Transcription
Hey everyone. In this video, I want to talk about the work of Miranda Fricker, um, and especially her concept of epistemic injustice.
So, what's noteworthy about Fricker is that she's combining insights from both epistemology and ethics. Epistemology, recall, is the study of knowledge, and ethics is the study of right and wrong. So, Fricker is going to be working in an area of philosophy called social epistemology. Social epistemology is the study of how our social position in the world impacts what we can know. Um, so social epistemologists are concerned with how social power might, um, skew or color our understanding of the world. So, as a result of inequalities in power, there might be, um, ways in which our collective understanding of the world that we live in becomes flawed.
So, Fricker's working in social epistemology. She wants to think about how our social position impacts our ability to know the world we live in, and then she wants to connect that up with ethics because she wants to think about whether we have specific obligations to make sure that we are understanding our world properly. So, she combines epistemology and ethics because she's thinking about our responsibility as knowers, or our responsibility as believers. We can conceive of our responsibility as believers in at least a couple of different ways. Um, we might ask the question, do we have ethical obligations to possess the truth, to have the right beliefs? Um, and then relatedly, we might ask a question about whether we have ethical obligations to engage with the evidence in particular ways. So, are there particular obligations we have as knowers to evaluate the evidence in the right kinds of ways in order to guarantee that we possess the truth?
Um, so she's going to be thinking about a responsibility as knowers, but she's going to narrow her focus a little bit more. She's going to be focused on our responsibility as knowers as we engage with other people. So, she won't necessarily, at least straight away, be concerned with how we evaluate scientific evidence or maybe, uh, factual evidence like, uh, I don't know, um, how we evaluate, um, the evidence about climate change. Um, she's going to instead be focused on our obligations to engage with other people in particular ways. So, our responsibilities as knowers as we engage with other people.
So, um, much of the paper is dedicated to giving an epistemic account of how we come to understand and describe the world we live in. So, uh, foundationally, uh, Miranda Fricker is going to point out that, um, the way that we come to understand the world that we live in, the way we describe the world we live in, is based on concepts that we all agree on using to describe the world. In other words, um, the current social understanding of the world that we possess is built using concepts that we all agree to utilize. So, we have concepts with a shared meaning that we use to describe the world we live in.
Um, so it's a general epistemic question, um, do our concepts accurately portray the world? So, I don't know, we have the concept of "bless," and we can ask the epistemic question, um, does our concept of "bless" actually portray the world as it is, or, um, is our concept somehow colored such that it's misdescribing the world? An epistemic question about whether our concepts provide us knowledge about the world as it really is. In social epistemology, we can ask a related question. We could ask the question, do our social concepts, the concepts we utilize to describe the social world we live in, are those concepts adequate? In other words, do they actually track the truth? Do they capture, in essence, the social world as it really is? So, do, uh, the concepts that we've agreed on to utilize to describe the world really get the world as it is accurately? Does it portray the world accurately, or are there flaws in our concepts such that they prevent us from understanding the truth about our world? And in particular, and this will be Fricker's major concern, is do our concepts that we utilize to describe the world, do they actually alienate us from our own experiences because they don't actually capture the truth? So, we go to describe the world that we live in, we use the concepts we possess, but ultimately, they fail to portray the world as it really is. So, we don't even understand our own world.
Okay, so there's a classic example of of how this might go. So, at Cornell University in the '70s, female students were experiencing sexual harassment by a professor. And, um, what was noteworthy is that at the time, um, socially, we didn't have the specific social concept "sexual harassment." So, we didn't have that concept to describe the world that we live in. U, we had other concepts. In particular, these women had other concepts. So, when they reported the incident to, uh, the administration at the school, um, they said the professor is flirting with us, and they were saying it as a complaint. Now, you might be able to anticipate why this was problematic, because "flirting" has at least a possible positive connotation. It also has, maybe, a negative connotation, but, uh, most importantly, it doesn't describe the behavior we call sexual harassment. So, when they went to the administration and they said the professor is flirting, they were trying to say something's wrong, but the concepts they were using to describe the situation weren't conveying what was actually wrong.
Okay, so this phenomenon of an inadequacy in our concepts, Fricker calls a gap in our hermeneutic resources. So, uh, hermeneutic resources are those resources that we utilize to, um, conceptualize the world we live in. "Sexual harassment" as a new concept is a hermeneutic resource employed to characterize the particular experience that these women were having. So, when they started utilizing the phrase "sexual harassment," they filled in the gap in our hermeneutic resources such that they were better able to describe what was happening to them. And what's really noteworthy to me about this case is that, um, what was happening is that, um, the women were actually alienated from their own experience because they didn't have the conceptual tools to describe it. And what's noteworthy about incidents is when we don't have the conceptual resources to describe our experiences is that we may ourselves come to misunderstand them, and in that way, we would be alienated from them because we can't properly conceive of them. They feel one way, but our conceptual resources, um, explains something different. So, that gap between the feeling of the situation, let's say, and the conceptual resources we have to describe the feeling is a kind of alienation from the experience itself.
So, this gets us into ethics because Fricker is going to pose the question, well, who actually creates the hermeneutic or conceptual resources we have to describe our reality? In other words, who produces the meanings that are our concepts contain? And in particular, she's going to ask, well, whose resources, um, or, um, whose benefits, um, are gained by maintaining the status quo in the resources we possess, the conceptual resources we utilize? So, is there a way in which, um, power is upheld or maintained by, uh, the maintenance of the status quo with our conceptual resources? So, who puts these conceptual resources into place, and how do they benefit from those conceptual resources? And, um, um, how would power be redistributed if we had a different set of resources?
