Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Relevance of Credibility Excess in a Proportional View of Epistemic Injustice: Differential Epistemic Authority and the Social Imaginary

2010; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 25; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/02691728.2010.534568

1464-5297

José Médina,

Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics

Abstract This paper defends a contextualist approach to epistemic injustice according to which instances of such injustice should be looked at as temporally extended phenomena (having developmental and historical trajectories) and socially extended phenomena (being rooted in patterns of social relations). Within this contextualist framework, credibility excesses appear as a form of undeserved epistemic privilege that is crucially relevant for matters of testimonial justice. While drawing on Miranda Fricker's proportional view of epistemic justice, I take issue with its lack of attention to the role that credibility excesses play in testimonial injustices. I depart from Fricker's view of the relation between credibility excesses and credibility deficits, and I offer an alternative account of the contributions that undeserved epistemic privileges make to epistemic injustices. Then, through the detailed analysis of To kill a mockingbird, I elucidate the crucial role played by the social imaginary in creating and sustaining epistemic injustices, developing an analysis of the kind of social blindness produced by an oppressive social imaginary that establishes unjust patterns of credibility excesses and deficits. Keywords: AuthorityCredibilityEpistemic JusticeHermeneutical JusticeSocial ImaginationTestimonial Knowledge Acknowledgements The author is deeply grateful to the insightful critical comments received from two anonymous reviewers of Social Epistemology. The author is also deeply indebted to Miranda Fricker not only for her pioneering work, which inspired this essay, but also for her detailed comments on an earlier version of this essay. Both the anonymous reviewers and Professor Fricker have helped tremendously to improve the argument of this paper. Professors Carlos Thiebaut and Fernando Broncano also gave extremely valuable feedback on an earlier version of this paper delivered at the Carlos III University in Madrid (Spain) in April 2010. Notes [1] See especially her example in Fricker (Citation2007, 18–19). [2] See Andersen and Miller (Citation1997), Basow (Citation1995), Burns‐Glover and Veith (Citation1995), Centra and Gaubatz (Citation2000), and Miller and Chamberlin (Citation2000). For a rich discussion of these pedagogical issues in the context of feminist and race theory, see the essays in Crabtree, Sapp, and Licona (Citation2009). See also Giroux and Giroux (Citation2004) and Bell hooks (Citation2003). [3] For the notion of the social imaginary, I rely heavily on the works of Castoriadis (Citation1997a, Citation1997b, Citation1998, Citation2007), Gatens (Citation1995), and Gatens and Lloyd (Citation1999). The social imaginary should be understood as a repository of images and scripts that become collectively shared. This symbolic repository provides the representational background against which people tend to share their thoughts and listen to each other in a culture. [4] There is also in the novel the very subtle insinuation of a possible sexual abuse of Mayella by her father. The key textual evidence for that insinuation comes in Tom's testimony when he says: "She reached up an' kissed me 'side of th' face. She says she never kissed a grown man before an' she might as well kiss a nigger. She says what her papa do to her don't count. She says, 'Kiss me back, nigger'" (Lee Citation2002 [1960], 221; emphasis added). The allusion to "what her papa do to her" in the context of trying to convince Tom to kiss her certainly invites the reader to entertain the possibility that Mayella's father may have been not only physically abusive to her, but sexually abusive as well. This subtle insinuation is reinforced by the picture painted of Mayella's situation at home where the danger of abuses of all sorts seems be there for her, as the young female in the house who has to endure the excesses of her father when he comes drunk at the end of the day. There is also a veil of ambiguity in this respect in Atticus Finch's interrogation of Mayella: "'Do you love your father, Miss Mayella?' […] 'Love him, whatcha mean?' 'I mean, is he good to you, is he easy to get along with?' 'He does tollable, 'cept when—' […] 'Does he ever go after you?' 'How do you mean?'" (Lee Citation2002 [1960], 208–209). Atticus goes on to talk about physical abuse from that point onwards, but although he never comes out and says anything explicit about possible sexual aggressions and he never questions Tom on what Mayella could have meant by "what papa do to her," the insinuation is subtly there, touching on a very difficult social silence, another social taboo that is hard to break (perhaps harder than the one about interracial relations). [5] I have defined active ignorance elsewhere as the kind of recalcitrant, self‐protecting ignorance that builds around itself an entire system of resistances (see Medina Citationforthcoming). This active ignorance is to be contrasted with the mere absence of belief or the mere presence of false beliefs, for it has deep roots in systematic distortions and in hard‐to‐eradicate forms of blindness and deafness. For analyses in the recent literature in the epistemology of ignorance, see especially Sullivan and Tuana (Citation2007) and Tuana (Citation2004, Citation2006). [6] In recent years there have been numerous studies of the racial and gender aspects of cultural representations of sexuality, exposing the myths and social distortions that have pervaded the sexual imagination of our culture. For a particularly detailed and influential study of this kind, see Patricia Hill Collins (Citation1990). [7] Fricker (Citation2007, 174–175) devotes the last chapter of her book to hermeneutical justice, but she distinguishes it from testimonial justice from the beginning of the book. For Fricker, testimonial and hermeneutical fairness are two separate—although not unrelated—species of epistemic justice. [8] The Harlem renaissance had taken place in the 1920s and it had echoed pre‐existing, vibrant and subversive black cultural movements in the South as well as in many other places in the African diaspora. See Locke (Citation1992 [1925]). [9] Of course, alternative social imaginaries are not sealed off from each other and they have noticeable influences upon one another, typically with those more mainstream and socially empowered exerting a more pervasive and hard‐to‐escape influence. As a result, there are often assumptions and limitations that all the closely related social imaginaries will share; and even the most marginal standpoint and the most eccentric alternative way of imagining social reality may reproduce important aspects of the mainstream. An account of this can be found in Bourdieu's discussions of generational conflicts. See Bourdieu (Citation1984, Citation1991). [10] I owe this suggestion to an anonymous reviewer of Social Epistemology. [11] Fricker argues that testimonial epistemic virtue is a socially trained perceptual capacity: namely, the capacity for social perception that enables the subject to "see his interlocutors in epistemic colour" (Citation2007, 71). As Fricker summarizes it, "the main idea is that where a hearer gives a suitably critical reception to an interlocutor's word without making any inference, she does so in virtue of the perceptual deliverances of a well‐trained testimonial sensibility" (Citation2007, 71). Epistemic perceptions and judgments—deliverances of epistemic sensitivity—are not a matter of applying pre‐set principles. Rather, the subject ""just sees" her interlocutor in a certain light, and responds to his word accordingly" (Fricker Citation2007, 76). [12] According to Fricker, "critical openness" is what is most characteristic of the responsible hearer's stance. Following McDowell (Citation1998), she defines critical openness as "a rational sensitivity such that the hearer may critically filter what she is told without active reflection or inference of any kind" (Fricker Citation2007, 69). [13] For critical analyses of this social script, its use for motivating and justifying lynching, and its legacy, see Davis (Citation1983) and Hill Collins (Citation1990).