Dear Dr. Kristie Dotson,

It is an honor to write to you. To commemorate the 10-year-anniversary of your paper “Conceptualizing Epistemic Oppression,” Jim Collier, the Editor of the Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective, asked me to write a Critical Appreciation of the piece. I eagerly accepted the invitation, and only then realized what a tremendous task I had agreed to undertake: I am to discuss why your article was significant, where arguments about epistemic oppression stand currently, and speculate about where they might go in the future. All in about 3,000 words … [please read below the rest of the article].

Image credit: anjan58 via Flickr/Creative Commons

A few weeks ago, I returned from the 2024 philoSOPHIA conference, where I sought input from some of my feminist colleagues about how they had noticed conversations about epistemic oppression shift in the 10 years since your article’s publication. I was reassured by their responses: wide-eyed, they confirmed what I already suspected: changes to the discipline have been so massive and so wide-ranging that it would be impossible to summarize them succinctly.

But I will try anyway, because if anyone’s work merits an extended letter of gratitude, it is yours. And, although most thank-you notes do not contain separate sections, it’s also true that most critical appreciations are not written as lengthy thank-you notes. I read your recent and incredible letter to Octavia Butler and found inspiration in your approach (Dotson 2023). In for a penny, I suppose …

Since I am writing both to you and to the readers of the Social Epistemology blog, I will start with a summary of “Conceptualizing Epistemic Oppression.” In that summary, I want to highlight one of the things I was most interested in when I returned to this paper: your use of Plato’s cave analogy in your description of three types of epistemic exclusion. Next, I’ll say a little about why, in my view, the article was significant, drawing attention to the kinds of conversations about social and critical epistemologies the piece opened and encouraged. By way of conclusion, I’ll highlight just a couple of directions that I imagine conversations about social epistemology might take in the future.

Before I go further, I want to mention that lots of folks have taken up and responded to “Conceptualizing Epistemic Oppression” over the past 10 years.^[1] Here are just a few: Alison Bailey published a Critical Reply in this very Review and Reply Collective back in 2014. Tay Rogers developed a critique of your argument, claiming that in fact, all three types of epistemic exclusion are irreducible (Rogers 2021). Brianna Toole connects standpoint theory and epistemic oppression, claiming that to understand and ameliorate epistemic oppression, we need the tools developed by folks working in standpoint epistemology (Tool 2019). Nora Berenstain characterizes epistemic exploitation as a form of epistemic oppression (Berenstain 2016, 585). Emmalon Davis situates her account of epistemic appropriation within your framework of epistemic oppression, explaining that in situations of epistemic appropriation, epistemic resources from the margins are utilized in dominant epistemic communities and by dominant knowers in a way that detach those resources from those who developed them and in ways that benefit those who already have unearned epistemic power (Davis 2018, 702). And, and, and…

What I’m trying to say is this: when I describe how “Conceptualizing Epistemic Oppression” contributed to the field I am not saying anything new. And I only have the space to highlight a few directions that your conceptualization of epistemic oppression has traveled throughout its ten years.

It is also important to say: this article isn’t where discussion of epistemic oppression begins. I appreciate that in your work, you acknowledge decades—in many cases, centuries—of work on epistemic oppression’s histories, mechanisms, and harms (as well as resistance to those harms and strategic uses of those very mechanisms). In your paper, you cite Patricia Hill Collins’ Black Feminist Thought as providing an important account of the epistemic oppression that Black women face (Dotson 2014, 116). And in one of my favorite footnotes of yours (from “Tracking Epistemic Violence, Tracking Practices of Silencing”), you remind readers that:

For well over a hundred years, women of color have remarked upon the kind of silencing that follows from not gaining the appropriate recognition as a knower. See, for example, Williams 1905; Carby 1982; Lugones and Spelman 1983; Lorde 1984; Mohanty 1984; Aziz 1992; Oyewumi 1997; Cooper 1998; and Green 2007 (Dotson 2011, 252).

