Filozofija i drustvo 2017 Volume 28, Issue 4, Pages: 1063-1086
https://doi.org/10.2298/FID1704063P
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Epistemic justice as a virtue in hermeneutic psychotherapy
Prijić-Samaržija Snježana (University of Rijeka, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Department of Philosophy, Rijeka, Croatia)
Miškulin Inka
The value turn in epistemology generated a particularly influential new
position - virtue epistemology. It is an increasingly influential
epistemological normative approach that opts for the intellectual virtues of
the epistemic agent, rather than the truth-value of the proposition, as the
central epistemic value. In the first part of this article we will attempt to
briefly explain the value turn and outline the basic aspects of virtue
epistemology, underlining the diversity of epistemic attitudes associated
with this approach and their positive impact on expanding epistemological
horizons. The second part will be focused on the virtues of epistemic
responsibility and epistemic justice as particularly appropriate for
evaluating social processes such as, for example, testimony and
conversational practices in general. In the third section we will show how
the psychiatric and psychotherapeutic communicational act can be more
efficiently analyzed and evaluated from the perspective of the virtue of
epistemic justice, than from the traditional epistemic approach based on a
monist concept of truth. The fourth and fifth section synthesize the
discussion by introducing the concept of hermeneutic psychotherapy as a
therapeutically and epistemically favorable framework for evaluating
communicational acts in psychotherapy.
Keywords: virtue epistemology, epistemic responsibility, epistemic justice, philosophy of psychiatry and psychotherapy, testimony, hermeneutic psychotherapy