Epistemic Advantages Research Articles

Moral testimony and epistemic privilege

AbstractHow should we, as philosophers, respond to the pure moral testimony of people in marginalized positions? Some philosophers argue that marginalized people have an epistemic advantage concerning their experiences of marginalization, such that, if we are non‐marginalized, then we should defer to their moral testimony concerning these experiences. We might accept this as a requirement for ordinary conversation but doubt that any such requirement obtains when we do philosophy, since philosophy requires a critical stance. This paper argues that philosophers should also defer in such cases. It concludes that non‐marginalized philosophers can only properly address certain moral propositions concerning the experiences of marginalized people if they engage in ongoing philosophical discussions with such people, starting from a position of trust.

Factivity, hallucination, and justification

Veridically perceiving puts us in a better epistemic position than, say, hallucinating does, at least in that veridical perception affords knowledge of our environment in a way that hallucination does not. But is there any further epistemic advantage? Some authors have recently argued that veridical perception provides a superior epistemic benefit over hallucination not just concerning knowledge, but concerning justification as well. This contrasts with a traditional view according to which experience provides justification irrespective of whether it’s veridical or hallucinatory. I think both views are mistaken. Although this traditional view should be rejected in favor of one on which some hallucinations are epistemically worse than veridical perceptions (and some are not), I don’t believe there is good reason to think that the mere fact of hallucination—or factivity more generally—has any consequences for justification. Susanna Schellenberg has endorsed both the traditional and the factive views (for different elements or kinds of perceptual justification), and I critique her views in detail, though I also draw out more general epistemological lessons about factivity and evidence.

Relational Epistemologies: Friendship and Reading in Shida Bazyar’s Drei Kameradinnen

Abstract This article demonstrates that friendship is a productive concept through which to analyse the narrative voice and structure in Shida Bazyar’s Drei Kameradinnen (2021). Drawing on Max Czollek’s ‘Theatre of Integration’, I argue that the friendship between the three protagonists allows us to describe marginalized experiences without recentring the dominant German discourse. Their friendship is the source of the epistemic advantage as theorized by José Medina: by listening carefully and repeatedly to their friends’ stories, the protagonists produce knowledge about structural injustices. I argue that the novel ultimately proposes friendship as a model for reading that renders the underlying structures of narrativized marginalized experience intelligible. As an example, this article provides a close reading of one of the anecdotes in the novel. Inspired by Susan S. Lanser and Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan’s ‘Narratology at the Checkpoint’, I show that Bayzar’s novel highlights how traditional narrative structures do not lend themselves to describing marginalized experiences.

Bioethics-CSR Divide

Bioethics-CSR Divide

Epistemic Diversity and Epistemic Advantage: A Comparison of Two Causal Theories in Feminist Epistemology

AbstractFeminist epistemology aims to propose epistemic reasons for increasing the representation of women or socially subordinated people in science. This is typically done—albeit often only implicitly—by positing a causal mechanism through which the representation of sociodemographic minorities exerts a positive effect on scientific advancement. Two types of causal theories can be identified. The “epistemic diversity thesis” presents a causal path from sociodemographic diversity to scientific progress mediated by epistemic diversity. The “thesis of epistemic advantage” proposes a causal path from social subjugation to capacity for inquiry. The latter theory is defined with substantial ambiguity in the existing literature, and I present an explicit causal reformulation that disambiguates it. The epistemic diversity thesis focuses on the effect of group composition on collective epistemic performance and is largely silent about what kind of characteristics lead to individual epistemic excellence. On the other hand, the thesis of epistemic advantage seeks to identify sociodemographic background conditions that make certain epistemic agents strictly better knowers or inquirers than others and pays little attention to the synergistic effects of diverse group composition. Such a difference in the causal structure reflects the diverging political characteristics of the two theories.

Standpoint moral epistemology: the epistemic advantage thesis

Standpoint moral epistemology: the epistemic advantage thesis

Observations, Experiments, and Arguments for Epistemic Superiority in Scientific Methodology

AbstractThis article argues against general claims for the epistemic superiority of experiment over observation. It does so by dissociating the benefits traditionally attributed to experiment from physical manipulation. In place of manipulation, we argue that other features of research methods do confer epistemic advantages in comparison to methods in which they are diminished. These features better track the epistemic successes and failures of scientific research, crosscut the observation/experiment distinction, and nevertheless explain why manipulative experiments are successful when they are.

