Vice Epistemology

One of the areas in which this recent uptake of interest in the non-ideal manifests itself is in the field of character-based, or ‘responsibilist’, virtue epistemology. The defining feature of virtue epistemology is its focus on the evaluation of epistemic agents, and specifically the exploration of what qualities make someone an excellent or deficient epistemic agent.Footnote ² For much of its recent history, however, virtue epistemologists have focussed more or less exclusively on the epistemic virtues themselves, traits like open-mindedness, intellectual humility, conscientiousness, and diligence.Footnote ³ It is only in the past few years that sustained attention has been turned towards the (arguably more common) intellectual vices, traits like arrogance, dogmatism, negligence, and intellectual rigidity.Footnote ⁴

The study of the intellectual vices specifically, what Quassim Cassam has referred to as ‘vice epistemology’, raises questions including what is it that makes a character trait intellectually vicious, what are the nature and effects of specific vices, and how do the intellectual vices relate to the intellectual virtues.Footnote ⁵ Two contributions to this volume engage directly with such issues. Heather Battaly's ‘Can Closed-Mindedness be an Intellectual Virtue?’ does so by raising the intriguing possibility that closed-mindedness, seemingly a paradigmatic vice that represents a ‘popular favourite’ for vice epistemologists,Footnote ⁶ might on occasion count as an intellectual virtue. Building upon an account of closed-mindedness as an ‘unwillingness or inability to engage seriously with relevant intellectual options’,Footnote ⁷ Battaly identifies three different conceptions of intellectual vice: effects-vice, responsibilist-vice, and personalist-vice. Focusing specifically on effects-vices, according to which traits are vicious ‘whenever they produce a preponderance of bad epistemic effects (or fail to produce a preponderance of good epistemic effects)’,Footnote ⁸ Battaly then illustrates how, in the normal case, closed-mindedness does generally meet this criterion. However, she goes on to note certain cases where acts of closed-mindedness might count as virtuous on account of the effects they produce, before drawing the still more provocative conclusion that, in epistemically hostile environments, the disposition to be closed-minded might count as virtuous. She ends by noting that, despite the apparent hostility of aspects of our present epistemic environment, we should be wary about using this argument to justify closed-mindedness in the actual world.

A different set of vices underpin Alessandra Tanesini's discussion in ‘Caring for Esteem and Intellectual Reputation: Some Epistemic Benefits and Harms’, though again the question of when a certain trait or quality counts as virtuous and when it counts as vicious serves as a major theme. The central notion of her discussion is esteem, which she characterises as ‘a positive or negative attitude, directed at a person, group or institution for their good or bad qualities’.Footnote ⁹ After providing some initial discussion of esteem and the related notions of reputation and admiration, Tanesini goes on to argue that it is epistemically valuable: it both helps us make ‘reasoned judgements about who to trust' in situations where we are relying on the expertise of others,Footnote ¹⁰ and can also be helpful in acquiring knowledge of one's own good qualities. Moreover, she goes on to argue that desiring esteem provides an incentive to raise performance, and that, as a consequence, esteem can be virtuously pursued. Not all desires for esteem are virtuous, however, and the final sections of Tanesini's paper explore two familiar vices of esteem: intellectual vanity and intellectual timidity.

Epistemic Injustice

In the last few decades, the topic of epistemic oppression has attracted significant philosophical attention. Drawing on previous work on various dimensions of oppressive power relations in feminist, anti-racist, post-colonial, Marxist, and other theoretical frames and activist movements, theorists have identified epistemic oppression as involving ‘persistent epistemic exclusion that hinders one's contribution to knowledge production…an unwarranted infringement on the epistemic agency of knowers’.Footnote ¹¹ One significant form of epistemic oppression discussed in several contributions to this volume is epistemic injustice. Footnote ¹² This term was coined by Miranda Fricker to describe a type of ‘wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower’.Footnote ¹³ Fricker describes two types of epistemic injustice. Testimonial injustice occurs where a speaker's testimony is understood but the hearer unfairly downgrades her credibility because of a prejudice against the speaker's social identity, wronging her in her capacity as a giver of knowledge.Footnote ¹⁴ Hermeneutical injustice occurs where a widespread absence of shared interpretive tools makes it difficult for the speaker's social experience to be understood in the first place, either by the hearer or even by the speaker herself, wronging her in her capacity as a giver or producer of knowledge.Footnote ¹⁵ Numerous other forms of epistemic injustice have been identified in connection with, for example, wilful ignorance of marginalised groups’ hermeneutical resources, the distribution of epistemic goods, and the undermining of one's ability to participate in inquiry.Footnote ¹⁶ There has also been some significant work applying various concepts of epistemic injustice to concrete cases, such as educational justice, rape and domestic abuse myths, and healthcare practices concerning intersex patients.Footnote ¹⁷

