Epistemic Violence & Failures to Understand

This panel offers three case studies in which the social location of knowers influences how and what they know, as well as what they will be able to know in the future. Individual people know from within a community and rely on these communities for epistemic resources. These epistemic resources are what render the world intelligible and make sense of individual and collective experiences. However, the epistemic resources developed by those in socially dominant and powerful positions are often not adequate for understanding the experiences of those in other social locations. In addition, these inadequate resources are often maintained in the service of stabilizing current, oppressive power structures. Together we explore the ways in which those who have been situated as socially powerful have increased responsibilities to know well and offer some strategies for meeting this goal. Taken together, these papers provide evidence for the wide variety of situations in which epistemic location and communal epistemic resources are relevant and integral to material outcomes and continue a long research tradition within American philosophy of taking very seriously the social location and oppressive/liberatory power of individuals and groups.

The first paper demonstrates that issues of social location and intelligibility are relevant to the gender-based asylum claims process. Applicants for gender-based asylum are often found unintelligible to those who will make decisions about asylum claims. The author argues that communal dependence on epistemic communities allows us to articulate why applicants face the problem of being found unintelligible persistently and finds that the resources used are consistently not “sufficient” enough to “track” applicants’ experiences in their countries of origin and their experiences of gender-related persecution.

The second paper applies this framework to the relationship between learners, educators, and educational institutions and shows that educators’ epistemic practices and ways of being can result in epistemic harm to learners. The author argues that in order to properly develop inclusive pedagogies and curricula and to build communities of inquiry that both disrupt hegemonic power dynamics and offer truly transformational experiences to all learners, we need to educate ourselves as teachers, researchers, and learners in epistemically responsible practice and relationships.

The third paper utilizes the conceptual tools developed in social epistemology to interrogate philosophic research practices with respect to implicit bias. Specifically, they argue that the shift in focus (by some) from the testimony of people of color to evidence that can be collected independently of such testimony results in epistemic harm and deficient epistemic resources. They end with the development of best practices for engaging with empirical psychological data as evidence for systematic oppressions in philosophic research.

This panel is an opportunity to explore the expansiveness and limitations of current research within contemporary social epistemology and its relations to global and historical oppressions. The different cases explored highlight the versatility of the theoretical tools while raising questions about priorities and moral impact. Most importantly, the three papers together provide a potential pathway for the development of new shared epistemic resources for knowing our world more effectively so we can live in and engage with our world in more fruitful and ethical ways.