Epistemic Injustice
Plus a contribution by co-moderator Olivia Sun, our upcoming café on self-love, suggested readings and resources, and more.
Introduction
By Adrian Ma
Our latest Curiosity Café, moderated by Olivia Sun and Sophia Whicher, explored the phenomenon of epistemic injustice—injustice in which someone is wronged in their capacity as a knower or giver of knowledge. Below, you can find a recap of just a few of the ideas we shared in our gathering of sixty-plus subjects of knowledge (unfortunately, the fallibility of human memory, and the inhuman illegibility of my handwriting, have resulted in many contributions being unfairly excluded.) But first:
Featured Content:
Curiosity Café Recap: Epistemic Injustice
Community Survey
“The Power of Imagination” by Olivia Sun
Upcoming Events
Readings & Resources
Curiosity Café Recap: Epistemic Injustice
By Adrian Ma
As Miranda Fricker—the philosopher who literally wrote the book on the topic of our latest café—observes, our capacity as “subject[s] of knowledge” is widely perceived to be “essential to human value.” But what happens when we are undermined in precisely this capacity—when injustice stands in the way of our generating knowledge or sharing it with others?
Tuesday’s café, moderated by Olivia Sun and Sophia Whicher, began with our examining three forms of epistemic injustice from philosophical literature. (Do any of these resonate with you?)
Testimonial injustice occurs when, in Fricker’s words, “prejudice causes a hearer to give a deflated level of credibility to a speaker’s word.” Consider Zara:
When Zara, a woman of colour, attends work meetings, she notices that most of the time her ideas are brushed aside by management. At first, she thinks that maybe her ideas are just… bad. But then she notices that when her white male peers bring these same ideas to the table, her manager jumps on them, praising these ideas as innovative and forward-thinking.
Have you ever been in a situation where you feel like what you have to say isn’t being taken seriously for the wrong reasons? Have you ever gotten a sense that it had something to do with one or several of your visible, and perhaps historically marginalized, identity markers?
Whom do you tend to believe in your life?
Can you think of a time when you might have contributed to testimonial injustice?
Whom do we, as a society, tend to believe?
Next up was hermeneutical injustice, which occurs when (as Fricker put it) “a gap in collective interpretive resources puts someone at an unfair disadvantage when it comes to making sense of their social experiences.” For this gap to count as a hermeneutical injustice, however, it must have been caused by the discriminatory exclusion of a particular social group from participation in the production of knowledge. An example of this can be found in an article by Dr. Janina Maschk, who describes how stereotypical views of ADHD and the historically male-centred nature of ADHD research have marginalized the distinctive ways in which the condition tends to present itself in women, and have made it difficult for women to be diagnosed or to receive adequate support:
...I struggled with activities that seemed simple to others. In school, concentrating in the classroom felt impossible. While my classmates seemed to have no trouble focusing on the teacher’s words, my mind would always wander elsewhere. This continued through school and beyond, making me question what was wrong with me… When I thought of ‘ADHD’, I’d picture a young hyperactive boy, not a girl labelled as a daydreamer, too chatty or too slow…. Years later, while I was starting my PhD, and feeling overwhelmed by the workload, I stumbled upon a research paper on ADHD in women. At that moment, everything started to make sense. The descriptions and symptoms resonated deeply with my experiences, and for the first time, I felt understood.
Have you ever not been able to find the right concepts to make sense of a particular experience (or set of experiences) you’ve had (maybe you’ve been left feeling a little “crazy”)?
Have you ever been in a situation where you do have the right language to explain your experiences, but the person you’re trying to communicate with isn’t familiar with it?
Finally, we explored the notion of contributory injustice, which is when knowers willfully maintain and use structurally dominant frameworks and refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of alternative frameworks. Consider Olivia’s example of Hani and Sam:
Sam understands the concept of “aromanticism” and accepts it as an intelligible approach to love. However, when Hani tells Sam that they plan to raise a child with their close friend, Sam interprets this as a confession that Hani is no longer aromantic—they have fallen in love with their close friend! Hani insists that it is a deep platonic love but Sam interprets this as denial—after all, it’s hard to be vulnerable about love with others. Thus, Sam is aware of and understands the aromantic framework of love but she still thinks within the romantic framework that she is used to.
