Content area
Full Text
I cannot recall the words of my first poem
but I remember a promise
I made my pen
never to leave it
lying
in somebody else's blood.
Audre Lorde, "To the Poet Who Happens to Be Black and the Black Poet Wlio Happens to Be a Woman"1
INTRODUCTION
In this paper, first and foremost, I aim to issue a caution. Specifically, I caution that when addressing and identifying forms of epistemic oppression one needs to endeavor not to perpetuate epistemic oppression. Epistemic oppression, here, refers to epistemic exclusions afforded positions and communities that produce deficiencies in social knowledge. An epistemic exclusion, in this analysis, is an infringement on the epistemic agency of knowers that reduces her or his ability to participate in a given epistemic community.2 Epistemic agency will concern the ability to utilize persuasively shared epistemic resources within a given epistemic community in order to participate in knowledge production and, if required, the revision of those same resources.3 A compromise to epistemic agency, when unwarranted, damages not. only individual knowers but also the state of social knowledge and shared epistemic resources.
Unfortunately, avoiding unwarranted epistemic exclusions is an exceedingly difficult task. It may well be impossible. For example, we simply do not have the capacity to track all the implications of our positions on any given issue, which would, arguably, be necessary to avoid epistemic oppression entirely. This realization relegates efforts to be conscious of and minimize epistemic oppression to a kind of naïveté characteristic of Utopian dreamers who advocate pie-in-the-sky goals achievable only in theory. Like many forms of pessimism, pessimism about epistemic fairness assumes an all-or-nothing stance. Either we can eliminate epistemic oppression entirely, or we can do nothing about epistemic oppression at all. This position is an obvious oversimplification of the many options available. One can advocate for better, more responsible epistemic conduct capable of reducing epistemic oppression, without also harboring unrealistic expectations for superior epistemic conduct and abilities necessary for eliminating epistemic oppression entirely. In this vein here I issue a caution and a proposal for minimizing epistemic oppression.
To issue this caution, I take Miranda Fricker's book Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing as a paradigmatic case of the challenges that arise when attempting to avoid epistemic...