Forum entries from the Seminar: Critical Epistemologies

On Anderson: Institutions

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Source Text: Epistemic Justice as a Virtue of Social Institutions Elizabeth Anderson (2012) Epistemic Justice as a Virtue of Social Institutions, Social Epistemology, 26:2, 163-173, DOI: 10.1080/02691728.2011.652211 Publication

The text by Anderson helped shed light on a few issues I stumbled over with Frickers Account. On top of the various issues I and seemingly others have with her virtue-based approach, I think a utilitarian angle is worth considering. That would be: okay, I accept that people can help fight injustice by realising their privilege, showing restraint, silencing themselves, and adopting the benevolent listening approach. I think that is a practical, virtuous, and realistic endeavour. But is it the effective path to alleviating structural injustice? I think not, and initially, that is a major reason I discarded Fricker’s approach, although I saw merit. I have similar concerns to Anderson in the scalability of virtues. Virtuous behavior might help my personal well-being, it gives me normative elevation and might even further the quality of relationships I have. But is it applicable to society, is it enough to counteract structural injustice? Well, maybe, assuming that:

  1. Everyone realizes their privilege,
  2. Everyone concludes that justice is the right goal,
  3. Upon deciding to adopt a virtuous stance, everyone at least moderately succeeds in practicing what they preach.

I think, for society, the same society that came up with patriarchy in the first place, external pressure, some measure independent of the convictedness of the subjects is needed. Anderson made the powerful point of: “Anything that works, goes”, which took me some time to appreciate. I am always angry when I get told to keep my shower to a minimum or stop using plastic straws when I know exactly that my using less water is nothing compared to the institutionalized practice of Coca-Cola putting water into bottles. I feel like it is unjustified to ask me to save water while others triple their output, for performance. The same thing applies to Epistemic injustices. It strikes me how much energy it costs to keep up virtuous behavior individually and how little effect there is to show for it. I do not believe in “trickling up” where institutions will eventually adopt individual practices. Is Fricker thereby less right in her point? No, it adds up, as an entire population showering shorter adds up to lots of water saved. Anderson also points out how locally innocent biases can create injustice on a “macro” scale. Another indicator for me is that local virtue is not the sole solution, as it can still feed and sustain a system enforcing epistemic injustice.

I still have doubts about what to do now with my ideas, on how the world looks that I want. I lack the imagination of seeing a world that is epistemically just, and it is hard to strive for something one cannot even imagine. The system is inherently leaning toward inequality, if I try to balance something on a needle, it will only go well so long, before small imbalances create chain reactions and the object should be called unstable. Should we even succeed in “resetting” society, creating equal participation for each subject, how will it remain just? Is Justice always a conjunct of Equality? Are there ways to achieve real Justice without needing equality?

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created by Aron Petau on Tuesday 14. July 2020, 17:45

On Medina, the informant and the inquirer

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Source Text: Dr. José Medina (2012) Hermeneutical Injustice and Polyphonic Contextualism: Social Silences and Shared Hermeneutical Responsibilities, Social Epistemology, 26:2, 201-220, DOI: 10.1080/02691728.2011.652214 Publication

My biggest takeaway here was that, as I tried to hint at in an earlier comment, Whenever we talk about justice, this necessarily refers to a relational concept, where everybody has a double role to ensure successful communication. Medina calls these the inquirer and the informant. So, every individual has to make sure to act to her capacity as an epistemologically sound knowledge-acquiring agent (the inquirer). This would involve knowing when and how to falsify/qualify statements, making inferences about the theory of mind, and generally comparing different statements. The other role is the informant, where the individual should have the capacity to function as an object in an inquiry by another. Very roughly this can, I think, be compared to any good communication model, where there are a listener and a speaker, and both have to function. What was new here, or at least came out more clear is that it not only depends on the capacity of both of these roles on the subject, but it is also directly dependent on the “other”, the agent opposite of the subject. We may call this other society later but it helps me to visualize the other as an individual nonetheless. Where the analogy to communication now fails, in my opinion, is this cross-dependence, where an agent does not fully determine her capacity to act both as an inquirer and as an informant, it is co-determined by the “other”. So, if I, as an “other”, listen to someone's statements, and I fail or refuse to understand the epistemic content of the message, I am not only impairing my epistemic agency, but I also hurt the epistemic agency of the subject. Maybe obvious to most, but this thought struck me as being exactly the point of leverage for dysfunctionalities in power relations. Also argued convincingly in the paper was that these are distinct and independent agencies, which can be impairing an individual separately. Overall, the Medina text was incredibly helpful after the somewhat confusing Fricker text that felt incomplete and left a lot of questions for me. The medina text picked up all my initial doubts, that I couldn't properly formulate, and many more, while still holding to the general framework of Fricker. Although I was not convinced by the Fricker Text, I tend to think the strategy:

