Epistemic Privilege Research Articles

Ethnocentric Universalism: Its Nature, Epistemic Harm, and Emancipatory Prospects

ABSTRACT This paper does three interrelated things. First, it argues that the universalism that forms the target of criticism and attack by decolonial theorists from the Global South is a debased form of universalism, what might be termed ‘ethnocentric universalism’. Second, equipped with a conceptual grip on ethnocentric universalism, it shows that the picture on which ethnocentric universalism confers some innocuous epistemic privilege to members of dominant groups is not quite accurate – ethnocentric universalism is incompatible with the epistemic flourishing of members of dominant groups. And third, based on that claim, and the additional consideration that ethnocentric universalism equally undermines the epistemic flourishing of members of historically marginalized groups, it proposes an emancipatory framework for engaging with it.

A consideration of the influence of researchers’ lived experiences: Reflections on epistemic privilege and social justice in qualitative research.

A consideration of the influence of researchers’ lived experiences: Reflections on epistemic privilege and social justice in qualitative research.

Epistemic Privilege, Phenomenology and Symptomatology in Functional/Dissociative Seizures

ABSTRACT Much work on clinical testimony assumes that none can know better than the patient what they experience. We show that in certain contexts this assumption is unwarranted; clinician expertise encompasses disease phenomenology, to the extent that the clinician may know better than the patient what the patient is experiencing or has experienced. Conversations between clinicians and people with functional/dissociative seizures (FDS) show that initial phenomenological reports of FDS (what we call ‘surface’ phenomenology) are often inconsistent with more fine-grained descriptions produced after detailed inquiry (‘reflective’ phenomenology). Assuming the initial reports are made in good faith, this process involves the clinician showing the patient something about their experience they did not already (explicitly) know. Failure to engage in this reflective process can result in misdiagnosis and mistreatment. Thus, uncritical acceptance of patient testimony – an unwarranted credibility excess – may be as harmful as its unwarranted dismissal. We conclude that: the epistemically just clinician cannot rely on expertise in le corps objectif alone, they must also cultivate an understanding of le corps propre for the patients they encounter; and epistemic (in)justice cannot be considered solely something a clinician does to the patient. Instead, epistemic justice in the clinical encounter is an intrinsically collaborative process.

Epistemic Shortcuts and Unjust Diagnostic Practices

ABSTRACT When diagnosing psychological disorders, doctors are expected to take the mental anguish of patients and offer fast and accurate explanations. The pressure that comes with this often leaves doctors in need of epistemic shortcuts for faster diagnoses. One such epistemic shortcut is to lean on statistical data when offering a diagnosis. When used justly, doctors consider a patient’s testimony, exhibited symptoms and statistical data relating to the general features of the patient such as age, weight and sex to determine if a patient has a given disorder or illness. Practices such as this have the capacity to yield good results at a quick pace, however, such practices may also be abused. With a focus on gender statistics and psychological diagnoses, I argue that systematic practices of epistemic injustice may occur when the statistical data becomes over-valued and the epistemic privilege of patients to be able to assert their own bodily and mental experiences is ignored. This places patients at risk of misdiagnosis, long-term damage and pain, or even death. It also produces patient mistrust both of themselves and of the medical community, which can carry further repercussions for public health.

Know your place: Fractured epistemic privilege among women in state organizations

Know your place: Fractured epistemic privilege among women in state organizations

Epistemic Injustices in Disaster Theory and Management

The present paper argues that the standardised treatment of disaster research and practice perpetuates the production of systematic epistemic injustices against victims of disasters. On the one hand, disaster victims are often prevented from contributing with their opinions and knowledge to the processes of disaster mitigation and disaster conceptualisation. On the other hand, disaster victims tend to lack the hermeneutical resources to make sense of their experiences intelligibly, due to the existence of significant hermeneutical gaps in the hegemonic terminology on the matter. I argue that both forms of epistemic injustice, the testimonial and the hermeneutical, are sustained by an epistemic privilege between the Global North and the Global South in matters of disasters. The second group comprises what I categorise generally as ‘disaster victims’. I identify two forms of structural prejudice that operate against disaster victims: one is the ‘non-expert’ prejudice, and the other is the colonial prejudice. Finally, because of the intercultural nature of disaster environments, I discuss the field of ‘multicultural competencies’ as a useful form of unveiling and counteracting the epistemic injustices contained in both disaster theory and practice.