More Process, Less Principles: The Ethics of Deploying AI and Robotics in Medicine.

Current national and international guidelines for the ethical design and development of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics emphasize ethical theory. Various governing and advisory bodies have generated sets of broad ethical principles, which institutional decisionmakers are encouraged to apply to particular practical decisions. Although much of this literature examines the ethics of designing and developing AI and robotics, medical institutions typically must make purchase and deployment decisions about technologies that have already been designed and developed. The primary problem facing medical institutions is not one of ethical design but of ethical deployment. The purpose of this paper is to develop a practical model by which medical institutions may make ethical deployment decisions about ready-made advanced technologies. Our slogan is "more process, less principles." Ethically sound decisionmaking requires that the process by which medical institutions make such decisions include participatory, deliberative, and conservative elements. We argue that our model preserves the strengths of existing frameworks, avoids their shortcomings, and delivers its own moral, practical, and epistemic advantages.

From Where Women Knowledge Workers Stand: the Making of an Emancipatory Standpoint during and since the Gezi Protests

Abstract This article rethinks Gezi Protests as a sui generis women’s movement which continues to this day, albeit in a form of unorganized flow. To make this point, the article focuses on the Gezi and Post-Gezi lifeworld experiences of women knowledge workers who participated in the Protests. It is argued that the worker-citizen experiences of these women have provided them with a specific epistemic advantage, which has turned in an emancipatory standpoint during the Gezi and has been reproduced since then – despite significant setbacks. Although still lacking a corresponding feminist counter-hegemonic project, the emancipatory standpoint of the women-in-movement of Gezi Protests is not only negative and adaptive but also formative. It immanently stands for the rationalization of all forms of governance. In that regard, it represents a wish for a new public power rather than a demand for entitlement and recognition by an already existing state.

A Theory of Racialized Judicial Decision-Making

In this Article, I introduce a theory of racialized judicial decision-making as a framework to explain how judicial decision-making as a system contributes to creating and maintaining the racial hierarchy in the United States. Judicial decision-making, I argue, is itself a racialized systemic process in which judges transpose racially-bounded cognitive schemas as they make decisions. In the process, they assign legal burdens differentially across ethnoracial groups, to the disproportionate detriment of ethnoracial minorities. After presenting this argument, I turn to three mechanisms at play in racialized judicial decision-making: (1) whiteness as capital that increases epistemic advantages in the judicial process, (2) color-evasive approaches as effective tools to justify racially disparate outcomes, and (3) the elevation of racial discrimination into a status of exceptionalism that justifies heightened standards in proving racial anti-discrimination claims. I argue that the racialized judicial decision-making process reproducing the social racial hierarchy is institutionalized via the legitimacy courts wield. I conclude with a discussion on the agency and autonomy inherent in the judicial decision-making process, emphasizing judicial decision-making is not simply a reflection of ideology—personal or otherwise—individual biases, or cultural tides, and can as a system be leveraged to further racial equity in a democratic society.

Standpoint Theory and the Psy Sciences: Can Marginalization and Critical Engagement Lead to an Epistemic Advantage? – Corrigendum

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Manipulation as theft

ABSTRACT Should there be a right not to be manipulated? On Kantian grounds, manipulation, lies and paternalistic coercion are moral wrongs, and for similar reasons; they deprive people of agency, insult their dignity, and fail to respect personal autonomy. On welfarist grounds, manipulation, lies and paternalistic coercion share a different characteristic; they displace the choices of those whose lives are directly at stake, and who are likely to have epistemic advantages, with the choices of outsiders, who lack critical information. Kantians and welfarists should be prepared to endorse a (moral) right not to be manipulated, though on very different grounds. At the same time, the creation of a legal right not to be manipulated raises hard questions, in part because of definitional challenges. With welfarist considerations in mind, it is best to start by prohibiting the most egregious instances of manipulation, while emphasizing that they may not count as fraud or deception. The basic goal should be to build on the claim that in certain cases, manipulation is a form of theft; the law should forbid theft, whether it occurs through force, lies, or manipulation.