So, so doubling back to this example of sexual harassment, Fricker is going to interpret this a particular way. It's because institutionally and socially, over the history of the human species, in particular, let's say the human species here in the United States, um, that men have had a particular kind of institutional power and social power. And so, men have had, um, more of a capacity for, um, creating social meaning, creating conceptual resources, and then maintaining the system of, of conceptual resources we have. So, men have propagated a particular meaning, um, have made use of particular language that describe the reality the way that they would like to see it described, in part because they are motivated, either consciously or unconsciously, to maintain the power that they possess. So, when a particular group of people, um, has this ability to create the conceptual resources we use to describe our reality and uphold them, Fricker is going to describe that as a kind of epistemic privilege. The people in power, the people who create the social meanings, have a privilege over those individuals who don't have the same power.
So, going back to our sexual harassment example, Fricker will say men have been in a position of epistemic privilege. They've been running the church, running the academic institutions, running the political institutions, running the legal institutions, and that has had the net effect of biasing our conceptual resources in their favor. Um, so, so in this instance, men have had a kind of epistemic privilege. Um, and there's a variety of ways in which we could use this concept. We could say, in the history of the United States, uh, white people have had a kind of epistemic privilege, and in particular, white men have had an a particular kind of epistemic privilege. Um, we might say that certain religious leaders have had a kind of epistemic privilege. And so, when there is an epistemic privilege, when there's a hierarchy in structure such that some people are at the top of the epistemic pyramid, so to speak, this is what Fricker refers to as hermeneutic inequality. There is inequality in, uh, each group's ability to contribute to the social understanding, to the conceptual resources we have. Some people are able to contribute much more, and some people are able to contribute much less.
So, in the sexual harassment case, Fricker's going to say women have not had an adequate opportunity to contribute to our social understanding of the world. They haven't been able to express their feelings and their reactions to the events that were happening to them. In this particular instance, women didn't have the opportunity to say, "We don't like being harassed in these ways. We don't like being talked to in these ways. Talking to us in these ways is bad," because those voices weren't expressed or given institutional privilege. Um, women were, in that instance, suffering from hermeneutic inequality. Men had more epistemic privilege.
Now, what Fricker is going to point out is that when there are widespread hermeneutical inequalities such that some people have epistemic privilege, um, what will result is either a partial or collective cognitive failing. What she means here is that if only a certain small percentage of people contribute to the conceptual resources we have to describe our world, then it'll be the case that over time, our conceptual resources actually fail to properly characterize the world as it really is. There'll be gaps in the hermeneutic resources, there'll be experiences that people have that the conceptual resources don't describe. Um, and this can become systematic or collective when, um, there is pervasive, um, hermeneutic inequality. When, when the hermeneutic equality is widespread, there can be deep or systematic cognitive failings in the sense that the experiences of whole groups of people, um, may fail to be reflected in the conceptual resources.
Okay, so, um, Fricker is going to label this phenomenon as a hermeneutical injustice. So, a hermeneutical injustice is when a group of people have their testimony or their experience in the world discounted or not reflected in our conceptual resources as a result of their identity. So, in the United States, it was a hermeneutical injustice, among other kinds of injustices, that, uh, black people were not reflected in, um, social, political, academic, and legal institutions. Those people were not contributing to the social understanding that was, um, producing and duplicating patterns of power because the legal institutions, the academic institutions, not only, um, informed the world, but they, um, propagate patterns of power and they maintain patterns of power. So, it was a hermeneutical injustice because these people weren't in positions socially where they could contribute to social understanding. In particular, they weren't in positions where they could express the experience of being black in the United States, just as women weren't in a position of social epistemic power to express what it's like to be, um, sexually harassed or hared by a man.
So, when a group, say women, um, Native Americans, indigenous people, um, are not, um, represented in the production of our conceptual resources, when they're not brought to the table to give language to their experiences such that our conceptual resources reflect their experiences, uh, Fricker is going to call this epistemic oppression. So, epistemic oppression is a kind of systematic discounting of a particular group's experience. It, it excludes them from the production of conceptual resources we utilize to describe the world. So, one of the net results of epistemic oppression, says Fricker, is that there will be significant gaps in our hermeneutic resources because whole groups of people won't be represented in the production of those resources.
So, this is a paper in part about the responsibility of knowers. So, the question then becomes, what, what are our obligations as it relates to epistemic oppression? Fricker is going to discuss the value of democratization of our conceptual resources, and what she means by that is, um, opening up the production of conceptual resources by including all groups of people, by having structures of information and propagation of knowledge that reflect all groups of people. And as individual knowers, we have a responsibility ethically to be sure that we are not discounting the testimony of particular groups of people as a result of their identity.
So, so doubling back to this question of, um, the ethics of knowing, or the ethics of social epistemology, Fricker is going to encourage us to be considerate when we're listening to other people, um, to be aware of the ways in which we might have cognitive biases that discount their testimony, perhaps because of their identity, and to, um, expand the production of conceptual resources such that we reduce the possibility of having either partial or complete or collective, um, cognitive failings. So, if the goal of, of our, our epistemic institutions, our academic institutions, our political and legal institutions, if the goal is to get it right, to track truth, then we need to make sure that those processes are inclusive. And that means having representation of different kinds of people in the production of our conceptual resources to be sure that those conceptual resources really do portray the world as it actually is.