Epistemic injustice and intellectual humility and failures in testimonial exchange
Now, clearly enough, some failures in testimonial exchange give rise to epistemic injustice, in particular testimonial injustice. Greenleaf wanted to know who his son's killer was, and Marge's testimony could have told him this; however, Greenleaf doesn't believe her testimony.
And, as we noted at the start of this paper, we might plausibly think that a lack of intellectual humility is at work here too.After all, Greenleaf certainly seems intellectually arrogant in his disregard of Marge's testimony. In this section, I now want to say a bit more about how these things—testimonial failure, epistemic injustice, and intellectual humility—might all hang together.The first thing to note is that testimonial injustice only arises from failures in testimonial exchange where there is something wrong with the hearer.Again, to quote Fricker, testimonial injustice occurs when “someone is wronged in their capacity as a giver of knowledge” (Fricker 2007, p. 7). As such, we might think of testimonial injustice in terms of not giving a person or group the credibility that they deserve—in particular, when they are giving testimony. Of course, that's not to say that all failures in testimonial exchange give rise to testimonial injustice—the case BAD HEARER certainly doesn't manifest testimonial injustice—however, whenever we have a case of testimonial injustice it is going to be a case where a testimonial exchange has failed as a result of there being something wrong (viciously wrong) with the hearer.5
But, importantly, it's not just testimonial injustice that is relevant to testimony, to how testimony might fail. Instead of being a product of a failure of testimonial exchange, other types of epistemic injustice (like hermeneutical injustice) can give rise to failures of testimonial exchange. Consider a failure of testimonial exchange where something has gone wrong with the hearer.
Imagine a culture where the intellectual accomplishments or achievements of women are never celebrated or even acknowledged; instead women are routinely dismissed as un-intellectual. In such a context, a woman might ask a question about Godel's incompleteness theorem, be given a good and true answers, and yet nevertheless fail to believe what she has been told because she's convinced herself that she can't understand such things.6 Notice, this isn't an example of testimonial injustice, because she's giving the testifier the creditability they deserve; nevertheless, it's still an example of epistemic injustice. And in this case, instead of the failure of testimonial exchange giving rise to the epistemic injustice, it is the epistemic injustice that leads to the failure in testimonial exchange.Non-testimonial forms of epistemic injustice can lead to other types of failures in testimonial exchange. Consider a failure of testimonial exchange where something has gone wrong with the speaker. Again, imagine a culture where the intellectual accomplishments or achievements of women are never celebrated or even acknowledged; instead women are routinely dismissed as un-intellectual. In such a context, a woman might feel extremely sheepish about sharing an insight, or giving testimony without caveating everything she says by hedging her claims and being self-deprecating. An outsider to this culture (who doesn't share this negative view of women) might happily ask a woman for directions, but not ultimately believe what she says because of all of the hedging and self-deprecating remarks. In this situation, it's the negative attitudes toward the intellectual contributions of women that is the epistemic injustice (though not an example of testimonial injustice), and this is what can give rise to the failure of testimonial exchange.
Consider a failure of testimonial exchange where the problem lies primarily in the environment. Imagine a culture where men routinely refrain from sharing truths with women—per- haps thinking that the truth can really only be properly handled and disseminated by men to men.
Because of this, let's imagine that the vast majority of men in this environment, would lieto a woman if they were asked for even basic truths (like directions).And imagine a woman from outside of this culture (who doesn't know about the “no sharing truths with women” rule) asks a man for directions. And let's say that this man is the exception to the rule in this culture, such that he is one of the very few men who doesn't mind sharing truths with everyone. And let's say he gives the outsider woman good, true directions to where she wants to go. Does she know how to get where she wants to go? If we think that the kind of environmental luck we find in FAKE BARN-style cases precludes knowledge, then we'd have to say, “no,” she doesn't know where she's going because she could have too easily gotten bad directions from one of the other men in the local environment. Again, in this situation, it's the negative attitudes toward sharing truth with women that is the epistemic injustice (though not an example of testimonial injustice), and this is what can give rise to the failure of testimonial exchange.
The only kind of failure in testimonial exchange where it's not easy to see how epistemic injustice could cause such a failure is a failure in testimonial exchange where there is something wrong with the utterance. However, that's understandable. In talking about epistemic injustice (or intellectual humility, for that matter), we're typically talking about intellectual character traits (virtues or vices); as such, if there is an instance of epistemic injustice that we'd want to point to as leading to a bad utterance, we'd be more inclined attribute this vice to a person (be it the hearer, the speaker, or people in the environment) and not to the utterance itself. Epistemic virtue and vice are best applied to epistemic agents and not utterances.
And clearly enough, like non-testimonial epistemic injustice, a lack of intellectual humility can also lead to a given testimonial exchange failing to transmit knowledge.
