Today I’m working again inspired by the work of Fricker, Dotson, Mills, and Young, trying to articulate a coherent and plausible way of thinking about how logic contributes to epistemic injustice. The pattern is that epistemic structures emerge within communities, are passed down from generation to generation, mutating over time, and acquiring inertia that makes them resistant to change.

I’ve been focusing on these papers recently because these are the papers I’m reading with my stage II and III epistemology students. One student suggested understanding what I call logical monsters (which I’ve called theoretical monsters and oppressive structural monsters in previous posts; I still don’t know what to call them) in terms of Kuhn’s idea of scientific paradigms. Paradigms are also theoretical structures that emerge from the praxis of scientific paradigms (I hope Kuhn wouldn’t mind me saying that), become dominant and the standards of “normal science,” until a revolution happens (like the one generated by Einstein at the start of the Twentieth Century).

One feature of Kuhn’s paradigm is that they are mostly closed entities that incorporate both theory and practice, and a revolution from a paradigm to another is not a mere transition, but indeed a revolution, producing new theories whose concepts are incommensurable with the corresponding concepts of the previous paradigms. An example used a lot in this literature is that of mass, which Einstein re-defined in his theory in ways that are incommensurable (i.e., logically incompatible) with the concept of mass defined by Newton. Incommensurability makes communication across paradigms impossible because the clash between the concepts produces incoherence, which in this literature is measured by inconsistency.

So the story is one of successive paradigms that grow out of a revolution until they become normalized until a new revolution happens that replaces them with yet new paradigms that are logically incompatible with previous ones. Now circling back to logical monsters (or epistemic structures), an issue that arises from applying a Kuhnian analysis is that it leads to something like “cultural incommensurability,” where the resistance to change (called inertia by Dotson) is the normalization of epistemic tools that could only be changed by a revolution that would construct a new paradigm incommensurable with the previous ones.

What I find unappealing in this picture is that it invites us towards cultural relativism, which I’m trying to counter by proposing that seeking coherence in dialectical enquiry can facilitate communication across cultures. I’m not getting much of a resolution here, but it’s the point of these daily blog posts, to spend time trying to articulate new ideas, and apply logic as I suggest in Logic in the Wild, in the neutral space of dialectical enquiry…

References:

Dotson, Kristie. “Conceptualizing Epistemic Oppression.” Social Epistemology 28, no. 2 (April 3, 2014): 115–38.

Mills, Charles W. "White Ignorance." In Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, edited by Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana, Chapter 1. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007.

Young, Iris Marion. "CHAPTER 2. Five Faces of Oppression." In Justice and the Politics of Difference, 39-65. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012.

Kuhn, Thomas S. (Thomas Samuel), and Ian. Hacking. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Fourth edition. Chicago ; The University of Chicago Press, 2012.