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Dr. Miranda Fricker (New York U, USA) “The credibility economy: Accounting for deficits and excesses”
Analysing testimonial injustice in both old and new forms, I will offer a mapping of the different kinds of wrong-making features that can be involved in a judgement of credibility. I will defend the idea that wrongful excessive credibility judgements are not intrinsic epistemic wrongs, but rather extrinsic ones. And I will revisit the merits of a virtue-based approach, both at the individual and the institutional level, never as a panacea but as an important interpersonal and structural set of counter-measures against epistemic injustices.
Dr. Amandine Catala (Universite du Quebec a Montreal, Canada) “A pluralist account of epistemic injustice and agency”
The literature on epistemic injustice currently displays a logocentric or propositional bias. This bias stems from an implicitly logocentric conception of epistemic agency, itself based on a conception of knowledge as propositional. I develop a broader, pluralist account of epistemic agency, which relies on a pluralist conception of knowledge that accounts not only for propositional knowledge, but also for non-propositional, experiential types of knowledge (such as practical, tacit, embodied, and affective knowledge) that have been largely neglected in discussions of epistemic injustice and agency, yet that have significant implications for our understanding of both. I argue that this pluralist account of epistemic agency pushes us to revisit the current conception of epistemic injustice and to expand its taxonomy to include non-propositional forms of epistemic injustice as well as meta-epistemic injustice.
Dr. Barend de Rooij (Tilburg U, Holland) “The right to explanation under conditions of epistemic injustice”
The right to explanation is the putative right of data subjects to an explanation of how and why the algorithmic decisions that affect them are made. Recognizing a right to explanation is one solution to the problem of algorithmic opacity, or the inscrutability of AI-powered decision-making algorithms that affect important aspects of our lives. Researchers are currently debating what an adequate explanation of algorithmic decisions would look like, a particularly pressing question in view of the complex machine learning algorithms that facilitate these decisions. The main aim of this paper is to situate these on-going discussions in the context of epistemic injustice.
The central argument I develop is that implementing the right to explanation risks drawing on epistemic practices that are liable to exclude, marginalize or otherwise harm certain communities of knowers. To show this, I first examine the grounds on which the right to explanation is usually defended: to enable self-advocacy, support deliberative agency, and facilitate algorithmic accountability. I then demonstrate that providing explanations with these grounds in mind involves potentially unjust epistemic practices (liable to injustices of both testimonial and hermeneutical kinds). Indeed, giving, demanding, and contesting explanations of algorithmic decisions does not occur in a vacuum, but against the background of social conditions that disadvantage some social groups in the economy of knowledge and belief. It is important to recognize this if we want to ensure equitable access to algorithmic explanations and avoid further marginalizing groups already vulnerable to exploitation and algorithmic bias.
Dr. Emmalon Davis (U of Michigan, USA), "Epistemic Branding"
Dr. Eisuke Sakakibara (UTokyo, Japan), “The oversight of implicature and implicational injustice in doctor-patient communication”
The concept of epistemic injustice provides a theoretical framework for considering the ethical issues arising in interpersonal communication. This article proposes the concept of implicational injustice as a novel type of epistemic injustice. An implicature is a message that a speaker does not explicitly state, but that is implicitly communicated by an utterance. Since the speaker does not explicitly state the implicature, it may be overlooked by the hearer. This oversight of implicature is likely to occur when the hearer prematurely terminates the search for relevance or when there is informational inequality between speaker and hearer. If premature termination or information inequality is caused by the hearer’s prejudice against the speaker or by the undue ignorance of the speaker, the oversight of implicature is deemed an implicational injustice. This article offers several examples of the oversight of implicature and implicational injustice in doctor-patient communication in which patients’ attempts to convey psychosocial messages to their physicians are often overlooked. Implicational injustice can be considered as a novel subtype of epistemic injustice that differs from other subtypes, such as silencing, testimonial injustice, and interpretative injustice. Implicational injustice prevents the sufferer’s full participation in epistemic collaboration and can inflict secondary harm, such as negative effects on clinical decision making.
Dr. Janaina Matida (IDP, Brazil & Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Chile) “Reasonable doubt and epistemic injustice: Eyewitness misidentification in the Brazilian criminal justice system”
In recent years, it can be said that the standard of proof known as “beyond a reasonable doubt” has been adopted by the Brazilian justice system. As a result, Brazilian judges have come to understand that they should convict when the accusatory hypothesis surpasses reasonable doubts. However, an analysis of cases involving misidentification evidence calls such convictions into question: how is it possible that manifestly misidentifications are considered so convincing in judges' evaluations? Even when the defense presents strong evidence, convictions persist as a result of the systematic reduction of credibility given to young, Black, marginalized individuals, sometimes combined with the excessive credibility given to eyewitnesses, or to the credibility judges attribute to police officers, or even to their own experience with criminal cases. Based on wrongful convictions overturned by the Superior Court of Justice, my presentation aims to examine to what extent the application of the beyond a reasonable doubt standard is influenced by various epistemic injustices in the Brazilian experience.
