Project Summary
Epistemic and speech injustices are garnering increasing attention in the specialized literature of social epistemology and political philosophy of language. These issues not only stand as important subjects within political and practical philosophy but also provide an illuminating context to explore more classic philosophical questions, such as the nature of knowledge and the prerequisites for specific speech acts. This project’s primary goal is to offer novel insights that deepen our comprehension of these injustices. It will also establish a structured classification of the various epistemic and linguistic elements exhibited across different phenomena falling under the broad category of “epistemic and speech injustices”, and explore their presence in different areas, such as mental health and the domains of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).
ESPEECHI is organized into two primary modules,. The first module delves into the nature of epistemic and speech injustices, while the second one ventures into domains where these injustices are more recently explored.
Module 1: The Nature of Epistemic and Speech Injustices
The primary objective of this module is to delve into the nature of epistemic and speech injustices. Testimonial and hermeneutical injustices, which have received a large amount of attention in recent literature, have traditionally been analyzed as forms of epistemic injustices (Fricker 2007). These are situations where a person is harmed in their capacity as a knower, i.e., their ability to share and produce knowledge (Fricker 2007, 1). However, both types of injustice also have a clear linguistic dimension: the first one depends on the low credibility a person receives after uttering a certain string of words, and the second one occurs when the victim lacks sufficient conceptual tools to understand and explain their experiences. On the other hand, situations of discursive injustice and silencing have been approached almost exclusively from a linguistic standpoint (Kukla 2014; Langton 1993), but these situations, different from testimonial and hermeneutical injustices, also entail an epistemological limitation for the individuals involved. Moreover, recent years have witnessed the emergence of new phenomena related to these injustices, including contributory injustice (Dotson 2012), conceptual competence injustice (Anderson 2017), content-focused injustice (Dembroff & Whitcomb 2022), epistemic appropriation (Davis 2018), affective injustice (Srinivasan 2017; Archer & Mills 2020) and cognitive injustice (Andrada & Menary manuscript), among others. Can we draw clear distinctions between epistemic and speech injustices? What kinds of phenomena fall under each category? How do they interrelate? Do we lose or gain anything by analyzing these phenomena from separate perspectives? What is the connection of these injustices to other related phenomena like offensive speech and disagreements? In the first module, we will attempt to chart a categorization of these phenomena that helps us answer these questions.
Submodule 1.1: Epistemic Injustices
The analysis of epistemic injustices raises certain puzzles. On one hand, these injustices, especially testimonial injustices, critically depend on the hearer’s biases and stereotypes towards people from historically disadvantaged groups in terms of social power. But are these biases and stereotypes better understood in individualistic terms, as Fricker suggests, or are they rather the result of discriminatory social practices and structures? Would these injustices disappear if we “cleanse” individuals’ minds, or would they persist if our practices remain the same? Would our social practices change if we change ourselves? Do changes in our practices contribute to shaping our individual mental states? On the other hand, what are the exact conditions that allow us to say that an epistemic injustice has occurred? Can the hearer, and not just the speaker, be epistemically harmed in one of these situations? Does a person suffer an epistemic injustice if, after receiving a credibility deficit, keep believing what they believed before being disbelieved? What is the relationship between having knowledge and being ascribed knowledge? In order to tackle these questions, we would like to explore the working hypothesis that social structures and practices are especially relevant to account for, and intervene in cases of, epistemic injustices: the norms conforming our practices as a society strongly constrain what we are able to know (Ayala 2016, 2018).