Although “Conceptualizing Epistemic Oppression” isn’t the first account of epistemic oppression, the paper makes several moves that helped these conversations bloom within academic philosophy; to open up; to move in new directions. Your paper insists that philosophers get comfortable naming the “unwarranted infringement on the epistemic agency of knowers” as epistemic oppression (Dotson 2014, 115). And you distinguish among three different types of epistemic oppression and connect that oppression to other work in critical epistemologies. Hell, I only started hearing the phrase “critical epistemologies” bandied about the conference circuit in 2019. I wonder if we can trace that term, at least in part, back to your work.

Backing Up a Bit: Summarizing “Conceptualizing Epistemic Oppression”

But I’ve gotten ahead of myself. I was so eager to explain the uptake your article received that I didn’t deliver on my promise to actually summarize it. I’ll do that now.

“Conceptualizing Epistemic Oppression” aims not only to explain what is distinctly epistemic about epistemic oppression, but also to highlight the experiences, effects, and stakes of living in epistemic worlds that do not provide the resources or frameworks for articulating (let alone ameliorating) the violences that they do to marginalized subjects. Alison Bailey offers an apt characterization of your paper as describing what it is like to live “in an epistemic twilight zone, a world where many of your lived experiences are regularly misunderstood, distorted, dismissed, erased, or simply rejected as unbelievable” (Bailey 2014, 1). I take you to be asking, in other words, about the conditions of possibility for knowledge production, and about how conditions of oppression already (in)form what we can know and express to one another.

You characterize epistemic oppression as “a persistent and unwarranted infringement on the ability to utilize persuasively shared epistemic resources that hinder one’s contributions to knowledge production” (Dotson 2014, 116). If someone is epistemically oppressed, they can’t effectively use epistemic resources to share their knowledge or to help produce new knowledge. You also explain that people have been talking about (to borrow language from José Medina 2013) “screwed up” epistemic structures and practices for decades, but folks haven’t usually framed the problem as one of epistemic oppression specifically. Instead, they claim or assume that any barrier to knowledge contribution or production is a byproduct of social or political oppression (Dotson 2014, 116).

But you claim that there exists “a form of epistemic oppression that is not solely reducible to social and political factors but rather follows from a feature of epistemological systems themselves, that is epistemological resilience” (116). We can’t analyze epistemic oppression as though it’s only and always the result of being socially or politically oppressed because epistemic oppression occurs as a result of knowledge systems’ resistance to change. Instead, understanding epistemic oppression requires that we look at the structures and barriers to knowledge creation and circulation.

You expand on the work that you began in “A Cautionary Tale: On Limiting Epistemic Oppression,” identifying three types of epistemic exclusion and explaining both how they are connected and how they are different.^[2] You explain that “a major point of distinction between reducible and irreducible epistemic oppression is the major source of difficulty one faces in addressing each kind of oppression, i.e. epistemic power or features of epistemological systems” (115). Basically, we can address reducible cases of epistemic oppression (first and second-order epistemic exclusion) using epistemic resources from within those same epistemological system (116). But since irreducible epistemic oppression occurs because of features of particular epistemological systems, that oppression (third-order epistemic oppression) can “only begin to be addressed through recognition of the limits of one’s overall epistemological frameworks” (116). In other words, we can’t use the epistemic resources of an epistemological system to address the irreducible epistemic oppression it causes because the resources themselves are causing the problem (and we can’t even see this).

Before I move on, I want to highlight something in your article that I find methodologically intriguing: to describe first, second, and third-order epistemic exclusion/oppression, you utilize Plato’s cave allegory (discussion begins on page 122). You ask your readers to imagine the ways that fettered persons in the cave might experience each type of epistemic exclusion: maybe the folks on the left of the cave floor are discredited by the folks on the right side of the cave floor as providers of information simply because of their location in the cave (first order exclusion), and maybe that problem could be fixed by listening to their perspective (aka using existing epistemic resources more effectively). Or maybe as a result of their first-order exclusion, left-side fettered persons’ experiences haven’t helped shape the epistemic resources that the rest of the people in the cave utilize (second-order exclusion), and maybe that can be fixed by reflecting on and revising existing epistemic resources. Or maybe the unique experiences produced by being on the left allow one to know things that they cannot make sense of or communicate using the resources available, and maybe we’d need entirely new epistemic resources developed from beyond the cave (not just revised resources from within).

