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Spitting Out the Kool-Aid, Arianna Falbo

SERRC — September 6, 2018 — 1 Comment

Author Information: Arianna Falbo, Brown University, Arianna_Falbo@brown.edu.

Falbo, Arianna. “Spitting Out the Kool-Aid: A Review of Kate Manne’s Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 8 (2018): 12-17.

The pdf of the article gives specific page references. Shortlink: https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-40A

The years of far-right rhetoric about Hillary Clinton have formed a real-time theatre of misogyny, climaxing at the 2016 Presidential election.
Image by DonkeyHotey via Flickr / Creative Commons

Kate Manne’s Down Girl breathes new life into an underexplored yet urgently important topic. Using a diverse mixture of current events, empirical findings, and literary illustrations, Manne guides her reader through the underbelly of misogyny: its nature, how it relates to and differs from sexism, and why, in supposedly post-patriarchal societies, it’s “still a thing.”[1]

Chapter 1 challenges the standard dictionary-definition or “naïve conception” of misogyny, as Manne calls it. This view understands misogyny primarily as a psychological phenomenon, operative in the minds of men. Accordingly, misogynists are disposed to hate all or most women because they are women.

The naïve conception fails because it renders misogyny virtually non-existent and, as a result, politically inert. Misogynists need not feel hatred towards all or even most women. A misogynist may love his mother or other women with whom he shares close personal relationships. Manne insists that this should not detract from his being an outright misogynist. For example, the naïve view fails to make sense of how Donald Trump could both love his daughter while simultaneously being misogyny’s poster boy. A different analysis is needed.

Following Haslanger (2012), Manne outlines her “ameliorative” project in chapter 2. She aims to offer an analysis of misogyny that is politically and theoretically useful; an analysis that will help to reveal the stealthy ways misogyny operates upon its perpetrators, targets, and victims. Manne argues that misogyny should be understood in terms of its social function: what it does to women and girls.

On her view misogyny functions to uphold patriarchal order, it punishes women who transgress and rewards those who abide.[2] Misogyny is thus selective: it does not target all women wholesale, but prioritizes for those who protest against patriarchal prescriptions. In Manne’s words: “misogyny primarily targets women because they are women in a man’s world…rather than because they are women in a man’s mind.”[3]

Chapter 3 outlines, what I take to be, one of the most original and illuminating insights of the book, a conceptual contrast between sexism and misogyny. Manne dubs sexism the “justificatory” branch of patriarchal order: it has the job of legitimizing patriarchal norms and gender roles. Misogyny, on the other hand, is the “law enforcement” branch: it patrols and upholds patriarchal order. Both misogyny and sexism are unified by a common goal “to maintain or restore a patriarchal social order.”[4]

In Chapter 4, Manne discusses the gender coded give/take economy that she takes to be at the heart of misogyny’s operation.[5] Patriarchal order dictates that women have an obligation to be givers of certain feminine-coded goods and services such as affection, sex, and reproductive labour.

Correspondingly, men are the entitled recipients of these goods and services in addition to being the takers of certain masculine-coded privileges, including public influence, honour, power, money, and leadership. When men fail to receive these feminine-coded goods, which patriarchal order deems they are entitled to, backlash may ensue. What’s more, women who seek masculine-coded privileges, for example, leadership positions or other forms of power and prestige, are in effect violating a patriarchal prohibition. Such goods are not theirs for the taking—women are not entitled takers, but obligated givers.

In chapter 5, Manne considers a popular “humanist” kind of view according to which misogyny involves thinking of women as sub-human, non-persons, lifeless objects, or mere things. She turns this view on its head. She argues that: “her personhood is held to be owed to others in the form of service labour, love, and loyalty.”[6] As per the previous chapter, women are socially positioned as human givers. Manne’s contends that misogyny is not about dehumanization, but about men feeling entitled to the human service of women. She pushes this even further by noting that in some cases, when feminine-coded human goods and services are denied, it is men who may face feelings of dehumanization.[7]

Chapter 6, in my opinion, is where a lot of the action happens. In this chapter Manne presents the much-needed concept of himpathy: the undue sympathy that is misdirected away from victims and towards perpetrators of misogynistic violence.[8] She explains how certain exonerating narratives, such as the “the golden boy”, function to benefit highly privileged (normally: white, non-disabled, cis, heterosexual, etc.) men who commit violent acts against women.[9]

In this chapter Manne also draws upon and adds to the growing literature on testimonial injustice. Testimonial injustice occurs when a speaker receives either a deficit or surplus of creditability owing to a prejudice on the part of the hearer.[10] Manne discusses how in cases of he said/she said testimony involving accusations of sexual assault, privileged men may be afforded excess creditability, thereby undermining the creditability of victims – there is only so much creditability to go around.[11]

This, she notes, may lead to the complete erasure, or “herasure” as Manne calls it, of the victim’s story altogether.[12] Creditability surpluses and deficits, she says: “often serve the function of buttressing dominant group members’ current social position, and protecting them from downfall in the existing social hierarchy.”[13] Exonerating narratives puff up privileged men and, as a result, deflate the creditability of women who speak out against them. These unjust distributions of creditability safeguarding dominate men against downward social mobility. In a slogan: “testimonial injustice as hierarchy preservation.”[14]

In Chapter 7, Manne discusses why victims of misogynistic violence who seek moral support and attention are regularly met with suspicion, threats, and outright disbelief. Patriarchy dictates that women are human givers of moral support and attention, not recipients (as per the arguments of chapter 4). Drawing moral attention towards women who are victimized by misogyny attempts to disrupt patriarchy’s divisions of moral labour. Manne says that this is “tantamount to the server asking for service, the giver expecting to receive…it is withholding a resource and simultaneously demanding it.”[15]

In chapter 8, Manne explores how misogyny contributed to Hillary Clinton’s loss of the 2016 US presidential election. She claims that misogyny routinely targets women who infringe upon man’s historical turf; women who try to take what patriarchal order decrees as the jobs and privileges reserved for men. Overstepping or trespassing upon his territory often results in misogynistic retaliation. Such women are seen as “greedy, grasping, and domineering; shrill and abrasive; corrupt and untrustworthy”[16] or, in the words of the current President of the United States, “nasty.”[17]

Down Girl ends by discussing the prospects of overcoming misogyny. At one point Manne says, as if to shrug her shoulders and throw up her arms in despair: “I give up.”[18] Later, in a subsequent interview, Manne claims she did not intend for this to be a discouraging statement, but a “liberating declaration.”[19] It is an expression of her entitlement to bow out of this discussion (for now), after having said her piece and making conversational space for others to continue.

In my opinion, Down Girl is essential reading for any serious feminist, moral, or political scholar. The proposed analysis of misogyny is lucid and accessible while at the same time remaining acutely critical and rigorous. The text does not get bogged down in philosophical jargon or tedious digressions. As such, this book would be fairly congenial to even the philosophically uninitiated reader. I highly recommend it to both academics and non-academic alike. Moreover, Manne’s addition of “himpathy” and “herasure” to the philosophical lexicon helps to push the dialectic forward in innovative and insightful ways.

Despite being on such a sombre and depressing topic, I found this book to be engrossing and, for the most part, enjoyable to read. Manne has an inviting writing style and the book is scattered with a number of brilliant quips, clever examples, and gripping case studies. Though, be warned, there are certainly sections that might reasonably be difficult, uncomfortable, and potentially triggering. Down Girl examines some of the most fraught and downright chilling aspects of our current social and political atmosphere; including real life depictions of horrific violence against women, as well as the attendant sympathy (himpathy) that is often given to those who perpetrate it. This is to be expected in a book on the logic of misogyny, but it is nonetheless important for readers to be extra cognisant.

After finishing the book, I have one main concern regarding the explanatory reach of the analysis. Recall that on Manne’s account: “misogyny’s primary function and constitutive manifestation is the punishment of “bad” women, and policing of women’s behavior.”[20] Misogyny’s operation consist in a number of “down girl moves” designed to keep women in line when they fail to “know their place” in a man’s world.[21] She emphasizes the retaliatory nature of misogyny; how it functions analogously to a shock collar: fail to do as patriarchy demands as and risk being shocked.[22]

I worry, though, that this emphasis on punishing patriarchy’s rebels fails to draw adequate attention to how misogyny can target women for what appears to be nothing more than the simple reason that he is dominant over her. It is not only rebels who are misogyny’s targets and victims, but also patriarchy’s cheerleaders and “good” girls. (Though, those who protest are presumably more vulnerable and have greater targets on their backs.)

Perhaps the analogy is better thought of not in terms of him shocking her when she fails to obey patriarchal order, but him administering shocks whenever he sees fit, be it for a perceived failure of obedience or simply because he is the one with the controller. Or, to use another analogy that picks up on Manne’s “policing” and “law enforcement” language, maybe misogyny is characterized best as a crooked cop, one who will pull you over for a traffic violation, but also one who will stop you simply because he feels he can, for he is the one with the badge and gun.

A woman might play her role in a man’s world to a tee; she may be happily complacent, she may give him all of her feminine-coded goods, in the right manner, in the right amount, at the right time, and so on. She may never threaten to overstep historical gender roles, nor does she attempt to cultivate masculine-coded privileges. She may even add fuel to patriarchy’s fire by policing other women who disobey. Even still, despite being on her very best behaviour, she too can be victimized by misogynistic violence. Why? It remains unclear to me how Manne’s analysis could offer a satisfying answer. While I deeply admire the proposal, I am curious of how it captures non-corrective cases of misogyny that don’t aim to punish for (apparent) violations of patriarchal order.

Manne notes that a major motivation for her writing is “to challenge some of the false moral conclusions we swallow with the Kool-Aid of patriarchal ideology.”[23] I came away from this book having learned a great deal about the insidious ways misogyny operates to put women and girls down; many a Kool-Aid has been spit out. Down Girl also plants fertile seeds for future research on misogyny, a topic desperately in need of more careful attention and intelligent investigation.

In the preface Manne says that: “ultimately, it will take a village of theorists to gain a full understanding of the phenomena.”[24] This book makes headway in offering theorists a myriad of conceptual tools and resources needed to facilitate and push the discussion forward. I anticipate that Down Girl will be a notable benchmark for many fruitful discussions to come.

Contact details: Arianna_Falbo@brown.edu

References

Berenson, Tessa. “Presidential Debate: Trump Calls Clinton ‘Nasty Woman’.” Time, 20 Oct. 2016, time.com/4537960/donald-trump-hillary-clinton-nasty-woman-debate/.

Bullock, Penn. “Transcript: Donald Trump’s Taped Comments About Women.” The New York Times, 8 Oct. 2016, nytimes.com/2016/10/08/us/donald-trump-tape-transcript.html.

Cleary, Skye C. “It Takes Many Kinds to Dismantle a Patriarchal Village.” Los Angeles Review of Books, 2 Mar. 2018, lareviewofbooks.org/article/takes-many-kinds-dismantle-patriarchal-village/.