Have you ever felt like someone took you less seriously than they should because of how you framed or presented your ideas? Or have you ever been told that the way you’re framing your ideas isn’t “suitable”?
Have you ever been the Sam to someone else’s Hani?
Here’s what some of you had to say in response to all of the above:
Different types of epistemic injustice can feed into each other. The absence of the appropriate conceptual resources (hermeneutical injustice), for example, can make it difficult to communicate one’s experiences to other people, and thus increase the chances of suffering testimonial injustice.
In cases of hermeneutical injustice, the “gap in collective interpretive resources” tends to originate from one of two causes: 1) the relevant conceptual resources were marginalized from mainstream discourse, or 2) they were never generated in the first place, because those with the relevant identities and experiences were silenced or excluded from mainstream knowledge communities.
Epistemic justice raises the question of who is holding onto, or gatekeeping, knowledge. Consider professions in which it is common to use impressive-sounding jargon to mystify or elevate the nature of one’s work, thus introducing artificial obstacles for those who seek to enter that line of work or climb the ladder.
Although lived experience may not always be sufficient as a credential, we should be wary of putting too much weight on formal education when it comes to deciding who is a reliable source of knowledge. When we only turn to people with formal educational credentials for insight, we erase important facts and stories that have been excluded from academia due to past testimonial injustices.
It can be hard to identify instances of contributory injustice, because everybody sees the world through different frameworks—the fact that one doesn’t agree with your framework doesn’t seem quite sufficient to constitute injustice.
Maybe what puts the “injustice” in contributory injustice is not the mere fact of disagreement but disagreement plus invalidation. It is not simply saying “I don’t see things the way you do,” but saying, “Your way of seeing things makes no sense; you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Some of you shared examples of contributory injustice involving capitalistic attitudes toward work:
When someone calls you lazy for refusing paid work, that may constitute a form of contributory injustice, because it signals an unwillingness to acknowledge an attitude toward life in which earning money is not the primary concern.
When you’re hyper-productive but struggling with mental health problems, people might be skeptical of how much you’re struggling, due to our tendency in a capitalist society to regard productivity as a marker of mental wellness.
We can see hermeneutical injustice at work when we feel the need to use different labels to express ourselves in different settings. I might hesitate to use certain labels because I am concerned they will not be understood or accepted by an audience for whom these labels—and the ideas they refer to—would be foreign, radical, or triggering.
Having identified three salient forms of epistemic injustice, we proceeded after the break to explore how such injustices might be addressed:
What could you change in your own life to help mitigate epistemic injustice?
What role might diversifying representation in art and media play in mitigating these harms?
How might education need to change?
How might we need to change how we think about knowledge-related concepts? (Think: what counts as “truth” or “fact”? How might we need to change what we think about or how we prioritize “objectivity”?)
How do we motivate people to seek out marginalized knowledge that already exists?
What are some other factors that are not in your control?
Here’s what some of you had to say:
Epistemic injustice—and testimonial injustice in particular—is made more likely when we see people through the filter of stereotypes or other reductive categories. When we flatten individuals into types, we deceive ourselves, on the basis of superficial impressions, into thinking that we know what they are “really” like, and are thus more likely to presume what they will say or mean.
Addressing epistemic injustice requires time and energy that many people don’t have. It’s hard to engage in the perspective-taking necessary to understand marginalized experiences when you’re living paycheque to paycheque. Making it easier for people to meet their basic needs might, therefore, indirectly contribute to solving epistemic injustice.
Injustice can perpetuate injustice. Prejudicial beliefs, for example, can persist across generations in a family, a community, a tradition, and so on, and victims of hermeneutical injustice who lack access to the relevant sense-making tools are prevented from passing them onto future generations.