I’ve gotten a little bit in the weeds with your cave example, and I know yours is not a paper about Plato. What I appreciate is not the Plato though; it’s the rather queer use (Ahmed 2017) of perhaps the most widely known and cited thought experiment in Western Philosophy.^[3] The point is not whether you’ve provided a faithful retelling of the cave allegory (whatever “faithful” means in this context); the point is that if we think about the embodiment and the experiences of those fettered persons, we start understand epistemic oppression in a new way. You’re able to show us three ways epistemic oppression develops, how each exclusion can produce another, and to emphasize how hard it is to address through your retelling of the cave allegory.

In its insistence that there is something specifically epistemic going on with oppression, and that we need to be theorizing what that something is (and what it’s like to experience it) “Conceptualizing Epistemic Oppression” challenges the assumption that epistemic oppressions and hermeneutical lacuna can be addressed solely through listening better and to a more diverse array of voices. This may work for first-order epistemic oppression, but not for second, and certainly not for third-order situations. In other words, you remind us that epistemic oppression doesn’t look only like deficits in credibility (though it can).

I want to thank you personally for this insight. For as far as I can remember, I learned about epistemology through learning about epistemic oppression. I came up in philosophy after you and so many others had begun to gain traction within the discipline—at a time when, and in a place where, epistemology did not begin by asking “Are questions of knowledge related to questions of ethics and politics?” (or worse, by already assuming they are not related), but instead asked “How are these specific questions of epistemology also and already questions of ethics and politics?”

Standpoint epistemology, Black Feminist epistemologies, and critical epistemologies from many additional methodological orientations have played major roles in shifting the shape of the discipline’s curiosity about epistemic oppression. For me, though, and for very many other philosophers, it was your work that allowed us to think anew about how to identify, analyze, and resist epistemic oppression and build new epistemological worlds.

What’s Happening with Epistemic Oppression Now?

Through my discussion of your paper I had a tough time figuring out how to talk about where epistemic oppression stands currently, as an analytical framework, as a lived experience, and as a tool both for theory and for practice. I’m thinking about epistemic oppression almost like it’s an octopus—unfurling its tentacles, shifting shape and color, making a home out of improbably tiny spaces.

Part of why it’s hard to decide where to start is because discussions of epistemic oppression are everywhere—the phenomenon itself and theories that take it up, apply it, and expand seem to show up everywhere, within and beyond philosophy. I look forward to hearing from readers of the Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective about where they are seeing epistemic oppression go. In this section, I’ll highlight two directions I’ve seen these conversations take that I’ve been the most excited about.

Epistemic Oppression and Decolonial Epistemologies

It’s not quite accurate to say that conversations about epistemic oppression are turning toward decolonial epistemologies, methods, and histories (because these theories have, in a sense, always been a part of this literature). In a 2020 essay, Elena Ruíz explains hermeneutic violence “can be understood as violence done to structures of meaning and intelligibility that allow for the meaning of everyday cultural acts and practices definitive of a cultural tradition to emerge” (Ruíz 2020, 209). She explains that conditions of hermeneutical violence contribute to the difficulty of identifying and understanding existing resources for resisting colonial violence and erasure: to be Dotsonian about it, these epistemic resources face third-order exclusions.

In 2022, you, Nora Berenstain, Julieta Paredes, Elena Ruíz, and Noenoe K. Silva published “Epistemic Oppression, Resistance, and Resurgence,” a collaborative analysis of colonial epistemological systems and of indigenous resistance to epistemic violence and oppression. Y’all explain that epistemic oppression is a key mechanism by which settler colonial epistemologies, politics, and economic structures function. In the section signed by (and, I’m assuming, authored primarily by) Berenstain and Ruíz, they contend that:

Dotson (2014, 2018a, b) created the concept of epistemic oppression to theorize the ways that specific populations are suppressed in their power to contribute to shared epistemic resources, adding a new domain of inquiry and explanatory power to the rich tradition of anti-colonial theory on epistemic violence (Mohanty, 1988; Quijano, 2000; Sousa Santos, 2014; Spivak, 1988) (Berenstain et al. 2022).

