Epistemologies of Ignorance

This chapter defends an Aristotelian account of patriotism that differs from, and improves upon, the ‘extreme’ account of Aristotelian patriotism defended by Alasdair MacIntyre in a famous lecture. The virtue of patriotism is modeled on Aristotle’s account of the virtue of friendship; and the resulting account of patriotism falls between MacIntyre’s extreme patriotism and Marcia Baron’s moderate patriotism. The chapter illustrates how this plausible Aristotelian account of patriotism can avoid the dilemma that Baron has pressed against MacIntyre’s extreme account. It (...) also illustrates why the virtue of patriotism cannot coexist with willful forms of ignorance. In its discussion of patriotism and ignorance the chapter draws on a recent study (2018) of the especially strong connection in the United States between patriotism and poverty. (shrink)

Winner of the American Philosophical Association’s 2019 Essay Prize in Latin American Thought | Western imperialism has received many different types of moral-political justifications, but one of the most historically influential justifications appeals to an allegedly universal form of human nature. In the early modern period this traditional conception of human nature—based on a Western archetype, e.g. Spanish, Dutch, British, French, German—opens up a logical space for considering the inhabitants of previously unknown lands as having a ‘less-than-human’ nature. This appeal (...) to human nature originally found its inspiration in the philosophy of Aristotle, whose ethical thought pervaded the work of European philosophers at the outset of the early modern period and the modern age of empire. Indeed some Spanish writers—most famously, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (b. 1494)—explicitly appealed to Aristotle’s moral-political philosophy in order to justify the conquest of the Americas in the early sixteenth century, for instance to justify war against the Aztecs and other indigenous peoples. At the time of European arrival, the Aztec civilization was easily the greatest in Mesoamerica—and yet the Europeans generally considered the Aztec people to be ‘barbaric,’ i.e. less-than-fully-human. (shrink)

There has been extensive discussion of testimonial epistemic injustice, the phenomenon whereby a speaker’s testimony is rejected due to prejudice regarding who they are. But people also have their testimony rejected or preempted due to prejudice regarding what they communicate. Here, the injustice is content focused. We describe several cases of content focused injustice, and we theoretically interrogate those cases by building up a general framework through which to understand them as a genuine form of epistemic injustice that stands in (...) intertwined relationships to other forms of epistemic injustice. (shrink)

Structural gaslighting arises when conceptual work functions to obscure the non-accidental connections between structures of oppression and the patterns of harm they produce and license. This paper examines the role that structural gaslighting plays in white feminist methodology and epistemology using Fricker’s (2007) discussion of hermeneutical injustice as an illustration. Fricker’s work produces structural gaslighting through several methods: i) the outright denial of the role that structural oppression plays in producing interpretive harm, ii) the use of single-axis conceptual resources to (...) understand intersectional oppression, and iii) the failure to recognize the legacy of women of color’s epistemic resistance work surrounding the issue of sexual harassment in the workplace. I argue that Fricker’s whitewashed discussion of epistemic resistance to sexual harassment in the United States is a form of structural gaslighting that fails to treat women of color as knowers and exemplifies the strategic forgetting that is a central methodological tactic of white feminism. (shrink)

Публикация (#3) из научно-популярного цикла: "Структурная онтология познания с доктором Шимко".

The exculpatory rhetorical power of the term “honest belief” continues to invite reliance on the bare credibility of belief in consent to determine culpability in sexual assault. In law, however, only a comprehensive analysis of mens rea, including an examination of the material facts and circumstances of which the accused was aware, demonstrates whether a “belief” in consent was or was not reckless or wilfully blind. An accused's “honest belief” routinely begs this question, leading to a truncated analysis of criminal (...) responsibility, and error. The problem illustrates how easily old rhetoric perpetuates assumptions that no longer have a place in Canadian law. (shrink)

"Newark Lessons" offers a response to the harassment and threats that George Yancy faced after the publication of his "Dear White America" letter, published in the New York Times on 24 December, 2015. The Newark Lessons are an autobiographical account how the white community of my childhood used the Newark Race Riots/Rebellions as a trope to teach me about the value of whiteness. I discuss the damaging effects of these lessons in terms of the collateral damage of white supremacy for (...) white people. (shrink)

Politics of Reality includes nine essays that examine sexism, the exploitation of women, the gay rights movement and other topics from a feminist perspective. -/- The essays "The Problem That Has No Name" and "A Note On Anger" have been translated into Spanish by Maria Lugones for circulation in la Asociacion Argentina de Mujeres en Filosofia.