Dr. Jennifer Lackey (Northwestern U, USA)
TBA
Dr. Kathleen Murphy-Hollies (U of Birmingham, UK) "Epistemic injustice, self-knowledge and perspective"
In this talk, I consider what epistemic injustice looks like in cases where people’s testimony involves falsehoods. There are a number of reasons that this could happen, ranging from individuals having delusions to more everyday memory failures. I argue that in these cases, we can separate giving uptake to the propositional content of testimony, and giving uptake to the perspective conveyed in that testimony. This way, we avoid facing an anxiety-inducing trade-off between generously giving uptake even to questionable testimony, or being stricter with the testimony we accept but at the risk of perpetrating epistemic injustice.
I argue that it’s important to give uptake to the perspective conveyed in inaccurate testimony because, along the lines of agential accounts of self-knowledge, the important factor for the development of the self with others is reciprocal exchanges, rather than veridicality. Inaccuracies do not necessarily impede these processes.
This gives us a way to connect and give uptake to testimony which we find bizarre and almost impossible to get our heads around. By nevertheless giving uptake the perspective rather than the propositional content, which may involve paying attention to what ‘resonates’ and how delusions can be meaningful, we avoid perpetrating epistemic injustice in these cases.
Dr. Kengo Miyazono (Hokkaido U, Japan) & Karin Shimizu (Hokkaido U, Japan) “Caring for victims of epistemic injustice”
This paper discusses the importance of caring for victims of epistemic injustice and suggests possible measures for providing such care. While previous works on epistemic injustice tend to focus on preventing and correcting epistemic injustice in the future, we focus on treating the psychological and physical harms suffered by those who have already experienced epistemic injustice. We argue that there is an important analogy between epistemic injustice and complex PTSD, which suggests that PTSD treatment methods could also be applicable to victims of epistemic injustice. Additionally, we explore the potential use of chatbots and conversational AIs as part of our treatment program.
Dr. Kunimasa Sato (Ibaraki U, Japan) "Narrative Testimony and Transformative Injustice"
This presentation propounds a distinct kind of epistemic injustice that unjustly treats narrative testimony that conveys cues for narrators’ worldviews. Fricker’s distinction between testimonial and hermeneutical injustice provides little rhetorical space for epistemic injustice against testimony that conveys narrators’ worldviews—perspectives, aspect-taking, and narrative scheme—that call for listeners’ interpretations in entertaining it. In this paper, I argue that narrative injustice occurs when narrators’ worldviews are unduly discounted, omitted, or improperly distorted. First, I demonstrate that narrative testimony cues narrators’ worldviews that reflect their understanding of lived realities and can be good evidence for them, whereas it serves only as contested evidence in support of the narrator’s given claim. Second, I suggest that narrative injustice consists of the thwarting of worldview sharing. Third, it primarily stems from credibility deficit due to collective identity prejudices against narrators’ social identities and from unintelligibility due to the pervasiveness of master narratives in public discourse, which results in the marginalization of the narrative testimony of those in socially powerless positions. Fourth, it can compromise agents’ potential to flourish as narrators and result in their episodic memories being distrusted and their capacity to refine their worldview being denied.
Dr. Masashi Kasaki (Nagoya U) “Translation and epistemic injustice”
There are reasons for which translation is important for various forms of epistemic injustice: (a) various forms of epistemic injustice arise in inter-linguistic (and inter-cultural) contexts in which translators
are necessarily involved; (b) Translators play at least dual roles in translating: understanding and interpreting a text written in the source language, and rendering their understanding in the target
language. In playing these dual roles, translators may sustain and even exacerbate some form of epistemic injustice, whereas they may have potential to rectify or alleviate some other form of epistemic
injustice; and in addition, (c) translators are particularly vulnerable to certain forms of epistemic injustice. There is a vast and growing literature on translation ethics where justice/injustice is one of the prominent topics. With the help of that literature, I, in this talk, aim at achieving two things: (i) articulating the forms
of epistemic injustice to which translators qua translators are vulnerable, and (ii) presenting two case studies to illustrate how Japanese translations of English words or texts alleviate or exacerbate certain forms of epistemic injustice in concrete socio-cultural contexts.
Dr. Mary Gregg (Yonsei U, Korea) “The help of oppressive jokes and the harm of acclamatory jokes: a matter of epistemic standpoint?”
