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.     

Injustice in the Spaces between Concepts

I argue that epistemic injustice manifests not only in the content of our concepts, but in the spaces between them. Others have shown that epistemic injustice arises in the form of “testimonial injustice,” where an agent is harmed because her credibility is undervalued, and “hermeneutical injustice,” where an agent is harmed because some community lacks the conceptual resources that would allow her to render her experience intelligible. I think that epistemic injustice also arises as a result of prejudiced and harmful defects in the inferential architecture of both scientific practice and everyday thinking. Drawing on lessons from the philosophy of science, I argue that the inferential architecture of our epistemic practices can be prejudiced and wrongful, leading to a variety of epistemic injustice that I am calling “inferential injustice.” This type of injustice is fully structural; it inheres in our epistemic practices themselves rather than as a direct result of an individual's action. For this reason, cases of inferential injustice are importantly different from extant cases of epistemic injustice and are especially hard to track. We need a better understanding of inferential injustice so that we can avoid and ameliorate cases such as the ones I present here.     

Distinguished Lecture: Social structure,narrative and explanation

Recent work on social injustice has focused on implicit bias as an important factor in explaining persistent injustice in spite of achievements on civil rights. In this paper, I argue that because of its individualism, implicit bias explanation, taken alone, is inadequate to explain ongoing injustice; and, more importantly, it fails to call attention to what is morally at stake. An adequate account of how implicit bias functions must situate it within a broader theory of social structures and structural injustice; changing structures is often a precondition for changing patterns of thought and action and is certainly required for durable change.     

What is My Role in Changing the System? A New Model of Responsibility for Structural Injustice

What responsibility do individuals bear for structural injustice? Iris Marion Young has offered the most fully developed account to date, the Social Connections Model. She argues that we all bear responsibility because we each causally contribute to structural processes that produce injustice. My aim in this article is to motivate and defend an alternative account that improves on Young’s model by addressing five fundamental challenges faced by any such theory. The core idea of what I call the “Role-Ideal Model” is that we are each responsible for structural injustice through and in virtue of our social roles, i.e. our roles as parents, colleagues, employers, citizens, etc., because roles are the site where structure meets agency. In short, the Role-Ideal Model (1) explains how individual action contributes to structural change, (2) justifies demands for action from each particular agent, (3) specifies what kinds of acts should be undertaken, (4) moderates between demanding too much and too little of individual agents, and (5) provides an account of the critical responses appropriate for holding individuals accountable for structural injustice.     

All Justice is Social but it’s not all Social Justice

I take social injustice to be injustice perpetrated on members of society by laws and public social practices. I take social justice to be the struggle to right social injustice. After explaining these ideas, I then address the question: why are so many people opposed to the very idea of social justice? I offer a number of explanations, among them, that to acknowledge that there is social injustice in one’s society often requires considerable change on one’s part.     

Hermeneutical Injustice and Liberatory Education

Hermeneutical injustice occurs when there is a gap in the interpretive resources available to members of a society due to the marginalization of members of a social group from sense‐making practices. In this paper, I address two questions about hermeneutical injustice that are undertheorized in the recent literature: (1) what do we mean when we say that someone lacks the interpretive resources for making sense of an experience? and (2) how do marginalized individuals develop interpretive resources? In response to (1), I argue that to lack interpretive resources is to lack conceptual skill or know how. In response to (2), I draw on resources from Gilbert Ryle and Andy Clark and provide a model of how marginalized individuals develop new conceptual skills by naming their shared experience and using it as a tool for scaffolding each other's conceptual performance. At the same time, I draw on the work of Gaile Pohlhaus and Kristie Dotson to show how these practices succeed only through the redistribution of epistemic power across differently situated social groups.     

Samaritanism and Civil Disobedience

In this paper, I defend the existence of a moral duty to disobey the law and engage in civil disobedience on the basis of one of the grounds of political obligation—the Samaritan duty. Christopher H. Wellman has recently offered a ‘Samaritan account’ of state legitimacy and political obligation, according to which the state is justified in coercing each citizen in order to rescue all from the perilous circumstances of the state of nature; and each of us is bound to obey the law, as the state demands, because we each have a responsibility to help rescue others when this assistance is not unreasonably costly. Though Wellman recognizes that there can be reasons for disobeying the law and resisting injustice in otherwise legitimate states, he overlooks the possibility that at least some of these reasons could be Samaritan in nature, grounded in the duty to rescue people from peril. As I shall argue, the Samaritan duty supports obligations to disobey the law, when the law prohibits Samaritan rescues, and to engage in civil disobedience, when unjust laws and practices contribute to endangering people. The discussion proceeds as follows. After a brief overview of the Samaritan duty, I articulate my case for Samaritan duties to disobey the law, and duties to engage in civil disobedience when unjust laws, institutions, or practices enable what I call ‘persistent Samaritan perils’. I then examine and respond to several objections to my account: first, that the costs of law-breaking are unreasonable, and thus cannot be morally required; second, that individuals’ particular acts of protest and civil disobedience do not appear to make any difference to the rescue, and thus cannot be required; third, that I stretch the Samaritan duty beyond recognition; and fourth, that the Samaritan duty binds us to help people in need or peril anywhere, not particularly at home. I consider in conclusion the advantages and limits of my account of citizens’ Samaritan duties in the face of injustice.     