In classes that examine entrenched injustices like sexism or racism, students sometimes use “distancing strategies” to dissociate themselves from the injustice being studied. Education researchers argue that distancing is a mechanism through which students, especially students of apparent privilege, deny their complicity in systemic injustice. While I am sympathetic to this analysis, I argue that there is much at stake in student distancing that the current literature fails to recognize. On my view, distancing perpetuates socially sanctioned forms of ignorance and (...) unknowing, through which students misrecognize not only their complicity in injustice, but also the ways that injustice shapes the world, their lives, and their knowledge. Thus, distancing is pedagogically problematic because it prevents students from understanding important social facts, and because it prevents them from engaging with perspectives, analyses, and testimonies that might beneficially challenge their settled views and epistemic habits. To substantiate this new analysis, I draw on recent work on epistemologies of ignorance, especially José Medina’s account of “active ignorance.” In order to respond to student distancing, I argue, it is not sufficient for teachers to make students aware of injustice, or of their potential complicity in it. Beyond this, teachers should cultivate epistemic virtue in the classroom and encourage students to take responsibility for better ways of knowing. The article ends by outlining several classroom practices for beginning this work. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that African-American philosophy emerges from a socio-existential context where persons of African descent have been faced with the absurd in the form of white racism. African-American Philosophy through the Lens of Socio-Existential Struggle. Philosophy & Social Criticism, Volume 37: 551–574). The concept of struggle, given the above, functions as both descriptive and heuristic vis-à-vis the meaning of African American philosophy. Expanding upon Charles Mills’ concept of non-Cartesian sums, I demonstrate the inextricable link between Black lived (...) experience, struggle, and the morphology of meta-philosophical assumptions and philosophical problems specific to African-American philosophy. Because of the philosophical pretensions of white Western philosophy, with it claims to universal truth and objective knowledge, the particularity of African-American philosophical concerns with questions of embodiment and race is often deemed ersatz or non-philosophical. In this article, I argue that whiteness as the transcendental norm is productive of a form of ignorance endemic to Western philosophical practices that are myopic and hegemonic. Finally, African-American philosophy is theorized as a gift, as a critical counter-narrative that can be deployed to fissure Western philosophy’s narcissism. (shrink)

Beginning with the experience of a white woman's stomach seizing up in fear of a black man, this essay examines some of the ethical and epistemological issues connected to white ignorance. In conversation with Charles Mills on the epistemology of ignorance, I argue that white ignorance primarily operates physiologically, not cognitively. Drawing critically from psychology, neurocardiology, and other medical sciences, I examine some of the biological effects of racism on white people's stomachs and hearts. I argue for a nonideal medical (...) theory focused on improving wellness in a society that systematically has damaged the health of people of color. The essay concludes that to be fully successful, critical philosophy of race must examine not just the financial, legal, political, and other forms of racism, but also its biological and physiological operations. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that Foucaultian genealogy offers a critical approach to practices of remembering and forgetting which is crucial for resisting oppression and dominant ideologies. For this argument I focus on the concepts of counter-history and counter-memory that Foucault developed in the 1970’s. In the first section I analyze how the Foucaultian approach puts practices of remembering and forgetting in the context of power relations, focusing not only on what is remembered and forgotten, but how , by whom, (...) and with what effects. I highlight the critical possibilities for resistance that this approach opens up, and I illustrate them with Ladelle McWhorter’s genealogy of racism in Anglo-America. In the second section I put the Foucaultian approach in conversation with contemporary work in pragmatism and critical theory on the social epistemology of memory. In the third and final section, I explore some of the implications of the Foucaultian notion of resistance and what I term guerrilla pluralism for contemporary epistemological discussions of ignorance in standpoint theory and race theory. (shrink)

