Archives For Laura Beeby

Collective resources and collectivity: A reply to José Medina, Laura Beeby

Jim Collier —  October 22, 2012 — Leave a comment

Author Information: Laura Beeby, California State University, Fullerton, lbeeby@fullerton.edu

Beeby, Laura. 2012. Collective resources and collectivity: A reply to José Medina Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 1 (11): 12-15.

The PDF of the article gives specific page numbers. Shortlink: http://wp.me/p1Bfg0-ty

Please refer to:

I am grateful to José Medina for his thoughtful response to my concerns about abandoning the notion of a broadly shared hermeneutical resource.[1] This notion of a shared resource, opened up so nicely by Fricker’s work, will be of interest to anyone concerned with how we manage to share our thoughts with one another — both in terms of shared understandings and in terms of shared conversations.[2] Without some shared set of meanings, concepts, terms, or practices, these fundamental capacities for communication and understanding become impossible for us. The questions under discussion in my exchanges with Medina are about how we share our collective resource, and with whom we do the sharing. Medina’s comments provide helpful clarification about these questions, and they promise to move the debate forward in several ways.

First, as I said, they provide a necessary clarification. In my previous reply to Medina, I expressed the concern that polyphonic contextualism might inevitably result in a turn “away from talk of interpretive resources and towards a context-based parsing of politically significant communication failures.”[3] In other words, I worry that any move away from a broadly shared resource and towards a more context-sensitive approach is a move away from Fricker’s central concern that our collective resources can become structurally prejudiced. With respect to my concerns here, it appears that there may be room for some middle ground. It seems clear that Medina wants to hold on to talk (and use) of collective hermeneutical resources, or, in his own words, shared expressive and interpretive resources. Instead of abandoning resource talk altogether, Medina advocates a shift away from thinking of hermeneutical resources as broadly shared and towards a conception of these resources as divided amongst sub-groups and tied to particular contexts and expressive practices. This emphasis on the ways in which our communicative practices and requirements vary from context to context is at the heart of Medina’s polyphonic contextualism. It is, I think, both a useful insight into our communicative practices and a potential source of trouble for Medina.

To begin, let’s be clear about Medina’s conception of our shared expressive and interpretive resources.

In the first place, far from trying to shift our attention away from hermeneutical resources, my polyphonic contextualism and my argument in the paper under discussion try to show precisely that we need to pay attention to expressive and interpretative resources in a more pluralistic and situated way, taking into account not only those resources that are widely or universally shared, but also those that are only shared by subgroups in virtue of their distinctive experiences, and even those nascent meanings that only some individuals (who do not yet constitute a well-formed public) are struggling to articulate. I argued that there are typically more hermeneutical resources than those shared by all the members of a collective.

In this passage, Medina alludes to three distinct kinds of resource: widely or universally shared resources, resources shared by subgroups with distinctive experiences, and nascent resources emerging from individuals not yet grouped as well-formed publics. This expanded repertoire of resources accomplishes two goals. First, it helps us to avoid the distorted perspectives that may result from a homogenous resource. Second, it allows for the diversity of voices, standpoints, and practices that are surely present among any community of language users without imposing “the hermeneutical resources of mainstream culture or of the established social imaginary”.[5]

This picture of our shared hermeneutical resources is appealing and intuitively plausible. It captures the sometimes localized dynamics of communication and self-understanding. It pays attention to the fact that some of these practices are relative to events and issues tethered to a particular geographic location or specific sub-population (Medina’s example about the epistemic needs of immigration officials is a vivid illustration of this). However, I worry that to take this approach is to risk minimizing the force of hermeneutical injustice.

For Fricker, the notion of hermeneutical injustice depends on the sense that we all share, and are all thereby vulnerable to, a collective resource. Indeed, this collectivity is the only thing that allows a dominant understanding of one practice or the complete lack of understanding about another practice to become oppressive. If we have other options to turn to for our expressive and interpretive needs, the sense that we are victims of hermeneutical injustice becomes more difficult to motivate. It is the idea of an established social imaginary that grounds Fricker’s notion of hermeneutical injustice in the first place. For Fricker, hermeneutical injustice is the injustice of having some significant area of one’s social experience obscured from collective understanding. If there is no failure in our collective understanding, but only a partial occlusion of understanding in some of our resource sub-communities, we lose much of the intuitive plausibility of Fricker’s case for the presence of an injustice.