Here, Ruíz and Berenstain point out that your thinking about epistemic oppression was always connected to traditions and practices of resisting colonial violence. They explain that although settler colonialism looks much different across time and land, “a commonality that arises among these variegated techniques of violence is that colonization is, in large part, an epistemic project” because “settler systems of epistemic and conceptual resources and the relations among them are constructed to preclude certain forms of knowledge. This is not an accident; it is a central goal of colonial violence.” (284) Third-order epistemic oppression isn’t an unfortunate side-effect of dominant colonial epistemologies—it’s what these epistemologies are for.

In your contribution to that essay, you explain epistemic oppression in terms of “bad magic” (291). Epistemologies, you suggest, do not describe truth—they conjure it. They establish what seems “normal” or “just so” (292). And you explain that:

Epistemological systems that fail to promote epistemic reflexivity, e.g., an awareness that one’s epistemology has significant limits, generate bad magic. Bad magic, here, is another word for epistemic oppression. It is a term my grandmother would be familiar with, even if the definition I am about to offer would leave her blinking and annoyed. Still, by bad magic, I mean the cultivation, maintenance and protection of everyday practices that have a modal profile that includes regularly generating reckless and relentless harm (291).

I understand you to be saying that, without being able to reliably detect that our epistemologies are fallible (or are not the only way of making sense of our worlds), we may be doomed to epistemically oppress others. Or, more accurately, as long as our epistemological systems aren’t reflexive, they will produce epistemic oppression (297).

I’m interested to track more conversations about epistemic oppression and resistance to colonial violence—readers might be interested to know that the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) is hosting an “Epistemic Oppression and Decolonization” conference from May 29-31, 2024.^[4]

Epistemic Oppression and Disability

Philosophers of disability have made some crucial interventions in the epistemic injustice literature and in work on epistemologies of ignorance. Your work is not particularly focused on Fricker’s formulation of epistemic injustice, though you offer important critiques of her epistemic injustice framework (Dotson 2012). But I’ve seen your work on epistemic oppression emerging in several recent pieces about disability.

Shelley Tremain, for example, asks of work on epistemic injustice and epistemologies of ignorance, “is the concept of epistemological ignorance itself a paradoxical and self-contradicting ableist metaphor?” (Tremain 2017, 175). She asserts that a consideration of disability:

[H]as been left out of analyses of epistemic justice, in particular, and social epistemology, in general. I showed that insofar as feminist and other philosophers have not taken disability into account in their analyses of epistemic injustice, they have circumscribed the political domain too narrowly, obscuring epistemological resources that they ought to acknowledge (182).

Here, Tremain is not engaging with your work on epistemic oppression directly —she is engaging largely with Fricker and Medina’s extended analyses of testimonial and hermeneutical injustice in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. I cite her here because I think Tremain is highlighting a third-order epistemic exclusion: there are epistemic resources from disability theorists and disabled people that folks in social epistemology have failed to engage with, and their epistemological systems suffer—and generate suffering—as a result.

I’m encouraged to see that there has been some more recent work from philosophers of disability that takes up epistemic oppression more directly. Christine Wieseler,  for example, identifies multiple kinds of epistemic oppression that bioethics and bioethicists perpetuate when thinking and talking about disability and when making policy recommendations. Wieseler cites Berenstain’s account of epistemic exploitation, Gaile Pohlhaus Jr.’s account of willful hermeneutical ignorance, and Corwin Aragon’s account of epistemic imperialism to explain the ways in which this oppression becomes disguised as an epistemically virtuous practice (Wieseler 2020, 716). Wiesleler explains that:

[E]pistemic exclusion can occur in ways that may not be readily identifiable; like willful hermeneutical ignorance, the terms epistemic exploitation and epistemic imperialism refer to epistemic practices that may prima facie appear to be epistemically virtuous because they involve dominantly situated knowers engaging with marginally situated knowers” (Wieseler 2020, 717).