There has been a great deal of philosophical analysis supporting the position that race is semantically empty, ontologically bankrupt and scientifically meaningless. The conclusion often reached is that race is a social construction. While this position is certainly accepted by the majority of philosophers working within the area of critical race theory, the existentially lived and socially embodied impact of `race' is often left either unexplored or under-theorized. In this article, I provide a philosophical analysis of how `race' operates at (...) the level of the embodied within the context of the quotidian, and how the recognition of instances of racism is grounded within an epistemological community. I demonstrate that race as lived is a powerful experience that emerges within an interstitial space of enduring myths and habituated bodily postures. My elevator example demonstrates that, as a lived reality, race is insidious and negatively impacts the integrity of, in this example, the black body and the white body. The black body is shown to undergo a process of `confiscation' through the phenomenon of the white gaze, which is a form of learned embodied seeing, while the white body elides any responsibility for holding the black body captive. The white gaze is theorized as a cultural achievement, which is productive of a form of ignorance. Instances of anti-racism, then, are not restricted to mere cognitive shifts in one's perspective, but must involve performing the body's racialized interactions with the world differently. (shrink)

Marilyn Frye's first book, The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory, presents nine philosophical lectures: four on women's subordination, four on resistance and rebellion, one on revolution. Its approach combines a lesbian perspective with analytical philosophy of language. The major contributions of the book are its analysis of oppression, highly suggestive discussions of the roles of attention in knowledge and ignorance and in arrogance and love, a defense of political separatism not based on female supremacism, and a development of (...) the idea of lesbian epistemology. Its proposal for resisting White racism will be controversial. Its treatment of gay rights is not balanced by an acknowledgement that drag queens, like "totaled women," are products of oppression, not simply of intolerance. The most philosophically problematic aspect of the book is its analysis of coercion and of the roles of coercion in women's subordination. This creates an unresolved tension with the positive message of the second half of the book. Despite this difficulty, these essays are an outstanding contribution to contemporary feminist theory. (shrink)

Marilyn Frye's first book, The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory, presents nine philosophical lectures: four on women's subordination, four on resistance and rebellion, one on revolution. Its approach combines a lesbian perspective with analytical philosophy of language. The major contributions of the book are its analysis of oppression, highly suggestive discussions of the roles of attention in knowledge and ignorance and in arrogance and love, a defense of political separatism not based on female supremacism, and a development of (...) the idea of lesbian epistemology. Its proposal for resisting White racism will be controversial. Its treatment of gay rights is not balanced by an acknowledgement that drag queens, like "totaled women," are products of oppression, not simply of intolerance. The most philosophically problematic aspect of the book is its analysis of coercion and of the roles of coercion in women's subordination. This creates an unresolved tension with the positive message of the second half of the book. Despite this difficulty, these essays are an outstanding contribution to contemporary feminist theory. (shrink)

This paper provides a phenomenological analysis of the navigation of academia as experienced by two Black scholars, situated in dissimilar disciplinary and cultural traditions and origins. What is shared is an interest in the academic space that exists within which Black scholars may freely roam, and the structure and function of the boundaries that are present. The policing of Black thought and Black emotion within those boundaries, the violence with which the boundaries are enforced, and the strategies and rationales employed (...) by Black academics in expanding, resisting, subverting, and acquiescing to said boundaries is explored by way of the authors’ testimonies. Drawing on our lived experience of academia, we suggest that the academy functions as a frontier of racist violence, where the thinking that grounds state-based racist violence is taught, legitimated and fostered. Through a dialogue which brings to the fore the tensions and contradictions of the outlooks and strategies employed by Black academics, we testify to the emancipatory potential of Black pain, Black rage and Black thought. (shrink)

The traditional blackface character Black Pete has been at the center of an intense controversy in the Netherlands, with most black citizens denouncing the tradition as racist and most white citizens endorsing it as harmless fun. I analyze the controversy as an utter failure, on the part of white citizens, of what Alison Jaggar has called multicultural literacy. This article aims to identify both the causes of this failure of multicultural literacy and the conditions required for multicultural literacy to be (...) possible. I argue that this failure of multicultural literacy is due to hermeneutical injustice and to white ignorance. I close by considering possible avenues for fostering multicultural literacy. (shrink)