Davis, Emmalon. “Typecasts, Tokens, and Spokespersons: A Case for Credibility Excess as Testimonial Injustice” Hypatia, 2016.

Fricker, Miranda. Epistemic Injustice Power and the Ethics of Knowing. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Haslanger, Sally. Resisting Reality. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Manne, Kate. Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Medina, José. The Epistemology of Resistance. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Medina, José. “The Relevance of Credibility Excess in a Proportional View of Epistemic Injustice: Differential Epistemic Authority and the Social Imaginary” Social Epistemology, 2011.

Penaula, Regan. “Kate Manne: The Shock Collar That Is Misogyny” Guernica, 7 Feb. 2018, https://www.guernicamag.com/kate-manne-why-misogyny-isnt-really-about-hating-women/.

Yap, Audre. “Creditability Excess and the Social Imaginary in Cases of Sexual Assault.” Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, 2017.

[1] Manne (2017): xxi.

[2] Manne (2017): 72.

[3] Ibid: 69.

[4] Ibid: 80.

[5] At least as it is manifests in the cultures of the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, these are the focus of Manne’s analysis. Cf. ibid: fn. 3.

[6] Ibid: 173.

[7] Ibid: 173.

[8] Ibid: 197.

[9] Ibid: 197.

[10] Cf. Fricker (2007), though, Fricker focuses primarily upon creditability deficits. See, Davis (2016), Medina (2011, 2012), and Yap (2017), among others, for discussions of how creditability surpluses can also constitute testimonial injustice.

[11] See Manne’s discussion of Medina (2011) who stresses this point, 190.

[12] Ibid: 209-14.

[13] Manne (2017): 194.

[14] Ibid: 185.

[15] Ibid: 304.

[16] Ibid: 303.

[17] Berenson (2016).

[18] Manne (2017): 300.

[19] Cleary (2018).

[20] Manne (2017): 192.

[21] Ibid: 68.

[22] Cf. Penaluna (2018).

[23] This is from an interview with Los Angeles Review of Books; see Cleary (2018).

[24] Manne (2017): xiii.

Philosophers and Scientists Are Social Epistemic Agents, Seungbae Park

SERRC — June 26, 2018 — Leave a comment

Author Information: Seungbae Park, Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology, nature@unist.ac.kr

Park, Seungbae. “Philosophers and Scientists are Social Epistemic Agents.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 6 (2018): 31-40.

The pdf of the article gives specific page references. Shortlink: https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-3Yo

Please refer to:

Bryant, Amanda. “Each Kuhn Mutually Incommensurable.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 6 (2018): 1-7.
Arnold, Markus. “Is There Anything Wrong with Thomas Kuhn?.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 5 (2018): 42-47.

The example is from the regime of Hosni Mubarak, but these were the best photos the Digital Editor could find in Creative Commons when he was uploading the piece.

The style of examples common to epistemology, whether social or not, are often innocuous, ordinary situation. But the most critical uses and misuses of knowledge and belief remain all-too-ordinary situations already. If scepticism about our powers to know and believe hold – or are at least held sufficiently – then the most desperate political prisoner has lost her last glimmer of hope. Truth.
Image by Hossam el-Hamalawy via Flickr / Creative Commons

In this paper, I reply to Markus Arnold’s comment and Amanda Bryant’s comment on my work “Can Kuhn’s Taxonomic Incommensurability be an Image of Science?” in Moti Mizrahi’s edited collection, The Kuhnian Image of Science: Time for a Decisive Transformation?.

Arnold argues that there is a gap between the editor’s expressed goal and the actual content of the book. Mizrahi states in the introduction that his book aims to increase “our understanding of science as a social, epistemic endeavor” (2018: 7). Arnold objects that it is “not obvious how the strong emphasis on discounting Kuhn’s incommensurability thesis in the first part of the book should lead to a better understanding of science as a social practice” (2018: 46). The first part of the volume includes my work. Admittedly, my work does not explicitly and directly state how it increases our understanding of science as a social enterprise.

Knowledge and Agreement

According to Arnold, an important meaning of incommensurability is “the decision after a long and futile debate to end any further communication as a waste of time since no agreement can be reached,” and it is this “meaning, describing a social phenomenon, which is very common in science” (Arnold, 2018: 46). Arnold has in mind Kuhn’s claim that a scientific revolution is completed not when opposing parties reach an agreement through rational argumentations but when the advocates of the old paradigm die of old age, which means that they do not give up on their paradigm until they die.

I previously argued that given that most recent past paradigms coincide with present paradigms, most present paradigms will also coincide with future paradigms, and hence “taxonomic incommensurability will rarely arise in the future, as it has rarely arisen in the recent past” (Park, 2018: 70). My argument entails that scientists’ decision to end further communications with their opponents has been and will be rare, i.e., such a social phenomenon has been and will be rare.

On my account, the opposite social phenomenon has been and will rather be very common, viz., scientists keep communicating with each other to reach an agreement. Thus, my previous contention about the frequency of scientific revolutions increases our understanding of science as a social enterprise.

Let me now turn to Bryant’s comment on my criticism against Thomas Kuhn’s philosophy of science. Kuhn (1962/1970, 172–173) draws an analogy between the development of science and the evolution of organisms. According to evolutionary theory, organisms do not evolve towards a goal. Similarly, Kuhn argues, science does not develop towards truths. The kinetic theory of heat, for example, is no closer to the truth than the caloric theory of heat is, just as we are no closer to some evolutionary goal than our ancestors were. He claims that this analogy is “very nearly perfect” (1962/1970, 172).

My objection (2018a: 64–66) was that it is self-defeating for Kuhn to use evolutionary theory to justify his philosophical claim about the development of science that present paradigms will be replaced by incommensurable future paradigms. His philosophical view entails that evolutionary theory will be superseded by an incommensurable alternative, and hence evolutionary theory is not trustworthy. Since his philosophical view relies on this untrustworthy theory, it is also untrustworthy, i.e., we ought to reject his philosophical view that present paradigms will be displaced by incommensurable future paradigms.

Bryant replies that “Kuhn could adopt the language of a paradigm (for the purposes of drawing an analogy, no less!) without committing to the literal truth of that paradigm” (2018: 3). On her account, Kuhn could have used the language of evolutionary theory without believing that evolutionary theory is true.

Can We Speak a Truth Without Having to Believe It True?

Bryant’s defense of Kuhn’s position is brilliant. Kuhn would have responded exactly as she has, if he had been exposed to my criticism above. In fact, it is a common view among many philosophers of science that we can adopt the language of a scientific theory without committing to the truth of it.

Bas van Fraassen, for example, states that “acceptance of a theory involves as belief only that it is empirically adequate” (1980: 12). He also states that if “the acceptance is at all strong, it is exhibited in the person’s assumption of the role of explainer” (1980: 12). These sentences indicate that according to van Fraassen, we can invoke a scientific theory for the purpose of explaining phenomena without committing to the truth of it. Rasmus Winther (2009: 376), Gregory Dawes (2013: 68), and Finnur Dellsén (2016: 11) agree with van Fraassen on this account.

I have been pondering this issue for the past several years. The more I reflect upon it, however, the more I am convinced that it is problematic to use the language of a scientific theory without committing to the truth of it. This thesis would be provocative and objectionable to many philosophers, especially to scientific antirealists. So I invite them to consider the following two thought experiments.

First, imagine that an atheist uses the language of Christianity without committing to the truth of it (Park, 2015: 227, 2017a: 60). He is a televangelist, saying on TV, “If you worship God, you’ll go to heaven.” He converts millions of TV viewers into Christianity. As a result, his church flourishes, and he makes millions of dollars a year. To his surprise, however, his followers discover that he is an atheist.

They request him to explain how he could speak as if he were a Christian when he is an atheist. He replies that he can use the language of Christianity without believing that it conveys truths, just as scientific antirealists can use the language of a scientific theory without believing that it conveys the truth.

Second, imagine that scientific realists, who believe that our best scientific theories are true, adopts Kuhn’s philosophical language without committing to Kuhn’s view of science. They say, as Kuhn does, “Successive paradigms are incommensurable, so present and future scientists would not be able to communicate with each other.” Kuhn requests them to explain how they could speak as if they were Kuhnians when they are not Kuhnians. They reply that they can adopt his philosophical language without committing to his view of science, just as scientific antirealists can adopt the language of a scientific theory without committing to the truth of it.

The foregoing two thought experiments are intended to be reductio ad absurdum. That is, my reasoning is that if it is reasonable for scientific antirealists to speak the language of a scientific theory without committing to the truth of it, it should also be reasonable for the atheist to speak the language of Christianity and for scientific realists to speak Kuhn’s philosophical language. It is, however, unreasonable for them to do so.

Let me now diagnose the problems with the atheist’s speech acts and scientific realists’ speech acts. The atheist’s speech acts go contrary to his belief that God does not exist, and scientific realists’ speech acts go contrary to their belief that our best scientific theories are true. As a result, the atheist’s speech acts mislead his followers into believing that he is Christian. The scientific realists’ speech acts mislead their hearers into believing that they are Kuhnians.

Moore’s Paradox

Such speech acts raise an interesting philosophical issue. Imagine that someone says, “Snow is white, but I don’t believe snow is white.” The assertion of such a sentence involves Moore’s paradox. Moore’s paradox arises when we say a sentence of the form, “P, but I don’t believe p” (Moore, 1993: 207–212). We can push the atheist above to be caught in Moore’s paradox. Imagine that he says, “If you worship God, you’ll go to heaven.” We request him to declare whether he believes or not what he just said. He declares, “I don’t believe if you worship God, you’ll go to heaven.” As a result, he is caught in Moore’s paradox, and he only puzzles his audience.

The same is true of the scientific realists above. Imagine that they say, “Successive paradigms are incommensurable, so present and future scientists would not be able to communicate with each other.” We request them to declare whether they believe or not what they just said. They declare, “I don’t believe successive paradigms are incommensurable, so present and future scientists would not be able to communicate with each other.” As a result, they are caught in Moore’s paradox, and they only puzzle their audience.

Kuhn would also be caught in Moore’s paradox if he draws the analogy between the development of science and the evolution of organisms without committing to the truth of evolutionary theory, pace Bryant. Imagine that Kuhn says, “Organisms don’t evolve towards a goal. Similarly, science doesn’t develop towards truths. I, however, don’t believe organisms don’t evolve towards a goal.” He says, “Organisms don’t evolve towards a goal. Similarly, science doesn’t develop towards truths” in order to draw the analogy between the development of science and the evolution of organisms. He says, “I, however, don’t believe organisms don’t evolve towards a goal,” in order to express his refusal to believe that evolutionary theory is true. It is, however, a Moorean sentence: “Organisms don’t evolve towards a goal. I, however, don’t believe organisms don’t evolve towards a goal.” The assertion of such a sentence gives rise to Moore’s paradox.

