Salient alternatives and epistemic injustice in folk epistemology

Abstract

The notion of salience figures prominently in contemporary epistemology and some empirical evidence suggests a salient alternatives effect on folk epistemological ascriptions of knowledge: People are less inclined to ascribe knowledge that p to a subject when a possibility, q, that is incompatible with p is salient. The paper builds on previous work in which I argue that the salient alternative effect on knowledge ascriptions is best understood as a cognitive bias. I continue this approach by considering a number of questions for foundational epistemology that arise from further reflection on the salience of alternatives and epistemic position. On this basis, I turn to more applied issues. First, I draw on a body of work in social psychology in order to motivate the working-hypothesis that social stereotypes will make some alternatives more, and some less, salient. Likewise, I empirically motivate a related working-hypothesis that social stereotypes may lead to both overestimation and underestimation of a subject's epistemic position. Finally, I argue that if these working-hypotheses are true, the outcome may be a distinctive route to epistemic injustice.