The usual focus in the epistemic injustice literature is on ways we can be wronged in our capacity as givers and producers of knowledge. In her contribution, ‘Understanding Epistemic Trust Injustices and Their Harms’, Heidi Grasswick inverts this approach, focussing instead on wrongs experienced in one's capacity as a receiver of knowledge. In the process, she identifies a new class of epistemic injustices: epistemic trust injustices. She concentrates in particular on the ways in which epistemic trust injustices arise in interactions between expert and lay communities, especially between scientists and marginalised social groups. As Grasswick argues, ‘scientific knowledge is an especially important case to examine with respect to epistemic injustices… it is a dominant and powerful form of knowing in contemporary society, with deep significance for the structure of our social and material lives’.Footnote ¹⁸ Given the importance of scientific knowledge, and the division of intellectual labour that specialised knowledge production entails, relationships of epistemic trust are essential. In order to trust responsibly, we must exercise our epistemic agency by judging which speakers and which groups of putative experts deserve our trust. Doing so with regard to scientific communities, Grasswick argues, involves not just identifying their ability to provide us with significant knowledge, but also whether they sincerely care for our interests in producing and sharing their knowledge. Epistemic trust injustices arise when it is impossible to responsibly place one's trust in scientific experts on account of their having historically failed to meet the conditions of trust vis-à-vis one's social group, as is often the case for those in marginalised communities. As Grasswick shows, this harms the subjects of epistemic trust injustices in their capacity as receivers of knowledge, and produces a negative feedback loop where similar injustices recur because lay communities disengage from expert inquiry altogether. Grasswick closes with a few suggestions for addressing epistemic trust injustices by repairing expert–lay relations and increasing the participation of marginalized communities in scientific inquiry.

Alison Bailey's ‘On Anger, Silence, and Epistemic Injustice’ uses feminist theory, particularly work on epistemic oppression by feminists of colour, to explore the place and role of anger in epistemic injustice. Starting from the observation that ‘anger is the emotion of injustice’,Footnote ¹⁹ Bailey sketches the ways in which epistemic oppression provokes anger, how mechanisms similar to those that silence and dismiss marginalised speakers’ testimony also work to cool and dismiss their anger, and how holding on to one's anger in the face of injustice is an important and useful tool for resisting oppression. In the process, she introduces a variety of vivid concepts and distinctions, such as María Lugones's distinction between anger that is hard-to-handle because it is heavy – frustrating and exhausting in the face of repeated failures to be taken seriously – and anger that is hard-to-handle because it is rebellious – disorderly because directed against existing social and epistemic structures that make it difficult to be taken seriously in the first place.Footnote ²⁰ Other distinctions are Bailey's own, such as the difference between two ways in which the anger of oppressed people is managed: tone policing, which identifies moments of anger and silences them as irrational or improper, and tone vigilance, which looks for anger before it is even expressed on the basis of the speaker's social identity. Bailey stitches together these distinctions – what she calls different ‘textures’ of anger – to give a multifaceted picture of knowing resistant anger, a kind of righteous anger directed against oppression on the basis of one's knowledge of one's own social experience, despite persistent obstacles to having both one's knowledge and one's anger taken seriously within dominant interpretive frames.

