Wiser Together: Toward a Theory of Epistemic Reputation

This chapter examines the ways in which disabled people are subject to epistemic injustice. It starts by introducing how social epistemology models the creation of shared knowledge and then uses feminist epistemology to highlight the role of social and political power in producing epistemic privilege, exclusion, and oppression. The well-known concepts of testimonial and hermeneutic epistemic injustice are discussed in relation to disability, showing how these forms of injustice are frequently experienced within the lives of disabled people. In particular, disabled experience has features that distinguish it from the experiences of sexism and racism most commonly used as illustrations of epistemic injustice. The chapter ends by arguing that the potential for epistemic injustice poses unprecedented risks for disabled people in the current context, which could be minimized by recognizing that ignorance about disabled lives is not inevitable, but something that can and should be challenged.

In this essay, I argue that the destruction or hiding of archives can cause long-lasting epistemic harms and constitute complex ethical challenges. The case of Kenya’s ‘migrated archives’ is argued to be an example of how actions in the past can have long-lasting epistemic consequences and can cause contemporary epistemic injustices and harms related to one’s knowledge of the past. The perpetrators of such harms and injustices are argued to have a backward-looking epistemic responsibility and to be liable to make epistemic amends. The practice of acknowledgement is suggested as one possible way to make effective epistemic amends. I argue that making effective epistemic amends would constitute a step towards addressing epistemic harms and injustices related to our knowledge of the past. However, it is important to remember that this would only constitute one out of many necessary steps in addressing epistemic injustice and that further individual, institutional and ideological changes are necessary.

Socially extended knowledge has recently received much attention in mainstream epistemology. Knowledge here is not to be understood as wholly realised within a single individual who manipulates artefacts or tools but as collaboratively realised across plural agents. Because of its focus on the interpersonal dimension, socially extended epistemology appears to be a promising approach for investigating the deeply social nature of epistemic practices. I believe, however, that this line of inquiry could be made more fruitful if it is connected with the critical notion of epistemic responsibility, as developed in feminist responsibilism. According to feminist responsibilists, at the core of epistemic responsibility is a critical disposition toward correcting epistemic injustice. This epistemic idea is highly relevant to the epistemological context of illness, where patient testimony is often disregarded. Hence, though restricted to the epistemological context of the experience of illness, this chapter delves into epistemic injustice and its robust mechanisms. I thus explore what responsible epistemic practices should involve in order to redress that injustice and how epistemic responsibility should be socially extended. The discussion proceeds as follows. First, by relying on Arthur Frank’s innovative work on illness narratives, I focus on chaotic bodily messages from patients overwhelmed by suffering and then explain why these messages should count as genuine narratives or testimonies despite their inarticulateness. Second, I elaborate on how epistemic injustice concerning such narratives (i.e., chaos narratives) is produced or reproduced, in particular how both a dominant sociocultural norm and our inherent vulnerability can contribute to their production or reproduction. Finally, I propose an extended form of epistemic responsibility that ameliorates this aspect. Laying particular emphasis on the epistemic role of mature empathy, I characterise the extended epistemic responsibility in terms of extended empathic knowledge.

Epistemic injustice is commonly defined as a wrong done to a person or social group in their capacity as knowers by another party. This paper seeks to draw the attention of scholars working in social epistemology to the as-yet not fully explored phenomenon of self-inflicted epistemic injustice. I propose that it is possible for a person or social group to inflict an epistemic injustice on themselves, which I term agent self-inflicted epistemic injustice and group self-inflicted epistemic injustice, respectively. To illustrate the possibility of self-inflicted epistemic injustice, I discuss Miranda Fricker’s (2007. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press) analysis of testimonial and hermeneutical injustice and consider cases of both self-inflicted testimonial injustice and self-inflicted hermeneutical injustice. The proposed notion of self-inflicted epistemic injustice, however, is not limited to Fricker's conception of epistemic injustice. To show this I discuss Gaile Pohlhaus Jr.'s (2012. Hypatia, 27(4), 715–735.) analysis of willful hermeneutical ignorance and Kristie Dotson’s (2011. Hypatia, 26(2), 236–257) description of testimonial smothering and highlight the fact that these two kinds of epistemic injustice can also be self-inflicted.

The primary objective of this paper is to nuance our understanding of how a knowledge-centred injustice can manifest in planning. To do so, the paper draws upon the concept of “epistemic injustice” from the field of social epistemology. Epistemic injustice occurs when certain voices are unjustly discredited and/or systemically marginalised. Recognising and addressing epistemic injustice is crucial as it can generate unjust harms in planning decision-making, as well as perpetuate institutionalised prejudice. The paper seeks to enhance our understanding of “epistemic injustice” by presenting a framework for identifying: (1) the conditions to be met for it to manifest; (2) how meeting different conditions generates different degrees of harm; and (3) detailing how meeting certain conditions may help to perpetuate institutionalised prejudice. The paper references a case of planning conflict in an informal settlement in Iran to illustrate the workings of this framework. The benefits and limitations of the framework are discussed. Suggestions for further research are identified. This paper contributes to the field by providing a framework for refining our theoretical understanding of epistemic injustice in planning and offering a practical illustration of the framework’s use in a context that is comparatively underrepresented in planning research.

