Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-x24gv Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-04T21:06:05.928Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Resources, Rules, and Oppression

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Abstract

There is a large and growing literature on communal interpretive resources: the concepts, theories, narratives, and so on that a community draws on in interpreting its members and their world. (They're also called “hermeneutical resources” in some places and “epistemic resources” in others.) Several recent contributions to this literature have concerned dominant and resistant interpretive resources and how they affect concrete lived interactions. In this article, I note that “using” interpretive resources—applying them to parts of the world in conversation with others—is “a rule‐governed activity”; and I propose that in oppressive systems, these rules are influenced by the rules of oppression. Section I clarifies some rules governing the use of resources. Section II draws on work by Gaile Pohlhaus, Jr. and others to suggest that according to the present rules of our oppressive system, it is permissible for dominantly situated speakers to dismiss interpretive resources developed in marginalized communities. Section III appeals to Charles Mills's work on White ignorance to propose, further, that our system's rules make it impermissible and deserving of punishment to use resistant resources. The conclusion enumerates several further points about such rules governing the use of interpretive resources, their social effects, and some philosophical literatures.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © 2019, Hypatia, Inc.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bettcher, Talia Mae. 2012. Trans women and the meaning of “woman”. In The Philosophy of Sex: Contemporary Readings, 6th ed., ed. Power, Nicholas, Halwani, Raja, and Soble, Alan. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.Google Scholar
Burge, Tyler. 1986/2007. Intellectual norms and the foundations of mind. Reprinted in Foundations of mind: Philosophical essays, volume 2. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Davis, Emmalon. 2018. On epistemic appropriation. Ethics 128 (4): 702–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
DiAngelo, Robin. 2018. White fragility: Why it's so hard for white people to talk about racism. Boston: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Donaldson, Mike. 1993. What is hegemonic masculinity? Theory and Society 22 (5): 643–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dotson, Kristie. 2011. Tracking epistemic violence, tracking practices of silencing. Hypatia 26 (2): 236–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Engelhardt, Jeff. 2018. Linguistic labor and its division. Philosophical Studies 176 (7): 1855–71. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-018-1099-2.Google Scholar
Frances, Bryan. 2014. Disagreement. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Freyd, Jennifer J., and Fitzgerald, Louise F. 2017. Trump's DARVO defense of harassment accusations. Boston Globe, December 20. https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2017/12/20/trump-darvo-defense-harassment-accusations/bTCR10QDrjLaYAwsQHCtpsM/story.html.Google Scholar
Fricker, Miranda. 2007. Epistemic injustice: power and the ethics of knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goetze, Trystan S. 2018. Hermeneutical dissent and the species of hermeneutical injustice. Hypatia 33 (1): 7390.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grant, Jaime M., Mottet, Lisa, Tanis, Justin Edward, Harrison, Jack, Herman, Jody, and Keisling, Mara. 2011. Injustice at every turn: A report of the national transgender discrimination survey. Washington, D.C.: National Center for Transgender Equality.Google Scholar
hooks, bell. 2004. The will to change: Men, masculinity, and love. New York: Atria Books.Google Scholar
Koss, Mary, Gidycz, C. A., and Wisniewski, N. 1987. The scope of rape: Incidence and prevalence of sexual aggression and victimization in a national sample of higher education students. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 55 (2): 162–70. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-006X.55.2.162.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Langton, Rae. 1998. Subordination, silence, and pornography's authority. In Censorship and silencing: Practices of cultural regulation, ed. Post, R. Oxford: J. Paul Getty Trust and Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Lewis, David. 1979. Scorekeeping in a language game. Journal of Philosophical Logic 8 (3): 339–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lindquist‐Dorr, Lisa. 2004. White women, rape, and the power of race in Virginia, 1900–1960. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Mason, Rebecca. 2011. Two kinds of unknowing. Hypatia 26 (2): 294307.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McGowan, Mary Kate. 2004. Conversational exercitives: Something else we do with our words. Linguistics and Philosophy 27 (1): 93111.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McGowan, Mary Kate. 2009. Oppressive speech. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 87 (3): 389407.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mills, Charles W. 1997. The racial contract. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Mills, Charles W. 1998. Blackness visible. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Mills, Charles W. 2007. White ignorance. In Race and epistemologies of ignorance, ed. Sullivan, Shannon and Tuana, Nancy. Albany: SUNY Press.Google Scholar
Pohlhaus, Gaile Jr. 2012. Relational knowing and epistemic injustice: Toward a theory of willful hermeneutical ignorance. Hypatia 27 (4): 715–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Raphael, Jody. 2013. Rape is rape: How denial, distortion, and victim blaming are fueling a hidden acquaintance rape crisis. Chicago: Chicago Review Press.Google Scholar
Yancy, George. 2018. #IAmSexist. New York Times. October 24. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/24/opinion/men-sexism-me-too.html.Google Scholar
Young, Iris Marion. 1990. Justice and the politics of difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar