Yesterday I talked about “the social construct of a theoretical monster that is based in a logic that reinforces its inertia and its resistance to change”. I know what I mean by that, but it’s quite a mouthful. Let me try again, in terms of “emerging structural oppression”. The idea is that power structures within a community and society evolve over time, dividing a population into those favoured by the structure, and those oppressed by it.

In a more traditional Marxist analysis of dialectical history, the structures come to be formed by the distribution of goods, resources, and means of production. In a thicker understanding, inspired for instance by the recent work of Iris Marion Young, the structure can arise from non-material power structures, such as systemic marginalisation or cultural imperialism. It’s this thicker sense of oppression that concerns me here because I’m targeting logical injustice in the community.

The historical aspect of the power structure is still very much relevant, however, as per Kristie Dotson’s understanding of irreducible epistemic oppression, or Charles W. Mills’s on white ignorance. I take an important lesson from Mills on white ignorance: systemic ignorance, based on collective (selective) memory and amnesia, evolves as epistemic systems that align with the upper side of a power structure. These epistemic systems become the norm in a society, the things that are taught in schools, that function in institutions such as courts of law, councils, and governments, and that people come to believe collectively.

Such epistemic systems include false beliefs or lack of knowledge (i.e., ignored information) that is passed on from generation to generation, acquiring inertia (as per Kristie Dotson’s analysis) that generates epistemic oppression on top of material oppression. I believe the epistemic oppression that emerges in those power structures survives the change in material oppression, so that a social revolution of the Marxist kind, for instance, can leave the epistemic power structures intact.

Well, that’s still very abstract, I’m afraid! But I’m in the process of developing and articulating this idea to make it relevant to understanding the social role of logic in epistemic oppression. To be followed.

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.