Scientific antirealists would also be caught in Moore’s paradox, if they explain phenomena in terms of a scientific theory without committing to the truth of it, pace van Fraassen. Imagine that scientific antirealists say, “The space between two galaxies expands because dark energy exists between them, but I don’t believe that dark energy exists between two galaxies.” They say, “The space between two galaxies expands because dark energy exists between them,” in order to explain why the space between galaxies expands.

They add, “I don’t believe that dark energy exists between two galaxies,” in order to express their refusal to commit to the truth of the theoretical claim that dark energy exists. It is, however, a Moorean sentence: “The space between two galaxies expands because dark energy exists between them, but I don’t believe that dark energy exists between two galaxies.” Asserting such a sentence will only puzzle their audience. Consequently, Moore’s paradox bars scientific antirealists from invoking scientific theories to explain phenomena (Park, 2017b: 383, 2018b: Section 4).

Researchers on Moore’s paradox believe that “contradiction is at the heart of the absurdity of saying a Moorean sentence, but it is not obvious wherein contradiction lies” (Park, 2014: 345). Park (2014: 345) argues that when you say, “Snow is white,” your audience believe that you believe that snow is white. Their belief that you believe that snow is white contradicts the second conjunct of your Moorean sentence that you do not believe that snow is white.

Thus, the contradiction lies in your audience’s belief and the second conjunct of your Moorean sentence. The present paper does not aim to flesh out and defend this view of wherein lies the contradiction. It rather aims to show that Moore’s paradox prevents us from using the language of a scientific theory without committing to the truth of it, pace Bryant and van Fraassen.

The Real Consequences of Speaking What You Don’t Believe

Set Moore’s paradox aside. Let me raise another objection to Bryant and van Fraassen. Imagine that Kuhn encounters a philosopher of mind. The philosopher of mind asserts, “A mental state is reducible to a brain state.” Kuhn realizes that the philosopher of mind espouses the identity theory of mind, but he knows that the identity theory of mind has already been refuted by the multiple realizability argument. So he brings up the multiple realizability argument to the philosopher of mind. The philosopher of mind is persuaded of the multiple realizability argument and admits that the identity theory is not tenable.

To Kuhn’s surprise, however, the philosopher of mind claims that when he said, “A mental state is reducible to a brain state,” he spoke the language of the identity theory without committing to the truth of it, so his position is not refuted by Kuhn. Note that the philosopher of mind escapes the refutation of his position by saying that he did not believe what he stated. It is also reasonable for the philosopher of mind to escape the refutation of his position by saying that he did not believe what he stated, if it is reasonable for Kuhn to escape the refutation of his position by saying that he did not believe what he stated. Kuhn would think that it is not reasonable for the philosopher of mind to do so.

Kuhn, however, might bite the bullet, saying that it is reasonable for the philosopher of mind to do so. The strategy to avoid the refutation, Kuhn might continue, only reveals that the identity theory was not his position after all. Evaluating arguments does not require that we identify the beliefs of the authors of arguments. In philosophy, we only need to care about whether arguments are valid or invalid, sound or unsound, strong or weak, and so on.

Speculating about what beliefs the authors of arguments hold as a way of evaluating arguments is to implicitly rely on an argument from authority, i.e., it is to think as though the authors’ beliefs determine the strength of arguments rather than the form and content of arguments do.

We, however, need to consider under what conditions we accept the conclusion of an argument in general. We accept it, when premises are plausible and when the conclusion follows from the premises. We can tell whether the conclusion follows from the premises or not without the author’s belief that it does. In many cases, however, we cannot tell whether premises are plausible or not without the author’s belief that they are.

Imagine, for example, that a witness states in court that a defendant is guilty because the defendant was in the crime scene. The judge can tell whether the conclusion follows from the premise or not without the witness’s belief that it does. The judge, however, cannot tell whether the premise is plausible or not without the witness’s belief that it is. Imagine that the witness says that the defendant is guilty because the defendant was in the crime scene, but that the witness declares that he does not believe that the defendant was in the crime scene. Since the witness does not believe that the premise is true, the judge has no reason to believe that it is true. It is unreasonable for the judge to evaluate the witness’s argument independently of whether the witness believes or not that the premise is true.

In a nutshell, an argument loses its persuasive force, if the author of the argument does not believe that premises are true. Thus, if you aim to convince your audience that your argument is cogent, you should believe yourself that the premises are true. If you declare that you do not believe that the premises are true, your audience will ask you some disconcerting questions: “If you don’t, why should I believe what you don’t? How can you say to me what you don’t believe? Do you expect me to believe what you don’t?” (Park, 2018b: Section 4).

In case you still think that it is harmless and legitimate to speak what you do not believe, I invite you to imagine that your political rival commits murder to frame you. A false charge is brought to you, and you are tried in court. The prosecutor has a strong indictment against you. You state vehemently that you did not commit murder. You, however, have no physical evidence supporting your statement. Furthermore, you are well-known as a person who speaks vehemently what you do not believe. Not surprisingly, the judge issues a death sentence on you, thinking that you are merely speaking the language of the innocent. The point of this sad story is that speaking what you do not believe may result in a tragedy in certain cases.

A Solution With a Prestigious Inspiration

Let me now turn to a slightly different, but related, issue. Under what condition can I refute your belief when you speak contrary to what you believe? I can do it only when I have direct access to your doxastic states, i.e., only when I can identify your beliefs without the mediation of your language. It is not enough for me to interpret your language correctly and present powerful evidence against what your language conveys.

After all, whenever I present such evidence to you, you will escape the refutation of what you stated simply by saying that you did not believe what you stated. Thus, Bryant’s defense of Kuhn’s position from my criticism above amounts to imposing an excessively high epistemic standard on Kuhn’s opponents. After all, his opponents do not have direct access to his doxastic states.

In this context, it is useful to be reminded of the epistemic imperative: “Act only on an epistemic maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal one” (Park, 2018c: 3). Consider the maxim “Escape the refutation of your position by saying you didn’t believe what you stated.” If you cannot will this maxim to become a universal one, you ought not to act on it yourself. It is immoral for you to act on the maxim despite the fact that you cannot will it to become a universal maxim. Thus, the epistemic imperative can be invoked to argue that Kuhn ought not to use the language of evolutionary theory without committing to the truth of it, pace Bryant.

Let me now raise a slightly different, although related, issue. Recall that according to Bryant, Kuhn could adopt the language of evolutionary theory without committing to the truth of it. Admittedly, there is an epistemic advantage of not committing to the truth of evolutionary theory on Kuhn’s part. The advantage is that he might avoid the risk of forming a false belief regarding evolutionary theory. Yet, he can stick to his philosophical account of science according to which science does not develop towards truths, and current scientific theories will be supplanted by incommensurable alternatives.

There is, however, an epistemic disadvantage of not committing to the truth of a scientific theory. Imagine that Kuhn is not only a philosopher and historian of science but also a scientist. He has worked hard for several decades to solve a scientific problem that has been plaguing an old scientific theory. Finally, he hits upon a great scientific theory that handles the recalcitrant problem. His scientific colleagues reject the old scientific theory and accept his new scientific theory, i.e., a scientific revolution occurs.

He becomes famous not only among scientists but also among the general public. He is so excited about his new scientific theory that he believes that it is true. Some philosophers, however, come along and dispirit him by saying that they do not believe that his new theory is true, and that they do not even believe that it is closer to the truth than its predecessor was. Kuhn protests that his new theory has theoretical virtues, such as accuracy, simplicity, and fruitfulness. Not impressed by these virtues, however, the philosophers reply that science does not develop towards truths, and that his theory will be displaced by an incommensurable alternative. They were exposed to Kuhn’s philosophical account of science!

Epistemic Reciprocation

They have adopted a philosophical position called epistemic reciprocalism according to which “we ought to treat our epistemic colleagues, as they treat their epistemic agents” (Park, 2017a: 57). Epistemic reciprocalists are scientific antirealists’ true adversaries. Scientific antirealists refuse to believe that their epistemic colleagues’ scientific theories are true for fear that they might form false beliefs.

In return, epistemic reciprocalists refuse to believe that scientific antirealists’ positive theories are true for fear that they might form false beliefs. We, as epistemic agents, are not only interested in avoiding false beliefs but also in propagating “to others our own theories which we are confident about” (Park, 2017a: 58). Scientific antirealists achieve the first epistemic goal at the cost of the second epistemic goal.

Epistemic reciprocalism is built upon the foundation of social epistemology, which claims that we are not asocial epistemic agents but social epistemic agents. Social epistemic agents are those who interact with each other over the matters of what to believe and what not to believe. So they take into account how their interlocutors treat their epistemic colleagues before taking epistemic attitudes towards their interlocutors’ positive theories.

Let me now turn to another of Bryant’s defenses of Kuhn’s position. She says that it is not clear that the analogy between the evolution of organisms and the development of science is integral to Kuhn’s account. Kuhn could “have ascribed the same characteristics to theory change without referring to evolutionary theory at all” (Bryant, 2018: 3). In other words, Kuhn’s contention that science does not develop towards truths rises or falls independently of the analogy between the development of science and the evolution of organisms. Again, this defense of Kuhn’s position is brilliant.

Consider, however, that the development of science is analogous to the evolution of organisms, regardless of whether Kuhn makes use of the analogy to defend his philosophical account of science or not, and that the fact that they are analogous is a strike against Kuhn’s philosophical account of science. Suppose that Kuhn believes that science does not develop towards truths, but that he does not believe that organisms do not evolve towards a goal, despite the fact that the development of science is analogous to the evolution of organisms.

An immediate objection to his position is that it is not clear on what grounds he embraces the philosophical claim about science, but not the scientific claim about organisms, when the two claims parallel each other. It is ad hoc merely to suggest that the scientific claim is untrustworthy, but that the philosophical claim is trustworthy. What is so untrustworthy about the scientific claim, but so trustworthy about the philosophical claim? It would be difficult to answer these questions because the development of science and the evolution of organisms are similar to each other.

A moral is that if philosophers reject our best scientific theories, they cannot make philosophical claims that are similar to what our best scientific theories assert. In general, the more philosophers reject scientific claims, the more impoverished their philosophical positions will be, and the heavier their burdens will be to prove that their philosophical claims are dissimilar to the scientific claims that they reject.

Moreover, it is not clear what Kuhn could say to scientists who take the opposite position in response to him. They believe that organisms do not evolve towards a goal, but refuse to believe that science does not develop towards truths. To go further, they trust scientific claims, but distrust philosophical claims. They protest that it is a manifestation of philosophical arrogance to suppose that philosophical claims are worthy of beliefs, but scientific claims are not.

This possible response to Kuhn reminds us of the Golden Rule: Treat others as you want to be treated. Philosophers ought to treat scientists as they want to be treated, concerning epistemic matters. Suppose that a scientific claim is similar to a philosophical claim. If philosophers do not want scientists to hold a double standard with respect to the scientific and philosophical claims, philosophers should not hold a double standard with respect to them.

There “is no reason for thinking that the Golden Rule ranges over moral matters, but not over epistemic matters” (Park, 2018d: 77–78). Again, we are not asocial epistemic agents but social epistemic agents. As such, we ought to behave in accordance with the epistemic norms governing the behavior of social epistemic agents.