Inter-Personal Epistemic Practices

One of the key insights that motivated the turn towards theorising the social dimensions of epistemology was the significance of familiar inter-personal interactions, communications, and exchanges for our epistemic lives and conduct. What is striking about the early analytic work in this area, however, is the extent to which discussion of our socio-epistemic practices initially focussed (and, to some extent, still focusses) upon the internal mental states of the agents involved in such interactions, and how little it explores the ways in which those interactions actually play out within public and social spaces. The literature on disagreement, for instance, has primarily concerned the question of how, and if, epistemic agents should revise their beliefs and other doxastic states in the face of disagreement.Footnote ²¹ Similarly, much of the work on testimony has focussed upon theorising the conditions and mechanisms by which knowledge or warranted belief can be acquired via the testimony of others.Footnote ²² Yet, if we are to fully appreciate the ways in which our social-epistemic practices not only benefit but also disadvantage (and even harm) those involved, then we need to pay attention to the fact that these practices do not occur in the cold calm of the perfect epistemic agent's mind. Rather, they occur ‘out in the open’: in public, social, sometimes vexed, and often complicated interactions and exchanges between people.

The three contributions to this section of the volume can all be seen as contributing to a reorientation of social epistemology to more avowedly grapple with the interpersonal aspects of epistemic practice in the ways just outlined. Casey Rebecca Johnson, in ‘Just Say “No!”: Obligations to Voice Disagreement’, does so by bringing new focus to the debate on disagreement. Departing from the conventional approach to discussing disagreement, Johnson asks not what the individual's doxastic response to discovering disagreement should be, but what she should do in the public and social space in which she realises that disagreement. Is it permissible, in the face of disagreement, to stay quiet and keep her opinions to herself? Or, is she obliged to make her opinions a matter of public record? Johnson argues the case for the latter. Not only are we obliged to make it known that we disagree with others, but often we are epistemically obliged to do so. Drawing on David Lewis's conception of the ‘conversational scoreboard’, Johnson argues that, when in a situation of disagreement, one must express content that at least ‘appears to be’ incompatible with what one took to be objectionable; and, crucially, one must make that sentiment of disagreement clear to at least some of the other participants in the original conversation. Importantly, Johnson explains, the obligation to make one's dissent public in this way is defeasible and can be overridden by prudential and moral considerations, as well as epistemic ones. In the final section of the paper, Johnson considers four potential sources for this obligation: epistemic well-being; the nature of inquiry; commitments to joint action; and the nature of doxastic justification.Footnote ²³

Olivia Bailey turns our attention towards another fundamental epistemic practice – testimony – in her contribution ‘On Empathy and Testimonial Trust’. Bailey's focus is upon testimonial exchanges that involve speakers who belong to one or more oppressed groups. By drawing out the complex relationship between empathy and trust in these cases, Bailey reveals the importance of theorising testimony in terms of the personal and social dynamics between recipient and speaker, not only its narrow epistemic function of transferring knowledge and warranted belief. Empathy, in the sense that interests Bailey, is a ‘form of emotionally-charged imaginative perspective-taking’.Footnote ²⁴ It is a way to understand the world as others experience it, to ‘walk a mile in their shoes’, as the idiom goes. ‘Testimonial trust’, as Bailey understands it, is a robustly interpersonal stance whereby one comes to believe the content of another's testimony at their word, without independently verifying that what they say is true. In the first half of the paper, Bailey explores the ways in which empathy can support testimonial trust by providing evidence as to the speaker's epistemic competence, particularly in cases that involve what Bailey calls ‘testimony about experience’. This support represents a clear upshot to empathy's role in testimony. In the second half of the chapter, however, Bailey carefully draws out the darker side to the relationship between empathy and testimonial trust. In cases where a speaker belongs to one or more oppressed groups, Bailey explains, an unwavering or incautious reliance on empathy can lead to a double failure on the part of the recipient of testimony: firstly, to recognise the limitations of their epistemic perspective and imaginative capacities; and secondly, to respect the personal and moral significance of the speaker's investment in the testimonial exchange. With this in mind, Bailey lays out the case that – for all of the benefits of empathy – it can sometimes be morally and epistemically responsible to ‘trust without empathy’.Footnote ²⁵