Engaging Antiracist And Decolonial Praxis To Advance Equity In Oregon Public Health Surveillance Practices.

Public health surveillance and data systems in the US remain an unnamed facet of structural racism. What gets measured, which data get collected and analyzed, and how and by whom are not matters of happenstance. Rather, surveillance and data systems are productions and reproductions of political priority, epistemic privilege, and racialized state power. This has consequences for how communities of color are represented or misrepresented, viewed, and valued and for what is prioritized and viewed as legitimate cause for action. Surveillance and data systems accordingly must be understood as both an instrument of structural racism and an opportunity to dismantle it. Here, we outline a critique of standard surveillance systems and practice, drawing from the social epidemiology, critical theory, and decolonial theory literatures to illuminate matters of power germane to epistemic and procedural justice in the surveillance of communities of color. We then summarize how community partners, academics, and state health department data scientists collaborated to reimagine survey practices in Oregon, engaging public health critical race praxis and decolonial theory to reorient toward antiracist surveillance systems. We close with a brief discussion of implications for practice and areas for continued consideration and reflection.

Philosophy of Technology

The contribution of the philosophy of technology is based on a reflection on the nature of artifacts, their knowledge and the normative conditions linked to their production and use, with a discussion on the realism/anti-realism of artificial classes according to the functional theory and the historical-intentional theory of artifacts. At the same time, questions of functional knowledge and the epistemic privilege of the knowledge that makers have of their products are addressed. Finally, the discussion of artifacts as value-bearers and their normative dimension of technique is analyzed.

Knowing What One Likes: Epistemicist Solution to Faultless Disagreement

AbstractIn this paper, I argue that the phenomenon of faultless disagreement for predicates of taste may be fruitfully explained by appealing to the vagueness of predicates of taste and the epistemicist reading of vagueness as defended by Timothy Williamson (1994). I begin by arguing that this position is better suited to explain both the “faultless” and “disagreement” intuition. The first is explained here by appealing to the necessary ignorance of the predicate’s boundaries and a plausible account of constitutive norms of taste assertions, while the second by insisting on classical, absolutist semantics for judgments containing predicates of taste. Furthermore, I analyze the arguments against the reading of taste predicates as vague based on the alleged epistemic privilege concerning one’s taste and on the lack of definite cases. Responding to these objections, I develop a plausible account of constitutive norms of taste assertions, comment on the assumed epistemic privilege concerning taste ascriptions and provide a more detailed account of sources of the vagueness of predicates of personal taste, which I dub “super-vagueness.”

Europe is not a country: da Europa às europas nos estúdios literário

“Africa is not a Country” is a slogan that opposes reducing the African reality to an overly simplistic narration. Starting from the concept of Orientalism and its homonymous work from Said, I will try to tackle instances that tend to flatten the European reality into the exclusive perception of the colonial legacy. I want to reflect on the borders of the “abyssal line,” showing how Chakrabarty's discourse on provincializing Europe cannot be completed until we abandon this monolithic vision and manage to re-think Europe as europes, uncapitalized and in the plural form, to embrace the whole declination of European possibilities and taking off epistemic privileges from this area of the world and gaining a cultural province of the world-literary landscape.

Social Structure and Epistemic Privilege

Lukács is widely recognized as being the first critical theorist to have explicitly developed the idea of a “standpoint theory”. According to such a theory, members of oppressed groups enjoy an epistemic privilege regarding the nature of their oppression. However, there is no agreement regarding what precise argument Lukács offers for his claims regarding the alleged epistemic privilege of the working class. Additionally, it remains unclear whether later feminist standpoint theories share any continuity with Lukács’s argument. In this analysis, I identify four arguments for the epistemic privilege of oppressed groups that could be attributed to Lukács. I argue that, although Lukács does not consistently endorse any specific argument, the most promising interpretation suggests that epistemic privilege arises from a contradiction between the norms that guide the self-understanding of such groups and the effects of the social practices they are socially obligated to engage in.