One obstacle to cultivating the intellectual humility necessary to address epistemic injustice is the prospect of re-examining and perhaps overturning comfortable, familiar, or deeply cherished beliefs. (Consider a fierce patriot whose belief in the greatness of their country is destabilized by an honest reckoning with the nation’s historical wrongs.)
Diversifying representation in art and the media can address epistemic injustice by expanding the pool of conceptual resources and cultural narratives from which we can draw to make sense of our experiences, and by increasing the likelihood that others will understand our attempts to communicate those experiences. In this respect, art has a particular advantage over disciplines such as philosophy and science: being free from the need to systematize or intellectualize, a work of art can explore and represent experiences that tend to elude our ordinary conceptual frameworks.
It is difficult to contribute our knowledge when the way we express or piece together ideas is not considered valid. Maybe part of the solution to epistemic injustice lies in diversifying the forms of legitimate communication. For example, what if it became more common to draw out our ideas, to map them visually, instead of always verbalizing them?
Our current approach to education is overly prescriptive, in that it puts too much emphasis on what we should or shouldn’t do or think. Instead, education should aim to foster epistemic humility—to cultivate an appreciation of the fact that our beliefs are always subject to revision, and an openness to contrary points of view.
We should be doing more philosophy in schools—not simply reading philosophy, but practicing it, much like we do at these cafés—because it fosters awareness of the importance of thinking critically about dominant narratives.
Thanks for reading. For those who came, I hope at least some of the ideas you contributed have been justly represented above. Now, check out Olivia’s piece below on the power of imagination as a partial antidote to epistemic injustice (and if you haven’t already, subscribe to her YouTube channel, where she posts detailed video essays on a wide range of topics, including in philosophy). And if you missed it, go back and read Sophia’s piece on loneliness as a product of hermeneutical injustice from our December newsletter on loneliness. (If you didn’t miss it, you can also read it again.)
Community Survey
For those who’ve attended our Curiosity Cafés, please consider taking our brief community survey. We are conducting this survey to gather feedback on our events, and it should only take a few minutes to complete. Your responses are completely anonymous and will be invaluable in helping us improve our offerings. Thank you in advance!
“The Power of Imagination”
By Olivia Sun
What we know is limited by our particular social circumstances. The neighbourhood we grew up in, the colour of our skin, the way we present our gender—these identity features position us differently within the world. When an identity group is marginalized by society’s structures, they often face epistemic injustice, where they are harmed in their ability to know things and excluded from the production of knowledge.
In our last café, we discussed how one might expand their breadth of knowledge to reduce epistemic injustice. One possibility we considered was exposing ourselves to art and media that portray a diverse set of experiences. Since we cannot completely change our social circumstances and cannot acquire every experience possible, using art and media to help us imagine different experiences is the next best thing. Art is particularly well-suited for this task because it engages our senses and emotions, thus immersing us more vividly than reading an academic paper. But epistemologists, or scholars engaged in the study of knowledge, have debated the effectiveness of using imagination to understand others. Pessimists about our imaginative abilities point to how our imagination regularly fails. Nomy Arpaly gives an example of someone who, upon seeing their colleague only eat salad for lunch, assumes that their colleague has body image issues even though they just genuinely love salad. If I can’t imagine being full after only eating salad, then my colleague cannot be full either! Arpaly claims that we are prone to “runaway simulations,” where we run a mental simulation of what it’s like to be someone else but our imagination becomes overconfident and resists contrary evidence or forces evidence to fit our imagination. This seems especially true of what Laurie Paul termed “transformative experiences”: experiences that change you on a deep level, such as going to war or becoming a parent. Such experiences cannot be imagined prior to having them. Similarly, one might think that experiences from radically different social identities are transformative in this way. For example, can I really understand what it’s like to live in poverty by watching films like Parasite and Slumdog Millionaire? Are we therefore doomed to commit epistemic injustice?
