WP4. Epistemic Risk, Epistemic Dependence, and Epistemic Defenselessness

A distinctive kind of epistemic risk that epistemic dependence relations may foster is the risk of epistemic defenselessness, which can in turn take different forms depending on what causes the epistemic defenseless of the epistemically dependent agent. WP4 will investigate the nature and implications of this sort of epistemic risk in connection with recent work in social and political epistemology.

Concerning its nature, the first question that WP4 will address is the question of what kinds of epistemic dependence relations are at a greater risk of giving rise to forms of epistemic defenselessness. One idea is that epistemic dependence relations that are sustained over time are in principle more liable to incur in such epistemic risks than occasional epistemic reliance (some examples of sustained epistemic dependence relations are the dependence of students upon their teachers and the general public’s dependence on mass media). In addition, epistemically dependent persons who are in a much worse epistemic position than the agents they are dependent on are plausibly more likely to become epistemic defenseless due to forms of epistemic injustice, exploitation, oppression or corruption (see §3) than people with ample epistemic resources (e.g., children, persons with intellectual disabilities and illiterate people as opposed to adults, people without disabilities, and highly educated people).

A subsequent question that will be explored is the question of what makes an epistemic dependence relation safe from the risk of becoming epistemic defenseless. One hypothesis that will be explored is that safe epistemic dependence relations are such that the agent upon whom the epistemically dependent person depends does comply with her duties of epistemic care to the latter (see below for a statement of this idea). In addition, another plausible (and compatible) hypothesis is that safe epistemic dependence relations are those that arise in socially and epistemically protective environments, i.e., environments that have been deliberately engineered to reduce the risk of epistemic defenselessness at the same time as to help the agents inhabiting them achieve their epistemic goals or favor their epistemic interests—e.g., by including well-regulated practices for monitoring and policing epistemic injustice and oppression in relations of epistemic dependence; see Goldberg (forthcoming) for a related notion of epistemically engineered environments; Goldberg (2010) for the idea of socially protective epistemic environments concerning testimonial exchanges.

Another question that WP4 will address is the question of what can epistemically dependent agents do to protect them from or, eventually, ameliorate the risk of becoming epistemically defenseless due to forms of epistemic injustice, oppression, corruption and exploitation. A related question is the question of to what extent being epistemically dependent can be considered epistemically valuable if the risk of becoming epistemically defenseless turns out to be unavoidable. An answer to these two questions will be given in close connection with José Medina’s very influential work on the epistemology of resistance (Medina 2013), which accounts for ways in which socially and epistemically oppressed people can use their epistemic resources and abilities to, in his own words, “undermine and change oppressive normative structures and the complacent cognitive-affective functioning that sustains those structures” (p. 3).

The guiding idea here will be to transpose the concept of epistemic resistance to the context of dependence relations to account for ways in which epistemically unprivileged people (i.e., people who count with limited epistemic resources) can guarantee that the relevant relations of epistemic dependence on epistemically privileged agents are free from epistemic injustice and oppression. In this way, WP4 will explore to what extent the epistemically unprivileged can use their epistemic powers for ceasing to be epistemically dependent and thus for becoming intellectually autonomous. In connection with this, a key notion that WP4 will develop is the notion of epistemic empowerment, which refers to the different factors that can facilitate that epistemically dependent subjects free themselves from pathological forms of epistemic dependence.

Also in connection with this, one key avenue for research (previously mentioned) will be that of accounting for the idea that epistemically privileged people have duties of epistemic care to the epistemically unprivileged, where the ultimate goal of these duties in the context of epistemic dependence is that of epistemically empowering the latter. The idea is that, just as we have duties of care to others (see Sander-Staudt 2011 for an overview), we have duties of epistemic care, i.e., duties with epistemic content, such as the duty to satisfy the informational needs of others or the duty to facilitate the improvement of their cognitive abilities, especially of epistemically dependent subjects. In keeping with one popular conception of duties of care in ethics (Tronto 1994), in order for one to comply with one’s duties of epistemic care one needs to be attentive, i.e., disposed to become aware of the relevant epistemic need; responsible, i.e., willing to take care of such an epistemic need; competent, i.e., reliable in providing good and successful epistemic care (e.g., one needs to update one’s information in case one is not knowledgeable of the issue the relevant epistemic need is about); and responsive, so as to prevent potential epistemic oppression and injustice that one may cause in the course of epistemic care-giving. This is but a sketch of the view, which WP4 will develop in full detail and apply to the risk of becoming epistemic defenseless in relations of epistemic dependence as well as to the risk of non- compliance with one’s epistemic duties in the context of trust (see next work package).