This article examines Samantha Vice's essay ‘How Do I Live in This Strange Place?’, which sparked a storm of controversy in South Africa, as a starting point for interrogating understandings of whiteness and racism that are dominant in critical philosophy of race. I argue that a significant body of philosophical scholarship on whiteness in general and by white scholars in particular obfuscates the structural dimension of racism. The moralisation of racism that often permeates philosophical scholarship reproduces colourblind logics, which provide (...) individualistic explanations for structural problems, thereby sustaining white dominance. In the process, I show that notions of white guilt, white habits, white ignorance, white invisibility, white privilege, and white shame as they are theorised in much critical philosophy of race share a crucial limitation: they minimise white people's active interest in reproducing the racist status quo. Studies, such as Vice's, that frame racism as a moral dilemma while silencing its institutionalisation and the central cause for its existence and longevity – that is, white people's investment in maintaining economic, political, and symbolic power – further naturalise white supremacy. (shrink)

This article responds to Marzia Milazzo's article ‘On white ignorance, white shame, and other pitfalls in critical philosophy of race’, in which Milazzo argues that the concepts white shame, white guilt, white privilege, white habits, white invisibility and white ignorance are pitfalls in the process of decolonisation. Milazzo contends that the way these concepts are theorised in much critical philosophy of race minimises white people's active interest in reproducing the racial status quo. While I agree with Milazzo's critique of white (...) shame and white guilt, I argue that these affective responses are fundamentally different to the remaining concepts. Drawing on critical whiteness studies and agnotology, I argue that white privilege, white invisibility and white ignorance are valuable conceptual tools for revealing white people's active investment in maintaining racial inequality. Whereas Milazzo sees a contradiction between white people's active interest in maintaining racial inequality and concepts like white invisibility and white ignorance, I argue that, correctly theorised, these concepts resolve this apparent contradiction. I contest Milazzo's call to reject white privilege, white invisibility and white ignorance, arguing that these concepts are useful tools in the project of decolonisation. (shrink)

A common remedial response to a culture of racism, sexism, homophobia and other forms of oppression on college campuses has been to institute mandatory implicit bias training for faculty, staff and students. A critical component of such training is the identification of unconscious prejudices in the minds of individuals that impact behavior. In this paper, I critically examine the rush to rely on implicit bias training as a panacea for institutional culture change. Implicit bias training and the notion of implicit (...) bias it is grounded in is examined and the advantages and limitations of this approach is elaborated. An exclusive focus on implicit bias, it is argued, can protect ignorance rather than correct it. Similar to implicit bias, microaggressions is a concept that has played a role in campus diversity interventions. An examination of microaggression education demonstrates how it corrects for some of the pitfalls of relying on the concept of implicit bias to improve campus climate. The ambiguity that is characteristic of microaggressions, however, hints at the need to explore the type of “unknowing” that both implicit bias education and microaggression education attempt to remedy. Building on the recent scholarship around the idea of epistemic injustice, crucial insights can be gleaned about the significance of shifting the focus from lack of knowledge to a willful resistance to know. In the final section, some implications for improving campus climate are drawn out. (shrink)

On December 3, 2014, in a piece entitled “White America’s Scary Delusion: Why Its Sense of Black Humanity Is So Skewed,” Brittney Cooper criticizes attempts to deem Black rage at state-sanctioned violence against Black people “unreasonable.” In this paper, I outline a problem with epistemology that Cooper highlights in order to explore whether beliefs can wrong. My overall claim is there are difficult-to-defeat arguments concerning the “legitimacy” of police slayings against Black people that are indicative of problems with epistemology because (...) of the epistemic power they accumulate toward resilient oblivion, which can have the effect of normalizing oppressive conditions. That is to say, if one takes the value of lessening oppression as a key feature of normative, epistemological conduct, then it can generate demands on epistemological orientations that, in turn, generate wrongs for beliefs and, more specifically, beliefs as wrongs. (shrink)

Calls for diversity in higher education have been ongoing for, at least, a century. Today, the diversity movement in higher education is in danger of being co-opted in the US by a move to make ‘intellectual diversity,’ i.e. the diversity of political opinion, on par with the cultural and historical diversity that one finds within differently racialized populations. Intellectual diversity is thought to track different modes of thinking between conservatives and progressives that need policy interventions to promote and protect. Here (...) I offer an account of a mode of thinking to probe what conservative, libertarian, progressive, and critical theory orientations, as modes of thinking, should show in order to present themselves as tokens of ‘intellectual diversity.’ Ultimately, I gesture to the conclusion that intellectual diversity as a mode of thinking degrades into either infinite particularity or impossible singularity that do little establish a call for policy intervention. (shrink)