Our imagination certainly is flawed, but a tool doesn’t need to be infallible for it to be valuable. In fact, rather than think about imagination as a static tool, I find it more accurate to think of it as a skill that we can develop. To respond to pessimists about imagination, one might distinguish between imagining specific qualities or sensations and imagining a state of being. Our imagination is not great at imagining the taste of a fruit we’ve never had or a colour we’ve never seen, but is it really impossible to imagine what it’s like to be a parent? Romantic love, platonic love, and other types of love will not perfectly match the experience of parental love, but we can extract certain features, such as the experience of missing someone, of arranging what you care about around another person, etc., and imagine how they compare to features of parental love. Similarly, when a white person is trying to imagine the experience of being called a racist slur, they might recall their own experiences of being hurt by someone’s words and modify that experience in various ways. Experiences are complex states of being that involve a variety of facts we can learn to make our imagining more or less accurate. Thus, the more details we have about a person’s life and their position in society, the more we can improve our imaginative endeavours.
While experience teaches us in a first-hand way that nothing can be a perfect substitute for, diverse art and media still serve an important purpose. If anything, this draws attention to how deep the impacts of epistemic injustice are and how hard it is to combat them. This should motivate us even more to work toward a society where experiences are not marginalized on the basis of social identity.
Upcoming Events
Curiosity Café: Bi-weekly on Tuesdays, tickets below!
We will host our next Curiosity Café on Tuesday, March 4th, from 6:00 - 8:30 pm at the Madison Avenue Pub (14 Madison Ave, Toronto, ON M5R 2S1). Come and hang out with us, grab food, and read through our handout from 6:00 - 6:30 pm. Our structured discussion will run from 6:30 - 8:30 pm with a 10-minute break in the middle!
The topic of our next café is Self-Love
Missing the event description? Head over to our Eventbrite page! We’re trying to make the length of our newsletters a little less overwhelming.
If you have accessibility-related concerns, please visit our Eventbrite Page—in the event description, you will find some accessibility-related information about the venue and the event.
We will still have five free tickets available for our attendees. If paying anything at all is not financially feasible for you or our ticketing system presents some other barrier, please contact our Director of Community Programs, Sophia, at sophia@beingnbecoming.org. These tickets will be given away on a first-come, first-served basis, no questions asked! You can expect to hear back from her within 72 hours.
Readings & Resources
Sophia’s Recommendations:
Highway of Tears: A True Story of Racism, Indifference, and the Pursuit of Justice for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls by Jessica McDiarmid. In this book, McDiarmid accounts for the stories of several Indigenous women and girls who disappeared on the deserted stretch of highway in northern B.C. where many Indigenous women, girls, two-spirit, and gender-diverse people have disappeared, and are often murdered. McDiarmid details the effects of this on their families and their communities and connects this to the ongoing national crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and gender-diverse people across our country. I included a quote from this book as an example of testimonial injustice—marginalized people across our country—in this case, Indigenous people–—are a lot less likely to be taken at their word when they interact with our “justice” system, and this has very real and long-lasting effects on their lives. You can learn more about the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous women, girls, two-spirit, and gender-diverse people here.
“We Teach Life, Sir” by Rafeef Ziadah. You can find a video of the original live performance here, or listen to it and follow along with the lines on Spotify here. I think this poem is, at its core, about epistemic injustice—the dehumanization that Palestinians face in the media, and the anger and frustration at having to frame injustice in terms that Western journalists will understand and take seriously.
Featured Quote
There is more to ethical consciousness than deciding what to do. A virtuous perception gives us a moral understanding of experiences, people, situations, and events—a view of the world in moral colour … and it is part and parcel of this way of seeing that even the morally wisest person remains open to surprises. Or, rather, the fact that she is open-hearted enough to resist the dishonest safety of fixed moral understandings is the crowning mark of her moral wisdom.
- Miranda Fricker
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