Archives For José Medina

White Ignorance and Hermeneutical Injustice: A Comment on Medina and Fricker, Charles W. Mills

SERRC —  December 17, 2013 — Leave a comment

Author Information: Charles W. Mills, Northwestern University, c-mills@northwestern.edu

Mills, Charles W. “White Ignorance and Hermeneutical Injustice: A Comment on Medina and Fricker.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 3, no. 1 (2013): 38-43.

The PDF of the article gives specific page numbers. Shortlink: http://wp.me/p1Bfg0-1ce

Please refer to:

In my “White Ignorance” (Mills 2007), I welcomed the development within formal epistemology of social epistemology, and the advent of journals like Social Epistemology, while complaining that the authors in this new branch of epistemology seemed in general to be working with a concept of the social that excluded social oppression. So I should begin by saying how delighted I am to find my essay being discussed years later in none other than Social Epistemology (and the Review Collective) itself — and by two philosophers, Miranda Fricker and José Medina, whose recent books (Fricker 2007; Medina 2013) I see as exemplary challenges to this unfortunate pattern of exclusion. I would claim that in the same way that the “ideal theory” famous from John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1999) has oriented — or, in my view, mis-oriented — philosophical discussions of social justice, so its epistemic analogue has arguably mis-oriented philosophical discussions of social epistemology.  Continue Reading…

In Critical Replies , , , ,
permalink

Review of The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations, by José Medina, Laura Beeby

SERRC —  July 17, 2013 — Leave a comment

Author Information: Laura Beeby, California State University, Fullerton, laurabeebyis@googlemail.com

Beeby, Laura. 2103. “Review of The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations, by José Medina.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 2 (8): 66-70.

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

Please refer to:

The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations
by José Medina
Oxford University Press, 2012, 352 pp

José Medina’s picture of epistemic resistance is compelling because he presents epistemic activism as something that regular people can do in the course of their day-to-day lives. This is not a book about firebrands and grand sweeping change.  Instead it is mostly about what Medina calls “the everyday struggle toward epistemic justice”. Though he does highlight “epistemic heroes” like Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Rosa Parks — people who resist unjust norms when few others have the courage and clarity to do so — it is clear that Medina intends that each of us take up a habitual stance of epistemic resistance, and moreover that this is not a particularly unreasonable expectation. We can participate in epistemic resistance while we work, while we raise families, or while we discuss news with our friends. This leaves the door open for those who do not see themselves as particularly radical — epistemically or otherwise — to join in the movement towards epistemic justice. For Medina, epistemic resistance is something both radical and unassuming.  In fact, the most subversive and radical knowers may be those who practice epistemic resistance almost unconsciously while they visit a supermarket or gather with friends and family. For Medina, to be epistemically resistant is to feel friction when relying on a single understanding, to constantly allow room for other voices and other ways of understanding and being in the world. Continue Reading…

In Books and Book Reviews , , , ,
permalink

How is hermeneutical injustice related to ‘white ignorance’? Reply to José Medina’s “Hermeneutical Injustice and Polyphonic Contextualism: Social Silences and Shared Hermeneutical Responsibilities”, Miranda Fricker

SERRC —  July 12, 2013 — 2 Comments

Author Information: Miranda Fricker, University of Sheffield, m.fricker@sheffield.ac.uk

Fricker, Miranda. 2013. “How is hermeneutical injustice related to ‘white ignorance’? Reply to José Medina’s ‘Hermeneutical Injustice and Polyphonic Contextualism: Social Silences and Shared Hermeneutical Responsibilities’.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 2 (8): 49-53.

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

Please refer to:

I have learned an enormous amount from all the discussions of epistemic injustice in the Review and Reply Collective, and I have found it virtually impossible to know how to intervene. However, something in José Medina’s discussion of hermeneutical injustice and, in particular, its relation to the phenomenon that Charles Mills has termed ‘white ignorance’, has opened up an issue to which I feel I can make a contribution. That is, despite being unsure about how best to relate the phenomenon I wrote about under the head ‘hermeneutical injustice’ to the phenomenon of white ignorance[1] (something Gaile Pohlhaus has also written about under the more generic label ‘willful hermeneutical ignorance’), I am inclined to express some disagreement with the direction Medina wants to take the category ‘hermeneutical injustice’. Continue Reading…

In Critical Replies , , , , , ,
permalink

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

SERRC —  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. Continue Reading…

In Critical Replies , , , , ,
permalink

José Medina. Reply to Laura Beeby

SERRC —  May 28, 2012 — Leave a comment

Author Information: José Medina, Vanderbilt University, jose.m.medina@Vanderbilt.edu

Medina, José. 2012. “Reply to Laura Beeby” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 1 (6): 36-38.

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

Please refer to:

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. Continue Reading…

In Critical Replies , , ,
permalink

Laura Beeby. Reply to José Medina

SERRC —  May 21, 2012 — 1 Comment

Author Information: Laura Beeby, California State University at Fullerton, laurabeebyis@googlemail.com

Beeby, Laura . 2012. “Reply to José Medina” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 1 (6): 27-30.

The PDF of the article gives specific page numbers. Shortlink: http://wp.me/p1Bfg0-15j

Please refer to:

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’. Continue Reading…

In Critical Replies , , , , ,
permalink