In this article I analyse two complaints of white vilification, which are increasingly occurring in Australia. I argue that, though the complainants (and white people generally) are not harmed by such racialized speech, the complainants in fact harm Australians of colour through these utterances. These complaints can both cause and constitute at least two forms of epistemic injustice (willful hermeneutical ignorance and comparative credibility excess). Further, I argue that the complaints are grounded in a dual misrecognition: the complainants misrecognize themselves (...) in their own privileged racial specificity, and they misrecognize others in their own marginal racial specificity. Such misrecognition preserves the cultural imperialism of Australia’s dominant social imaginary—a means of oppression that perpetuates epistemic insensitivity.Bringing this dual misrecognition to light best captures the indignity that is suffered by the victims of the aforementioned epistemic injustices. I argue that it is only when we truly recognize difference in its own terms, shifting the dominant social imaginary, that “mainstream Australians”can do their part in bringing about a just society. (shrink)

“Ignorance” is receiving an increased amount of philosophical attention. The study of it even has its own name, “agnotology.” Some ignorance remains simply a case of not having enough information, but increasingly philosophers are recognizing a whole other type of ignorance, one that is socially constructed and often actively promoted. In the first section of this paper I examine perhaps the best known type of socially constructed ignorance, “white ignorance.” White ignorance reflects a lack of genuine understanding of the social (...) realities of others and it creates injustice. In the second section of the paper, I consider what it means to “genuinely understand,” arguing that when it comes to issues of justice those with epistemic power have a moral obligation to at least attempt to understand others’ social realities. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that the notion of ‘reasonableness’ that is, for many, at the heart of the Philosophy for Children approach particularly and education for democratic citizenship more broadly, is constituted within the epistemology of ‘white ignorance’ and operates in such a way that it is unlikely to transgress the boundaries of white ignorance so as to view it from without. Drawing on scholarship in critical legal studies and social epistemology, I highlight how notions of reasonableness often include (...) consensus, ‘racialised common sense’ and the ‘typical’ view. In addition the promotion of particular dispositions on the grounds of ‘reasonableness’ both promotes stability and limits how one may think otherwise. Thus, P4C practices that fail to historicise, examine and challenge prevailing notions of reasonableness establish an epistemically ‘gated’ community of inquiry. (shrink)

‘Unconscious bias happens by our brains making incredibly quick judgements and assessments without us realising. Biases are influenced by background, cultural environment and experiences and we may not be aware of these views and opinions, or of their full impact and implications. This article opposes this point of view by arguing that bias is not unconscious but is conscious and linked to Charles Mills’ ‘Racial Contract’ and its ‘epistemologies of ignorance’. These epistemologies emerge from what the Equality Challenge Unit calls (...) ‘our background, cultural environment and personal experience’. Asserting that racism stems from ‘unconscious bias’ diminishes white supremacy and maintains white innocence as a ‘will to forget’ institutional racism. In equality and diversity training ‘unconscious bias’ has become a performative act to move beyond racism through training to participate in a constructed ‘post-racial’ reality. The article argues that through decolonizing ‘unconscious bias’, ‘white fragility’ and ‘self-forgiveness’ we can begin to see hidden institutional whiteliness at the base of conscious bias. (shrink)

Sometimes ignorance is an excuse. If an agent did not know and could not have known that her action would realize some bad outcome, then it is plausible to maintain that she is not to blame for realizing that outcome, even when the act that leads to this outcome is wrong. This general thought can be brought to bear in the context of climate change insofar as we think (a) that the actions of individual agents play some role in realizing (...) climate harms and (b) that these actions are apt targets for being considered right or wrong. Are agents who are ignorant about climate change and the way their actions contribute to it excused because of their ignorance, or is their ignorance culpable? In this paper I examine these questions from the perspective of recent developments in the theories of responsibility for ignorant action and characterize their verdicts. After developing some objections to existing attempts to explore these questions, I characterize two influential theories of moral responsibility and discuss their implications for three different types of ignorance about climate change. I conclude with some recommendations for how we should react to the face of the theories' conflicting verdicts. The answer to the question posed in the title, then, is: "Well, it's complicated.". (shrink)

Liberalism is the political philosophy of equal persons, yet liberalism has denied equality to those it saw as black sub-persons. In Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism, political philosopher Charles Mills challenges mainstream accounts that ignore this history and its current legacy in the United States today.