"When in doubt, give the subject full epistemic credibility"

Is a good strategy that might alleviate a lot of issues regarding functions of power, and hierarchy, but also further, it might be a good counter for things as our confirmation bias, expectation bias and many individual errors that we could minimize by constantly exposing ourselves to falsifiability through others (voluntarily). Sounds like science applied to agency to me.

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created by Aron Petau on Thursday 09. July 2020, 11:25

On Jaggar: Norms, Outlaw Emotions, and the Ideal Society

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Source Text: Alison M. Jaggar (1989) Love and knowledge: Emotion in feminist epistemology, Inquiry, 32:2, 151-176, DOI: 10.1080/00201748908602185 Publication

I found Jaggar to be a very wholesome read, it was the perfect amount of grounded argumentative structure and felt very connected as a whole. This was, together with the ideas from Lugones the best and most fruitful paper for me. On outlaw emotions: First, I hate the term, I think it’s placative and fails to frame the (actually nice) idea behind it. Outlaw Emotions are all those emotions incompatible with the dominant norms. That’s a huge field to cover, among feminist emotions they would also encompass emotions that are irrational or “faulty”. So, Jaggar does the term Justice by saying, some, but not all Outlaw Emotions are Feminist emotions. To make this evident, just think of a murderer's joy for killing, it is of no feminist interest to dissect, yet it is against dominant values. So, experiencing Outlaw emotions is a (probably) necessary, but not sufficient condition for feminism. The incompatible emotion serves to create discourse and change. Jaggar convincingly shows how emotions have a direct influence on beliefs and can validly constitute evidence, while simultaneously validly influencing values in a similar manner. When we talk about dominant/alternative norms, we already endorse hierarchy in society. We acknowledge its existence, simply by identifying the dominant norm. I am not quite sure what exactly Jaggar proposes we should do with the hierarchy structures in society. Explicitly I can read: Subcultures rejecting dominant norms should be formed, to create counterbalances and a somewhat fair discourse over the topic. “How can we determine which outlaw emotions are to be endorsed or encouraged and which rejected? In what sense can we say that some emotional responses are more appropriate than others? What reason is there for supposing that certain alternative perceptions of the world, perceptions informed by outlaw emotions, are to be preferred to perceptions informed by conventional emotions? Here I can indicate only the general direction of an answer, whose full elaboration must await another occasion. I suggest that emotions are appropriate if they are characteristic of a society in which all Human Life (and perhaps some nonhuman life, too) thrive, or if they are conducive to establishing such a society.” To me this passage sounds sketchy at best, there is no indication of how to successfully separate appropriate from inappropriate emotions. Roughly, I read this part as: emotions are warranted iff they increase the balance of power. (equivalent to minimizing the height of the hierarchy) I would love to get to read this “other occasion” because it seems indefensible to me to formulate a norm that states: Accept only emotions which eliminate/diminish norms. The idea roughly resembles Rawls's Minimax Principle, where a policy should be implemented iff the benefit for the most disadvantaged is highest. Another thing I found helpful is her reformulation of what norms do: “Dominant Norms tend to serve dominant interests” til here nothing new, this is a tautology for me, I understand norms as identical to dominant interests, that’s literally what norms are. Is an alternative, suppressed norm even thinkable? Isn't it inherent in a norm that it be the dominant one? But then, after that: "Whatever our color / gender / class / sexual orientation, we are likely to adopt the dominant value of racist, classist, homophobe, misogynistic white men." This was rather helpful to me, as it reframes the “act” of oppression as the “likelihood of value distribution” being skewed in your favor, making everybody’s values more likely to be similar to yours. This nicely illustrates how a system can be hierarchical and oppressive, without anybody actively, intentionally “acting oppressive”, while still perpetuating oppression. I'm not saying everybody is acting unintentionally oppressive, but it is always hard to imagine for me to picture "White Men" forming a group and collectively deciding on who to hate this coming season, Conceptually separating "being oppressed" and "oppressing" into phenomena without necessary inherent causal relation makes sense to me here.

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created by Aron Petau on Tuesday 23. June 2020, 18:52