Consider some of Fricker’s examples to see the importance of a broadly shared resource. First, her paradigm example about the origins of the term ‘sexual harassment’ would be much less compelling if women like Carmita Wood had access to other resources in addition to the collectively shared one. If Wood had access to other means of understanding and communicating about her experiences (sub-group and nascent resources, for example), there would be less of a sense that she was prevented from understanding and communicating about her experiences in such a way as to constitute an injustice. In Fricker’s parlance, these significant areas of Wood’s social experience would not have been quite as obscured from collective understanding. Instead, they would only be obscured from some understandings in some contexts. Similarly, in the example taken from McKellan’s novel Enduring Love, the notion that Joe was a victim of some sort of one-off marginalization and hermeneutical injustice only makes sense against the background of a dominant understanding that Joe-like people are people of privilege. If the police did not understand that Joe was being harassed, but some people might have understood this in the right context and under the right circumstances, then Joe’s case seems like more of an unfortunate story of a man misunderstood by the police. It does not seem as much like the story of a moment when our collective hermeneutical resources were inadequate for Joe’s needs in such a way as to obscure relevant social experiences from collective understanding.

Does this mean that there are no sub-dialects or nascent half-meanings? Of course not. In fact, it may be the case that Medina’s picture of how our expressive and interpretive resources work is a more complete and inclusive picture than Fricker’s. There is a lot to like about the polyphonic contextualist’s picture. However, in giving her account of hermeneutical injustice, Fricker does not aim to provide us with a picture of our resources that is fully comprehensive. Instead, she begins a process of thinking about what hermeneutical resources might be like by thinking about cases in which they fail us. Perhaps Fricker’s kind of dominant and inadequate resource only arises when the other kinds of resources suggested by Medina are stamped out or otherwise made unavailable. In this case, polyphonic contextualism might present us with a better picture of the solution than the problem. Medina himself affords this kind of interpretation:

I contend that a more nuanced—polyphonic—contextualization offers a more adequate picture of what it means to break social silences and to repair the hermeneutical injustices associated with them.

In this way, polyphonic contextualism picks up where Fricker leaves off. Polyphonic contextualism is about what it means to break social silences, and hermeneutical injustice is about the silences themselves and how they come about. The two pictures need not be incompatible.

Medina moves on from resource talk to a discussion of collective agency and shared responsibility. Of course he is right to point out that our institutions and structures are not separate from our “hearts and minds”. I did not mean to suggest such separation. Instead, my thoughts about broadly shared responsibility were intended to mirror my thoughts about a broadly shared resource. The thought was something like this: if we share the resource collectively, then we also share the responsibility for the upkeep and maintenance of the resource in terms of both epistemic virtue and in terms of functionality. I worry that a turn away from a conception of broadly shared resources will entail a turn away from this sense of shared responsibility. My claim is that it is harder to feel responsible for a sub-resource that does not seem to touch on your immediate social experience. It is hard to feel responsible for a resource that you don’t use. In this way, polyphonic contextualism may result in dividing, rather than mobilizing, our collective agency. Again, under the Fricker model we see only cases where collective agency goes wrong. In these cases, and precisely because the resource is broadly shared among us, we are still responsible for the dominant social imaginary even when it does not do an adequate job of representing a fair (or polyphonic) picture of social experience.

I want to suggest that there may be a way of taking Fricker and Medina together here. In so doing, we begin to have a more complete picture of what our hermeneutical resources might be like at a range of moments and for a range of people. This picture seems to remain congenial to Medina’s goals, though he and I may differ in terms of mobilization strategies for collective agency.

References

Beeby, Laura. 2012. Reply to José Medina. Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 1 (6) http://wp.me/p1Bfg0-lV.

