that narrative fiction becomes pertinent, as it has the potential to influence the social imagination for the better. Fricker uses fictional scenarios to clarify her notions of epistemic injustice; I argue that aside from elucidating analysis of our epistemic practices, fiction can also provide epistemic correctives. In the first through fourth sections of the paper, I explore ways in which narrative fiction can combat testimonial and hermeneutical injustice. The fifth section then considers the unique features of narrative fiction in this capacity to resist epistemic injustice and argues that it capitalizes on advantages that other approaches cannot share in.     

Epistemic Injustice in Social Cognition

Silencing is a practice that disrupts linguistic and communicative acts, but its relationship to knowledge and justice is not fully understood. Prior models of epistemic injustice tend to characterize silencing as a symptom that follows as a result of underrepresenting the knowledge of others. In this paper, I advance a model of epistemic injustice in which the opposite sometimes happens. Drawing on recent work in experimental cognitive science, I argue that silencing can cause misrepresentations of knowledge and, subsequently, epistemic injustice to occur. Drawing on recent work in epistemology, I also argue that, according to some leading theories, silencing potentially causes ignorance by depriving individuals and communities of knowledge itself. These findings expand our understanding of silencing in social practice, contribute a broader model of epistemic injustice for research at the intersection of ethics and philosophy of mind, and have implications for leading theories of knowledge in epistemology.     

认知不公正：认知维度下理解医患互动的视角

从认知不公正的理论视角出发对医患互动予以重新审视。研究发现,医患间的认知不公正不仅阻碍医患间证言知识的有效传递,凸显二者在认知预期与互动意愿上的差异,而且呈现出波动性、形态多样性和伤害间接性的特点,加速医患互动工具化的同时,加剧双方弥合信任的难度。尽管医患主动采取“理直气和”与“关系就医”的调适策略,但医患关系的改善以及认知不公正的消除不仅是医疗领域内医患双方的合作问题,还需要从更广泛的社会维度出发,迈向扩大的医患共同体。

     

Epistemic Injustice and Open‐Mindedness

In this paper, I argue that recent discussions of culprit‐based epistemic injustices can be framed around the intellectual character virtue of open‐mindedness. In particular, these injustices occur because the people who commit them are closed‐minded in some respect; the injustices can therefore be remedied through the cultivation of the virtue of open‐mindedness. Describing epistemic injustices this way has two explanatory benefits: it yields a more parsimonious account of the phenomenon of epistemic injustice and it provides the underpinning of a virtue‐theoretical structure by which to explain what it is that perpetrators are culpable for and how virtues can have normative explanatory power.     

Mary Astell on Bad Custom and Epistemic Injustice

Mary Astell is a fascinating seventeenth‐century figure whose work admits of many interpretations. One feature of her work that has received little attention is her focus on bad custom. This is surprising; Astell clearly regards bad custom as exerting a kind of epistemic power over agents, particularly women, in a way that limits their intellectual capacities. This article aims to link two contemporary sociopolitical/social‐epistemological projects by showing how a seventeenth‐century thinker anticipated these projects. Astell's account of bad custom shows that she was attuned to the kinds of institutional or structural explanations theorized by Sally Haslanger, and that she acknowledges that bad custom—as an institutional or structural explanation—is intimately linked with epistemic injustice, albeit a kind not yet captured by contemporary social epistemologists. I call this form of epistemic injustice found in Astell epistemic internalization injustice. I argue that the epistemic significance of Astell's notion of bad custom is that it enables us to understand how bad custom conditions human relations in such a way as to result in epistemic injustice. Through coming to understand her notion of bad custom, we can expand our understanding of social epistemic phenomena like epistemic injustice.     

Epistemic Injustice and Resistance in the Chiapas Highlands: The Zapatista Case

Though Indigenous women in Mexico have traditionally exhibited some of the highest levels of maternal mortality in the country—a fact that some authors have argued was an important reason to explain the EZLN uprising in 1994—there is some evidence that the rate of maternal mortality has fallen in Zapatista communities in the Chiapas Highlands in the last two decades, and that other health indicators have improved. In this article, we offer an account of the modest success that Zapatista communities have achieved in improving their health levels. In particular, we argue that Zapatista women have implicitly used a form of feminist standpoint theory to diagnose the epistemic (and economic) injustice to which they have been traditionally subjected and to develop an epistemology of resistance that is manifested in actions such as becoming health promoters in their communities. We also argue that this epistemology of resistance is partially responsible for the improvement of health levels in their communities. Finally, on the basis of our discussion of the Zapatista case, we suggest that standpoint theory could play an important role in other healthcare settings involving oppressed minorities.     

The Empathy Dilemma: Democratic Deliberation,Epistemic Injustice and the Problem of Empathetic Imagination

Res Publica - One of the challenges facing complex democratic societies marked by deep normative disagreements and differences along lines of race, gender, sexuality, culture and religion is how...     

Relational Knowing and Epistemic Injustice: Toward a Theory of Willful Hermeneutical Ignorance

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.     

Vulnerability of Individuals With Mental Disorders to Epistemic Injustice in Both Clinical and Social Domains

Many individuals who have mental disorders often report negative experiences of a distinctively epistemic sort, such as not being listened to, not being taken seriously, or not being considered credible because of their psychiatric conditions. In an attempt to articulate and interpret these reports we present Fricker’s concepts of epistemic injustice (Fricker, 2007, p. 1) and then focus on testimonial injustice and hermeneutic injustice as it applies to individuals with mental disorders. The clinical impact of these concepts on quality of care is discussed. Within the clinical domain, we contrast epistemic injustice with epistemic privilege and authority. We then argue that testimonial and hermeneutic injustices also affect individuals with mental disorders not only when communicating with their caregivers but also in the social context as they attempt to reintegrate into the general society and assume responsibilities as productive citizens. Following the trend of the movement of mental health care to the community, the testimonies of people with mental disorders should not be restricted to issues involving their own personal mental states.