Alison Bailey has recently explored the nature of what she calls privilege‐evasive epistemic pushback or “the variety of willful ignorance that many members of dominant groups engage in when they are asked to consider both the lived experience and structural injustices that members of marginalized groups experience daily.” In this article, I want to use Bailey's argument to demonstrate how privilege‐evasive epistemic pushback is facilitated and obscured by the disciplinary tools of traditional Western philosophy. Specifically, through exploring philosophical cultures of (...) justification and case studies, this work will reveal how students engage in privilege‐evasive epistemic pushback by deploying the reason/emotion divide and various philosophical norms and practices it underlies to protect their epistemic home turf. Then, I offer three emotion‐enhancing critical philosophical practices aimed at disrupting the ignorance‐promoting moves of privilege‐evasive epistemic pushback and, instead, engage emotion as epistemically significant. (shrink)

This piece contextualizes a discussion by liminal feminists on the identifiers ‘women of color’ and ‘Third World women’ that emerged from some uncomfortable and constructive conversations at the 2015 FEAST conference. I focus on concerns of marginalization and gatekeeping that are far too often reiterated within the uneasy racial dynamics among feminist philosophers.

The precise nature of microaggression purposely obscures the exploration of the intentionality of perpetrator and the quantification of the harm committed. The act fits neatly into a system that privileges some and validates their reality to themselves and to us. This paper explores microaggression and recommends strategies for avoiding its harms.

In this paper I address the questions posed to me by Bret Davis, Zeynep Direk, and Charles Mills, by focusing on, first, the eurocentrism of academic philosophy in the West and strategies to overcome it; secondly, the interface of critical philosophy of race and global politics, especially as the latter touches on Islamophobia; and, thirdly, the role of critical philosophy of race in challenging the complacency of philosophy departments in the face of the discipline’s long-standing complicity with racism.

This paper focuses on epistemic practices within biomedical ethics that are related to disability. These practices are one of the reasons that there is tension between biomedical ethicists and disability advocates. I argue that appeals to conceptual neutrality regarding disability, which Anita Silvers recommends, are counterproductive. Objectivity as neutrality serves to obscure the social values and interests that inform epistemic practices. Drawing on feminist standpoint theory and epistemologies of ignorance, I examine ways that appeals to objectivity as neutrality serve to (...) maintain the status quo and ignorance regarding disability. I adapt Charles Mills’s notion of “white ignorance” in order to consider the systematic social ignorance regarding disability that is treated as knowledge. Bioethicists commonly dismiss the reports of disabled people regarding their quality of life as biased, while claiming that their own judgments are objective. Sandra Harding’s notion of strong objectivity is useful for thinking about ways that examination of values and interests informing epistemic practices related to disability in biomedical ethics could create better knowledge practices by taking the standpoint of disabled people seriously. (shrink)

Willful ignorance is an important concept in criminal law and jurisprudence, though it has not received much discussion in philosophy. When it is mentioned, however, it is regularly assumed to be a kind of self-deception. In this article I will argue that self-deception and willful ignorance are distinct psychological kinds. First, some examples of willful ignorance are presented and discussed, and an analysis of the phenomenon is developed. Then it is shown that current theories of self-deception give no support to (...) the idea that willful ignorance is a kind of self-deception. Afterwards an independent argument is adduced for excluding willful ignorance from this category. The crucial differences between the two phenomena are explored, as are the reasons why they are so easily conflated. (shrink)