Finally, the present paper is intended to be critical of Kuhn’s philosophy of science while enshrining his insight that science is a social enterprise, and that scientists are social epistemic agents. I appealed to Moore’s paradox, epistemic reciprocalism, the epistemic imperative, and the Golden Rule in order to undermine Bryant’s defenses of Kuhn’s position from my criticism. All these theoretical resources can be used to increase our understanding of science as a social endeavor. Let me add to Kuhn’s insight that philosophers are also social epistemic agents.

Contact details: nature@unist.ac.kr

References

Arnold, Markus. “Is There Anything Wrong with Thomas Kuhn?”, Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 5 (2018): 42–47.

Byrant, Amanda. “Each Kuhn Mutually Incommensurable”, Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 6 (2018): 1–7.

Dawes, Gregory. “Belief is Not the Issue: A Defence of Inference to the Best Explanation”, Ratio: An International Journal of Analytic Philosophy 26, no. 1 (2013): 62–78.

Dellsén, Finnur. “Understanding without Justification or Belief”, Ratio: An International Journal of Analytic Philosophy (2016). DOI: 10.1111/rati.12134.

Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2^nd ed. The University of Chicago Press, (1962/1970).

Mizrahi, Moti. “Introduction”, In The Kuhnian Image of Science: Time for a Decisive Transformation? Moti Mizrahi (ed.), London: Rowman & Littlefield, (2018): 1–22.

Moore, George. “Moore’s Paradox”, In G.E. Moore: Selected Writings. Baldwin, Thomas (ed.), London: Routledge, (1993).

Park, Seungbae. “On the Relationship between Speech Acts and Psychological States”, Pragmatics and Cognition 22, no. 3 (2014): 340–351.

Park, Seungbae. “Accepting Our Best Scientific Theories”, Filosofija. Sociologija 26, no. 3 (2015): 218–227.

Park, Seungbae. “Defense of Epistemic Reciprocalism”, Filosofija. Sociologija 28, no. 1 (2017a): 56–64.

Park, Seungbae. “Understanding without Justification and Belief?” Principia: An International Journal of Epistemology 21, no. 3 (2017b): 379–389.

Park, Seungbae. “Can Kuhn’s Taxonomic Incommensurability Be an Image of Science?” In The Kuhnian Image of Science: Time for a Decisive Transformation? Moti Mizrahi (ed.), London: Rowman & Littlefield, (2018a): 61–74.

Park, Seungbae. “Should Scientists Embrace Scientific Realism or Antirealism?”, Philosophical Forum (2018b): (to be assigned).

Park, Seungbae. “In Defense of the Epistemic Imperative”, Axiomathes (2018c). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-018-9371-9.

Park, Seungbae. “The Pessimistic Induction and the Golden Rule”, Problemos 93 (2018d): 70–80.

van Fraassen, Bas. The Scientific Image. Oxford: Oxford University Press, (1980).

Winther, Rasmus. “A Dialogue”, Metascience 18 (2009): 370–379.

One Thing is Testimonial Injustice and Another Is Conceptual Competence Injustice, Manuel Padilla Cruz

SERRC — March 8, 2018 — Leave a comment

Author Information: Manuel Padilla Cruz, Universidad de Sevilla, mpadillacruz@us.es

Padilla Cruz, Manuel. “One Thing is Testimonial Injustice and Another Is Conceptual Competence Injustice.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 3 (2018): 9-19.

The pdf of the article gives specific page references. Shortlink: https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-3Vi

Please refer to:

Anderson, Derek. “Conceptual Competence Injustice.” Social Epistemology 31, no. 2 (2017): 210-223.
Padilla Cruz, Manuel. “On the Usefulness of the Notion of ‘Conceptual Competence Injustice’ to Linguistic Pragmatics.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 6, no. 4 (2017): 12-19.
Anderson, Derek. “Relevance Theory and Conceptual Competence Injustice.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 6, no. 7 (2017): 35-39.
Podosky, Paul-Mikhail Catapang and William Tuckwell.[1] “There’s No Such Thing as Conceptual Competence Injustice: A Response to Anderson and Cruz.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 6, no. 11 (2017): 23-32.
Anderson, Derek. “Yes, There Is Such a Thing as Conceptual Competence Injustice.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 1 (2018): 26-35.

Image by Jon Southcoasting via Flickr / Creative Commons

Derek E. Anderson’s (2017) identification and characterisation of conceptual competence injustice has recently met some resistance from Podosky and Tuckwell (2017). They have denied the existence of this new type of epistemic injustice on the grounds that the wronging it denotes may be subsumed by testimonial injustice: “instances of conceptual competence injustice can be accurately characterised as instances of testimonial injustices” (Podosky and Tuckwell 2017: 26). Additionally, they have questioned the reasons that led Anderson (2017) to distinguish this epistemic injustice from testimonial, hermeneutical and contributory injustices (Podosky and Tuckwell 2017: 26-30).

Criticising the methodology followed by Podosky and Tuckwell (2017) in their attempt to prove that conceptual competence injustice falls within testimonial injustice, Anderson (2018) has underlined that conceptual competence injustice is a structural injustice and a form of competence injustice –i.e. an unfair misappraisal of skills– which should be retained as a distinct type of epistemic injustice because of its theoretical significance and usefulness. Causal etiology is not a necessary condition on conceptual competence injustice, he explains, and conceptual competence injustice, as opposed to testimonial injustice, need not be perpetrated by social groups that are negatively biased against a particular identity.

The unjust judgements giving rise to it do not necessarily have to be connected with testimony, even though some of them may originate in lexical problems and mistakes in the linguistic expressions a speaker resorts to when dispensing it. Accordingly, testimonial injustice and conceptual competence injustice may be said to be different kinds of injustice and have diverse effects: “It is not necessary that a person’s testimony be disbelieved, ignored, or pre-empted in an episode of CC [conceptual competence] injustice. CC injustice involves only an unjust judgment about a person’s ability to think well using certain concepts” (Anderson 2018: 31).

Welcoming the notion of conceptual competence injustice, I suggested in a previous contribution (Padilla Cruz 2017a) that it could be borrowed by the field of linguistic pragmatics in order to conceptualise an undesired perlocutionary effect of verbal interaction: misappraisals of a speaker’s actual conceptual and lexical abilities as a result of lack or misuse of vocabulary. Relying on Sperber and Wilson’s (1986/1995) description of intentional-input processing as a relevance-driven activity and of comprehension as a process of mutual parallel adjustment, where the mind carries out a series of incredibly fast simultaneous tasks that depend on decoding, inference, mindreading and emotion-reading, I also showed that those misappraisals result from deductions. A speaker’s alleged unsatisfactory performance makes manifest assumptions regarding her[1] problems with words, which are fed as weakly implicated premises to inferential processes and related to other detrimental assumptions that are made salient by prejudice.

In so doing, I did not purport to show, as Podosky and Tuckwell wrongly think, “how epistemic injustice manifests in the field of relevance theory” (2017: 23) or that “conceptual competence injustice is particularly useful in a relevance theoretical model of linguistic pragmatics” (2017: 30). Rather, my intention was to propose introducing the notion of conceptual competence injustice into general linguistic pragmatics as a mere way of labelling a type of prejudicial implicature, as they themselves rightly put it (Podosky and Tuckwell 2017: 30). The derivation of that sort of implicature, however, can be accounted for –and this is where relevance theory comes into the picture– on the basis of the cognitive processes that Sperber and Wilson’s (1986/1995) framework describes and of its conceptual apparatus.

In another contribution (Padilla Cruz 2017b), I clarified that, as a cognitive pragmatic framework, relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson 1986/1995) is concerned with the processing and comprehension of the verbal and non-verbal intentional stimuli produced in human communication. It very satisfactorily explains how hearers forge interpretative hypotheses and why they select only one of them as the plausibly intended interpretation. Relevance theorists are also interested in the generation of a variety of effects –e.g. poetic (Pilkington 2000), humorous (Yus Ramos 2016), etc.– and successfully account for them.

Therefore, the notion of conceptual competence injustice can only be useful to relevance-theoretic pragmatics as a label to refer to one of the (pernicious) effects that may originate as a consequence of the constant search for optimal relevance of intentional stimuli. I will not return to these issues here, as I consider them duly addressed in my previous contribution (Padilla Cruz 2017b).

My aim in this reply is to lend support to Anderson’s (2017) differentiation of conceptual competence injustice as a distinct type of epistemic injustice. I seek to argue that, ontologically and phenomenologically, conceptual competence injustice must be retained in the field of social epistemology as a helpful category of injustice because it refers to a wronging whose origin and scope, so to say, differ from those of testimonial injustice. Testimonial injustice stems from (mis)judgements pertaining to the output of an action or epistemic practice wherein epistemic agents may participate or be engaged. The action in question is giving testimony and its output is the very testimony given. The scope of testimonial injustice, therefore, is the product, the result of that action or epistemic practice.

In other words, testimonial injustice targets the ability to generate an acceptable product as a consequence of finding it not to satisfy certain expectations or requirements, or to be defective in some dimensions. In contrast, conceptual competence injustice denotes an unfairness that is committed not because of the output of what is done with words –i.e. informing and the dispensed information– but because of the very linguistic tools wherewith an individual performs that action –i.e. the very words that she makes use of– and supposed underlying knowledge. To put it differently, the scope of conceptual competence injustice is the lexical items wherewith testimony is dispensed, which lead prejudiced individuals to doubt the conceptual and lexical capacities of unprivileged individuals.

In order to show that the scopes of testimonial and conceptual competence injustices vary, I will be drawing from the seminal and most influential work on communication by philosopher Herbert P. Grice (1957, 1975).[2] This will also encourage me to suggest that the notion of testimonial injustice (Fricker 2003, 2007) could even be refined and elaborated on. I will argue that this injustice may also be perpetrated when a disadvantaged individual is perceived not to meet requirements pertaining to testimony other than truthfulness.

Content Characteristics or Requirements of (Good) Testimony

As an epistemic practice, dispensing testimony, or information, could be characterised, along Grice’s (1959, 1975) lines, as a cooperative activity. Testimony is given because an individual may be interested in imparting it for a variety of reasons –e.g. influencing others, appearing knowledgeable, contradicting previous ideas, etc.– and/or because it may benefit (an)other individual(s), who might (have) solicit(ed) it for another variety of reasons –e.g. learning about something, strengthening ideas, changing his worldview, etc. As an activity that brings together various individuals in joint action, providing testimony is subject to certain constraints or requirements for testimony to be properly or adequately dispensed. Let us call those constraints or requirements, using philosopher John L. Austin’s (1962) terminology, felicity conditions.

Some of those felicity conditions pertain to the individuals or interlocutors engaged in the epistemic practice. The dispenser of testimony –i.e. the speaker or informer– must obviously possess certain (true) information to dispense, have the ability to impart it and pursue some goal when giving it. In turn, the receiver of testimony should, but need not, be interested in it and make this manifest by explicit mention or elicitation of the testimony.