In a departure from the previous two chapters' focus on the core socio-epistemic practices of testimony and disagreement, Miranda Fricker's ‘Ambivalence About Forgiveness’ explores the epistemic functions, and possible degradations, of two inter-personal moral practices: blame and forgiveness. Fricker explains that blame and other mechanisms of moral accountability have a social constructive power that functions proleptically. By treating a wrongdoer as if she already shares one's moral outlook, in other words, one can thereby effect a change in the wrongdoer's moral understanding such that she comes to share one's outlook. But, at the same time, blame can degenerate into moral-epistemic domination, where the blamer shuts down the possibility of dialogue over the nature of the wrong committed, brow-beating the blamee into accepting the blamer's outlook. Similarly, forgiveness – particularly the form Fricker calls ‘gifted forgiveness’, where the wronged party lets go of her feelings of resentment without any redemptive change on the part of the wrongdoer – can also bring about a change in the wrongdoer's moral understanding by treating her as if she already shares the forgiver's outlook. Again, this proleptic mechanism has the potential for abuse. A gift of forgiveness can shut down the alleged wrongdoer's ability to contest or question the nature of the harm, pre-empting moral dialogue and twisting the forgiven person into acquiescing to the forgiver's outlook. The potential for moral-epistemic domination is heightened when the forgiver and forgiven are on either side of an imbalance of social power, further undermining the forgiven person's ability to challenge the forgiver's moral understanding. Forgiveness can also mask or smuggle in feelings of blame, short-circuiting the normal processes by which such resentment is communicated and forsworn.

Applied Epistemology

Once one scratches beneath the surface, one often finds the distinction between applied and non-applied philosophy (or, certainly, applied and ‘theoretical’ philosophy) to be a fairly spurious one. That is certainly the case for this volume, in which each of the papers included explores some recognisable way in which our epistemic lives, as individuals and as communities, malfunction or go wrong. Our choosing to demarcate a number of the papers specifically as applied epistemology should therefore be taken with more than a pinch of salt. Nonetheless, we do so because each of these papers contributes to a particular recent trend within epistemology: the bringing of epistemological insights to bear on important and detailed case studies. This has seen epistemologists turn their attention towards an increasingly diverse array of issues, including the use of the internet,Footnote ²⁶ the nature of fake news,Footnote ²⁷ and the epistemic standards of Anglo-American legal systems.Footnote ²⁸ The three papers of this section each undertake a similarly insightful applied analysis.Footnote ²⁹

The section opens with Quassim Cassam's paper ‘The Epistemology of Terrorism and Radicalisation’, which explores some of the epistemic practices in operation within counter-terrorism theory and practice. Specifically, he considers two popular answers to the question, ‘what leads a person to turn to political violence?’:Footnote ³⁰ the Rational Agent Model (RAM), according to which terrorists are rational agents who turn to violence as a means for pursuing their political ends; and the Radicalisation Model (RAD), according to which people turn to political violence because they have been radicalised. Both views, Cassam argues, are flawed. RAM, although of some value, is unable to explain cases where terrorism is inefficacious and it is patently irrational to believe that it could have been otherwise. RAD, more seriously, faces significant theoretical difficulties about what it means to be ‘vulnerable’ to radicalisation, since given the ‘multiple highly personal and idiosyncratic pathways to behavioural radicalisation’ it is highly unlikely there is any such thing as the radicalisation process.Footnote ³¹ Cassam's preferred alternative to RAM and RAD is a view he calls Moderate Epistemic Particularism (MEP), a view that seeks not to explain the turn to political violence in a way that will allow us to uncover general causal laws, but to understand particular instances of it. This view is ‘moderate’, Cassam notes, because it does not deny the possibility of drawing interesting generalisations about the turn to political violence. The point, instead, is that we should recognise the limitations of these generalisations in the face of human particularity.

Ian James Kidd and Havi Carel's ‘Healthcare Practice, Epistemic Injustice, and Naturalism’ applies insights from the literature on epistemic injustice to the field of healthcare, revealing a number of ways in which ill persons are wronged in their capacity as knowers. Drawing on works by phenomenologists of illness and biographical accounts of the experience of illness, Kidd and Carel present a number of these pathocentric epistemic injustices, which are ultimately connected to the very conception of health at work in most healthcare settings. They show how ill persons experience testimonial injustice, because of prejudices arising from ‘pathophobia’, or negative attitudes towards illness or ill persons. Pathocentric testimonial injustice not only wrongs ill persons as givers of knowledge, but can also lead to serious harms when ill persons’ testimony regarding their treatment in the healthcare system is not taken seriously by healthcare providers. The issue is compounded by pathocentric hermeneutical injustices, which arise because there is a lack of adequate shared vocabulary for discussing the experience of illness, and a common distaste, even among healthcare professionals, for discussing suffering and death. These injustices are persistent because ill persons are often excluded from participation in the processes by which healthcare professionals develop shared understandings of illness. One root of the problem, Kidd and Carel explain, is that our very concept of health is excessively naturalistic, focused on functional biological aspects at the expense of the lived experience of illness and health. They argue that naturalistic conceptions of health may promote or even necessitate the pathocentric epistemic injustices they describe.

