Epistemic Oppression, White Ignorance, and Systemic Logical Injustice

I read the piece "White Ignorance" by Charles W. Mills this week with my students in a course on epistemology. We first read Miranda Fricker on epistemic injustice, then Kristie Dotson on epistemic oppression, and I’ve come to make more precise a feeling I’ve had about social injustice but couldn’t really put my finger on it. This is not a novel idea, but I think I’m in a better place now to articulate it and relate it to logic's role in the community. Can logic be systemically oppressive? I’m afraid so, yes.

Let’s take the papers in order. Fricker describes epistemic injustice with two types, testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice. Testimonial injustice is her primary instance of epistemic injustice, which is to wrong someone in their capacity as a knower. Hermeneutical injustice is when people or communities aren’t allowed to communicate how they make sense of the world; they are wronged in their capacity as understanders.

Dotson asked whether epistemic and hermeneutical injustice are reducible to social injustice. Testimonial injustice, after all, comes from a credibility deficit based on prejudice, which is pervasive in society, especially in groups that are systematically oppressed (like African Americans, to highlight an example). Dotson argues that testimonial injustice is reducible because nothing about the epistemic systems needs to change for rehabilitation. What needs to change is how society oppresses groups of people, not what epistemological tools are available.

As a case of hermeneutical injustice, Fricker describes how women had no epistemic tools to defend themselves in their work environment until they created the concept of “sexual harassment.” Once the concept became available and used widely, women were able to make sense of their individual experiences by sharing them with other women who experienced the same abuse but didn’t have a way to make it known. Dotson argues that this is similarly a type of reducible injustice because epistemic systems do not need to change for rehabilitation. What needs to happen is an expansion of the set of epistemic tools available. With the new concept established, social justice can be better described and addressed, but the epistemic system as such doesn’t change.

For Dotson, irreducible epistemic injustice occurs when the epistemic tools fail people in their capacity as knowers in a way that can’t be reduced to prejudice or addressed with an expansion of conceptual tools. The epistemic tools need to be revised. The system as a whole fails to allow a place to express coherent views, and more importantly, what fails is the inertia of the system, the resistance to change. What Dotson highlights here are the systemic patterns of epistemic oppression, something Fricker had included in her analysis.

Now, moving to Mills and "White Ignorance," we have a case of epistemic injustice which isn’t so much about the repression of knowledge from a marginalised group (which of course happens, as per Fricker and Dotson), but the preservation and replication of ignorance about the lives and experiences of the marginalised group. It’s a systemic pattern of ignorance in which a community or society fails to rectify what is believed and taught by people, from generation to generation. The way I want to express it is that society acquires theoretical monsters infested by errors, that ignore and erase important facts, and that become the dominant shared epistemic system passed on from generation to generation. Part of that theoretical monster is a way of articulating coherence, with deep conceptualisation that resists the logical articulation of alternative views, beliefs, and norms.

What we’re getting is the social construct of a theoretical monster that is supported by a logic that sustains its inertia and resistance to change. Well, that’s how I can articulate it to myself at the moment, and I’m also planning to develop this further in the next stage of my research.

References:

Fricker, Miranda. *Epistemic Injustice*. Oxford University Press, 2007.

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.