Speaker: Jade Fletcher (St Andrews)

Practices, Normativity, and Ideological Construction: Conceptualizing Epistemic (In)Justice

The aim of this exploratory paper is to put into dialogue two different threads in contemporary social philosophy. Charles Mills made a helpful interjection into the epistemic injustice literature when he suggested that the concept of ideology is valuable for analytic epistemologists. Sally Haslanger has developed a metaphysics which captures how ethically pernicious ideologies can construct unjust social realities. In this paper I want to explore how this metaphysics of the social world might complicate our understanding of the nature of epistemic injustice, and consequently our conception of the demands of epistemic justice. This is to accept Mills’ invitation to take more seriously the explanatory potency of ideology when theorising epistemic injustice, but, following Haslanger, I understand ideologies to be metaphysically productive. I argue that this metaphysical reframing brings to light a potentially misguided theoretical orientation that pervades the epistemic injustice literature.