Here again, we see a debunking of the idea that privileged folks simply need to learn to listen better if we want to achieve a less epistemically oppressive world.^[5]

Finally, in her essay, “Complexity as Epistemic Oppression: Writing People with Intellectual Disabilities Back into Philosophical Conversations,” Rebecca Monteleone offers what she calls a practical intervention into institutional/academic philosophy’s epistemic oppression of people labelled with intellectual disabilities (Monteleone 2023, 748). She explains that “gatekeeping around the construction of credible philosophical contributions epistemically oppresses (to use Black feminist philosopher Kristie Dotson’s term [Dotson 2014]) people labeled with intellectual disabilities, even as intellectual disability is increasingly taken up in philosophical arguments” (748). Monteleone includes a “formal language” and “plain language” abstract, along with an Easy Read Summary in her essay. For Monteleone, “the Easy Read and plain language pieces of this article are not ancillary to the development of this argument, but central to it. They are not individual accommodations, but an attempt to epistemically reimagine philosophy” (755). In short, Monteleone enacts and invites a doing of philosophy otherwise, and in ways that do not merely seek the assimilation of disabled people into philosophy, but that transform the discipline’s foundational epistemologies.

The Cutting Room Floor

I selected just 2 things to talk in some detail about, but there’s so much more I wanted to cover! To offer just a quick list of other directions I’ve seen epistemic oppression travel in the time since your paper’s publication:

❧ Alison Bailey offers an analysis of affective injustice, urging scholars of epistemic injustice and epistemic oppression to consider the inseparability of knowledge and emotion (Bailey 2018).

❧ Tempest Henning draws from your work on testimonial smothering (Dotson 2011) to develop a theory of argumentative smothering (Henning 2021).

❧ Folks are thinking about gaslighting as a form of epistemic oppression or violence (McKinnon 2019). See also the special cluster of papers in Hypatia on epistemic injustice and gaslighting (edited in 2020 by Alison Bailey, and including essays by Ruíz, Berenstain, Wieseler, and Pohlhaus 2020).

❧ Microaggressions and Philosophy, a 2020 volume edited by Lauren Freeman and Jeanine Weekes Schroer, includes several pieces that take up epistemic oppression, like Saba Fatima’s “I Know What Happened to Me The Epistemic Harms of Microaggression” and Jeanine Weekes Schroer and Zara Bain’s “The Message in the Microaggression: Epistemic Oppression at the Intersection of Disability and Race.”

❧ K. Bailey Thomas discusses the “epistemic erasure” that some decolonial theorists perform when engaging with Kimberelé Crenshaw’s theorization of intersectionality (Thomas 2020, 520). Here, Thomas invites us to reflect on, and address, the epistemic oppression and violences we often repeat, even in our attempts to think develop decolonial epistemologies.

And, and, and …

Conclusion: Where is Epistemic Oppression Heading?

By way of conclusion, I will point to a couple places I think that scholarly conversations about epistemic oppression might be headed. (I should mention: I’m writing from, and speculating about, a United States, academic philosophy context.)

First, I bet that folks writing about epistemic oppression will continue to devote more and more attention to addressing the thorniest kind of epistemic oppression you describe: those of the third order, those that challenge the very epistemic resources from which dominant knowledges emerge.

Berenstain and Ruíz rightly point out that alternatives to epistemically oppressive contemporary and colonial academic traditions “are here, have always been here, and have been changing, updating, and transforming to adapt to and accommodate the demands of these times” (Berenstain et al. 2020, 290). I suspect (and I hope) that we will keep seeing accounts of third-order epistemic oppression and tools for navigating and resisting it.

Relatedly, I see a lot of interest around moving away from (or at least, relying less heavily on) propositional knowledge, and away from the misguided assumption that if we think carefully (but using the same methods we always have) we’ll  get somewhere radically new. In “Forms of Knowing and Epistemic Resources,” Alexis Shotwell criticizes social epistemology’s emphasis on “know that” rather than “know how” (Shotwell 2017, 79). Even back in 2014, Alison Bailey suggested that “since the epistemological resilience at this third level runs strong and deep, it makes sense for us to broadly consider the possibility that there may be affective, creative, or other non-cognitive responses to epistemic oppression” (Bailey 2014, 68). I’ve been excited to witness these conversations emerge even in spaces of academic philosophy (not all of ‘em, but enough that I’m starting to count on being epistemically disoriented).

