Epistemic injustice in education

What it means to be a knower together with the social practices through which we come to know are irreducibly complex ethical concepts (Congdon, 2018). Extant analyses of epistemic injustice typically hinge on the ethical dimensions underpinning two of our basic epistemic practices, those being, conveying knowledge to others and making sense of our own social experiences. Few could argue exchanges at the centre of the acquisition, generation, sharing and auditing of knowledge constitute value-laden processes. After all, there is no epistemology without ontology. Too often cognizers/knowers are sacrificed in service of sterilized knowledge—knowledge immune to the pathogens embedded in salient agential particularist features, interdependently-calibrated zetetic principles, and novel epistemic environments. Predictably then, there are times when educators might fail to live up to their moral-epistemic obligations. Time-impoverished environments and outcome-driven internalised cultures lead us to sometimes fall short. We fail to account for and exercise due care in relation to the epistemic vulnerabilities of our students (see Johnson, 2023). Where there are human beings trying to sincerely figure out what to accept or believe or do or perform, there is potential for wrongdoing. And since normatively-calibrated established etiquettes for interdependent inquiry are still at gestational stage, we still have much to learn about avoiding harms in co-dependent epistemic settings.

This special issue attempts to address this lacuna. Though there has been some work in the area of epistemic injustice in education (Kotzee, 2017), the topic remains relatively underexplored in educational philosophy and theory. Educators are not perfect. We make mistakes. We are less than we ought to be at times. We might interrupt, distort, quieten or smother the testimony of people in our classes (Dotson, 2011, 2014). Entrenched sage on the stage habits might conceivably render us less than virtuous listeners. We might, consciously or otherwise, assign undue credibility excesses or deficits to students based on pre-existing prejudices (Medina, 2013, 2017). Depending on the context in which we wrong and/or harm students, these might be fleeting or more permanent. Either way, they matter. If we take our epistemic duty of care seriously, we must become better moral-epistemic practitioners, better human beings.

As I have elsewhere argued (Dunne, 2020, pp. 3–4), when you are harmed in your capacity as a knower, you are not treated as fully human. Not being taken seriously, not being recognized as a testifier, is a form of dehumanization. It can damage agents, not only in their standing as knowers, but also as human beings. Likewise, not being listened to or believed eats away at a person from the inside-out. This can lead to marginalization and impaired agency. It can cause crippling and incessant doubt, entrenched feelings of negative self-worth, and move agents to distrust the significance and evidential weight of their lived experience, to doubt the worthiness of their beliefs or claims to knowledge. Depending on the particulars of the situation, it can suppress one’s voice and interpretative capacities, and by extension, one’s standing within collective meaning-making and meaning-sharing social practices. Testimonial injustice likewise obstructs the optimal circulation and flow of knowledge. Obstructing the open-minded, curiosity-driven giving and asking for reasons at the centre of any worthwhile rational inquiry, it inhibits the flow of evidence, doubts, fresh ideas, the ameliorative friction of discordant reasons, along with any other epistemic inputs conducive to knowledge (Fricker, 2007, 2017).

The five papers in this special issue tackle some of the concerns above. Care has been taken to break new ground. Authors focus on both the theoretical and practical implications of their analyses, drawing on themes such as trust, servility, Verstehen, cultures of speed, and epistemic exploitation.

Carter and Meehan in their paper ‘Trust Distrust, and Testimonial Injustice’ explore a novel link between testimonial injustice and trust. Drawing on a performance-normativity framework used primarily in virtue epistemology (Sosa, 2007, 2010, 2017), they argue that both credibility excesses and deficits feature incompetent trusting on the part of the hearer. In short this PNF (performance normativity framework) asks us to evaluate performance along three distinct axes: (i) did the performance succeed in attaining its aim; (ii) was the performance competent in such a way that, ceteris paribus, it would reliably enough issue in success, and, (iii) was the performance apt-in other words-was the success because of the competence?

So, what has this got to do with epistemic injustice? The import is as insightful as it is helpful. To mitigate testimonial injustice (incompetent trusting), Carter and Meehan suggest the cultivation of, and deliberate practice therein, of metacompetences, those being, second-order competences to suitably regulate/govern one’s exercise of first-order competences. In layperson’s terms when applied to the field of epistemic injustice: competently knowing and respecting the limits of one’s competence when it comes to appropriately trusting the credibility of testimony, or more precisely in the words of the authors, ‘when she can reliably recognise the limits of her competence to trust reliably enough’.