Within this module, we will also analyze the relationship between epistemic injustices and a sort of disagreement called “deep disagreement”. This term was coined by Robert Fogelin (1985), and refers to situations of disagreement where the parties involved not only disagree over the truth-value of a given proposition, but also over the (epistemic, moral, aesthetic or normative) standard that they should adopt to resolve the dispute. Only recently the relationship between both phenomena has been addressed. It seems that when someone unfairly assigns less credibility to a speaker than they deserve, and this happens in a situation of disagreement, the disagreement might more easily become a deep one (Lagewaard 2021). This raises several questions. Can deep disagreements contribute to making epistemic injustices more common? Exactly which types of epistemic injustices? What can we learn from one of these phenomena by analyzing the other? A proposal we would like to explore goes precisely in the opposite direction suggested by Lagewaard. We wonder whether deep disagreements could help alleviate epistemic injustice. If we accept that our standards are not already construed every time we enter a discussion and, instead, we assume that they are built and shaped through our particular judgments (Kinzel & Kusch 2018), then discussing with those who have different worldviews could provide useful friction to start seeing things from a different angle (Medina 2013). If this were the case, under what conditions could a situation of deep disagreement lead us to a state of epistemic perplexity and genealogical anxiety, allowing us to reduce epistemic injustices? We will explore this route in this submodule.
Submodule 1.2: Speech Injustices
“Speech injustices” is the label we use in this project to refer to certain injustices that occur specifically at the linguistic level, and to highlight the linguistic dimension of other already mentioned injustices, such as testimonial and hermeneutical injustices. Speech injustices have typically been analyzed from speech act theories, as fails at the illocutionary level. Some of the more recent discussions have revolved around the conception of “uptake” to account for these cases of injustice and whether the speaker’s communicative intention is sufficient to determine the speech act at play or, on the contrary, we need to take into account the interaction between speaker and hearer (Wyatt 2009, 139). In this sub-module, besides addressing these debates, we would like to explore others that have received less attention. Specifically, we would like to explore, on the one hand, the role played by different contextual factors in determining the meaning conveyed through our words (Almagro, Hannikainen & Villanueva 2022), especially in public contexts where the audience is indeterminate in variety and size. What factors, and to what extent, exert an effect in the determination of the meaning conveyed through our words? On the other hand, we would like to take a step back and explore alternative approaches from the philosophy of language to address cases of speech injustices. Are there alternatives to speech act theory to better account for these situations? Do other semantic and metasemantic proposals, like Allan Gibbard’s Expressivism (Gibbard 2003) or John MacFarlane’s Relativism (2014), offer any additional advantages? How could this approach be complemented with a proposal from formal semantics?
To address the aforementioned question, we will pay attention to an additional phenomenon closely related to speech injustices: linguistic offensiveness. Why does the utterance of a sentence sometimes count merely as a way of providing information on a matter, and in other cases, the utterance of the same sentence counts as a way of being offensive? Intentionalist speech act theories tend to relegate the offensiveness of language to the perlocutionary level, i.e., to the effect produced by our words in the hearer (O’Driscoll 2020). However, we have the intuition that in many cases, a particular statement is offensive even if the audience does not get offended and the speaker did not have the intention to offend. Can speech act theory adequately accommodate these cases? Could these theories include some aspects of offensiveness at the illocutionary level? Exploring these issues from the perspective of offensiveness can shed light on the question of speech injustices. The working hypothesis we want to explore here is that offensiveness and various speech injustices are two sides of the same coin: both are the result of the same type of normativity, with the caveat that in the case of injustices, they result from correctly following unjust norms. Other semantic and metasemantic proposals, different form speech act theory, could do the work here, avoiding certain risks such as ending blaming the victim in cases of offensive speech.
Module 1’s Working Hypotheses
- Social structures and practices are especially relevant to account for, and intervene in, cases of epistemic and speech injustices.
- Deep disagreements could be helpful in alleviating epistemic and speech injustices.
- There are alternative approaches to speech act theory that can address and account better for speech injustice cases.
- Offensiveness and certain speech injustices are two sides of the same coin if approached from a certain view on normativity.