Worlding Chinese environmental geographies: A systematic, bilingual literature review

This bilingual systematic review captures 10 years (2010–2020) of debates and evidence from human geography research that foregrounds the lived experiences of Chinese citizens in accounts of environmental change. In this first bilingual review of everyday environmental geographies, we analyse 157 papers from 10 English and 10 mainland Chinese journals, using a range of thematic categorisations to capture qualitative environment–society research on China. Given the quantitative disparity between Chinese (128) and English (29) papers, we focus primarily on the Chinese literature but bring this into conversation with work in English, identifying the conceptual and theoretical foundations and empirical insights of both, and considering current debates and gaps in environmental research in, and on China. Our review contributes to calls within geography to recognise the importance of regional knowledge production, the need to move beyond Anglophone linguistic and epistemic privilege, and the need for better knowledge to be produced that represents the diverse lived experience of people in China and pushes for better outcomes. In our discussion, we identify key areas for future theoretical, thematic, methodological, and empirical inquiry in environmental geographies of China.

The Paraleptic Effect

This article examines the alleged narratological paradox of paralepsis. It is argued that the first-person narrators of Moby-Dick, À la recherche du temps perdu and The Great Gatsby (to name but three prominent examples) occasionally display an inexplicable awareness of facts that would be naturally inaccessible to them (knowledge of other people’s thoughts, minute familiarity with unwitnessed events, etc.). Paralepsis, as Genette calls it, can be defined as the class of situations in which a first-person narrator seems to exercise the impossible epistemic privilege. This paper argues against the existence of genuine paraleptic events on two levels. First, it is argued that this kind of narration is rarely epistemically paradoxical. Even some of the strongest candidates for paralepsis could be naturalized (the reader can detect possible natural ways in which the narrator might have obtained the seemingly impossible information). Second, even in cases where they cannot be convincingly naturalized, “paralepses” need not be mysterious. It is often possible to read them (as P. Dawson has done) as “authorial performances.” They can be explained as instances of a specific rhetorical procedure that we have termed raconteural narration: a mode of narration in which, for the sake of more convincing exposition, mere conjectures are offered without the usual modal phrases that indicate the speculative quality of such assertions and thus create the erroneous impression of uncanny narrative knowledge.

Embedding Reflexivity in Social Work Research through the Critical Reflexive Framework

Abstract Following the global pandemic, there is a need for more cross-national social work research which speaks to the increased and widespread, intra and international, effects of global social phenomenon. Achieving this aim requires social work researchers to be responsive to the intersection of complex lives, complicated problems and dynamic structural contexts. It is, therefore, important that researchers recognise how their identity and positionality within the research project spans several terrains such as social, political and value systems, as well as integrating multiple social categories and social roles. However, a review of the existing literature shows that the lack of conceptual guidance for ‘doing’ reflexivity means that researchers can sometimes pay insufficient attention to the influence that they have on the people and topic being studied. Drawing on the combined concepts of identity, translocational positionality and epistemic privilege, we aim to strengthen conceptual guidance by advancing the Critical Reflexive Framework (CRF). Following an illustrated example of the CRF, we argue for its widespread adoption to enhance the rigour, integrity and quality of social work research. We conclude that such high-quality research is essential to promote the emancipatory elements of social work practice which occurs in contexts of complexity, uncertainty and flux.

Persian orientalism: Raciolinguistic ideologies and the construction of ‘Iranianness’

AbstractThis article excavates the Eurocentric roots of Iranian nationalist discourse, which emerged from the political and intellectual trajectories of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Premised on the epistemic privilege of the Persian language, a selective remembrance of the past, and forging an internal Other, I contend that this raciolinguistic ideology equated Persianness with Iranianness and naturalised Persian as both a language and a race. I begin by tracing the origin of Iranianness or Irāniyat: a concept coined by Mirza Fath'Ali Akhundzadeh and Mirza Aqa Khan Kermani, two influential figures in late Qajar Iran, whose writings introduced and disseminated the Eurocentric and Orientalist view of the non‐Persian Other. In the second section, I examine how the Berlin Circle, a group of Iranian nationalist intellectuals in the early 20th century, elaborated these ideas into a coherent racial and political ideology that later informed the Pahlavis' state‐building project in 1925. The last section of the article engages with the recent neologism of the ‘Persianate World’, an intellectual enterprise imbued with an Orientalist predisposition that aims to inscribe a trans‐border and transcultural quality to Persian culture far beyond its current boundaries, encompassing Eurasia and Central Asia.