Of course, intellectual humility doesn't guarantee that testimony will work as it should. For example, someone can be perfectly intellectually humble and still be lied to, or someone can be perfectly intellectually humble and still find themselves in environments hostile to knowledge acquisition via testimony. And what is more, intellectual vice—namely, intellectual arrogance or intellectual servility—are not any guarantee that testimony will fail. Someone can be a complete, arrogant jerk and still acquire knowledge via testimony. Someone can be intellectually servile and self-deprecating and still acquire knowledge via testimony. But in any case, someone who fails to be intellectually humble might very well be more susceptible to failures in testimonial exchange than, everything else being the same, someone who doesn't, someone who is intellectually humble.Consider the Greenleaf case again. The first place we noted where testimonial exchanges could fail is with the hearer—with the person receiving the testimony. It is Greenleaf, the hearer, who fails to listen to the excellent testimony of Marge, and it is Greenleaf, the hearer, who listens unreflectively to the lies and deceptions of Ricky. But if we draw from the doxastic account of intellectual humility—where intellectual humility is the virtue of accurately tracking what one could non-culpably take to be the positive epistemic status of one's own beliefs—we can easily think of the failure in Greenleaf as a failure in intellectual humility. After all, Greenleaf is simply not accurately tracking what he could non-culpably take to be the positive epistemic status of his belief regarding his son—the belief which is of central importance to the case. Greenleaf is intellectually arrogant in holding his belief regarding the lack of value of Marge's testimony and the value of Ricky's as strongly as he does.And, ultimately, Greenleaf is intellectually arrogant in holding his belief regarding his son's fate as strong as he does, because he has systematically (and out of prejudice) failed to track defeaters for his belief (presented by Marge).7
And, to be sure, this result doesn't rest on the doxastic account of intellectual humility; other accounts of intellectual humility could come to a similar verdict.
Take Roberts and Wood's account of intellectual humility where intellectual humility is “a striking or unusual unconcern for social importance, and thus a kind of emotional insensitivity to the issues of status” when it comes to acquiring epistemic goods (2007, p. 239). Greenleaf, I think we can agree, is simply not sufficiently insensitive to issues of status when it comes to pursuing epistemic resources regarding his son's fate. In particular, Greenleaf seems hypersensitive to his and Ripley's status as men over and against Marge's status as a woman. So again, it looks like we could say that Greenleaf's failure at intellectual humility fed his prejudice and ultimately lead to a testimonial injustice.And we can also think of cases where a lack of intellectual humility in the speaker, or a lack of intellectual humility in the local environment, can also lead to failures in testimonial exchanges. We can think of cases where a given speaker is so intellectually servile that their testimony seems understandably untrustworthy to reflective hearers. Or we can imagine an environment where nine out of ten people would give misinformation because they're far too confident in what they know. However, like non-testimonial epistemic injustice, the only kind of failure in testimonial exchange where it's not easy to see how a lack of intellectual humility could cause such a failure is a failure in testimonial exchange where there is something wrong with the utterance. But, again, I think this makes sense given that the proper objects of intellectual humility and its corresponding vices are agents (hearers or speakers) and not utterances.
Importantly, however, failures in testimony as a result of non-testimonial epistemic injustice don't seem to be necessarily linked in any way with failures of intellectual humility. It seems as though we can imagine cases where everyone in the local environment is intellectually humble, but where certain members of that environment simply don't have access to important epistemic resources.
Or, we can imagine cases where someone is afflicted with anxiety and Imposter Syndrome, such that they become self-doubting and intellectually servile; this might lead to failures in testimonial exchange, but without being the product of any non-testimonial epistemic injustice.Testimonial injustice, however, might be different. It seems like testimonial injustice might be necessarily linked with failures of intellectual humility. To be sure, someone can fail to be intellectually humble without committing testimonial injustice (just imagine an intellectually arrogant person sitting alone on a deserted island); however, all cases of testimonial injustice— where someone doesn't give someone else the credibility that they deserve—could potentially be seen as a product of either intellectual arrogance of intellectual servility.8 Consider again Roberts and Wood's account of intellectual humility in term of “a striking or unusual unconcern for social importance, and thus a kind of emotional insensitivity to the issues of status” when it comes to acquiring epistemic goods (2007, p. 239). If testimonial injustice quintessentially involves a reliance on stereotypes concerning a stigmatized group, then perhaps this necessarily signals the kind of concern (or even hyper-concern) for social status or issues of status that Roberts and Wood see as being incompatible with intellectual humility. But the connection between testimonial injustice and intellectual humility is particularly easy to see within the doxastic account of intellectual humility: if testimonial injustice consists of not giving someone the credibility they deserve, then we might think that every instance of testimonial injustice is an instance where someone is not accurately tracking the positive epistemic status of their beliefs (because they've failed to accurately account for the epistemic value of the relevant testimony).
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