Module 2: Epistemic and Speech Injustices: Exploring New Territories
One of the features that makes research on epistemic and speech injustices so complex and, at the same time, so interesting is not only that all of them may have both an epistemic and linguistic dimension, but also that they can be found in various domains, helping to uncover certain unjust practices that had previously gone unnoticed, but also to understand better the very phenomena at stake. In this project we will explore the presence of these types of injustices in two particular contexts: mental health (Kidd, Spencer & Carel 2022), and STEM domains (Grasswick 2017; Rittberg et al. 2020). The reason why Wittgenstein explored the issue of rule-following in his Philosophical Investigations in both mathematics and inner sensations is that both domains appear to be the least likely to be influenced by social norms –although for different reasons. It is a common intuition that mathematics is objective and entirely independent of social changes, and that no one but oneself can know their own sensations in a private manner. Following a similar line of reasoning of Wittgenstein’s motivation, we will explore the presence of epistemic and speech injustices in mental health and STEM domains because they can serve as a good testing ground for the structural hypothesis we want to explore in this project. Moreover, these domains have only started to be studied very recently and are related to significant social issues: the stigma of mental illness and gender and class inequality in certain areas of knowledge.
Submodule 2.1: Mental Health
Different epistemic injustices, especially testimonial and hermeneutical injustices, have been recently discussed in healthcare and mental health contexts (see Kidd, Spencer & Carel 2022 for a recent review). However, both other types of epistemic injustice and different speech injustice situations have been less explored in this context. In this submodule, we
would like to fill this gap in the literature. Exploring the specificities of these injustices in the psychiatric context can help us, on the one hand, better understand these injustices. Are people with mental health problems simply more vulnerable to experiencing this type of injustice, or can they also experience them in different ways? Do these cases merely represent the materialization of the same phenomena but in a particular context, or do they, on the contrary, constitute a special type of injustice?
On the other hand, exploring the relationship between epistemic and discursive injustices in the psychiatric context can shed light on more classical issues in philosophy of mind. What exactly is a mental illness? Do we have first-person authority? Is this authority epistemic or semantic? Is sincerity sufficient to take as true any mental self-attribution? We will explore the idea that the psychiatric context, given its implications, has specific particularities that, although they can help us better understand these phenomena, the conclusions and policies derived from research within this context cannot be generalized and extrapolated to any other context. For instance, the criteria for assigning first-person authority in legal contexts may substantially differ.
Submodule 2.2: Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics
Many countries exhibit a gender, ethnicity and race gap in several areas of knowledge, like Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics (STEM), but also Philosophy (Torres 2020). These gaps are present even in the countries with the highest levels of gender equality and social security, giving rise to a “strange paradox”, as some scholars have described it (Gunderson et al. 2011; Sanandaji, 2016; Stoet and Geary 2018). But what are the causes of these kinds of gaps? The idea that people have different inherent abilities and interests by virtue of their gender, ethnicity or race is often provided as a reason to explain this phenomenon: gaps are the result of the opportunities to take academic alternatives based on their interests and strengths. Others, however, think that a main cause for these gaps is that disadvantaged groups are more exposed to two psychological phenomena: stereotype threat and implicit biases. In this submodule we will explore the idea that appealing to subjective interests to explain these gaps is misleading and harmful, in part because it hides some discriminatory practices and institutional structures that contribute to these under representations (Haslanger 2016). To do so, we will explore the presence of epistemic and speech injustices in STEM contexts.
What are exactly the stereotypes that foster these injustices in STEM contexts? Which practices contribute to the underrepresentation of certain groups in these fields of knowledge? Do the various phenomena falling under the scope of the expression “epistemic and speech injustices,” differentiated in the first part of this project, occur equally in this context? How do these injustices contribute to the aforementioned gaps? In this final section of the project, we will address these questions, aiming to clarify whether, as in the case of mental health, the type of injustice that occurs in the STEM context exhibits distinctive features and requirements.
Module 2’s Working Hypotheses
- The psychiatric context, given its implications, has specific particularities that, although they can help us better understand epistemic and speech injustices, the conclusions and policies derived from research within this context cannot be generalized and extrapolated to other contexts.
- Appealing to subjective interests to explain gender and race gaps in STEM is misleading and harmful, because it hides some discriminatory practices and institutional structures, which foster epistemic and speech injustice situations, that contribute to these gaps.