Charles Mills’ Epistemology and Its Importance for Social Science and Social Theory

Abstract

In Charles Mills’ essay, “White Ignorance,” and his trail-blazing monograph, The Racial Contract , he developed a view of how Whiteness or anti-Black-Indigenous-and-Latinx racism causes individuals to hold false beliefs or lack beliefs about racial injustice in particular and the world in general. I will defend a novel exegetical claim that Mills’ view is part of a more general view regarding how racial injustice can affect a subject’s epistemic standing such as whether they are justified in a belief and whether their degree of confidence in the belief is rational given their evidence. Then, in light of this novel exegetical claim, I show how this interpretation of Mills’ view about how racial injustice causes ignorance relates to proper evaluation of whether justified philosophers and social scientists count as epistemologically justified in holding the views that dominate their respective scholarly literature.