Fricker, Miranda. 2007. Epistemic injustice: Power and the ethics of knowing. New York: Oxford University Press.

Medina, José. 2012a. Hermeneutical injustice and polyphonic contextualism: Social silences and shared hermeneutical responsibilities. Social Epistemology 26 (2): 201-220.

Medina, José. 2012b. Reply to Laura Beeby. Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 1 (6). http://wp.me/p1Bfg0-ms.

[1] Medina (2012b).

[2] See Fricker (2007) here.

[3] Beeby (2012), p.4.

[4] Medina (2012b), p.1.

[5] Medina (2012b), p.1.

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José Medina. Reply to Laura Beeby

Jim Collier —  May 28, 2012 — Leave a comment

Medina, José. 2012. Reply to Laura Beeby (PDF)
Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 1 (6)
http://wp.me/p1Bfg0-ms

Reply to Laura Beeby

José Medina, Vanderbilt University

(Editor’s Note: José Medina responds to Laura Beeby’s Reply to José Medina)

I am grateful for Laura Beeby’s clear and perceptive critical commentary of my article “Hermemeutical Injustice and Polyphonic Contextualism”. Although I agree with a great deal of Beeby’s analysis, in my reply I will focus on two areas of disagreement: one concerning her remarks about hermeneutical resources, and the other concerning her remarks about shared responsibility for hermeneutical injustice.

In the first place, far from trying to shift our attention away from hermeneutical resources, my polyphonic contextualism and my argument in the paper under discussion try to show precisely that we need to pay attention to expressive and interpretative resources in a more pluralistic and situated way, taking into account not only those resources that are widely or universally shared, but also those that are only shared by subgroups in virtue of their distinctive experiences, and even those nascent meanings that only some individuals (who do not yet constitute a well-formed public) are struggling to articulate. I argued that there are typically more hermeneutical resources than those shared by all the members of a collective. My argument was not an argument against shared hermeneutical resources in general, but an argument against Fricker’s use of the notion of “the collective resource” in the singular. According to my polyphonic contextualism, such notion is a problematic analytical tool that can easily lead to distortions, for it captures at best only the hermeneutical resources of mainstream culture or of the established social imaginary. My polyphonic contextualism underscores that a collective is often heterogeneous and contains subgroups and diverse standpoints, and that although it is important to identify the hermeneutical resources that are shared within a collective, we always need to ask “shared by whom?”, so that we can properly understand how shared and non-shared resources can be used in situated communicative dynamics among particular subjects. In other words, any appeal to hermeneutical resources in our analysis has to be properly contextualized by taking into account what is shared and what is not shared by subjects, groups, and entire collectives. My polyphonic contextualism does not try to fracture understanding and interpretation to the point that nothing is antecedently shared and we are left with idiolects à la Davidson; it simply tries to bring our hermeneutical analyses in synch with the inner diversity and heterogeneity of interpretative communities and subcommunities.