While researchers have studied how white silence protects white innocence and white ignorance, in this essay Barbara Applebaum explores a form of white silence that she refers to as “listening silence” in which silence protects white innocence but does not necessarily promote resistance to learning. White listening silence can appear to be a constructive pedagogical tool for teaching white students about their implication in the perpetuation of racism. The truth of white students' listening may make it seem as if silence (...) promotes what George Yancy refers to as “tarrying” with a critique of whiteness. Applebaum argues, however, that white listening silence is itself a manifestation of complicity and needs to be disrupted. This examination expands discussions of white silence in the scholarship not by providing a formula for when silence is or is not pedagogically necessary, but rather by demonstrating that listening silence is not a form of “tarrying.” The first section examines the unique features of listening silence and the relationship between silence, ignorance, and innocence. The second section critically examines white listening silence in cross-cultural dialogues and draws upon the work of Linda Martin Alcoff to argue that listening silence must be understood within the discursive context in which it is practiced. Finally, three implications of this emphasis on the discursive context for the role of silence in tarrying with the critique of whiteness are discussed. (shrink)

Feminist epistemologies consider ways in which gender influences knowledge. In this article, I want to consider a particular kind of feminist empiricism that has been called feminist radical empiricism. I am particularly interested in this view's treatment of values as empirical, and consequently up for revision on the basis of empirical evidence. Proponents of this view cite the fact that it allows us to talk about certain things such as racial and gender equality as objective facts: not just whether we (...) have achieved said equality in our society, but whether we are, in fact, all equal. I will raise the concern that the way in which they model the role of values in epistemology may be a problematic idealization of the open-mindedness of human agents. In some cases, resistance to value-change cannot be diagnosed as a failure to respond adequately to evidence. If so, the strategy of empirically testing our values that some feminist radical empiricists suggest may not be as useful a tool for social change as they think. (shrink)

A book review of Lee McIntyre's Respecting Truth: Willful Ignorance in the Internet Age.

This article offers an overview on current trends and future research possibilities within the philosophy of whiteness. It examines the sub-field of the philosophy of whiteness within the context of the larger field of the philosophy of race in order to assess the viability and relevance of this field of study. Some of the topics on whiteness examined in the article include the problems of white ignorance and privilege, the invisibility of white supremacist racism to white people, and how all (...) these problems can be understood either as examples of epistemologies of ignorance or as unexamined habits in the sense used by pragmatist philosophy. The article argues that the current state of this field calls for a greater emphasis on public intellectualism on whiteness that would incorporate many ideas that are widely accepted by critical race scholars into the under-informed public discourse on race and whiteness. It also argues that the increasing prevalence of negative liberty movements in the United States should be examined in light of established research on the philosophy of whiteness. (shrink)

It's not that we haven't always been here, since there was a here. It is that the letters of our names have been scrambled when they were not totally erased, and our fingertips upon the handles of history have been called the random brushings of birds. (Lorde , ix) Because… [racialized peoples'] dehumanization has not been successful, conceiving of self and others and their exercise of themselves both against dehumanization and toward liberatory possibilities has meant living double lives backed up (...) by peopled ways of living, acting, perceiving, thinking familiar with the interstitial, liminal, and with breaking up with, delinking from, colonial modernity. (Lugones, this issue, 20; my emphasis) We are not born women of color. We become women of color. To become women of color, we would need to become fluent in each other's histories, to resist and unlearn an impulse allowing mythologies to replace knowing about one another…. We cannot afford to cease yearning for each other's company. (Alexander , 91; italics in original). (shrink)

My engagement with Dotson’s essay begins with an overview of first- and second-order epistemic exclusions. I develop the concept of an "unlevel knowing field." I use examples from the epistemic injustice literature, and some of my own, to highlight the important distinction she makes between reducible and irreducible forms of epistemic oppression. Next, I turn my attention to her account of third-order epistemic exclusions. I offer a brief explanation of why her sketch of at this level makes an important contribution (...) to the literature on epistemic injustice. In closing I suggest that Dotson’s account of third-order epistemic exclusions has a cognitive bend that limits the resources she might use for bringing about change, and suggest opening up the conversation to include affective, aesthetic or mystical resources. (shrink)

his paper answers a call made by Anita Allen to genuinely assess whether the field of philosophy has the capacity to sustain the work of diverse peoples. By identifying a pervasive culture of justification within professional philosophy, I gesture to the ways professional philosophy is not an attractive working environment for many diverse practitioners. As a result of the downsides of the culture of justification that pervades professional philosophy, I advocate that the discipline of professional philosophy be cast according to (...) a culture of praxis. Finally, I provide a comparative exercise using Graham Priest’s definition of philosophy and Audre Lorde’s observations of the limitations of philosophical theorizing to show how these two disparate accounts can be understood as philosophical engagement with a shift to a culture of praxis perspective. (shrink)