Other felicity conditions concern the testimony to be provided. For instance, it must be well supported, reliable and trustworthy. This is the sort of testimony that benevolent and competent informers dispense (Wilson 1999; Sperber et al. 2010), and the one on which the notion of testimonial injustice focuses (Fricker 2003, 2007). Making use again of Grice’s (1957, 1975) ideas, let us say that, for testimony to be appropriately imparted, it must satisfy a requirement of truthfulness or quality. Indeed, the maxim of quality of his Cooperative Principle prompts individuals to give information that is true and to refrain from saying falsehoods or things for which they lack adequate evidence.

But not only must testimony be truthful; for it to be properly dispensed, the information must also be both sufficient and relevant. Imagine, for instance, that someone was requested to tell the story of Little Red Riding Hood. For the narration to be complete, it should not only include details about who such a character was, where she lived, the fact that she had a grandmother who lived at some distance in the countryside, her grandmother’s conditions or their relationship, but also about what had happened to Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother one day before receiving her visit and what happened to Little Red Riding Hood upon finding the wolf lying on the bed, disguised as the grandmother.

If the narrator mentioned the former details but omitted the latter, her narration, regardless of the fact that what she said about the characters’ identity and residence was undeniably true, would not be fully satisfactory, as it would not contain enough, necessary or expected information. Her testimony about Little Red Riding Hood would not be considered sufficient; something –maybe a key fragment– was missing for the whole story to be known, correctly understood and appraised.

Imagine now that all the details about the characters, their residence and relationship were present in the narration, but, upon introducing the wolf, the narrator started to ramble and talked about the animal spices wolves belong to, their most remarkable features, the fact that these animals are in danger of extinction in certain regions of Europe or that they were considered to have magical powers in a particular mythology. Although what the narrator said about the three characters is unquestioningly true and the story itself is told in its entirety, it would not have been told in the best way possible, as it includes excessive, unnecessary and unrelated information.

Again, along Gricean (1957, 1975) lines, it may be said that testimony must meet certain requirements or satisfy certain expectations about its quantity and relation. Actually, while his maxim of quantity incites individuals to give the expected amount of information depending on the purpose of a communicative exchange and prevents them from retaining or omitting expected or indispensable information, his maxim of relation causes them to supply information that is relevant or connected with the purpose of the exchange. Even if the provided information is true, failure to satisfy those requirements would render it inadequately given.

To the best of my knowledge, the notion of testimonial injustice as originally formulated by Fricker (2003, 2007) overlooks these requirements of quantity and relation, which solely pertain to the content of what is said. Accordingly, this injustice could also be argued to be amenable to be inflicted whenever an informer imparts unreliable or not well-evidenced information, and also when she fails to add necessary information or mentions irrelevant details or issues. If she did so, her ability to appropriately dispense information could be questioned and she could subsequently be downgraded as an informer.

Testimony from the 2009 trial of Cambodian war criminal Duch. Image by Khmer Rouge Tribunal (ECCC) via Flickr / Creative Commons

Manner Characteristics or Requirements of (Good) Testimony

Testimony may be claimed to be adequately given when it is true, sufficient and relevant, but there are additional requirements that testimony should meet for it to be adequately imparted. Namely, the information must be presented in an orderly, clear and unambiguous way. How would you react if, when being told the story of Little Red Riding Hood, your interlocutor gave you all the necessary, relevant and true details –and nothing more– but she changed the order of the events, did not make it clear whom the wolf attacked firstly or what Little Red Riding Hood put in her basket, or resorted to unusual, difficult or imprecise lexical terms? Probably, you would say that the story was told, but many issues would not be crystal clear to you, so you would have difficulties in having a clear picture of how, when and why the events in the story happened.

Testimony may also be considered to be well dispensed when it is given in a good manner by correctly ordering events and avoiding both obscurity and ambiguity of expression. Order, clarity and ambiguity are parameters that do not have to do with what is said –i.e. the content– but with how what is said is said –i.e. its linguistic form. Accordingly, testimony may be asserted to be correctly imparted when it meets certain standards or expectations that only concern the manner in which it is given.[3] Some of those standards or expectations are connected with the properties of the linguistic choices that the speaker makes when wording or phrasing testimony, and others are determined by cultural factors.

For example, for a narration to count as a fairy tale, it would have to begin with the traditional and recurrent formula “Once upon a time” and then proceed by setting a background that enables identification of characters and situates the events. Similarly, for an essay to be regarded as a good, publishable research paper, it must contain, in terms of structure, an abstract, an introductory section where the state of the art of the issue to be discussed is summarised, the goals of the paper are stated, the thesis is alluded to and, maybe, the structure of the paper is explained.

Then, the essay must unfold in a clear and logically connected way, through division of the contents in various sections, each of which must deal with what is referred to in its heading, etc. In terms of expression, the paper must contain technical or specialised terminology and be sufficiently understandable. Many of these expectations are motivated by specific conventions about discourse or text genres.

Inability or failure to present information in the appropriate manner or to comply with operative conventions may also incite individuals to challenge an informer’s capacity to dispense it. Although the informer may be credited with being knowledgeable about a series of issues, she may be assessed as a bad informer because her performance is not satisfactory in terms of the linguistic means she resorts to in order to address them or her abidance by governing conventions. However, since such an assessment is motivated not by the quality, quantity or relation of the content of testimony, but by the tools with and the way in which the informer produces her product, its scope or target is obviously different.

Different Scopes, Distinct Types of Epistemic Injustice

The current notion of testimonial injustice only takes into account one of the three features of (well dispensed) testimony alluded to above: namely, quality or truthfulness. A more fine-grained conceptualisation of it should also consider two other properties: quantity and relation, as long as informers’ capacity to provide testimony may be doubted if they failed to give expected information and/or said irrelevant things or added unnecessary details. Indeed, quality, quantity and relation are dimensions that are connected with the content of the very information dispensed –i.e. what is said– or the product of the epistemic practice of informing. Testimonial injustice, therefore, should be characterised as the epistemic injustice amenable to be inflicted whenever testimony is found deficient or unsatisfactory on the grounds of these three dimensions pertaining to its content.

What happens, then, with the other requirement of good testimony, namely, manner? Again, to the best of my knowledge, Fricker’s (2003, 2007) description of testimonial injustice does not refer to its likely perpetration when an individual is judged not to impart testimony in an allegedly right manner. And, certainly, this characteristic of good testimony may affect considerations about how suitably it is given.

Dispensing information in a messy, obscure and/or ambiguous way could be enough for degrading an individual as informer. She could sufficiently talk about true and relevant things, yes, but she could say them in an inappropriate way, thus hindering or impeding understanding. Should, then, the manner in which testimony is provided be used as grounds to wrong an informer or to question a person’s capacities as such? Although the manner in which testimony is imparted may certainly influence assessments thereof, there is a substantial difference.

Failure to meet requirements of quality, quantity and relation, and failure to meet requirements of manner are certainly not the same phenomenon. The former has to do with the content of what is said, with the product or result of an activity; the latter, in contrast, as the name indicates, has to do with the way in which what is said is actually said, with the tools deployed to accomplish the activity. Testimony may be incorrectly dispensed because of its falsity, insufficiency or irrelevance, but it may also be inappropriately imparted because of how it is given –this is undeniable, I would say.

The difference between quality, quantity and relation, on the one hand, and manner, on the other hand, is a difference of product and content of that product, on the one hand, and tools to create it, on the other hand. Accordingly, testimonial injustice and conceptual competence injustice should be kept apart as two distinct types of epistemic injustice because the respective scopes of the judgements where each injustice originates differ. While in the former the issue is the content of testimony, in the latter what is at stake is the means to dispense it, which unveil or suggest conceptual deficits or lack of mastery of certain concepts.

Testimony is dispensed by means of linguistic elements that somehow capture –or metarepresent, in the specialised cognitive-pragmatic terminology (Wilson 1999; Sperber 2000)– the thoughts that a speaker entertains, or the information that she possesses, and is interested in making known to an audience. Such elements are words, which are meaningful units made of strings of recognisable sounds –i.e. allophones, or contextual realisations of phonemes, in the terminology of phonetics and phonology– which make up stems and various types of morphemes –prefixes, infixes and suffixes– conveying lexical and grammatical information. More importantly, words are arranged in more complex meaningful units –namely, phrases– and these, in turn, give rise to larger, and still more meaningful, units –namely, clauses and sentences. Manner is connected with the lexical units chosen and their syntactic arrangements when communicating and, for the sake of this paper, when providing testimony.

Speakers need to constantly monitor their production and their interlocutors’ reactions, which often cause them to revise what they have just said, reformulate what they are saying or are about to say, expand or elaborate on it, etc. As complex an activity as speaking is, it is not exempt of problems. At a lexical level, the speaker may fail to use the adequate words because she misses them or has trouble to find them at a particular time for a variety of factors –e.g. tiredness, absentmindedness, etc. (Mustajoki 2012). The chosen words may also diverge from those normally used by other language users in order to refer to particular concepts. This happens when speakers have mapped those concepts onto different lexical items or when they have mapped those concepts not onto single words, but onto more complex units like phrases or even whole sentences (Sperber and Wilson 1997).

The selected terms may alternatively be too general, so the audience somehow has to inferentially adjust or fine-tune their denotation because of its broadness. Consider, for example, placeholders like “that thing”, “the stuff”, etc. used to refer to something for which there is a more specific term, or hypernyms like ‘animal’ instead of the more precise term ‘duck-billed platypus’. Or, the other way round, the selected terms may be too specific, so the audience somehow has to inferentially loosen their denotation because of its restrictiveness (Carston 2002; Wilson and Carston 2007).

Above – Doggie. Image by lscott2dog via Flickr / Creative Commons

Think, for instance, of hyponyms like ‘doggie’ when used to refer not only to dogs, but also to other four-legged animals because of perceptual similarity –they have four legs– and conceptual contiguity –they are all animals– or ‘kitten’ when used to refer to other felines for the same reasons;[4] or imagine that terms like ‘wheel’ or ‘cookie’ were metaphorically applied to entities belonging to different, unrelated conceptual domains –e.g. the Moon– because of perceptual similarity –i.e. roundness.[5]

At a syntactic level, the linguistic structures that the speaker generates may turn out ambiguous and misleading, even though they may be perfectly clear and understandable to her. Consider, for instance, sentences like “I saw your brother with glasses”, where the ambiguity resides in the polysemy of the word ‘glasses’ (“pair of lenses” or “drinking containers”?) and the distinct readings of the fragment “your brother with glasses” (who wears/holds/carries the glasses, the hearer’s brother or the speaker?), or “Flying planes may be dangerous”, where the ambiguity stems from the competing values of the –ing form (what is dangerous, the action of piloting planes or the planes that are flying?).

