Conclusion
As epistemology continues to go through its “social turn,” and as more and more work is done on intellectual virtues and vices, it's worth considering how these issues might be related.
In this exploratory paper, I tried to suggest some ways failures in testimonial exchanges might be produced by epistemic injustice or a lack of intellectual humility. In the end, we were able to see that even non-testimonial variants of epistemic injustice are relevant to testimony and can cause failures in testimonial exchange in a number of different ways.Testimonial injustice, in contrast, doesn’t cause failures in testimonial exchange, but is instead the product of a particular kind of failure, namely, failures in testimonial exchanges where the problem lies with the hearer.Vices like intellectual arrogance or intellectual servility can lead to failures in testimonial exchange as well. And while these failures are largely independent from epistemic injustice, some forms of epistemic injustice (namely, testimonial injustice) might be intimately connected with a lack of intellectual humility. There is, no doubt, a lot more to say on these issues, but hopefully these preliminary remarks can be useful for future research in these areas.9Notes
1 Minghella 2000, p. 130.
2 To be sure, testimony can go wrong in all sorts of ways not captured by the basic model of testimonial exchange sketched above. For example, speakers rarely go around making utterances unprompted; as such, hearers often have to initiate the testimonial exchange by asking a question.And if their question is itself confusing or poorly articulated, then that can also pose a serious hurdle to a successful testimonial exchange. For the sake of space, however, we’ll leave such complicating factors to the side and stick to the aforementioned basic model.
3 For example, Heidi Grasswick identifies testimonial injustice as occurring “when a speaker is given less credibility than deserved (suffering a credibility deficit) because of an identity prejudice held by the hearer” (2013, sec.
4.1).4 Medina 2011 explores this possibility further.Also see Coady 2017.
5 This isn’t to say that a testimonial exchange cannot fail due to a vice in the hearer that is unrelated to testimonial injustice. A testifier’s membership in a stigmatized group might contribute to a failure of testimonial exchange in such a way that isn’t an example of testimonial injustice. The claim that is being made here, however, is that whenever there is an example of testimonial injustice then there is necessarily something wrong (in the sense explored in 26.1) with the hearer.
6 For more on phenomena like this, see Dotson 2011,2014
7 Of course, the testimony in the case of Greenleaf’s search for his son fails for lots of reasons. Like the BAD ASSERTION case, Ricky’s lie helps preclude viable testimonial exchange.And perhaps we could make the case that there was something wrong with the environment Greenleaf found himself in (like the BAD ENVIRONMENT case), an environment with a critical mass of liars and co-conspirators of gender prejudice. But it is worth stressing that had Greenleaf been more intellectually humble—had he done a better job accurately tracking the positive epistemic status of his beliefs (specifically his belief regarding the fate of his son and his belief regarding the value of Marge’s testimony), these other treats to testimonial exchange might have been mitigated or otherwise assuaged. If Greenleaf had been a better, more intellectually humble hearer, then maybe he could have recognized Ricky’s bad assertion (or later recognized he had defeaters for Ricky’s assertion that he needed to address). And maybe if Greenleaf had been a better, more intellectually humble hearer, he could have recognized the poor quality of his environment and taken extra precautions. Greenleaf’s failure, I propose, to accurately track the epistemic value of women’s testimony (including the testimony of Marge) fed his prejudice and lead to not only a failure in testimonial exchange but also to epistemic injustice.
8 Intuitions might diverge here according to how we want to ultimately define intellectual humility. For the sake of this paper, we’ll need to put debates concerning the definition of intellectual to the side; however, I hope that the above considerations show how at least a few of the proposed definitions in the contemporary literature seem to point to this connection between intellectual humility and testimonial injustice.
9 I am enormously thankful to Alessandra Tanesini for her comments and apt criticism of an earlier draft of this chapter.This research was supported in part by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation.
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