Statistical evidence and the criminal verdict asymmetry

Epistemologists have posed the following puzzle, known as the proof paradox: Why is it intuitively problematic for juries to convict on the basis of statistical evidence and yet intuitively unproblematic for juries to convict on the basis of far less reliable, non-statistical evidence? To answer this question, theorists have explained the exclusion of statistical evidence by arguing that legal proof requires certain epistemic features. In this paper, I make two contributions to the debate. First, I establish the Criminal Verdict Asymmetry, a previously-unarticulated asymmetry between the epistemic norms of guilty and not guilty verdicts. I argue that the prosecution and defense’s different epistemic burdens influence whether statistical evidence can generate the type of verdict each side pursues. Second, I point out a mistake in how theorists have understood the role of statistical evidence in criminal trials. Though epistemologists have primarily focused on whether statistical evidence can generate specific epistemic features required for convictions, I consider whether statistical evidence can demonstrate a lack of such features. I find that there are epistemic advantages to allowing the defense to introduce statistical evidence which can reveal the prosecution’s failure to prove the defendant’s guilt.

The Right to Difference: Interculturality and Human Rights in Contemporary German Literature by Nicole Coleman

Reviewed by: The Right to Difference: Interculturality and Human Rights in Contemporary German Literature by Nicole Coleman Miriam Schwarz Nicole Coleman. The Right to Difference: Interculturality and Human Rights in Contemporary German Literature. U of Michigan P, 2021. 258 pp. Cloth, $80.00. Drawing on antiracist scholarship, especially that of Fatima El-Tayeb, Nicole Coleman emphasizes in her introduction to The Right to Difference that the German national identity continues to be imagined as mono-ethnic and white.1 She sees this reflected in literary categories of German literature and criticizes that what started as a homogenizing endeavor in the nineteenth century is still apparent when scholars work with a binary that differentiates between white German literature and migrant or intercultural literature. Coleman argues that literature studies must aim to represent the reality of German diversity and suggests a reconceptualization of the term "intercultural literature" that forgoes "categorization based on background" (19). Here, precisely, is a disconnect between Coleman's premise and the theoretical solution she proposes: despite criticizing that Germanness is strongly associated with whiteness, she aims to detach intercultural literature from biographical rather than racist categories. This is reflected in Coleman's theory of interculturality. Her definition [End Page 112] of culture is separated from hierarchizing identity markers such as racialization or nationality and "assumes that there is a network of culture which overlaps [ … ] and that all humans affiliate with multiple cultures at the same time" (21); culture is "any kind of social group that provides us with meaning" (27). Her theory of difference works accordingly. Based on Derrida and Levinas, Coleman conceptualizes difference as networked and inherently interlinked with sameness. Since difference can therefore be understood as a commonality that all humans share, Coleman argues for a "right to difference" (33). While Coleman incorporates Leslie Adelson's criticism of the term interculturality concerning its implications of essentialized and discrete cultural entities, she does not address the term's implications that epistemic systems exist on an eye-to-eye level regardless of political and discursive hierarchies. Coleman admits that before an intercultural attitude that understands difference as a shared commonality is achieved, there is work to be done. Thus, she develops a new model of intercultural competence that she proposes as an "intercultural lens" (59). She proposes it as a tool for analyzing what she terms "human rights literature" (50), aiming to create an understanding of the right to difference. Based on models of intercultural competence and communication that argue for cultural relativism, namely, those by Milton J. Bennett and Darla K. Deardorff, Coleman's model consists of five categories that describe "attitudes towards cultural difference" (40). "Cultural ignorance" and "cultural exclusionism" describe a denial of cultural differences and a negative view of cultural differences, respectively. "Universalism" tries to understand and eventually reduce cultural differences from one's own cultural perspective, often by focusing on sameness rather than difference. "Autocultural reflexivity," the awareness of one's own cultural socialization, is the threshold to "interculturality" which is where "autocultural reflexivity and engagement with others come together" (41–42). Coleman argues that reading human rights literature does not automatically lead to empathy for those who are perceived as different. Rather, her analysis of eight contemporary German novels suggests ways of "reading interculturally" in order for "classrooms [to] become places for social knowledge about exclusionary practices and [ … ] racism, and also spaces for strategy testing and potential scenarios for intercultural societies" (57). Each of her four chapters of literary analysis contrasts two novels by different German authors who write about a similar topic, loosely describable as trials of genocide perpetrators, political incarceration, [End Page 113] German-Polish postwar identities, and refugees in contemporary Germany. Coleman examines the texts and protagonists by asking which of the attitudes toward cultural difference they represent. The context she provides for each chapter and the detailed teaching suggestions are highly resourceful, especially for teaching white students. The results of her analysis suggest that there is indeed a link between the authors' epistemic position, the topic they write about, and which overall attitude toward difference Coleman identifies in the texts. Given that scholars like José Medina have shown that marginalization leads to epistemic advantages, one might argue...