But more than this, I hope that the future holds precisely what you, Berenstain, Ruíz, Silva, and Paredes name in “Epistemic Oppression, Resistance, and Resurgence”: analyses of contemporary political crises which always simultaneously investigate the epistemic oppression that made these crises (and, in many cases, the thinking of these crises) possible. (Berenstain et al. 2022, 290) Ruíz and Berenstain explain that:

[T]he task of theorizing epistemic oppression is not only about epistemic oppression. Epistemic oppression is a story that gives language to a phenomenon in order to get past it, to carry on with the maintaining and reviving the forms of Indigenous and diasporic knowledge that colonialism has worked so tirelessly to corrupt and silence (287).

“Conceptualizing Epistemic Oppression” has made space for so many within philosophy, though your impact extends well beyond the discipline itself. At the very same moment that you highlight the difficulty of getting past epistemic oppression, you show us the kinds of careful, collaborative, and reflexive work that it will take. Thank you for paving new methodological pathways, for helping marginalized knowers identify, communicate about, and navigate epistemic problems and uneven epistemic home turfs.

Sending you much appreciation for this paper and for all of your work,

Claire A. Lockard
she/her
Assistant Professor of Philosophy
Mount Mary University

References

Ahmed, Sara. 2019. What’s the Use? Durham: Duke University Press.

Bailey, Alison. 2018. “On Anger, Silence, and Epistemic Injustice,” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 84: 93–115.

Bailey, Alison. 2014. “The Unlevel Knowing Field: An Engagement with Dotson’s Third-Order Epistemic Oppression.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 3 (10): 62-68.

Berenstain, Nora. 2016. “Epistemic Exploitation.” Ergo 3 (22): 569–590.

Berenstain, Nora, Kristie Dotson, Julieta Paredes, Elena Ruíz, and Noenoe K. Silva. 2022. “Epistemic Oppression, Resistance, and Resurgence.” Contemporary Political Theory 21: 283–314.

Davis, Emmalon. 2018. “On Epistemic Appropriation.” Ethics 128 (4): 702–727.

Dotson, Kristie. 2023. “XIII—Dear Octavia Butler.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 123 (3): 327–346.

Dotson, Kristie. 2014. “Conceptualizing Epistemic Oppression.” Social Epistemology 28 (2): 115–138.

Dotson, Kristie. 2012. “A Cautionary Tale: On Limiting Epistemic Oppression.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 33 (1): 24–47.

Dotson, Kristie. 2011. “Tracking Epistemic Violence, Tracking Practices of Silencing.” Hypatia 26 (2): 237–257.

Fatima, Saba. 2020. “I Know What Happened to Me The Epistemic Harms of Microaggression.” In Microaggressions and Philosophy, edited by Lauren Freeman and Jeanine Weekes Schroer, 163–183. New York: Routledge.

Hall, Kim Q. 2022. “Queering Philosophy.” New York: Rowman & Littlefield.

Henning, Tempest. 2021. “Don’t Let Your Mouth”: On Argumentative Smothering Within Academia. Topoi 40 (5): 913–924.

McKinnon, Rachel. 2019. “Gaslighting as Epistemic Violence: ‘Allies,’ Mobbing, and Complex Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Including a Case Study of Harassment of Transgender Women in Sport.” In Overcoming Epistemic Injustice: Social and Psychological Perspectives, edited by Benjamin R. Sherman & Stacey Goguen, 285–302. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

Medina, José. 2013. The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press.

Monteleone Rebecca. 2023. “Complexity as Epistemic Oppression: Writing People with Intellectual Disabilities Back into Philosophical Conversations.” Hypatia 38 (4): 746–759.

Peña-Guzmán, David M. and Joel Michael Reynolds. 2019. “The Harm of Ableism: Medical Error and Epistemic Injustice.” Kennedy Institute of Ethics 29 (3): 205–242.

Rogers, Taylor. 2021. “Resisting Epistemic Oppression.” Journal of Philosophical Studies 14 (39): 175–193.

Ruíz, Elena. 2020. “Between Hermeneutical Violence amd Alphabets of Survival.” In Theories of the Flesh, edited by Andrea J. Pitts, Mariana Ortega, and José Medina, 205-219. New York: Oxford University Press.