Linguistic Privilege and Justice: What Can We Learn from STEM?

Abstract

The linguistic privilege of native speakers in scientific communication, both oral and written, has been widely reported to influence researchers’ publications and careers in and beyond academia. I examine social structure and communication in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields through the example of big science and attempt to answer the question of why language injustice has a less significant effect on non-native scientists and engineers than on philosophy scholars. I do so by scrutinizing the role of signs and nonlinguistic boundary objects in STEM practice and written communication. I also argue that although high-energy physics is relatively linguistically inclusive, it is marked by linguistic privilege of certain groups that bears a structural character which is not common in STEM and is predominant mainly in megascience. I finally suggest that insofar as rhetoric in STEM is generally modest, its practices can serve as an example for analytic philosophy, which also aims at minimizing rhetoric.     

Testimonial Injustice and a Case for Mindful Epistemology

In her 2007 book Epistemic Injustice Miranda Fricker identifies testimonial injustice as a case where a hearer assigns lower credibility to a speaker due to “identity prejudice.” Fricker considers testimonial injustice as a form of epistemic injustice since it wrongs the speaker “in her capacity as a knower.” Fricker recommends developing the virtue of “testimonial justice” to address testimonial injustice. She takes this virtue to involve training in a “distinctly reflexive critical social awareness.” The main goal of this article is to argue that Fricker's proposed training falls short of the target and that a cultivation of the capacity of being present—the ability to be mindful—would be necessary to develop the critical social awareness that Fricker requires. I want to explore the impact of compassion and open-mindedness—virtues cultivated in mindfulness training—on testimonial justice specifically and virtue epistemology generally. In attempting to develop an epistemic account informed by mindfulness—a mindful epistemology—my primary goal is to bring Buddhist insights on how to anchor the mind by training it to be fully present and attentive into the focus of mainstream Western philosophy. More specifically, I argue that doing so allows us to appreciate the crucial role that a prediscursive level of cultivation plays in the development of testimonial justice.     

How Collusion Perpetuates Racial Discrimination in Societies that Ostensibly Promote Equal Opportunity

It is shown here that injustices due to racial discrimination are best identified in light of the deleterious effects they have upon their victims, rather than the beliefs and attitudes of their perpetrators. For among participants who cooperate clandestinely to bring about racial injustice there may be broad disagreement about what it is they are doing collectively, and why; or they may disagree in principle about whether what they are doing is morally right. I employ the notion of ‘nomotropic’ behaviour to replace the oversimplified notion of ‘rule-following’ in order to explain how duplicity and hypocrisy fall shy of being regarded as irrational in social climates where implicit norms reinforce racial privileging while explicit norms denounce it. Further, examining the ‘collective utility’ of dogmatic beliefs and norms comprising part of the social architecture that covertly reinforces racial injustice (while ostensibly deriding it) may help to explain why it often seems to make so little difference whether members of an unfairly advantaged elite, whose collaborative behaviour perpetuates a social injustice, individually approve of doing so or not.     

Structural linguistic injustice

This paper develops a concept of structural linguistic injustice. By employing the so-called structural-injustice approach, it argues that individuals' seemingly harmless language attitudes and language choices might enable serious harms on a collective level, constituting what one could call a structural linguistic injustice. Section 1 introduces the linguistic-justice debate. By doing so, it establishes linguistic diversity as the context in which phenomena such as individuals' language attitudes, language choice, and language loss occur. Moreover, the paper illustrates why employing the structural-injustice approach might be beneficial for the linguistic-justice debate. Section 2 conceptualizes individuals' (certain types of) language attitudes and language choice as (objectionable) social structures. Section 3 provides a concept of structural linguistic injustice. Section 4 suggests one possible remedy for structural linguistic injustice. Section 5 concludes the paper.     

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.     

The Epistemology of Justice

In arguing about justice, different sides often accept common moral principles, but reach different conclusions about justice because they disagree about facts. I argue that motivated reasoning, epistemic injustice, and ideologies of injustice support unjust institutions by entrenching distorted representations of the world. Working from a naturalistic conception of justice as a kind of social contract, I suggest some strategies for discovering what justice demands by counteracting these biases. Moral sentiments offer vital resources to this end.     

