Precursor to C.T. Nguyen in Epistemic Ethics?!? Reading Miranda Fricker's Epistemic Injustice
In exchanges of knowledge between a teacher and a listener, we ordinarily place a sense of epistemic responsibility on the teacher. As someone who understands or holds some form of knowledge about a subject, they have a responsibility to convey that knowledge truthfully to their listener. If they fail to do so, they may be negligently misleading, or intentionally deceiving at worst.
In her article “Epistemic Injustice and A Role for Virtue in the Politics of Knowing,” Miranda Fricker suggests that the listener, or “hearer,” also has a responsibility in an exchange of knowledge through testimony. Unpacking how a hearer may come to trust the testimony given by a teacher, Fricker suggests that hearers must develop a form of testimonial sensibility, governed by virtue of “reflexive critical openness” to others. Fricker introduces virtue ethics in order to capture the unreflective phenomenology of being a hearer. When we listen to others, we often take their word as true, absent of reflection, unless reasons for doubting are introduced. Hence, our initial openness to others prior to reasons for doubting can be encapsulated by a virtue of “reflexive critical openness,” since we are both open to unreflective listening but also in a critical position where we are vigilant of reasons for doubting.
Fricker then suggests that we may have different scales for our reflexive critical openness when interacting with different people: different epistemic sensibilities for different individuals. In institutional structures, for example, we may be predisposed to greater openness when listening to our boss or a consultant. In contrast, we may be predisposed to less openness when listening to an office intern. Problems of epistemic injustice arise when our epistemic sensibilities for certain groups may be unfairly predisposed in certain ways, due to culture, upbringing, or simple prejudice.
Interestingly, Fricker’s epistemic injustice can occur in two directions: someone may receive less credibility than they deserve, or alternatively, someone may receive more credibility than they deserve. What I find interesting is one of Fricker’s ideas for how epistemic prejudice can be broken: through “critical reflection on the part of the hearer.” The example that Fricker brings up is a teenager who may hold an epistemic prejudice against the word of elderly adults, but who reflects and changes his sensibilities after hearing a profound war story from his grandfather. It’s hard to specify what conditions should specifically entail critical reflection of one’s own epistemic sensibilities: these conditions themselves could end up prejudiced if we are not careful. However, I find it reasonable to argue that we could benefit if we all lowered the bar for critical reflection of our own epistemic sensibilities. That in all situations, we made it more common for critical reflection.
So, the question becomes, how could we practically encourage people to engage in further critical reflection of their epistemic sensibilities? I think that K12 education is a good starting point. A K12 curriculum that emphasizes a greater range of perspectives and (this is often forgotten) intentionally emphasizes ambiguity/non-objectivity in the humanities can help us lower the bar for critical reflection.
Furthermore, popular media can be leveraged as a tool. In modern stories, the ethicality of prejudice is often binary. People are either unprejudiced and good, or they are prejudiced and bad. This is actually problematic because it discourages active reflection and admittance of prejudiced epistemic sensibilities. People don’t wish to imagine themselves as evil. If popular media, movies, books, and shows emphasized prejudice as something normal, that we are all slightly prejudiced in different ways that we cannot control due to our identities and backgrounds (something I find to be convincing), then there may be less stigma around admitting prejudice and people may be more willing to engage in active critical reflection of their own ethical sensibilities.
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