In the second place, I fully agree with Beeby’s remarks about shared responsibility in the concluding paragraph. I am grateful to Beeby for identifying a key area of convergence between Fricker’s views and mine. Both of us agree that “we are all responsible for the epistemic virtue and vice present in our social and political institutions.” But this is not at all incompatible with also taking responsibility for what we say and do in particular communicative contexts. In fact, on my view, these areas of epistemic responsibility are interconnected and do not function independently, as Beeby and Fricker seem to think. Following Fricker, Beeby writes as if changing “structures” and changing “the hearts and minds of individual communicators” were independent tasks. On my view, institutions can only display hermeneutical virtues when and because individuals and communities have developed fair patterns of communication, and have learned to speak and listen to each other. Institutions cannot approximate the virtue of hermeneutical justice without improving the sensibilities of the subjects who are part of those institutions. For example, for the police force or the immigration authority of a country to becomes epistemically virtuous, police officers and immigration officers would have to learn to give a more fair hermeneutical treatment to those they interact with; and for this to happen, it is not enough to formulate the right protocols: the subjects following those protocols need to have the appropriate sensibilities and their “hearts and minds” have to be in it. On the other hand, I do not think that the mitigation of hermeneutical injustices and the achievement of hermeneutical virtue are things that individuals can do by themselves, for they certainly need institutional support and changes in the structural conditions of their interactions. If I called special attention to individual and interpersonal aspects of our epistemic responsibility with respect to hermeneutical injustices, it is because these elements are missing in Fricker’s account, not because I do not think that such responsibility has also a crucial collective and structural dimension. I think it would be a mistake to fall into a false dichotomy between individual and collective responsibility in our discussions of epistemic justice, as if the achievement of justice had to be left entirely in the hands of individuals, or entirely in the hands of institutions and structural conditions. In my new book The Epistemology of Resistance,[1] I argue for a social connection model of epistemic responsibility. What has primacy in this model is neither individual nor collective responsibility, but shared responsibility — that is, the responsibility of interconnected individuals in social networks. Leading political theorists such as Iris Marion Young[2] and Larry May[3] have also put the emphasis on shared responsibility in recent discussions of community responses to injustice. My own contextualist model of shared epistemic responsibility is inspired by these theorists. I could not be happier to see that Beeby’s concluding remarks also put the emphasis on the shared aspects of epistemic responsibility.

Contact details: jose.m.medina@Vanderbilt.edu

References

Beeby, Laura. 2012. Reply to José Medina. The Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective. Posted 21 May. http://social-epistemology.com/2012/05/21/laura-beeby-reply-to-jose-medina/

May, Larry. 1993. Sharing responsibility. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

May, Larry. 2005. Crimes against humanity: A Normative Account. New York: Cambridge University Press.

May, Larry. 2010. Genocide. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Medina, José. 2012. Hermeneutical injustice and polyphonic contextualism: Social silences and shared hermeneutical responsibilities. Social Epistemology 26 (2): 201-220.

Medina, José. 2012. The epistemology of resistance: Gender and racial oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations. Oxford: Oxford University Press (forthcoming December, 2012).

Young, Iris M. 2011. Responsibility for justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

[1] Medina, José. 2012. The epistemology of resistance: Gender and racial oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations. Oxford: Oxford University Press (forthcoming December, 2012).

[2] See esp. Young, Iris M. 2011. Responsibility for justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

[3] See May, Larry. 1993. Sharing responsibility. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; May, Larry. 2005. Crimes against humanity: A Normative Account. New York: Cambridge University Press; May, Larry. 2010. Genocide. New York: Cambridge University Press.

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Laura Beeby. Reply to José Medina

Jim Collier —  May 21, 2012 — 1 Comment

Beeby, Laura. 2012. Reply to José Medina (PDF)
Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 1 (6)
http://wp.me/p1Bfg0-lV

Reply to José Medina

Laura Beeby, California State University at Fullerton

(Editor’s Note: Laura Beeby replies to José Medina’s article “Hermeneutical Injustice and Polyphonic Contextualism: Social Silences and Shared Hermeneutical Responsibilities” in Social Epistemology 26.2, 2012.)

In “Hermeneutical Injustice and Polyphonic Contextualism: Social Silences and Shared Responsibilities”, José Medina suggests some refinements to Miranda Fricker’s notion of hermeneutical injustice. As Medina sees it, Fricker “pays insufficient attention to the interactive and performative dimension of hermeneutical injustice, which is treated [by Fricker] mainly as a semantic phenomenon concerning the intelligibility of experiential contents”. [1] While Fricker develops the idea of hermeneutical injustice as “the injustice of having some significant area of one’s social experience obscured from collective understanding” [2], Medina wants us to consider the thought that the notion of a collective understanding may be insufficiently complex to capture the social dynamics present in so many of our communicative exchanges. I think Medina is right to point out some difficulties presented by the idea of a collective understanding. However, I don’t think these difficulties necessarily preclude us from making any use of the idea at all.