The increasing popularity of the term ‘person‐centred’ in the healthcare literature and a wide range of ideals and practices it implies point to the need for a more inclusive and holistic healthcare provision. A framework developed in a Swedish context suggested narrative elicitation as a key practice in transition to person‐centred care. Initiating clinical communication by inviting people to tell their stories makes persistent yet often subtle problems in clinical communication visible. By drawing upon an observational study on narrative elicitation and vignette‐based focus group interviews with nurses, our aim is to trace ‘credibility deficits’ (Fricker 2007. Epistemic Injustice. Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press) and ‘credibility excesses’ (Medina 2011, Social Epistemology, 25, 1, 15–35, 2013, The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and the Social Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press) in narrative elicitation. We argue that narrative elicitation may be one way to tackle epistemic injustices by giving voice to previously silenced groups, yet it is not enough to erase the effects of ‘credibility deficits’ in clinical communication. Rather than judging individual professionals’ success or failure in eliciting narratives, we underline some extrinsic problems of narrative elicitation, namely structural and positional inequalities reflecting on narrative elicitation and the credibility of patients. ‘Credibility excesses’ can be useful and indicative to better understand where they are missing.

Analyzing social wrongs

The second half of the twentieth century is marked for the theory of knowledge by the renewal of many areas and the emergence of new problems. The boom in information theory, linguistics, cybernetics, neurobiology and research into neuropsychological syndromes (conditions caused by brain injury) lead to the emergence of cognitive sciences. At the same time, against the backdrop of disputes between positivist-minded philosophers and post-positivists about demarcation, social epistemology is born. Despite the fact that social epistemology goes back to the sociology of knowledge and is rooted in the history of philosophy, it has revolutionized the corresponding branch of philosophy, created an innovative research program and, thus, a new research field. Research in the field of social epistemology is not limited to the explication of the socio-historical prerequisites of knowledge, but is aimed at clarifying the conditions of production, transmission and dissemination of knowledge in general, not only scientific. Thus, among the popular research areas today there are the epistemology of testimonial knowledge, epistemic disagreement, diversity and relativism, feminist epistemology, epistemology of group knowledge and much more. This article is devoted to the genesis and analysis of one of the newest and most influential concepts in social epistemology – epistemic injustice. The concept of epistemic injustice largely concretizes the knowledge-power relationship, so it can be successfully applied within the framework of postcolonial theory, the theory of new social movements, cultural studies and the philosophy of politics. Thanks to this concept, researchers have access to a new conceptual apparatus and approach to studying modern problems, be it the problems of «counter-expertise» or modern conspiracy theories.

This article argues that some denialists of Japan’s military sexual slavery are responsible for past epistemic injustices. In the literature on epistemic responsibility, backward- and forward-looking justifications of responsibility are rarely distinguished. Moreover, notions of epistemic responsibility are mostly forward-looking. To fill the gap in the literature, this article offers a notion of backward-looking epistemic responsibility by arguing that some morally responsible agents who committed epistemic injustices are liable to make epistemic amends for past epistemic injustices. The article proceeds as follows. I introduce Japan’s military sexual slavery and how it is denied in two ways (state-led denial and individual-led denial). Both types of denial may involve epistemic injustices. Based on moral responsibility, I argue that some agents are liable to make epistemic amends for past epistemic injustices. I then offer three conditions to discern who is liable, which are conditions of causality, autonomy and epistemic competence. I apply my notion of backward-looking epistemic responsibility to Japan’s military sexual slavery and highlight its limits. Finally, I provide a concept of acknowledgment as a process of making epistemic amends.

Sometimes ordinary disagreements become deep as a result of epistemic injustice. The paper explores a hitherto unnoticed connection between two phenomena that have received ample attention in recent social epistemology: deep disagreement and epistemic injustice. When (pre-existing) epistemic injustice comes into play in a regular disagreement, this can lead to higher-order disagreement about what counts as evidence concerning the original disagreement, which deepens the disagreement. After considering a common definition of deep disagreement, it is proposed that the depth of disagreements is best understood as a matter of degree. Then, a case study of real-life disagreement is introduced: the disagreement about whether racism is a significant issue in the Netherlands, illustrated by the tradition of ‘Black Pete’. It is argued that there is disagreement about what counts as evidence in the case study because of two forms of epistemic injustice: testimonial and hermeneutical injustice. Specifically, there is disagreement about (the application of) epistemic principles concerning (A) whether private first-personal experience of racism is a weighty source of evidence in this domain, (B) whether victims of racism count as important testifiers in this domain, and (C) how to assess testimony that is not (fully) intelligible to you because it employs concepts and terminology you are unfamiliar with. By dismissing the relevant testimony and epistemic resources, the disagreement boils down to disagreement on the level of epistemic principles concerning (A), (B), and (C). Introducing injustice-based deep disagreement highlights moral and political aspects of disagreements that might seem factual.