The second article looks to pedagogical interventions to ameliorate servility in contexts where epistemic injustice is systemic. Here Battaly focuses on students who might exhibit one or more of the following behaviours at any given time: (i) those who are unaware of their intellectual strengths; (ii) those who may ignore or bury them; (ii) those who lack confidence in, or underestimate them; (iv) those who incorrectly adjudge themselves to be intellectually inferior to their peers. To avoid or ameliorate servility, she argues there is a pressing need to reframe the virtue of intellectual pride so that students ‘notice and remember their strengths, and draw on and acknowledge them when it is appropriate to do so.’ Following Whitcomb et al., (2017), she argues that intellectual pride is a disposition to be attentive to and appropriately own one’s intellectual strengths. Servility, on the revised neo-Aristotelian scale, is posited as analogous to the ‘mean between itself and arrogance, where servility is a disposition to under-own one’s intellectual strengths, and arrogance is a disposition to over-own them’.

Battaly stress-tests the limitations of educating for intellectual pride. For those who already suffer with high degrees of servility, she questions the efficacy of the traditional ‘caught and taught’ approach to intellectual virtues. By ‘caught’ she refers to routine exposure to exemplars and the cultivation of the emotion of admirability leading to emulation. By ‘taught’ she refers to explicit instruction about the virtue of intellectual pride through multi-modal pedagogical interventions. Standard approaches such as these, according to Battaly, however, are unlikely to help students prone to entrenched servility. On my view, it’s a little like showing James Milner what Cristiano Ronaldo the footballing exemplar can do, and then ask him to emulate his playing style. Aside from a range of factive constraints in play, there are myriad reasons as to why this is bound to be a pedagogical failure. In fact, it can backfire so much, that it may push the servility to even further extremes. And so, we need attainable role models. We need, to paraphrase Michael Croce, to move from moral saints (phronimoi) to embrace moral heroes (those who only have one virtue), together with enkratic people (individuals who overcome competing motivations to perform virtuous actions). Simply put, unlike extant ameliorative strategies which aim to combat servility, pedagogues ought to consider interventions which weaken the motivations and beliefs that prevent students from acquiring intellectual pride. They must likewise incorporate strategies which allow for the emulation of some actions and motivations that are not exemplary. What does this mean? In a nutshell—for those with heightened levels of servility, because the pendulum has swung so far the other way, students might need to emulate motivations and actions that are arrogant. This makes sense, since given their starting point, they most likely have to over-correct their servility in service of developing the virtue of intellectual pride.

Cassam in the third article examines the case of misunderstanding vaccine hesitancy and chronicles how explanatory charges of epistemic vice attribution (closed-mindedness, gullibility, dogmatism etc) are ultimately the enemy of Verstehen, framed here as, an exercise in sense-making, in seeing things from another person’s point of view, including their reasons, explicit assumptions and categories of thought. Scrutinizing examples of epistemically vicious vice-attributions, he explains that some suffer from under-determination and/or over-simplification. What is more—he questions the merits of blaming vaccine hesitancy on deficit understandings, most of which invoke the explanatory power of cognitive inadequacies. Seeing as most people express strong opinions about the nature and scope of appropriate epistemic conduct, viz.,—responsible and effective inquiry, there are bound to be cases where epistemic vices such as ‘intellectual myopia, oversimplification, overconfidence and arrogance’ get in the way of accurate and interpersonally-calibrated understandings.

He then turns to offer an explanatory account of vaccine hesitancy, focusing on the specifics of the Wakefield case. Surveying the attitudinal shift since this initially discredited and later falsified study, Cassam then proceeds to discuss a much more subtle case of vaccine hesitancy, one in which parents are tasked with not deciding whether a vaccine is safe on a population level per se, but rather, based on their particularist knowledge of their child’s strengths or vulnerabilities, to weigh up and determine whether the vaccine is safe for their child. This is, of course, a far more complex and philosophically interesting case worthy of more forensic analysis, of which Cassam obliges by inviting us to respectfully and tactfully engage with agents’ reasons for engaging in vaccine hesitancy. Rather than dismiss such in terms of blameworthy vice-attributions, make sincere efforts to try to understand why that person might conceivably consider said reasons to be strong enough to warrant their actions. In short, make efforts to meaningfully engage with the subjectivity of hesitators in pursuit of Verstehen.

