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Event Series:
Epistemology Seminar
Epistemology Seminar: Catarina Dutilh Novaes (VU Amsterdam & St Andrews)
25th April 2024 @ 1:00 pm - 2:30 pm
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Speaker: Catarina Dutilh Novaes (VU Amsterdam & St Andrews)
A Foucauldian critique of the epistemic injustice research program
Catarina Dutilh Novaes (joint work with Merel Talbi and Solmu Anttila)
Since the publication of Fricker’s groundbreaking Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (2007), vibrant debates on the complex relations between knowledge, ethics and power have ensued, arguably giving rise to a specific research program (in Lakatos’ sense). In contrast with apolitical social epistemology, the epistemic injustice research program problematizes the roles of power and social identities in epistemic processes. Two of its core assumptions are: there is a reasonably neat separation between epistemic phenomena and ethical-political phenomena (even if they often intersect); while frequent, occurrences of epistemic injustice are deviations from the norm that can be redressed—epistemic injustice is a bug, not a feature.
In this talk, I offer a critique of the epistemic injustice research program thus conceived, drawing on broadly Foucauldian ideas on the relations between power and knowledge. I focus on the second assumption above, specifically by revisiting Curry’s critique of Fricker’s and Medina’s respective analyses of To Kill a Mocking Bird, and by presenting a similar critique of Lackey’s recent work on criminal testimonial injustice. In both cases, the analyses of testimonial injustice as credibility deficit (Fricker and Medina) or as credibility excess (Lackey on confessions) miss the role and functions of these practices in perpetuating oppressive power structures (in these specific cases, white supremacy). Thus seen, epistemic injustice is a feature, not a bug, requiring much more than epistemic strategies to be redressed.