At a discourse or pragmatic level, finally, speakers may be unaware of conventions governing the usage and meaning of specific structures –i.e. pragmalinguistic structures (Leech 1983)– such as “Can/Could you + verb”, whose pragmatic import is requestive and not a question about the hearer’s physical abilities, or unfamiliar with sociocultural norms and rules –i.e. sociopragmatic norms (Leech 1983)– which establish what is expectable or permitted, so to say, in certain contexts, or when, where, how and with whom certain actions may or should be accomplished or avoided.

Would we, then, say that testimony is to be doubted or discredited because of mistakes or infelicities at a lexical, syntactic or pragmatic level? Not necessarily. The information per se may be true, reliable, accurate, relevant and sufficient, but the problem resides precisely in how it is presented. Testimony would have been given, no doubt, but it would not have been imparted in the most efficient way, as the most appropriate tools are not used.

When lexical selection appears poor or inadequate; words are incorrectly and ambiguously arranged into phrases, clauses or sentences; (expected) conventionalised formulae are not conveniently deployed, or norms constraining how, when, where or whom to say things are not respected or are ignored, what is at stake is not an informer’s knowledge of the issues testimony may be about, but her knowledge of the very rudiments and conventions to satisfactorily articulate testimony and to successfully dispense it. The objects of this knowledge are the elements making up the linguistic system used to communicate –i.e. vocabulary– their possible combinations –i.e. syntax– and their usage in order to achieve specific goals –i.e. pragmatics– so such knowledge is evidently different from knowledge of the substance of testimony –i.e. its ‘aboutness’.

Real or seeming lexical problems may evidence conceptual gaps, concept-word mismatches or (highly) idiosyncratic concept-word mappings, but they may lead privileged individuals to question disadvantaged individuals’ richness of vocabulary and, ultimately, the concepts connected with it and denoted by words. If this happens, what those individuals attack is one of the sets of tools to generate an acceptable product, but not the content or essence of such a product.

Conceptual competence injustice, therefore, must be seen as targeting the tools with which testimony is created, not its content, so its scope differs from that of testimonial injustice. The scope of testimonial injustice is the truthfulness of a series of events in a narration is, as well as the amount of details that are given about those events and the relevance of those details. The scope of conceptual competence, in contrast, is knowledge and correct usage of vocabulary, and possession of the corresponding concepts.

Conceptual competence injustice focuses on a specific type of knowledge making up the broader knowledge of a language and facilitating performance in various practices, which includes informing others or dispensing testimony. Such specific knowledge is a sub-competence on which the more general, overarching competence enabling communicative performance is contingent. For this reason, conceptual competence injustice is a competence injustice, or an unfairness about a type of knowledge and specific abilities –conceptual and lexical abilities, in this case. And just as unprivileged individuals may be wronged because of their lack or misuse of words and may be attributed conceptual lacunae, occasional or constant syntactic problems and pragmatic infelicities may induce powerful individuals to misjudge those individuals as regards the respective types of knowledge enabling their performance in these areas of language.

Conclusion

Phenomenologically, testimonial injustice and conceptual competence injustice are perpetrated as a consequence of perceptions and appraisals whose respective scopes differ. In testimonial injustice, it is information that is deemed to be unsatisfactory because of its alleged veracity, quantity and relevance, so the informer is not considered a good knower of the issues pertaining to that testimony. In conceptual competence injustice, in contrast, it is the tools by means of which information is dispensed that are regarded as inappropriate, and such inappropriateness induces individuals to doubt possession and knowledge of the adequate lexical items and of their corresponding, supporting conceptual knowledge.

While testimonial injustice is inflicted as a result of what is said, conceptual competence injustice is perpetrated as a consequence of the manner whereby what is said is actually said. Consequently, at a theoretical level, testimonial injustice and conceptual competence injustice should definitely be kept apart in the field of social epistemology. The latter, moreover, should be retained as a valid and useful notion, as long as it denotes an unfairness amenable to be sustained on the grounds of the linguistic tools employed to dispense testimony and not on the grounds of the characteristics of the product generated.

Contact details: mpadillacruz@us.es

References

Anderson, Derek E. “Conceptual Competence Injustice.” Social Epistemology. A Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Policy 37, no. 2 (2017): 210-223.

Anderson, Derek E. “Yes, There Is Such a Thing as Conceptual Competence Injustice.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 1 (2018): 26-35.

Austin, John L. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962.

Carston, Robyn. Thoughts and Utterances. The Pragmatics of Explicit Communication. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002.

Clark, Eve V. “What’s in a Word? On the Child’s Acquisition of Semantics in His First Language.” In Cognitive Development and the Acquisition of Meaning, edited by Timothy E. Moore, 65-110. New York: Academic Press, 1973.

Clark, Eve V. The Lexicon in Acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Escandell Vidal, M. Victoria. “Norms and Principles. Putting Social and Cognitive Pragmatics Together.” In Current Trends in the Pragmatics of Spanish, edited by Rosina Márquez-Reiter and M. Elena Placencia, 347-371. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2004.

Fricker, Miranda. “Epistemic Injustice and a Role for Virtue in the Politics of Knowing.” Metaphilosophy 34, no. 1-2 (2003): 154-173.

Fricker, Miranda. Epistemic Injustice. Power & the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Grice, Herbert P. “Meaning.” Philosophical Review 66 (1957): 377-388.

Grice, Herbert P. “Logic and Conversation.” In Syntax and Semantics vol. 3: Speech Acts, edited by Peter Cole and Jerry Morgan, 41-59. New York: Academic Press, 1975.

Leech, Geoffrey. Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman, 1983.

Mustajoki, Arto. “A Speaker-oriented Multidimensional Approach to Risks and Causes of Miscommunication.” Language and Dialogue 2, no. 2 (2012): 216-243.

Padilla Cruz, Manuel. “On the Usefulness of the Notion of ‘Conceptual Competence Injustice’ to Linguistic Pragmatics.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 6, no. 4 (2017a): 12-19.

Padilla Cruz, Manuel. “Conceptual Competence Injustice and Relevance Theory, A Reply to Derek Anderson.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 6, no. 12 (2017b): 39-50.

Pilkington, Adrian. Poetic Effects. A Relevance Theory Perspective. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2000.

Podosky, Paul-Mikhail, and William Tuckwell. 2017. “There’s No Such Thing as Conceptual Competence Injustice: A Response to Anderson and Cruz.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 6, no. 11: 23-32.

Rescorla, Leslie. “Overextension in Early Language Development.” Journal of Child Language 7 (1980): 321-335.

Sperber, Dan (ed.). Metarepresentations: A Multidisciplinary Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Sperber, Dan, and Deirdre Wilson. Relevance. Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986.

Sperber, Dan, and Deirdre Wilson. Relevance. Communication and Cognition. 2^nd edition. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995.

Sperber, Dan, and Deirdre Wilson. “The Mapping between the Mental and the Public Lexicon.” UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 9 (1997): 107-125.

Sperber, Dan, Fabrice Clément, Christophe Heintz, Olivier Mascaro, Hugo Mercier, Gloria Origgi, and Deirdre Wilson. “Epistemic Vigilance.” Mind & Language 25, no. 4 (2010): 359-393.

Wałaszeska, Ewa. “Broadening and Narrowing in Lexical Development: How Relevance Theory Can Account for Children’s Overextensions and Underextensions.” Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011): 314-326.

Wilson, Deirdre. “Metarepresentation in Linguistic Communication.” UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 11 (1999): 127-161.

Wilson, Deirdre, and Robyn Carston. “A Unitary Approach to Lexical Pragmatics: Relevance, Inference and Ad Hoc Concepts.” In Pragmatics, edited by Noel Burton-Roberts, 230-259. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007.

Yus Ramos, Francisco. Humour and Relevance. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2016.

[1] Reference to the speaker will be made by means of the feminine third person singular personal pronoun.

[2] The fact that the following discussion heavily relies on Grice’s (1957, 1975) Cooperative Principle and its maxims should not imply that such ‘principle’ is an adequate formalisation of how the human cognitive systems work while processing information. It should rather be seen as some sort of overarching (cultural) norm or rule subsuming more specific norms or rules, which are internalised by some social groups whose members unconsciously obey without noticing that they comply with it (Escandell Vidal 2004: 349). For extensive criticism on Grice’s (1957/1975) ideas, see Sperber and Wilson (1986/1995).

[3] Grice’s (1957, 1975) maxim of manner is articulated into four sub-maxims, which cause individuals to be (i) orderly, (ii) brief or concise, and to avoid (iii) ambiguity of expression and (iv) obscurity of expression. In my discussion, however, I have omitted considerations about brevity or conciseness because I think that these are the byproduct of the maxim of quality, with whose effects those of the manner sub-maxim of briefness overlap.

[4] This would be a type of overextension labelled over-inclusion, categorical overextension or classic overextension (Clark 1973, 1993; Rescorla 1980), where a word “[…] is applied to instances of other categories within the same or adjacent conceptual domain” (Wałaszeska 2011: 321).

[5] This would be a case of analogical extension or analogical overextension (Rescorla 1980; Clark 1993).

Yes, There Is Such a Thing as Conceptual Competence Injustice, Derek Anderson

SERRC — January 16, 2018 — Leave a comment

Author Information: Derek Anderson, Boston University, derek.e.anderson@gmail.com

Anderson, Derek. “Yes, There Is Such a Thing as Conceptual Competence Injustice.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 1 (2018): 26-35.

The pdf of the article gives specific page references. Shortlink: https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-3SL

Please refer to:

Anderson, Derek. “Conceptual Competence Injustice.” Social Epistemology 31, no. 2 (2017): 210-223.
Padilla Cruz, Manuel. “On the Usefulness of the Notion of ‘Conceptual Competence Injustice’ to Linguistic Pragmatics.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 6, no. 4 (2017): 12-19.
Anderson, Derek. “Relevance Theory and Conceptual Competence Injustice.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 6, no. 7 (2017): 35-39.
Podosky, Paul-Mikhail Catapang and William Tuckwell.[1] “There’s No Such Thing as Conceptual Competence Injustice: A Response to Anderson and Cruz.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 6, no. 11 (2017): 23-32.

Image from D. W. E. Carlier via Flickr / Creative Commons

Conceptual competence injustice (Anderson 2017) is a form of epistemic injustice that occurs when a dominant agent or structure impugns (implicitly or explicitly) a marginalized epistemic agent’s ability to use a concept. The most explicit occurrences involve testimony that asserts or implies what is traditionally regarded as a linguistic or conceptual truth. Dominant agents regard a marginalized agent’s testimony as revealing or implying a deficiency in conceptual competence, where this attribution of deficiency is unwarranted and contributes to a pattern of epistemic oppression.

This essay emphasizes two aspects of conceptual competence injustice: (1) the sense in which it is a structural injustice, and (2) the sense in which it is centrally a form of competence injustice (as opposed to testimonial injustice).