Humans and Animals’ Relationship in Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

This article has explored on the relationships between humans and nonhuman creatures which has long been a predominant dichotomous conceptualization. Especially it has analyzed Karen Joy Fowler’s book We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves which focuses on the relationship between humans and animals. The book also makes readers think about the interspecies relationship’s ethics and epistemologies as a part of ecopoetics. The present debate over animal rights and the condemnation of speciesism, which accords human creatures’ epistemic and ontological privilege, are central issues in critical and cultural animal studies.
 The dichotomous view of human-animal relationships holds that there is a categorical border between humans - who are perceived as moral subjects with personal rights and whose internal life is psychologically accessible - and animals, some of which can be considered as companions but always have a lower (or no) status in terms of legal and cultural status and whose minds are inaccessible. To investigate human and animal relations, I have formulated three steps throughout the paper. I have started by discussing recent theories that examine the bond between us and monkeys. Then I have discussed how Kellogg's experiment serves as a significant backdrop to Fowler's book.
 Finally, I have addressed the novel’s contribution to current critical discussions about human-animal interactions and animal rights, as well as the major plot of the book, which develops when the protagonist learns her own role in the ecopoetics of her chimpanzee sister Fern. The paper has investigated ecopoetics that emphasizes the move from interspecies companionship and togetherness to human superiority and instrumental asymmetry, focusing on the intricate human-animal relationships which recount an environment that causes (non-)human trauma and loss.

Watching the watchmen: Vigilance-based models of honesty fail to explain it

ABSTRACT Promoting honesty is considered a key endeavor in the betterment of our societies. However, our understanding of this phenomenon, and of its evil twin, dishonesty, is still lacking. In this text, we analyze the main tenets assumed by empirical models of vigilance and sanctions. We approach our analysis in three sections. Initially, we investigate the concept of honesty as assumed by commonly used methodologies in studying honesty. This then leads us to identify the previously overlooked but essential element of epistemic privilege in characterizing honesty. In the third part, we delve into how current explanatory models of honesty lack sufficient consideration of epistemic privilege, resulting in incomplete narratives about honesty. Our analysis of the extant literature suggests that both internal (including the self-concept maintenance theory) and external vigilance models fall short of explaining honesty and dishonesty because of both conceptual problems and empirical inadequacy. Identifying these shortcomings allows us to suggest some possible directions of research.

COMFORT WOMEN SURVIVING PANDEMICS: FROM ERASURE TO EMBODIED HOPE TOWARDS A FEMINIST-POSTCOLONIAL THEOLOGY OF RADICAL HOSPITALITY

The article accords epistemic privilege to comfort women as embodiment of the perversion of hospitality. It draws aparallelism between their surviving the pandemics of World War II as forcibly recruited sex slaves and COVID-19.Through their lived experience as survivors of pandemics, a feminist-postcolonial theology of radical hospitality firstcritiques biblical narratives of men’s hospitality to men. The parallel stories of Lot’s offer of his virgin daughters (Gen. 19)and the Levite’s offer of his concubine (Judges 19) expose, first, the hierarchisation of male guests over women, asproperty of men, and secondly, the inviolable creed of hospitality conferred on men by men, that is sustained by the cultural code that marks women’s bodies as violable. Secondly, the article argues that extending hospitality to comfort women (for example, war reparations) goes beyond the “law of ekstasis”, as touted in Fratelli Tutti, as comfort women themselves embody love, reciprocity, and inclusion.

Toward a Meta-Psychological Methodology: Reflections on Maslow and the Role of Experiencing and Perspective in Scientific Methods

In this brief article, I consider two concepts that Maslow advances in Toward a Humanistic Biology that relate to the role of scientific observation in psychological research and were forward-thinking at his writing. These are the importance of the humanistic concept of experiencing as a way of developing understanding, and the recognition of the impact of the perceptive capacities of observers. I consider these concepts in light of advances in critical and qualitative psychology, integrating concepts such as epistemic privilege and the use of experiencing as a method toward critical science—offering a contemporary foundation for a meta-psychological methodology.

The Epistemic Privilege of Measurement: Motivating a Functionalist Account

AbstractPhilosophers and metrologists have refuted the view that measurement’s epistemic privilege in scientific practice is explained by its theory neutrality. Rather, they now explicitly appeal to the role that theories play in measurement. I formulate a challenge for this view: Scientists sometimes ascribe epistemic privilege to measurements even if they lack a shared theory about their target quantity, which I illustrate through a case study from early geodesy. Drawing on that case, I argue that the epistemic privilege of measurement can precede shared background theory and is better explained by its pretheoretic function in enabling a distinctive kind of inquiry.