First, let’s look at some background to the idea of a collective understanding. In her account of hermeneutical injustice, Miranda Fricker draws our attention to one disadvantage stemming from women’s situation within an unjustly structured society. This particular disadvantage has to do with something that Fricker calls ‘social power’ and its influence on what she calls ‘collective forms of social understanding’.

One way of taking the epistemological suggestion that social power has an unfair impact on collective forms of social understanding is to think of our shared understandings as reflecting the perspectives of different social groups, and to entertain the idea that relations of unequal power can skew shared hermeneutical resources so that the powerful tend to have appropriate understandings of their experiences ready to draw on as they make sense of their social experiences, whereas the powerless are more likely to find themselves having some social experiences through a glass darkly, with at best ill-fitting meanings to draw on in the effort to render them intelligible.[3]

It seems reasonable to take Fricker as suggesting here that different social groups each contribute their perspective on various concepts like gender roles, workplace conventions, racial stereotypes, and other socially constructed concepts to a communal resource, which is then used by society at large as a tool to understand and interpret various situations and experiences relevant to those concepts. Because some social groups have more power (social, economic, etc.) than others, these powerful groups will not only contribute more information to the communal resource (a situation which sets conditions for later ‘eruptions’[4] of hermeneutical injustice), but they will also find it easier to use the resource when they need to understand some aspect of their social experience. This is presumably because powerful groups and individuals have more authority over social conventions and over which perspectives shape our norms, and therefore are also able to relate to the communal resource more easily since it contains familiar materials. Over time, the communal resource will come to reflect the perspective of powerful groups more than that of less powerful groups. Less powerful groups will have more and more difficulty understanding their own social experiences because they, and the community at large, lack the resources that are supposed to help them form such understandings. This is a rough sketch of the situation that Fricker suggests is both present in our society today and responsible for hermeneutical injustice.

Fricker illustrates the consequences of this situation with an example about the origins of the term ‘sexual harassment’. A woman named Carmita Wood worked for a Cornell University in the early 1970s, at a time when significant numbers of women had not been members of ‘the professions’ long enough for us to develop a nuanced understanding of professional gender relations.[5] At a time when we had no concept of what sexual harassment was, Carmita Wood’s boss made unwanted sexual advances to her in their place of work. Carmita did everything she could to avoid or alleviate the situation before succumbing to stress and trauma and quitting her job. Her subsequent claim for unemployment insurance was denied because she could not name or describe to her (or anyone else’s) satisfaction the reason for her unemployment. This moment, the moment when Carmita struggled and failed to find words to describe her experience, was the point when she became a victim of hermeneutical injustice. She could not find words to describe her experience because that experience, one we now understand as an instance of sexual harassment, was “obscured from collective understanding”.[6]

Medina builds on Fricker’s work on hermeneutical injustice by situating it in the framework of polyphonic contextualism. Polyphonic contextualism is Medina’s way of paying attention to the range of dynamics present in our communicative practices. He is troubled by Fricker’s narrow focus on the intelligibility of certain social experiences, and he advocates a broad focus on communicative dynamics across different social contexts.

But the problem remains in the ambiguity of the expression “the intelligibility of experience” as a semantic category detached from particular communicative dynamics. The multifaceted aspects of the struggles to make sense of one’s experiences to oneself, to those who undergo similar experiences, and to other groups are obscured by simply talking about the intelligibility or unintelligibility of experience without specifying to whom, in what communicative context and with what dynamic…[7]

In other words, an understanding of our experiences is not either obscured from or available to collective understanding. Instead, there are degrees and shades of understanding and intelligibility that come through different communicative dynamics. What’s more, it is unhelpful to think of this struggle as happening between an individual and society. Instead, the struggle happens most often between individuals or groups of people who communicate with each other for various reasons and in various contexts. These particular reasons and contexts will do more to shape the success of the conversation than any collective understanding stemming from a collective interpretive resource. Also, Medina is careful to point out, social power may turn out to be more of a obstacle to understanding one’s experiences than a help, as in the case of white ignorance.[8] In the end, the crucially important thing for Medina is that we are trying to make ourselves intelligible to someone in particular, not to society in general. And if this is the case, a collective understanding will be less important than a localized one.