Both stigma and discrimination, defined as a lack of knowledge of and a sense of discomfort in providing care to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, and + (LGBTQIA+) migrants, was found to manifest in a sample of LGBTQIA+ migrants who received nursing care in a recent study. The study concluded that nurses continue to have a limited understanding of the experiences of LGBTQIA+ migrants in the Canadian context, and that LGBTQIA+ migrants continue to have troubling 'care' experiences with nurses. Miranda Fricker has developed the concept of epistemic injustice drawing on feminist philosophy and social epistemology. Epistemic injustice refers to unfair treatment of a person by judging them as 'not a knower' in a communicative situation. For example, in a few circumstances when LGBTQIA+ migrants were admitted to psychiatric units due to suicide ideations as a direct result of identifying as a LGBTQIA+ migrants, the medical and nursing team responded with 'They are in Canada now. It is safe here!' and 'So, you are [LGBTQIA + ]! What's the big deal?' These unjust statements reflect an epistemic situation in which the hearer is negating what was heard, that is, that the speaker's intersecting identities of LGBTQIA+ and new immigrant has directly led to suicide ideation. The concept of epistemic injustice helps to frame this situation as one where the care provider is not doing justice to the needs of LGBTQIA+ migrants. This article draws on the narrative of an LGBTQIA+ migrant who is not recognised as a credible source of knowledge about their own lives and needs in the context of Canadian nursing care. Epistemic injustice helps to understand how stigma and discrimination is produced in this community by the very nursing profession who ostensibly want to help them.

This paper investigates the epistemic injustice in conflict reporting, where foreign parachute reporters collaborate with local producers and ‘fixers.’ Drawing from existing research on ‘fixers’ and other media professionals covering conflict zones and the philosophy of emotion and knowledge, I address the following questions: What is the role of local and foreign media professionals’ affective proximity and professional distance in the social epistemology of conflict news production and the epistemic hierarchy among the collaborators? What implications is this particular social epistemology believed to have for conflict reporting accuracy and ethics? Based on 36 semi-structured to in-depth interviews with foreign and local media professionals covering Ukraine, Israel, and Palestine and further online and offline contact with the Ukrainian ecosystem of foreign/conflict news production, I argue that the collaboration between foreign and local media professionals is sometimes marked by identity-prejudicial credibility deficit granted to local media professionals because of their affective proximity to the events they cover. This epistemic injustice mirrors other power vectors and the dominant journalistic professional ideology that values disinvolvement, distance, and detachment. In practice, the (local) media professionals’ affective proximity to their contexts is often appreciated as embodied knowledge beneficial to the nuance, accuracy, and ethics of journalistic practices and outcomes.

The paper is devoted to a novel formalization of beliefs in multiagent systems. Our aim is to bridge the gap between idealized logical approaches to modeling beliefs and their actual implementations. Therefore the stages of belief acquisition, intermediate reasoning and final belief formation are isolated and analyzed. We give a novel semantics reflecting those stages and suitable for building complex belief structures in the context of incomplete and/or inconsistent information. Namely, an agent starts with constituents, i.e., sets of initial beliefs acquired by perception, expert supplied knowledge, communication with other agents and perhaps other ways. Next, the constituents are transformed into consequents according to agents' epistemic profiles. Additionally, a uniform treatment of single agent and group beliefs is achieved. Importantly, we indicate an implementation framework ensuring tractability of reasoning about beliefs.

In bringing together the central topic of Lorraine Code's new book, Ecological Thinking (2006), with that of her first book, Epistemic Responsibility (1987), I want to draw attention to the location of her topics and positions in in-between places (or in-among places, granting that there may be more than two). A clear in-between place is visible with the terms epistemic responsibility and ecological thinking. They both link epistemic with ethical (or ethical-political) concerns, producing new intersections among areas of philosophy that have often been quite separate?epistemology, ethics, and social and political philosophy. In part because of Code's earlier work, discussions about epistemic responsibility, epistemic trust, and epistemic injustice are becoming increasingly visible in epistemology, particularly in intersections among the relatively new areas of social epistemology, virtue epistemology, and feminist epistemology (including feminist moral epistemology). In her new book, Code advances these and other in-between and intersecting places in important new ways. Ecological thinking is a term that Code uses in both literal and metaphori cal senses. She grants (in chapter 1) something of a starting place in Rachel Carson's work on (literal) ecology. She draws attention to Carson's specific understandings of habitat and habitability, terms that also suggest intersecting and interacting places since they refuse or challenge certain kinds of literal or conceptual separations between parts or species of nature and between human

The concept of social identity is central to research on epistemic injustice, but what it means to belong or not to belong to a marginalized identity is often left undertheorized. After offering an overview of the state of the art in social and feminist epistemology, in this introduction we argue that liminal and interstitial identities challenge received notions and push the conversation further. We then provide a brief synopsis of the articles included in this special issue.