Is there an epistemic advantage to being oppressed?

AbstractDo the oppressed have an epistemic advantage when it comes to knowing about the systems that oppress them? If so, what explains this advantage? In this paper, I consider whether an epistemic advantage can be derived from the oppressed's contingent tendency to have more relevant experiences and motivation than the non‐oppressed; or, alternatively, whether an advantage derives from the oppressed's very lived experience, thus being in principle unavailable to the non‐oppressed. I then explore the potential role of knowledge‐how for explaining an epistemic advantage. Ultimately, I conclude that the oppressed tend to have a contingent advantage, while rejecting that they have one in principle, except for when their phenomenological experience has an effect on the veracity of the claims they make. This has the important upshot that privileged people are not epistemically disadvantaged in principle and are thus often blameworthy for their ignorance about oppression.

Epistemic advantage on the margin: A network standpoint Epistemology

AbstractI use network models to simulate social learning situations in which the dominant group ignores or devalues testimony from the marginalized group. I find that the marginalized group ends up with several epistemic advantages due to testimonial ignoration and devaluation. The results provide one possible explanation for a key claim of standpoint epistemology, the inversion thesis, by casting it as a consequence of another key claim of the theory, the unidirectional failure of testimonial reciprocity. Moreover, the results complicate the understanding and application of previously discovered network epistemology effects, notably the Zollman effect (Zollman, 2007, 2010).

The Epistemic Relevance of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

The Epistemic Relevance of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Chloe Bamboulis (bio) and Lisa Bortolotti, PhD* (bio) Ratnayake's interesting paper challenges two claims, that cognitive distortions in depression involve epistemic issues; and that cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) can rectify those epistemic issues. We are going to discuss both claims here and offer some reasons not to underestimate the epistemic relevance of CBT. First, there may be epistemic issues underlying cognitive distortions in depression that CBT can effectively address, including blind acceptance of negative automatic thoughts and insensitivity to evidence. But, even if CBT were primarily in the business of enhancing utility as opposed to validity, this would have significant, though indirect, epistemic benefits. Validity and Utility in Depression All human agents, whether they have a mental health diagnosis or not, behave in ways that diverge from the ideal standards of epistemic and practical rationality, compromising validity and utility. Whereas validity mostly concerns the accuracy of mental representations and the correctness of explanatory hypotheses, utility concerns their adaptiveness. The goal of validity is to see the world, the self, and the future as they are, whereas the goal of utility is to enhance successful and productive behavior avoiding misery. Let's consider Ratnayake's example of a student who "performs mediocrely on a test and consequently believes that they will fail the entire course." Call her Susie. The depressive realism effect suggests that people with mild depressive symptoms are more accurate than controls when rating themselves and predicting their future, but the same epistemic advantage neither applies to those diagnosed with major depression nor extends to tasks that are not self-related. Suppose that Susie evaluates accurately her performance in the test and also accurately predicts that she will fail the entire course: she may be showing validity at the expense of utility. But what about those other thoughts Susie is likely to have due to her depression, about her social interactions and everyday situations? That the world is a cruel place and luck is always against her, that she is weak and unable to control her circumstances? These thoughts may lack both validity and utility. If we think that so-called cognitive distortions in depression only involve practical issues and [End Page 91] not epistemic issues, we may also believe that, if a therapy addresses cognitive distortions effectively, it does so because it boosts utility. But this would be misleading. Epistemic issues include generating implausible hypotheses that do not pass rigorous reality testing, but also arriving at hypotheses without taking into account the relevant evidence that is available. If Susie arrives at a self-prediction that turns out to be correct by simply accepting a negative automatic thought, this does not indicate that she has exercised epistemic rationality. Simply accepting that things will go badly due to negative biases may give rise to correct predictions, but the prediction will not reflect a careful consideration of the factors that are likely to contribute to the future outcome. This has implications for the discussion of the aims of CBT: the epistemic relevance of a therapeutic approach does not merely depend on whether it increases the overall number of accurate representations and correct hypotheses, but in whether it encourages grounding representations and hypotheses on experience and evidence. Does CBT Lead to Epistemic Improvement? The main thesis in Ratnayake's paper is that CBT does not produce more accurate self-evaluations or more reliable self-predictions but encourages a positive way of interpreting reality that, before engaging in therapy, people might not have taken advantage of. The claim, then, is that CBT does not contribute to validity but boosts utility: it may be instrumental to turning people into more practically rational agents, enabling them to navigate their environment in a more successful way. However, for Ratnayake, CBT does not turn people into more epistemically rational agents, because, instead of eliminating distortions from their reasoning, it promotes an interpretation of the facts that protects people from anxiety and depression. Take Susie who comes to believe, with high conviction, that she will fail the whole course because she performed mediocrely in one test. By inviting Susie to think about...