In the final paper of the volume, Keith Harris contributes to ongoing discussion about the epistemic merits of belief in conspiracy theories,Footnote ³² as he asks ‘What is Epistemically Wrong with Conspiracy Theorising?’ Harris focusses his discussion on the subset of conspiracy theories that offer explanations of events that run counter to official accounts, as well as implicating the supposed architects of the events in question in the promotion of the official accounts. Outlandish as some theories of this sort might be, Harris is careful to point out, they sometimes turn out to be true. Likewise, it will be reasonable for at least some people to believe some theories of this sort. If there is a problem with belief in conspiracy theories so defined, then it seems reasonable to suppose that it lies with the practices and forms of reasoning by which those beliefs often came to be held, not in the content of the beliefs themselves. Harris considers three explanations of what the problem with such ‘conspiracy theorising’ might be: that it typically manifests epistemic vice; that it leads to belief in unfalsifiable theories; and that it is akin to adherence to ‘degenerating research programmes’ in science. All three explanations, Harris argues, are unsatisfying, since each fails to pick out any failing that is characteristic of ‘conspiracy theorising’ and not equally characteristic of the theorising that leads to belief in supposedly more acceptable theories. In the second half of the paper, Harris offers his own suggestions for where the errors in conspiracy theorising might lie. These are two. Firstly, conspiracy theorists may employ a fallacious probabilistic form of modus tollens that leads to placing undue weight upon data that is ‘errant with respect to the official account’.Footnote ³³ Secondly, conspiracy theorists may display ‘a sort of higher-order epistemic vice’ that comes when an otherwise admirable devotion to inquiry is combined with a lack of attention to one's own biases and possibilities for error.Footnote ³⁴

Other Themes in Non-Ideal Epistemology

Owing to its origins in a two-day conference, this volume regrettably could not touch on every issue within the ambit of non-ideal epistemology. However, given our ambition to highlight the breadth and range of excellent work in this area, several other major themes bear mentioning. Whilst several of these topics represent currently flourishing areas of research within non-ideal epistemology, others represent areas for growth as research in this field continues to develop.

In addition to investigations of epistemic injustice in interactions between scientists and lay communities, as explored in Grasswick's contribution to this volume, there is growing interest in socially relevant philosophy of science more generally. Much like epistemology, over the 20^th Century philosophy of science broadly concentrated on theoretical issues divorced from the social contexts in which scientific inquiry proceeds and in which scientific knowledge is used. Contemporary philosophers of science, however, are increasingly concerned not only with giving accounts of the nature of scientific knowledge or its background metaphysics, but also with how scientific inquiry should be organized in order to serve the interests of local communities and whole societies, as well as the moral, political, and epistemic problems that can arise when science fails in these roles.Footnote ³⁵ As Carla Fehr and Kathryn Plaisance argue, doing more work of this kind stands to benefit society, scientific practice, and philosophical inquiry itself, but requires a re-orientation of philosophy of science as a field towards non-ideal theory and socially engaged research.Footnote ³⁶

Another topic neglected by mainstream epistemology until recently is the topic of ignorance. One important set of questions concerns the nature of ignorance; for example, is ignorance the contrary of knowledge, of true belief, or something different?Footnote ³⁷ Merely leaving discussion of ignorance there, however, obscures many complexities. Whilst culpability for one's ignorance has been discussed in moral philosophy in connection with the epistemic condition on moral responsibility,Footnote ³⁸ there is seldom any engagement with relevant epistemological questions, such as the availability of evidence to the agent and the extent of the agent's epistemic obligations in deciding how to act.Footnote ³⁹ Moreover, under certain conditions, ignorant beliefs can flourish with all the same respect that ought to be carried by knowledge. Such ignorance is not merely a passive lack of knowledge but an active and persistent impediment to true belief. This is particularly concerning where social injustice and ignorance walk in stride, enabling and reinforcing one another. Charles Mills coined the term epistemology of ignorance to describe such structures as they arise in societies implicitly or explicitly structured on racism.Footnote ⁴⁰ Much remains to be done on the topic of ignorance, its various forms, and how this decidedly non-ideal topic connects with moral and political issues.Footnote ⁴¹

