Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-xtgtn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-23T07:13:03.642Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Understanding Epistemic Trust Injustices and Their Harms

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 November 2018

Heidi Grasswick
Heidi Grasswick*
Affiliation:
Middlebury College
*
grasswick@middlebury.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Much of the literature concerning epistemic injustice has focused on the variety of harms done to socially marginalized persons in their capacities as potential contributors to knowledge projects. However, in order to understand the full implications of the social nature of knowing, we must confront the circulation of knowledge and the capacity of epistemic agents to take up knowledge produced by others and make use of it. I argue that members of socially marginalized lay communities can suffer epistemic trust injustices when potentially powerful forms of knowing such as scientific understandings are generated in isolation from them, and when the social conditions required for a responsibly-placed trust to be formed relative to the relevant epistemic institutions fail to transpire.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 84: Harms and Wrongs in Epistemic Practice , November 2018 , pp. 69 - 91
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2018 

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

1 Dotson, Kristie, ‘Tracking Epistemic Violence, Tracking Practices of Silencing’, Hypatia 26 (2011), 236–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fricker, Miranda, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Medina, José, The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations (Oxfordand New York: Oxford University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pohlhaus, Gaile, ‘Relational Knowing and Epistemic Injustice: Toward a Theory of Willful Hermeneutical Ignorance’, Hypatia 27 (2012), 715–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Dotson, ‘Tracking Epistemic Violence, Tracking Practices of Silencing’; Fricker, Epistemic Injustice; Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance; Pohlhaus, ‘Relational Knowing and Epistemic Injustice’.

3 Hookway, Christopher, ‘Some Varieties of Epistemic Injustice: Reflections on Fricker’, Episteme 7 (2010), 151–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Daukas, Nancy, ‘Epistemic Trust and Social Location’, Episteme 3, (2006), 109–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, 1.

6 Elizabeth Anderson, ‘Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2017/entries/feminism-epistemology/>.

7 Hookway, ‘Some Varieties of Epistemic Injustice’.

8 Collins, H. M. and Evans, Robert, Rethinking Expertise (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hardwig, John, ‘The Role of Trust in Knowledge’, The Journal of Philosophy 88 (1991), 693–708CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kitcher, Philip, ‘The Division of Cognitive Labor’, The Journal of Philosophy 87, (1990), 5–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kitcher, Philip, Science, Truth, and Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Code, Lorraine, What Can She Know?: Feminist Theory and the Construction of Knowledge (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991)Google Scholar; Haraway, Donna, ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’, Feminist Studies 14 (1988), 575–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Harding, Sandra, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?: Thinking from Women's Lives (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1991)Google Scholar.

10 Hardwig, ‘The Role of Trust in Knowledge’, 693.

11 Baier, Annette, ‘Trust and Antitrust’, Ethics 96 (1986), 231–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jones, Karen, ‘Trust as an Affective Attitude’, Ethics 107 (1996), 4–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 More could be said about what constitutes ‘irresponsibly-placed trust’. It could range from ignoring evidence, to negligence with respect to seeking out evidence to support one's trust assessments. The standards for seeking such reasons will vary dramatically depending on the stakes involved, but I do not take up these issues here. My primary concern is with social conditions that could prevent the formation of a responsibly-placed trust.

13 Adler, Jonathan, ‘Epistemological Problems of Testimony’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2015 Edition), Zalta, Edward N. (ed.)Google Scholar, <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2015/entries/testimony-episprob/>.

14 McLeod, Carolyn, ‘Trust’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2015 Edition), Zalta, Edward N. (ed.)Google Scholar, <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2015/entries/trust/>.

15 Frost-Arnold, Karen, ‘Imposters, Tricksters, and Trustworthiness as an Epistemic Virtue’, Hypatia 29 (2014), 790–807Google Scholar. See also Fricker, Miranda, ‘Can There Be Institutional Virtues?’ in Gendler, Tamar Szabo and Hawthorne, John (eds.), Oxford Studies of Epistemology 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)Google Scholar.

16 Hawley, Katherine notes that we can sometimes impose too much on others in the expectations that lie behind our trust in ‘Trust, Distrust and Commitment’, Noûs, 48 (2014), 1–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar. My discussion focuses on what we might rightfully expect.

17 Resnik, David B., ‘Scientific Research and the Public Trust’, Science and Engineering Ethics 17 (2011), 399–409CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

18 Grasswick, Heidi, ‘Scientific and Lay Communities: Earning Epistemic Trust through Knowledge Sharing’, Synthese 177 (2010), 387–409CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Anderson, Elizabeth, ‘Knowledge, Human Interests, and Objectivity in Feminist Epistemology’, Philosophical Topics 23 (1995): 27–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kitcher, Science, Truth, and Democracy.

20 See Katherine Hawley, ‘Trust, Distrust and Commitment’, for an important distinction between distrust and non-reliance (a form of lack of trust). Epistemic trust injustices could result in either case, but space limitations prevent any extended discussion here.

21 Townley, Cynthia points out that when we trust someone, we actually commit to not checking up on them. See her A Defense of Ignorance: Its Value for Knowers and Roles in Feminist and Social Epistemologies (Lanham, Md: Lexington Books, 2011)Google Scholar.

22 Lloyd, Elisabeth A., The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Tuana, Nancy, ‘The Speculum of Ignorance: The Women's Health Movement and Epistemologies of Ignorance’, Hypatia 21 (2006), 1–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Gould, Stephen Jay, The Mismeasure of Man, Revised & Expanded edition (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1996)Google Scholar; Harding, Sandra (ed.), The ‘Racial’ Economy of Science: Toward a Democratic Future (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993)Google Scholar.

24 Sullivan, Shannon and Tuana, Nancy (eds.), Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

25 Rosser, Sue Vilhauer, Women's Health – Missing From U.S. Medicine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

26 Scheman, Naomi, ‘Epistemology Resuscitated: Objectivity as Trustworthiness’, in Engendering Rationalities, ed. Tuana, Nancy and Morgen, Sandra (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001), 34Google Scholar.

27 Scheman, ‘Epistemology Resuscitated: Objectivity as Trustworthiness’, 36.

28 Scheman, ‘Epistemology Resuscitated: Objectivity as Trustworthiness’, 35.

29 ‘After Havasupai Litigation, Native Americans Wary of Genetic Research’, American Journal of Medical Genetics Part A 152A, (July 1, 2010), ixGoogle Scholar.

30 Scheman, ‘Epistemology Resuscitated: Objectivity as Trustworthiness’.

31 Epstein, Steven, Inclusion: The Politics of Difference in Medical Research (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.