Podosky & Tuckwell (2017) argue that every instance of conceptual competence injustice (hereafter: CC injustice) is an instance of testimonial injustice (Fricker 2007), and that therefore CC injustice is not a substantive or helpful concept in its own right. Further, they present arguments that CC injustice has not been adequately distinguished from either hermeneutical injustice or contributory injustice. My focus here will be on the main arguments that CC injustice is a kind of testimonial injustice and has no independent theoretical value. These arguments provide an excellent springboard for an elaboration of aspects (1) and (2) mentioned above.

Podosky & Tuckwell’s main argument proceeds in two stages. First, they argue that causal etiology is a necessary condition on CC injustice, so it cannot be distinguished from testimonial injustice on these grounds. Then they argue that every instance of CC injustice is identical to some instance of testimonial injustice. Section 2 argues that causal etiology is not a necessary condition on CC injustice. Section 3 highlights the ways in which CC injustice, as a form of competence (simpliciter) injustice, is distinct from various kinds of testimonial injustice. In section 4, I grant for the sake of argument that all CC injustice is testimonial injustice and argue that, even if that were true, there would still be such a thing as CC injustice and recognizing its existence would still be theoretically important.

Causal Etiology and Structural Oppression

It is not necessary that CC injustice be caused by any particular type of psychological state (Anderson 2017). This is because CC injustice exists as an aspect of structural epistemic oppression. Episodes are to be identified by the role they play in a broad pattern of epistemic marginalization and domination, not by the immediate psychological forces that produce them.

This contrasts sharply with Fricker’s account of testimonial injustice, episodes of which are necessarily caused by ‘negative identity prejudice,’ a psychological disposition to regard and/or treat members of some marginalized group in negative ways across a wide spectrum of social circumstances. Because CC injustice and testimonial injustice differ in this way with respect to causal etiology, it is easy to demonstrate they are distinct phenomena.

Against this, Podosky & Tuckwell argue that CC injustice intuitively requires the same causal etiology that Fricker attaches to testimonial injustice, so the two forms of injustice can’t be distinguished along these lines. Their argument involves an intuition pump intended to show that CC injustice cannot occur as the result of merely bad epistemic practices in the absence of prejudice.

Their intuition pump introduces a character: Taylor the coin-flipper. Taylor has no negative identity prejudices, but she has a bad epistemic practice. She regularly flips a coin to decide what to believe. Taylor meets Linda, a Black woman, who competently defends Meinongianism about non-existent objects. Taylor flips her coin and decides on that basis to regard Linda as incompetent with the concept of existence. Podosky & Tuckwell maintain that, intuitively, Taylor has not perpetrated CC injustice.

The defense of this claim is a pure intellectual seeming or intuition shared by the authors. They write, “Taylor does not seem to be committing anything other than shoddy epistemic behaviour; there doesn’t appear to be anything unjust about what she’s doing.”

They argue from this intuition that instances of CC injustice cannot arise from (merely) bad epistemic practices. They maintain that, for example, a white male graduate student who routinely dismisses the conceptual competence of women in his cohort, but who also dismisses everyone else for the same reason: because he has inaccurately high intellectual self-trust, so perpetrates no epistemic injustice against these women.[1]

He is guilty of bad epistemic practices because he gives himself unduly high credibility, but he is not guilty of any kind of epistemic injustice. The thought is (I suppose): this guy doesn’t discriminate against women; he treats men and women the same way; so he cannot be treating only these women unjustly as the account of CC injustice in Anderson (2017) entails.

Both the methodology and the conclusion of this argument are flawed. First, an appeal to brute intuition about whether Taylor has done something unjust is contentious in an unhelpful way. Those who agree that CC injustice can be perpetrated without identity prejudice will not have the same intuition as Podosky & Tuckwell. Let me start by making explicit the rationale behind this intuition.

Taylor’s choice to use the coin-flip, while epistemically blameworthy in general, intuitively acquires a special blameworthiness when she chooses to employ it in circumstances that could perpetuate the epistemic marginalization of women of color. Taylor is not exculpated by the possibility that she fails to recognize how coin flipping in her encounter with Linda might contribute to a pattern of epistemic oppression. A common feature of structural oppression is that those who participate in it do not typically know they are participating in it.

Further, the fact that Taylor behaves uniformly with marginalized and dominant agents does not mean her behavior toward marginalized groups is exculpated. Imagine a person who uses racial slurs in referring to white people and people of color uniformly; the uniformity of treatment does nothing to mitigate the wrongness of using racial slurs against people of color. Epistemic irresponsibility harms members of epistemically marginalized groups in different and more egregious ways than it harms members of epistemically dominant groups. Seen in this light, it is intuitively compelling that Taylor is doing something epistemically unjust in her treatment of Linda.

In addition to being unhelpfully contentious, we have good reason to think intuitions in this domain are ideologically loaded. Critical race theorists and Black feminists have taught us that individualistic intuitions about wrongness and blameworthiness in the context of structural oppression are not to be trusted because they are predictably and demonstrably conditioned by dominant power structures. Thus, Collins (2002) writes, “To maintain their power, dominant groups create and maintain a popular system of ‘commonsense’ ideas that support their right to rule.”[2]

Hence, members of dominant groups who benefit from structural oppression tend to see innocent individual motives as exculpatory, while members of subordinated groups tend to see participations in structural oppression as prime examples of injustice even when motives are innocent. For example, Matsuda (1987) argues that intuitions about individual blameworthiness with regard to reparations debts differ between groups that benefit from past oppressions and groups that still suffer from them.

Intuitions about what is necessary for blameworthiness are socially situated and tend to reflect group interests. Given the likelihood that dominant ideology influences intuitions about whether good-willed participation in structural oppression counts as injustice or not, a flat-footed appeal to intuition does little to rule out the possibility that CC injustice can occur without negative identity prejudice.

Finally, Podosky & Tuckwell’s conclusion, viz. that white male graduate students with merely over-inflated intellectual self-trust do not produce epistemic injustices, is false. In fact, this is a reductio of the position that bad epistemic practices by themselves are never sufficient to produce epistemic injustice. The prevalence of over-confident, socially dominant epistemic agents within philosophy is a cornerstone of epistemic marginalization of women of color and other marginalized identities. Demonstrating this requires only reflecting on ways that excessively self-confidence among dominant agents contributes to a general pattern of epistemic oppression within academic philosophy.[3]

Image from Paull Antero via Flickr / Creative Commons

Let us assume for the sake of argument that some over-inflated dominant agents really harbor no negative identity prejudices. Still, many dominant philosophers do harbor negative identity prejudices, which is a cornerstone of systemic epistemic marginalization. These negative identity prejudices produce testimonial injustices and CC injustices, as well as other aspects of epistemic oppression. Another cornerstone of epistemic oppression is the prevalence of situated ignorance (Dotson 2011) about marginalized lives that marginalized agents must face within the overwhelmingly white and male population of academic philosophers.

A third cornerstone is the force of willful hermeneutical injustice (Pohlhaus 2012) among dominant philosophers. Philosophers are trained to argue against opposing worldviews; thus, dominant philosophers are adroit at willfully resisting uptake of marginalized epistemic resources and thus adroit at preserving situated ignorance. A fourth cornerstone is the prevalence of epistemic exploitation (Berenstain 2016): marginalized agents are constantly called on to explain and defend the existence of their oppression by dominant agents, especially within a tradition that promotes a skeptical, questioning attitude toward everything. Epistemic exploitation erodes intellectual self-trust, elicits what Dotson (2011) calls unsafe testimony, and forces marginalized agents to engage in unwanted cognitive and emotional labor.

Now, in the midst of this climate, consider the role that over-confident but prejudice-free socially dominant epistemic agents play. While these agents tend to make life more difficult for everyone, their existence is much more potent and harmful for marginalized epistemic agents. The woman of color who is trying to make it in philosophy must deal with wave after wave of over-confidant white men who are judging that she does not adequately grasp the concepts she is working on. It doesn’t really matter if some of these men truly have no negative identity prejudices. Moreover, these dominant agents enjoy a relative advantage in conceptual competence credibility over marginalized agents.

As Medina (2012) observes, credibility is relative. Over-inflated intellectual self-trust in the context of academic philosophy often functions to unjustly increase dominant agents’ credibility. This constitutes a relative decrease in the credibility of marginalized agents who face myriad pressures to undermine their confidence. Being regarded as relatively less credible than over-inflated dominant agents contributes to the significant and unjust disadvantages faced by marginalized agents, compounding other issues, and does so regardless of whether these dominant agents harbor negative identity prejudices. Further, the over-inflated dominant agents then go about further diminishing the credibility of marginalized agents by disparaging their conceptual competence, using their over-inflated self-confidence to lend more credibility to their disparagements.

Conceptual competence injustice is an injustice because it is part of pernicious patterns of epistemic marginalization. The considerations raised here show that CC injustice is not necessarily caused by any particular psychological state. As such, we can sharply distinguish CC injustice from testimonial injustice as Fricker conceives it.

However, analogous arguments plausibly show that testimonial injustice itself should be reconceived as an aspect of structural oppression. Indeed, I think a better account of testimonial injustice would jettison Fricker’s causal etiology criterion. In that case, more work must be done to individuate the concept of CC injustice from the concept of testimonial injustice. The considerations in the next section aim to satisfy that further desiderata.

Competence Injustice, Not Testimonial Injustice

Podosky & Tuckwell argue that every instance of CC injustice is an instance of testimonial injustice. Let us assume that causal etiology is not necessary for either testimonial injustice or CC injustice. Then their arguments may still be workable. Here I reply that, even setting causal etiology aside, CC injustices are not always identical with instances of testimonial injustice.

My argument is straightforward. A judgment that constitutes CC injustice need not be connected with testimony in any central way. It is not necessary that a person’s testimony be disbelieved, ignored, or pre-empted in an episode of CC injustice. CC injustice involves only an unjust judgment about a person’s ability to think well using certain concepts. It is most convenient to characterize CC injustice by reference to testimony (as in Anderson 2017) because conceptual content is most directly characterized by reference to linguistic expressions, but CC injustice is not essentially concerned with what people say or might say.

CC injustice is primarily a form of competence injustice, a broader notion that encompasses all unjust judgments of ability. The abilities that are unjustly impugned in episodes of competence injustice might be cognitive or they might not be. Competence injustices are abundant; they include, for example, the sexist attitudes that a woman cannot be a soldier, a mechanic, or a computer programmer.

Whether an instance of competence injustice counts as a form of epistemic injustice depends on the connection between knowledge and the ability in question. A woman could be the victim of competence injustice regarding her ability to be a soldier purely on the basis of sexist views about physical strength and endurance. Her ability to be a mechanic might be unjustly doubted on the basis of sexist views about her ability to perform mechanical tasks, but it might also be a matter of conceptual competence injustice: consider the sexist attitude that a woman wouldn’t know the difference between a carburetor and a fuel pump. A woman might be passed over for a job as a mechanic as a result of such conceptual competence injustice. This example of CC injustice has nothing essential to do with testimony.

Podosky & Tuckwell recognize that sometimes CC injustice occurs in the absence of testimony. Nevertheless, they argue that such cases are best characterized as special kinds of testimonial injustice: either pre-emptive testimonial injustice or reflexive testimonial injustice.