The Applied Anthropology Degree Program at the Universidad Politécnica Salesiana: Features of the Applied Signature of Anthropological Wisdom from Its Historical Praxis

This article is framed within the field that studies anthropology through its institutions. Using the applied anthropology degree program at the Universidad Politécnica Salesiana in Ecuador as a case study, the article intends to show that the applied character of anthropology is a permanent, inherent, and necessary feature at every stage but especially in training. This work goes beyond the understanding of applied as a dispensable sub-discipline that embraces the function of solving problems that intertwine sociocultural diversity with development, education, health, and public policies, that is, the view that applied anthropology is one possibility among others but one which is possible to do without. The concrete experienced reviewed in this work shows distinctive elements, for example, the critical indigenism that conditioned the beginning of the applied anthropology program. As shown throughout this work, from the beginning, the program’s academic design valued anthropology as a set of conceptual and methodological resources capable of promoting intercultural processes, putting together activists’ networks, and shaping local wisdom, all the while upholding indigenous peoples’ and nationalities’ autonomies. The article prioritizes identifying traits that signify the applied dimension of anthropology based on the degree’s life and concrete academic praxis.1 Evidence emerges from archives, reflective essays on experience and, mainly, testimonials from alumni that fulfill an ideal criterion: activists and militants in indigenous territories or intercultural experiences. We conclude that what is applied is a necessary and inherent dimension of anthropological wisdom based on the assumption that “in-territory” training provides epistemic and pedagogical advantages relevant to the practice of anthropology.

Losing grip on the third realm: against naive realism for intuitions

Abstract Naive realism in philosophy of perception is the view that (factive) perception involves a direct relation between perceiving subjects and the world. The naive realist says that your perception of a cat on the mat is a worldly relation that is partially constituted by the cat and the mat; a spatio-temporal chunk of the world is presenting itself to you. Recently, Elijah Chudnoff and John Bengson have independently developed an extension of this view to intellectual experiences, or intuitions, for traditionally a priori domains. We argue that this view, which we call ‘intuitional naive realism’ (INR), will not have the epistemic advantages that Chudnoff and Bengson claim that it does. In perception, but not intuition, there is a deeper explanation of what makes it the case that one experience is constituted by the world while another is not. Whether or not INR is true, then, it does no interesting epistemological work for traditionally a priori domains.

Naturalism and the Projectability Challenge

Abstract In a recent paper in this journal, Bengson, Cuneo and Reiser (hereafter bcr) present a novel epistemic challenge to naturalist moral realism, which they call the Projectability Challenge. The Projectability Challenge aims to show that there is an important epistemic phenomenon, projectability, that naturalists are unable to explain, but which non-naturalists can explain. This flips a familiar dynamic on its head, since it is typically argued that the moral naturalist has epistemic advantages over the moral non-naturalist (see, e.g., Joyce 2006, Ch. 6; Bedke 2009). In this response, I argue that bcr dramatically underestimate the theoretical resources available to naturalists to explain the phenomenon of projectability. While bcr argue that no variety of moral naturalism can explain projectability, I contend that all varieties of moral naturalism can explain projectability. There is no projectability problem for any kind of naturalist realism.