In humor ethics, efforts have been made to classify the morally wrong and morally permissible, and morally acclamatory jokes by some set of criteria (Gaut (1998); Cohen (2001); Smuts (2010); Morreall (2009). One problem, however, is that many of jokes classed by these theorists as morally permissible can perpetuate serious harms (Luvell 2020: 5), while others classed as morally impermissible or morally wrong can and have been be used in ways which empower the very groups they were created to oppress (Gregg 2023). So what criteria might we use to more accurately capture the harm and help of these jokes, given that much of the existing conceptual framework in humor ethics fails to do so?
Dr. Rie Iizuka (Hiroshima U, Japan) “Epistemic injustice and standpoint epistemology”
Epistemic injustice and standpoint epistemology share significant commonalities, yet research directly connecting the two has been limited (Tuana, 2017). This paper argues that standpoint epistemology provides valuable tools for a nuanced understanding of epistemic injustice. Tanesini (2019) identifies three central claims in standpoint epistemology: the situated knowledge thesis, which posits that knowledge claims are rooted in social positions; the standpoint thesis, which suggests certain perspectives are epistemically privileged due to their less biased understanding; and the inversion thesis, which argues that the perspectives of socially subordinate groups can be epistemically privileged over those of dominant groups.
The situated knowledge thesis has two interpretations. If interpreted as suggesting that individuals in similar social roles develop similar cognitive skills and perspectives, it aligns with naturalized epistemology, implying that marginalized individuals may have more reliable perspectives on societal aspects. Alternatively, if seen as a matter of shared objective concerns, a standpoint becomes a set of theories and skills useful to a specific group, aligning with critical theory by offering a deeper understanding of power relations in unequal societies.
This paper examines which interpretation of the situated knowledge thesis is relevant to epistemic injustice. Fricker's (2007) analysis of testimonial injustice supports the first interpretation, while her analysis of hermeneutical injustice aligns with the second. By introducing these interpretations, I argue that they can counter relativistic criticisms of epistemic injustice and advocate for closer integration of research on standpoint epistemology and epistemic injustice.
Dr. Rima Basu (Claremont McKenna U, USA) “Ignorance as epistemic etiquette”
To call someone ignorant is to insult them. Much of the philosophical literature on ignorance has focused on its harms. For example, as Charles Mills's has influentially argued, white ignorance can act as a cognitive handicap that prevents those most privileged from seeing the world as it actually is. Where ignorance has been defended as good, it has been the strategic deployment of ignorance to benefit those disadvantaged by such systems. However, in these accounts, ignorance itself is still considered bad, even though it can be strategically used for beneficial purposes. In this paper, I argue that there are morally laudable cases of ignorance in and of itself. Specifically, I argue that ignorance is a virtue that protects from the vice of overcuriosity. For example, ignoring some gossip about a stranger on a train or a stain on a colleague's shirt just seems polite. Ignorance, or simply minding our own business, can often function as a form of epistemic etiquette to communicate respect for others. However, complications arise in determining the limits of this form of etiquette, as many examples of hermeneutical injustice rely on the disadvantaged not questioning the status quo, not being curious, or, to put it simply, being polite. As an upshot, however, an answer to that question offers a path to answering the more general question of when ignorance is permissible and when it is not.
Dr. Yuko Murakami (Rikkyo U, Japan) "Epistemic injustice and algorithmic bias"
This paper aims to expand epistemic injustice to apply to ethical and societal issues in data science, where biased outputs of information systems can perpetuate and reinforce discrimination. It also examines testimonial and hermeneutical injustice in cyberspace, emphasizing the incomplete and biased representation of real-world data in digital systems. Addressing these biases is crucial for fairer and inclusive applications of data-driven artificial intelligence.
In the realm of artificial intelligence and data science, so-called “algorithmic biases” pose a significant challenge. These biases, often stemming from the data used to train algorithms, can lead to discriminatory outcomes in various domains in everyday life. Such biases can reinforce existing inequalities and further marginalize vulnerable populations. Researchers and developers are often unaware what may happen after their products leave their hands; they just try optimizations with respect to demands and interests of their evaluators who may or may not be ethical nor fair.
Furthermore, the paper highlights how cyberspace, often seen as a reflection of the real world, can reinforce epistemic injustice. The representation of knowledge in cyberspace is not always accurate or complete; some perspectives may be excluded or misrepresented. For example, languages of online contents are unevenly distributed: English is used by 49.7% of all the websites whose content language is automatically recognized as of August 4, 2024. Only 38 languages are listed among more than 7000 living languages; No extinct languages are considered. This can lead to testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice. Conceptual extension of epistemic injustice to cyberspace will shed a light on a way toward an inclusive world, already inseparable from information systems.
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