In addition to this focus on the particularities of our listeners, Medina challenges Fricker to account for all of the smaller steps that we take on the way to intelligibility. Fricker’s theory is (perhaps fairly) characterized here as an all-or-nothing affair: either we all share the same cognitive deficit due to the gaps in our collective interpretive resources, or there is no gap and therefore no deficit or possibility of injustice. However, Medina claims that we can find ways of rendering an experience intelligible in some way while still remaining a victim of hermeneutical injustice. For example, it seems plausible that Carmita Wood may have fumbled towards some kind of limited understanding of her experience before she left her job and applied for unemployment insurance. This understanding would not have been as robust or easily communicable as the understanding that came after the creation of the term ‘sexual harassment’ and its attendant concept, but it seems plausible to call it an understanding nonetheless. This, then, is the advantage offered by polyphonic contextualism: with it, Medina can allow for the possibility of levels of intelligibility that are inextricably bound up with the social dynamics present between different speaker/listener parings throughout the community.

Medina’s most serious challenge to Fricker comes, then, in the form of a question:

But whose “collective understanding”? And whose “collective hermeneutical resource” (in the singular!)?[9]

It seems right that many of our experiences may be understood in degrees of intelligibility, and that we will struggle to articulate our experiences in different ways with different audiences. However, if we admit to these degrees then must we also change Fricker’s picture of our collective hermeneutical resources? The resource as Fricker describes it does not allow for foggy half-articulations, nor for articulations more available to one audience than another. For Fricker, Carmita Wood and her harasser share the same cognitive deficit, regardless of whom they speak with about sexual harassment. Given Medina’s exploration of communicative dynamics and social power, this seems unlikely to be the best characterization of their experience. So must we abandon a collective interpretive resource in favor of a series of smaller localized resources? I suggest that one consequence of adopting polyphonic contextualism is that we will shift our discussion away from talk of interpretive resources and towards a context-based parsing of politically significant communication failures. Resources will cease to hold the significance that they do for Fricker. The interpretive resources of people only tangentially connected to a situation will not play a role in our analysis of communication failures; instead, we will be concerned almost entirely with localized power dynamics and communicative practices. It may not be the case that we must abandon a collective resource, or even that we must decide between a range of resource models. Instead, we might find ourselves moving away from resource talk altogether.

One consequence of this shift is that we lose a sense of shared responsibility for politically significant communication failure. Although Medina develops the idea that Fricker’s understanding of hermeneutical injustice does not allow for agency and individual responsibility (for Fricker, hermeneutical injustice is a purely structural notion [10]), there is a sense for Fricker in which we all are responsible for the epistemic virtue and vice present in our social and political institutions. These structures may be more difficult to change than the hearts and minds of individual communicators, but they are nonetheless our institutions and structures. The responsibility to shape and improve them lies with each of us. If we no longer feel this sense of collective responsibility to society, then we are held only to standards of responsibility relative to each individual conversational context. And it is much easier to ignore the importance of an individual communication failure than it is to deny our part in shaping a shared resource accessible to sympathetic and unsympathetic listeners alike.

Contact details: laurabeebyis@googlemail.com

References

Fricker, Miranda. 2007. Epistemic injustice. Power and the ethics of knowing. New York: Oxford University Press.

Medina, José. 2012. Hermeneutical injustice and polyphonic contextualism: Social silences and shared hermeneutical responsibilities. Social Epistemology 26 (2): 201-220.

[1] Medina (2012), 210, original emphasis.

[2] Fricker (2007), 155.

[3] Fricker (2007), 148.

[4] Fricker’s (2007) term, 159.

[5] Fricker (2007) cites journalism, politics, academia, and the law as examples of ‘the professions’. See page 152.

[6] Brownmiller (1990), 180-181, as cited by Fricker (2007), 149-150.

[7] Medina (2012), 208, original emphasis.

[8] See Medina (2012), 212-214.

[9] Medina (2012), 210, original emphasis.

[10] Fricker (2007), 159.

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