I distinguish between two senses in which feminists have argued that the knower is social: 1. situated or socially positioned and 2. interdependent. I argue that these two aspects of the knower work in cooperation with each other in a way that can produce willful hermeneutical ignorance, a type of epistemic injustice absent from Miranda Fricker's Epistemic Injustice. Analyzing the limitations of Fricker's analysis of the trial of Tom Robinson in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird with attention to the (...) way in which situatedness and interdependence work in tandem, I develop an understanding of willful hermeneutical ignorance, which occurs when dominantly situated knowers refuse to acknowledge epistemic tools developed from the experienced world of those situated marginally. Such refusals allow dominantly situated knowers to misunderstand, misinterpret, and/or ignore whole parts of the world. (shrink)

While in agreement with Miranda Fricker?s context-sensitive approach to hermeneutical injustice, this paper argues that this contextualist approach has to be pluralized and rendered relational in more complex ways. In the first place, I argue that the normative assessment of social silences and the epistemic harms they generate cannot be properly carried out without a pluralistic analysis of the different interpretative communities and expressive practices that coexist in the social context in question. Social silences and hermeneutical gaps are misrepresented if (...) they are uniformly predicated of an entire social context, instead of being predicated of particular ways of inhabiting that context by particular people in relation to particular others. I contend that a more nuanced?polyphonic?contextualization offers a more adequate picture of what it means to break social silences and to repair the hermeneutical injustices associated with them. In the second place, I argue that the particular obligations with respect to hermeneutical justice that differently situated subjects and groups have are interactive and need to be determined relationally. That is, whether individuals and groups live up to their hermeneutical responsibilities has to be assessed by taking into account the forms of mutual positionality, relationality, and responsivity (or lack thereof) that these subjects and groups display with respect to one another. The central argument is developed through an examination of what in race theory and in contemporary epistemologies of ignorance has been termed ?white ignorance?; that is, the kind of hermeneutical inability of privileged white subjects to recognize and make sense of their racial identities, experiences, and social positionality. (shrink)

This article addresses the impact of systematic ignorance and epistemic uncertainty upon white Western women's participation in anti-racist and transnational feminisms. I argue that a “methodology of the privileged” is necessary for effective coalition-building across racial and geopolitical inequities. Examining both self-reflexivity and racial sedition as existing methods, I conclude that epistemic uncertainty should be considered an additional strategy rather than a dilemma for the privileged.

This paper aims to understand the relationship between ignorance and vulnerability by drawing on recent work on the epistemology of ignorance. After elaborating how we might understand the importance of human vulnerability, I develop the claim that ignorance of vulnerability is produced through the pursuit of an ideal of invulnerability that involves both ethical and epistemological closure. The ignorance of vulnerability that is a prerequisite for such invulnerability is, I contend, a pervasive form of ignorance that underlies and grounds other (...) oppressive forms of ignorance. Thus, undoing such forms of ignorance requires working toward a particular form of vulnerability: epistemic vulnerability. (shrink)

In The Alchemy of Race and Rights Patricia Williams notes that when people of color are asked to understand such practices as racial profiling by putting themselves in the shoes of white people, they are, in effect, being asked to, ‘look into the mirror of frightened white faces for the reality of their undesirability’ (1992, 46). While we often see understanding another as ethically and epistemically virtuous, in this paper I argue that it is wrong in some cases to ask (...) another to attempt to understand certain positions or lines of thought. In developing my argument I draw on the work of María Lugones to argue for a view of agency that is epistemically interdependent. I examine the case described by Patricia Williams to demonstrate specifically how the understanding requested in this case unfairly undermines both epistemic and non-epistemic agency. I distinguish appropriate requests for understanding from inappropriate requests so as to make clear that I am not suggesting that it is wrong to make such requests when the understanding sought after is difficult, painful, or even when it forces one to reconsider the meaning of one’s actions. Finally, I examine an example from Susan Brison to show how strategic refusals to understand may provide a pathway toward new ways of knowing and being in resistance to oppressive regimes. (shrink)