PANEL 16 / COMMUNICATIVE PATHS TO RIGHTING EPISTEMIC WRONGS
CONVENOR: GIULIA TERZIAN
All enquiries about the panel should be sent to [email protected].
The panel brings together original contributions by researchers affiliated with the FCT-funded project CORES — Communicative Paths to Righting Epistemic Wrongs. CORES starts from the increasingly widely accepted idea that agents are liable to suffer harms, wrongs, and injustices of a distinctively epistemic nature. Against the backdrop of this idea — and of the vast literature spawned by this very thought —, the project seeks to thoroughly excavate the ethical dimensions of various of our epistemic activities. This is for the sake of sharpening our understanding of the target phenomena, and the diagnostic-explanatory reach of extant accounts, on the one hand; and with an eye to envisioning pathways of correction, mitigation, and repair, on the other. To these ends, the project purposefully brings together researchers with different expertise profiles: in social epistemology, in applied and social philosophy of language, and in ethics and political philosophy. The panel’s contributions reflect this diversity of expertise and, simultaneously, showcase its intellectual benefits and potential.
Three of the contributions are of a more theoretical nature, and are driven by a shared concern: to clarify what, if anything, grounds claims of wronging and injustice in the epistemic domain. Each develops and defends a distinct approach to this foundational question. One paper shows that Fricker’s original account of the wrongmaking features of testimonial injustice can be naturally connected to the framework of relational egalitarianism. It also explores the connections between the latter framework and certain phenomena known as discursive injustices. Another contends that prevailing accounts fail to identify a genuinely epistemic form of wrong irreducible to moral or otherwise non-epistemic injustice. It advances a positive framework grounded in an account of the purpose of knowledge and the normative ideal of fair participation in the knowledge economy. A third examines whether epistemic injustice can be understood as a violation of rights, developing a taxonomy of epistemic wrongs and critically assessing putative epistemic rights – such as a right to know, to be known, or to credibility – while arguing that the violation of these rights may ground only secondary, rather than primary, forms of epistemic injustice.
Three further contributions adopt a more applied focus, examining specific institutional configurations that generate and sustain epistemic injustices and exploring the characteristics of communicative strategies aiming to overcome such injustices. One argues that asylum adjudication systems can perpetrate testimonial injustice even if their primary goal is material – to refuse asylum claims – rather than epistemic. On this basis, it defends a broader understanding of testimonial injustice than that originally proposed by Fricker. The other investigates a targeted pathway of amelioration, analysing how counternarratives may function within criminal proceedings for sexual violence to contest and counteract institutional epistemic injustices embedded in established conversational and evidentiary practices. The final contribution articulates a general strategy for overcoming wrongful epistemic exclusion from communicative environments. To this end, it develops a differentiated account of argumentative representation; and argues that two forms of such representation, in particular, are preferable responses to testimonial and hermeneutical injustice.
All enquiries about the panel should be sent to [email protected].
The panel brings together original contributions by researchers affiliated with the FCT-funded project CORES — Communicative Paths to Righting Epistemic Wrongs. CORES starts from the increasingly widely accepted idea that agents are liable to suffer harms, wrongs, and injustices of a distinctively epistemic nature. Against the backdrop of this idea — and of the vast literature spawned by this very thought —, the project seeks to thoroughly excavate the ethical dimensions of various of our epistemic activities. This is for the sake of sharpening our understanding of the target phenomena, and the diagnostic-explanatory reach of extant accounts, on the one hand; and with an eye to envisioning pathways of correction, mitigation, and repair, on the other. To these ends, the project purposefully brings together researchers with different expertise profiles: in social epistemology, in applied and social philosophy of language, and in ethics and political philosophy. The panel’s contributions reflect this diversity of expertise and, simultaneously, showcase its intellectual benefits and potential.
Three of the contributions are of a more theoretical nature, and are driven by a shared concern: to clarify what, if anything, grounds claims of wronging and injustice in the epistemic domain. Each develops and defends a distinct approach to this foundational question. One paper shows that Fricker’s original account of the wrongmaking features of testimonial injustice can be naturally connected to the framework of relational egalitarianism. It also explores the connections between the latter framework and certain phenomena known as discursive injustices. Another contends that prevailing accounts fail to identify a genuinely epistemic form of wrong irreducible to moral or otherwise non-epistemic injustice. It advances a positive framework grounded in an account of the purpose of knowledge and the normative ideal of fair participation in the knowledge economy. A third examines whether epistemic injustice can be understood as a violation of rights, developing a taxonomy of epistemic wrongs and critically assessing putative epistemic rights – such as a right to know, to be known, or to credibility – while arguing that the violation of these rights may ground only secondary, rather than primary, forms of epistemic injustice.
Three further contributions adopt a more applied focus, examining specific institutional configurations that generate and sustain epistemic injustices and exploring the characteristics of communicative strategies aiming to overcome such injustices. One argues that asylum adjudication systems can perpetrate testimonial injustice even if their primary goal is material – to refuse asylum claims – rather than epistemic. On this basis, it defends a broader understanding of testimonial injustice than that originally proposed by Fricker. The other investigates a targeted pathway of amelioration, analysing how counternarratives may function within criminal proceedings for sexual violence to contest and counteract institutional epistemic injustices embedded in established conversational and evidentiary practices. The final contribution articulates a general strategy for overcoming wrongful epistemic exclusion from communicative environments. To this end, it develops a differentiated account of argumentative representation; and argues that two forms of such representation, in particular, are preferable responses to testimonial and hermeneutical injustice.