Schroer, Jeanine Weekes and Zara Bain. 2020. “The Message in the Microaggression: Epistemic Oppression at the Intersection of Disability and Race.” In Microaggressions and Philosophy, edited by Lauren Freeman and Jeanine Weekes, 226–248. New York: Routledge.

Shotwell, Alexis. 2017. “Forms of Knowing and Epistemic Resources.” In The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice, 1^st edition, edited by Ian James Kidd, José Medina, and Gaile Pohlhaus Jr., 79–88. New York: Routledge.

Thomas, K. Bailey. 2020. “Intersectionality and Epistemic Erasure: A Caution to Decolonial Feminism.” Hypatia 35 (3): 509–523.

Tool, Brianna. 2019. “From Standpoint Epistemology to Epistemic Oppression.” Hypatia 34 (4): 598–618.

Tremain, Shelley. 2017. “Knowing Disability, Differently.” In The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice, 1^st edition, edited by Ian James Kidd, José Medina, and Gaile Pohlhaus, 175–184. New York: Routledge.

Wieseler, Christine. 2020. “Epistemic Oppression and Ableism in Bioethics” Hypatia 35 (4): 714–732.

^[1] This list is mostly for readers who aren’t already steeped in the epistemic oppression literature—I see from the texts I’m about to cite that you have already commented on several of these pieces and collaborated with many of these folks in other contexts.

^[2] This note was originally part of the letter’s main body, but I hit my word limit for this letter before I even finished my summary! For folks who would like a more detailed refresher on the three types of epistemic oppression you identify, read on, and/or consult Tay Rogers’ “Resisting Epistemic Oppression” (2021): On your view, “a first-order epistemic exclusion follows from a persistent compromise of one’s epistemic agency due to inefficiency within shared epistemic resources” (Dotson 2014, 123; emphases in original). To address a first-order exclusion, one can change how one is using already-available epistemic resources. In cases of first-order epistemic oppression the epistemic resources themselves aren’t the problem (125). But this doesn’t mean it’s easy to address—people with the credibility and the epistemic power don’t tend to be eager to give it up!

Second-order epistemic exclusion results from insufficient shared epistemic resources (126). In cases of second-order epistemic exclusion, we need to recognize the need to revise our existent epistemic resources (129)—doing things like listening to marginalized knowers more carefully is not going to be sufficient, if the concepts in our epistemic communities aren’t up to the task. Both first and second-order oppression are, on your account, reducible, because the resistance to reallocating or revising our epistemic resources is a result of “the social and historical development of epistemic power” (129).

Third-order epistemic oppression is different: it is “a compromise to epistemic agency caused by inadequate dominant, shared epistemic resources” (129). This inadequacy emerges from the “epistemological resilience” of an epistemological system (aka its resistance to change even when folks offer counterexamples or provide other kinds of evidence). You point out that “the very resilience of the system may thwart one’s ability to make significant headway in becoming aware of the limitations of one’s epistemological system by only revealing what the system is prone to reveal, thereby reinforcing the idea that one’s system is adequate to the task, when one is actually stuck in a vicious loop.” (132) In other words, we have a hard time even recognizing when our dominant epistemic resources are inadequate because they make knowing anything at all possible in the first place.

^[3] I use “queer use” in an Ahmedian sense here. In What’s the Use, Sara Ahmed explains that “queer use” refers to “how things can be used in ways other than that for which they were intended or by those other than for whom they were intended” (Ahmed 2019, 199). Plato may not have intended for the cave allegory to tell a story about epistemic oppression, and the Cave is typically used to explain Plato’s metaphysics and his beliefs about the role of the philosopher king. But for Ahmed, that needn’t stop critical epistemologists or theorists of oppression from using the text otherwise. See also Kim Q. Hall’s Queering Philosophy (2022).

^[4] Register to attend in person or virtually here: https://crc-iae.com/events/?lang=en.

^[5] See also David Peña-Guzmán and Joel Michael Reynolds’s “The Harm of Ableism: Medical Error and Epistemic Injustice” (2019).

Categories: Critical Appreciation, Critical Replies

Tags: Claire A. Lockard, Conceptualizing Epistemic Oppression, epistemic oppression, feminist philosophy, Kristie Dotson, SERRC 4/8/2024