Publication details
Epistemic Injustice: A Class Perspective
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2024 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | Certain social groups and classes face ostracization of their opinions, leaving them exploited and subordinate. Individuals with specific political stances are unfairly labeled as emotional or irrational, restricting their participation in political deliberation. These exclusions stem from assumptions about the inadequacy of certain groups’ knowledge. This phenomenon gains momentum as Western societies radicalize. Explaining the legitimacy of this ostracization often involves critiquing the argumentation structure and epistemic capabilities of the individuals from those groups and classes. One rather political philosophy’s framework addressed a similar issue. Fricker’s theory of epistemic injustice builds upon the foundation of analytical feminism, which recognizes strict logical, argumentation, and epistemological rules of reasoning. She mainly criticizes the unjust attribution of epistemic insufficiency, defending the capabilities of various gender, racial, and ethnic groups to obtain those. However, by this move, she forbids potential recognition of other discourses and political ontologies, then based on her principles, overlooking epistemic inequality rooted in economic and class distinctions is inevitable because knowledge of ‘correct’ reasoning rules is exclusive to certain classes, as Bourdieu and Gramsci demonstrated. Furthermore, despite progress toward gender, racial, and ethnic equality, class inequalities undermining educational attainment even worsen. I propose a new framework in order to avoid such drawbacks by turning attention to Gramsci and Foucault. Gramsci’s hegemony offers valuable insights into understanding epistemic injustices from a class perspective without relying on implicit reasoning rules. Similarly, Foucault’s exploration of discourses of truth even anticipated the framework of epistemic injustice avant la lettre. Despite his renunciation of Marxism, he proposed a project for resurrecting worker’s knowledge. |