According to Fricker, pre-emptive testimonial injustice occurs when a potential hearer’s prejudice operates in advance, before a speaker has a chance to speak, such that the victim’s testimony is never solicited. But clearly the example of the aspiring mechanic is not centrally about having one’s testimony pre-emptively dismissed. It’s not that the other mechanics don’t ask for her opinion or don’t believe her when she speaks. They don’t give her a job. They might have only seen her resume, seen that she was a woman, and passed her over due to conceptual competence injustice.

This is not an example of pre-emptive testimonial injustice.[4] Relatedly, conceptual competence injustice can operate in structural ways that don’t turn on pre-emptive testimonial injustice. There are many historical examples of people being excluded from professions on the grounds that members of their social group lack the requisite conceptual abilities, including law, medicine, politics, education, and business. These exclusions involve epistemic injustice that is not testimonial injustice.

Podosky & Tuckwell introduce the idea of reflexive testimonial injustice to address cases in which CC injustice happens in a private way. In the relevant cases the victim privately doubts her own conceptual competence, maybe loses it altogether if her doubt is extreme, but her testimony is never discredited because she refrains from speaking. The authors maintain that such episodes are best understood as a form of testimonial injustice.

Their first argument is that testimonial injustice can “manifest itself in this way . . . Fricker points out that the experience of persistent testimonial injustice may lead one to lose confidence in one’s beliefs and general intellectual capacities.” I agree that testimonial injustice can cause private CC injustice, but it does not follow that such instances of CC injustice are testimonial injustices.

That argument would have the form A causes B, therefore B is an instance of A, which is obviously invalid. Fricker does not explicitly theorize that testimonial injustice causes CC injustice, although this is a natural connection to make. But this causal connection does not entail that private CC injustices occurring as a result of testimonial injustices are themselves testimonial injustices.

The authors then argue that private CC injustice can be accurately characterized as reflexively perpetrated testimonial injustice, the phenomenon in which a marginalized person internalizes a negative identity prejudice against their own social identity and on this ground discredits their own testimony. However, there are clearly two different phenomena here. One is the person’s damaged confidence in her conceptual competence; the other is the fact that they ascribe their own testimony unduly low credibility. These are not obviously identical and Podowsky & Tuckwell give no reason why we should believe they are the same thing.

We can say more. The victim’s doubts about her credibility are often caused by damaged confidence in her conceptual abilities resulting from CC injustice inflicted by others. This causal story conflicts with the account Podowsky & Tuckwell offer, given their insistence on Fricker’s causal etiology for testimonial injustice. They maintain that reflexive testimonial injustice is necessarily caused by negative identity prejudice. So according to their reduction, the victim of private CC injustice always doubts their own conceptual competence because they have a negative identity prejudice against people like themselves which causes them to discredit such people’s testimony, including their own testimony when expressing the concepts in question.

This is byzantine and unconvincing. Moreover, this account would only cover cases in which a person’s damaged confidence in her conceptual abilities is the result of an internalized negative identity prejudice against her own social group. Hence, the reduction fails to account for cases in which a marginalized agent who harbors no negative identity prejudice is afflicted by private CC injustice.

The attempt to reduce all private CC injustice to reflexive testimonial injustice is unsuccessful. The distinction can be clarified further if we think about other effects that don’t concern testimony. A person suffering from private CC injustice might choose not to attend certain classes, read certain books, develop certain talents, or apply for certain jobs. These cases are not explained by the victim’s doubts about the credibility of her own testimony. They are explained by the fact that her confidence in her ability to think clearly using certain concepts has been damaged.

Existence and Explanatory Value

Even if it were proved that the class of conceptual competence injustices is necessarily a subset of testimonial injustices, this would not show that there is no such thing as CC injustice, nor would it show that CC injustice is not interesting or useful.

First, an argument from equivalence to non-existence is clearly invalid. One cannot argue that triangles do not exist by showing that the concept of a triangle is necessarily co-extensive with the concept of a polygon with three edges and three vertices. Even if Podosky & Tuckwell showed that the concept of CC injustice is necessarily co-extensive with the concept of testimonial injustice, this would not show that there is no such thing as CC injustice.

At most it would show that every instance of CC injustice is necessarily an instance of testimonial injustice and vice versa. But in fact the authors argue from a weaker starting point than intensional equivalence. They argue that CC injustices are a subset of testimonial injustices; therefore there is no such thing as CC injustice. This has the same form as the following argument. All cats are mammals; therefore there is no such thing as a cat. Clearly neither of these arguments is valid.

To show that there is no such thing as conceptual competence injustice, one would have to show that nothing is a conceptual competence injustice, which has not even been attempted. So the title of their paper, “There’s no such thing as conceptual competence injustice,” is strikingly inapt. A more apt title, perhaps, would have been: “Conceptual competence injustice has no explanatory value.” It seems this is the only thesis the authors might reasonably be pursuing. Indeed, perhaps the authors present this as their main thesis when they write, “we suggest that there isn’t anything more to be learned by thinking about conceptual competence injustice that isn’t captured by testimonial injustice.”

In that case their argument must have the form: A is a subset of B, therefore the concept of A has no explanatory value. But again this argument is obviously invalid. Electrons are a subset of fermions, but the concept of electron has explanatory value. Even if every instance of CC injustice were shown to be an instance of testimonial injustice, that would not suffice to undercut the explanatory value of the concept of CC injustice.

Even if CC injustice is a subset of testimonial injustice (which I’ve argued it’s not), it has important explanatory roles that aren’t addressed by a general account of testimonial injustice that does not theorize about CC injustice. One of these explanatory projects is presented in Anderson (2017) section 4, where I argue that conceptual competence injustice plays a distinctive role in shaping the adverse climate of academic philosophy for marginalized groups. Even if every instance of CC injustice were an instance of testimonial injustice, it would still be important to think about how this distinctive form of testimonial injustice operates within academic philosophy.

Another explanatory project—in fact, the one I was working on when I found a need to develop an account of conceptual competence injustice—involves the way in which unjustly low ascriptions of conceptual competence can shape the evolution of linguistic meaning within a dynamic metasemantic model. The idea, following Burge (1979, 1986), is that the semantic properties of expressions as used by a community are determined in part by patterns of deference. These patterns of deference are in turn shaped by distributed judgments of conceptual competence.

In the model I develop,[5] a preponderance of conceptual competence injustice within a system leads naturally to enfranchised semantic drift: over time, linguistic expressions in a community come to mean what dominant epistemic agents use them to mean because marginalized agents are perceived as conceptually incompetent. Even if every instance of CC injustice is an instance of testimonial injustice, the concept of CC injustice and not the concept of testimonial injustice is most explanatorily relevant when explaining enfranchised semantic drift.

In general, it is exceedingly difficult to prove a priori that a concept has no theoretical importance. No argument approaching such a proof has been offered against the theoretical significance of conceptual competence injustice.

Contact details: derek.e.anderson@gmail.com

References

Anderson, D. E. (2017). Conceptual competence injustice. Social Epistemology, 31(2), 210-223.

Berenstain, N. (2016). Epistemic exploitation. Ergo, an Open Access Journal of Philosophy, 3.

Burge, Tyler (1979). Individualism and the mental. Midwest Studies in Philosophy 4 (1):73-122.

Burge, Tyler (1986). Individualism and psychology. Philosophical Review 95 (January):3-45.

Collins, P. H. (2002). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. Routledge.

Dotson, K. (2011). Tracking epistemic violence, tracking practices of silencing. Hypatia, 26(2), 236-257

Jones, K. (2012). The politics of intellectual self-trust. Social Epistemology, 26(2), 237-251.

Matsuda, M. J. (1987). Looking to the bottom: Critical legal studies and reparations. Harv. Cr-cll rev., 22, 323.

Medina, J. 2012. The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and the Social Imagination. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Podosky, Paul-Mikhail Catapang and William Tuckwell.[1] “There’s No Such Thing as Conceptual Competence Injustice: A Response to Anderson and Cruz.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 6, no. 11 (2017): 23-32.

Pohlhaus, G. (2012). Relational knowing and epistemic injustice: Toward a theory of willful hermeneutical ignorance. Hypatia, 27(4), 715-735.

[1] For an extensive discussion of how to understand intellectual self-trust, see Jones (2012). Relevantly, Jones argues that excessive self-trust among dominant agents is itself a proper cause of epistemic injustice.

[2] Black Feminist Thought, pp. 284.

[3] Podosky & Tuckwell say they find it unclear what a “general pattern of epistemic bias against women of color” could refer to. The following is partly intended to address that lack of clarity.

[4] CC injustice in this case also produces an indefinite number of pre-emptive testimonial injustices, since there are many things the woman could have told the other mechanics had she worked there. By not giving her a job, they pre-empt all of her testimony. But the injustice in this case can’t be reduced to this collection of pre-emptive testimonial injustices.

[5] See Anderson (ms.) “Linguistic Hijacking.”

(Less Un-) Attainable Virtues: A Response to Alfano, Ben Sherman

SERRC — October 12, 2015 — 3 Comments

Author Information: Ben Sherman, Brandeis University, shermanb@brandeis.edu

Sherman, Ben. “(Less Un-) Attainable Virtues: A Response to Alfano.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 4, no. 10 (2015): 14-18.

The PDF of the article gives specific page numbers. Shortlink: http://wp.me/p1Bfg0-2mL

Please refer to:

Sherman, Benjamin R. “There’s No (Testimonial) Justice: Why Pursuit of a Virtue is Not the Solution to Epistemic Injustice.” Social Epistemology (2015): 1-22. doi:10.1080/02691728.2015.1031852.
Alfano, Mark. “Becoming Less Unreasonable: A Reply to Sherman.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 4, no. 7 (2015): 59-62.

Image credit: Nolene Dowdall, via flickr

I am honored that Mark Alfano has replied to my paper, “There’s No (Testimonial) Justice: Why Pursuit of a Virtue is Not the Solution to Epistemic Injustice” (2015)—I have been impressed with the work he (2012, 2013, 2014) and other situationists (e.g. Doris 2002, Olin and Doris 2014) have done in challenging virtue theories in both ethics and epistemology. His suggestions about how to effectively fight epistemic injustice are promising and very welcome. And, as far as I can tell, we disagree about very little. This overall agreement is not very surprising; as my paper reveals, I do not find virtue theories in general especially promising, and my attitude in informed in part by Alfano’s work. Continue Reading…

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Spitting Out the Kool-Aid, Arianna Falbo

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Philosophers and Scientists Are Social Epistemic Agents, Seungbae Park

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One Thing is Testimonial Injustice and Another Is Conceptual Competence Injustice, Manuel Padilla Cruz

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Yes, There Is Such a Thing as Conceptual Competence Injustice, Derek Anderson

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(Less Un-) Attainable Virtues: A Response to Alfano, Ben Sherman

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The Fundamental Question of Social Epistemology

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