The fourth contribution from Kidd seeks to make sense of how internalised models of speed erode our capacity to exercise the virtues of intellectual beneficence. Radically distorting our experience of time, he argues reified cultures of speed impede excellences of character which otherwise positively impact and advance the intellectual needs of others. Adopting a character-based criticism of higher education, Kidd seeks to capture character corruption in terms of ‘sustained, dynamic processes whereby a corruptee interacts, albeit often with critical resistance, with a variety of corruptors, the result of which is often a deterioration of their virtues and the facilitation of their vices’.

If we accept that many of us have fallen victim to the siren call of cultures of speed, and that moreover, some are enslaved by it, it quickly becomes clear that becoming faster and more productive while fuelling the gerbil wheel of increasing wants in a split-attention experiential economy, poses certain risks, intellectual, moral and existential, all of which threaten the principles of academic collegiality and good faith. Kidd explains that cultures of speed and the cult of false idolatry that occasionally comes on foot of it, wherein some academics seek to emulate what they perceive to be exemplars discharging their duties in an increasingly time-poor world, systematically obstructs other-regarding virtues, by changing, for the worst, their experience of time. Never being ‘off the clock’ so to speak, has the potential to eat away at academics. Time-pressures and the proliferation of ever-increasing tasks lead to hard decisions being made. Some choose to keep apace with current commitments but feel guilty about not being able to put their best foot forward since they have over-committed. A range of outcomes ensue, most of which restrict academics’ capacities to carry out their tasks in a timely and diligent manner. Competing activities and values drip-feed guilt intravenously and privileges the ‘I’ over the ‘We’. One risk with this is the emergence of a type of externally validated solipsism—a cognitive island celebrating the invincible summer within. For Kidd, academic cultures need to stop worshipping at the altar of speed and learn to appreciate the moral dimensions of slowness and speed in terms of pace, so that time for others is not lost to the Pavlovian tick-tock of instrumentalist idolatry.

The final article by Dunne and Kotsonis tackles the thorny concept of epistemic exploitation in education. To ameliorate or prevent avoidable harms befalling marginalised persons, they argue that exchanges in which educators compel marginalised persons to educate them and/or others about the nature of their oppression need to be understood in terms of having the potential to contribute to a series of epistemic-moral wrongs and harms, some of which culminate in a phenomenon they refer to as ontic burnout’—a form of interminable explanatory fatigue brought about by repeated requests to educated the privileged about what it means to be oppressed.

Reframing epistemic exploitation in terms of vulnerability-instrumentalization, the authors seek to isolate what precisely is exploitative about entitled requests to turn oneself ‘inside out’ and engage in zero-sum hurt-games for emancipatory ideals. They then turn to orchestrated pedagogical interventions in which credibility excesses and deficits emerge and show how either, or a combination of both, can lead to eudemonic harms for marginalised persons. In conclusion, they offer an exploratory account of ontic burnout—a specific subset of extreme physical, mental and emotional exhaustion that members of a certain social kind sometimes experience by virtue of being subject to a ‘certain set of constraints and enablements that is wrongful to them’ (Jenkins, 2020, p. 191). These eudemonic harms lead members of marginalised groups to periodically wish away their identity (at least the part that educators see as most salient/that which provides the greatest exchange value), for people to see them as more than the personal tutor to the privileged, more than the go-to for all things inclusive, open 24/7 to sharing their painfully acquired knowledge for the good of privileged bystanders.

Gerry Dunne
Philosophy of Education, Marino Institute of Education, Dublin, Ireland
[email protected]

Acknowledgements

It goes without saying that I owe a debt of gratitude to the authors who worked tirelessly in putting together their papers for this special issue. Some of the scholarship here will undoubtedly launch further research in cognate areas. A special word of thanks for accomplishing the above in such trying circumstances.

I would also like to express my gratitude to all those who offered assistance during this process. Without your time, expertise and considered feedback, none of this would have been possible. In particular, I would like to formally thank: Zsuzsanna Chappell, Alkis Kotsonis, Paul Gialdi, Aidan McGlynn, and audiences at UCD School of Philosophy at which some of this work was presented. Finally, I would like to thank all the reviewers who so graciously read and carefully commented on the submissions published in this special issue.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.