In the present political situation of increased polarization of opinion, cynicism about the potential for rational dialogue between opposing viewpoints, politicisation of expertise, and propagandistic disinformation masquerading as reliable news, practices of epistemic accountability take on renewed importance. However, work in this area seems largely concerned with classical epistemological questions about epistemic obligations and justification, and questions inherited from moral philosophy about whether belief, like action, must be voluntary for us to be blameworthy for getting things wrong.Footnote ⁴² While the notion of epistemic blame and epistemic culpability as notions distinct from their moral counterparts are assumed in some of the literature on epistemic injustice and intellectual vices, accounts of the conditions for being blamed in a specifically epistemic way are uncommon.Footnote ⁴³ Given the role of moral accountability in bringing us to shared moral understandings, we might expect its epistemic analogue to be similarly useful in overcoming differences of opinion in the political arena. At the very least, we may hope that in holding the epistemically irresponsible to account, we may prevent or mitigate the spread of false and misleading information. A non-ideal approach to these epistemological issues is sorely needed to address associated social and political problems.

Some of the issues discussed above, such as hermeneutical injustice and the pernicious effects of a naturalistic conception of health, point to a way our epistemic practices can go wrong in a cognitively deeper way than issues arising at the level of knowledge production, testimony, or intellectual character traits. Namely, sometimes things go wrong at the level of the very concepts we use to construct our beliefs and other attitudes. As Alexis Burgess and David Plunkett argue, ‘what concepts we have fixes what thoughts we can think… our conceptual repertoire determines… what beliefs we can have’.Footnote ⁴⁴ But the issue goes well beyond the doxastic: the concepts we have limit ‘what hypotheses we can entertain, what desires we can form, what plans we can make on the basis of such mental states, and accordingly constrains what we can hope to accomplish in the world’.Footnote ⁴⁵ When our concepts go wrong, our epistemic practices and everything that follows therefrom can be radically misdirected. There is growing attention in analytic philosophy to questions regarding the critique and revision of our concepts, referred to variously as conceptual engineering, Footnote ⁴⁶ conceptual ethics,Footnote ⁴⁷ and ameliorative inquiry.Footnote ⁴⁸ Such work has always been a part of philosophy, but conceptual analysis was for most of the 20^th century conceived along similar abstract lines to ideal theory in epistemology. More recent work takes seriously the epistemic, social, and political effects of both the concepts we have inherited and our efforts to improve them, as can be seen in work on our concepts of gender,Footnote ⁴⁹ sexual orientation,Footnote ⁵⁰ and the law.Footnote ⁵¹ There is room for considerably more work in this area, regarding both the development of theories of conceptual change and conceptual error, and detailed studies of further cases of concepts that have gone wrong.

Finally, a recurring issue in the background of most of the papers in this volume is the epistemological relevance of social identity, particularly where oppressive power relations are at work, as is nearly always the case in actual, non-ideal conditions. This theme reflects ongoing research in the critical epistemology of race, gender, sexuality, disability, indigeneity, and other axes of oppression.Footnote ⁵² Indeed, many movements within non-ideal epistemology are rooted in concerns brought to light by theory and activism in these various and often intersecting lines of inquiry. By critically examining how social identities and stereotypes influence the production of knowledge and belief, in both academic and lay settings, non-ideal epistemology from these perspectives can reveal biases that contribute to epistemic and other forms of oppression. However, these critical approaches have historically been marginalized within analytic philosophy, and to some extent remain so.Footnote ⁵³ Improving the philosophical understanding of our epistemic practices and of the non-ideal conditions in which all of us exercise our epistemic agency requires serious engagement with the overlooked perspectives and experiences explored by these critical approaches.