Epistemic injustice in mathematics

We investigate how epistemic injustice can manifest itself in mathematical practices. We do this as both a social epistemological and virtue-theoretic investigation of mathematical practices. We delineate the concept both positively—we show that a certain type of folk theorem can be a source of epistemic injustice in mathematics—and negatively by exploring cases where the obstacles to participation in a mathematical practice do not amount to epistemic injustice. Having explored what epistemic injustice in mathematics can amount to, we use the concept to highlight a potential danger of intellectual enculturation.

     

Two Kinds of Unknowing

Miranda Fricker claims that a “gap” in collective hermeneutical resources with respect to the social experiences of marginalized groups prevents members of those groups from understanding their own experiences (Fricker 2007). I argue that because Fricker misdescribes dominant hermeneutical resources as collective, she fails to locate the ethically bad epistemic practices that maintain gaps in dominant hermeneutical resources even while alternative interpretations are in fact offered by non‐dominant discourses. Fricker's analysis of hermeneutical injustice does not account for the possibility that marginalized groups can be silenced relative to dominant discourses without being prevented from understanding or expressing their own social experiences. I suggest that a gap in dominant hermeneutical resources is ambiguous between two kinds of unknowing: hermeneutical injustice suffered by members of marginalized groups, and epistemically and ethically blameworthy ignorance perpetrated by members of dominant groups.     

Structural Injustice and Massively Shared Obligations

It is often argued that our obligations to address structural injustice are collective in character. But what exactly does it mean for ‘ordinary citizens’ to have collective obligations vis‐à‐vis large‐scale injustice? In this article, I propose to pay closer attention to the different kinds of collective action needed in addressing some of these structural injustices and the extent to which these are available to large, unorganised groups of people. I argue that large, dispersed, and unorganised groups of people are often in a position to perform distributive collective actions. As such, ordinary citizens can have massively shared obligations to address structural injustice through distributive action, but, ultimately, such obligations are ‘collective’ only in a fairly weak sense.     

Can global justice provide a path toward achieving justice across the Americas?

In this article, I investigate actions that the United States took against Costa Rica during the 1980s in order to argue that current discussions about global justice and its foundations are flawed in three ways. First, it misidentifies the parties of global justice as individual citizens. Second, it conceptualizes global justice as exclusively a distributive justice concern and, as a result, it misidentifies what constitutes a global injustice as being the adverse fate of individuals who live in a poor nation. Finally, the current debate provides no guidance in what must be considered to identify the specific obligations one nation may have to another nation. Given these three problems, I maintain that we conceptualize global injustice as an issue of social justice rather than one exclusively of distributive justice. This will require identifying nations as the parties to global justice, at least in certain cases, and realizing that our goal is to remedy oppressive global structures of power. Utilizing the social justice I propose will put us on the road toward achieving justice across the Americas.     

Other People’s Problems: Student Distancing,Epistemic Responsibility,and Injustice

In classes that examine entrenched injustices like sexism or racism, students sometimes use “distancing strategies” to dissociate themselves from the injustice being studied. Education researchers argue that distancing is a mechanism through which students, especially students of apparent privilege, deny their complicity in systemic injustice. While I am sympathetic to this analysis, I argue that there is much at stake in student distancing that the current literature fails to recognize. On my view, distancing perpetuates socially sanctioned forms of ignorance and unknowing, through which students misrecognize not only their complicity in injustice, but also the ways that injustice shapes the world, their lives, and their knowledge. Thus, distancing is pedagogically problematic because it prevents students from understanding important social facts, and because it prevents them from engaging with perspectives, analyses, and testimonies that might beneficially challenge their settled views and epistemic habits. To substantiate this new analysis, I draw on recent work on epistemologies of ignorance, especially José Medina’s account of “active ignorance.” In order to respond to student distancing, I argue, it is not sufficient for teachers to make students aware of injustice, or of their potential complicity in it. Beyond this, teachers should cultivate epistemic virtue in the classroom and encourage students to take responsibility for better ways of knowing. The article ends by outlining several classroom practices for beginning this work.     

Linguistic Justice and Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

This paper investigates whether analytic philosophers who are non-native English speakers are subject to linguistic injustice and, if yes, what kind of injustice that is and whether it is different from the general disadvantage that non-native English speakers meet in a world where English is rapidly becoming the lingua franca. The paper begins with a critical review of the debate on linguistic justice, with a particular focus on the emergence of a lingua franca and the related questions of justice, both in terms of the disadvantages suffered by those groups who bear the cost of learning another language and in terms of forms of discrimination due to accents and language improprieties. We argue that being at a relative disadvantage compared to others does not necessarily translate in a proper injustice if fundamental civil, political and social provisions are in place. We suggest that a circumstance of injustice arises when such disadvantage affects those who are not yet members of such academic community such as prospective students, thus contributing in keeping the non-native group a minority. We qualify this case of disadvantage as a matter of structural injustice.