Abstract
Epistemic injustice occurs when we fail to appropriately respect others as epistemic agents. Philosophers building on the work of Miranda Fricker, who introduced the concept, have focused on epistemic injustices involving certain social categories, particularly race and gender. Can there be epistemic injustice attached to political conviction and affiliation? I argue yes: politics can be a salient social category that draws epistemic injustice. Epistemic injustices might also be intersectional, based on the overlap of politics and some other identity category like race or sex. Further, and more provocatively, I argue that political minorities in academia, in particular conservatives and libertarians, are most likely the victims of epistemic injustice on the basis of their politics. Such epistemic injustices might even be routine. Although more limited in scope and severity than other forms of epistemic injustice, political epistemic injustices in academia ought to be of special concern from a standpoint of social justice because of the academy’s central role in knowledge production and dissemination.
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Notes
The second form of epistemic injustice that Fricker identifies is hermeneutical injustice, “the injustice of having some significant area of one’s social experiences obscured from collective understanding owing to a structural identity prejudice in the collective hermeneutical resource” (2007, 155). For example, until recently victims of sexual harassment were unable to appropriately categorize their experiences because they had not been introduced to the concept of sexual harassment. Hermeneutical injustice, unlike testimonial injustice, must exist society-wide if it exists at all. If women were marginalized at work but not in society at large, then society would have provided them with a conceptual framework that would allow them to correctly identify what’s happening to them at work. By contrast, it’s possible that women’s opinions could be unfairly dismissed at work – constituting testimonial injustice – but not elsewhere. I won’t have much to say about hermeneutical injustice because of the scope of this paper: it’s clear that conservatives and libertarians aren’t facing hermeneutical injustice because they aren’t systemically marginalized. Indeed, both are skilled at generating concepts and slogans to propound their points of view (e.g., “reverse discrimination” and “nanny state”). Political hermeneutical injustices are possible, however, in totalitarian societies. The “newspeak” in George Orwell’s 1984 is a good example.
For a recent and thorough treatment of the demands of intellectual humility and the limits of expertise, see Ballantyne (2019).
CNN (2019) barely mentioned Hughes’s testimony in a single article that didn’t mention the booing, his age, his race (though it mentions ambiguously that Hughes “said he’s the descendant of slaves”), or the slurs directed at him.
Dotson’s definition of epistemic silencing requires that the audience must wrongly perceive that the victim isn’t a knower. So if knowledge requires true belief, then it seems that by definition no one with a wrong opinion could be victimized in this way. I have two responses to this. First, someone could be a knower in the sense that he or she knows enough to form a reasonable opinion. Second, it strikes me as a reasonable extension of Dotson’s view to say that people can also be victims of epistemic silencing if they are wrongly perceived as lacking justified belief, even if they don’t have knowledge.
For an overview of the political orientation of academics, see Gross and Simmons (2007).
The authors used a 7-point Likert scale (1 = not at all; 4 = somewhat; 7 = very much) to extract responses on questions about whether the participants would be a) negatively influenced in reviewing a grant application or paper if it took a “politically conservative perspective”; b) reluctant to invite a colleague to participate in a symposium if the colleague in question was “politically quite conservative”; and c) inclined to vote for the more liberal candidate given two equally qualified job candidates.
The means for perceived hostile climate, based on a 7-point Likert scale, were much higher for conservatives (M = 4.7) and moderates (M = 3.7) than liberals (M = 1.9).
For more information on the IAT and racial bias, see Holroyd et al. (2017).
Regarding worries about the predictive validity of the IAT, see for example Blanton et al. (2009).
The subjects who participated in the second study were randomly assigned to do either this political selection task or a similar selection task in which the subjects were cued into candidates’ racial identities (either white or black). The results of this selection turned up of no evidence racial bias against African Americans in the selection processes. African Americans did show a significant ingroup bias toward other African Americans, and even whites (“European Americans” in Iyengar and Westwood’s designation) showed a slight preference for African Americans.
As of September 3, 2020.
This allegation was with reference to Peters et al. (2020) – then forthcoming – in the comments thread of a post about the study in the philosophy blog, Daily Nous. http://dailynous.com/2019/07/29/political-hostility-willingness-discriminate-philosophy/
A stark example of this involves cases where psychologists asked test subjects to say whether they “knew” how a simple mechanism – a flush toilet or a bicycle – worked. Most said yes, though subsequently many could not actually describe or draw the actual details of the mechanisms. For a comprehensive overview of these results, see Sloman and Fernbach (2017).
For further discussion, see Peters et al. (2020, 536–538).
For a detailed discussion of the history of academic discussion of stereotypes, see Jussim et al. (2016).
I would above all like to thank Hrishikesh Joshi, who presented with me on this topic at the 2018 American Philosophical Association Pacific Division meeting in San Diego. Ultimately, we decided to make this a single author paper, but I’m nonetheless indebted to him from our fruitful collaboration. I’d also like to thank Dan Lowe for his especially helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Thanks also to Regina Rini, for chairing the APA session and for thought provoking discussion on this topic, and to David Boonin, Tim Perrine, Matt Lutz, Nathan Cofnas, and Dan Greco for comments on earlier drafts. Finally, I’d like to thank everyone else who has spurred my interest in this topic over the years, whether intentionally or not.
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Case, S. Political Conviction and Epistemic Injustice. Philosophia 49, 197–216 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-020-00263-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-020-00263-w