Epistemic Neglect

ABSTRACT

In most testimonial transactions between adults, the hearer’s obligation is to accord the speaker a level of credibility that matches the evidence that what she is saying is true. When the speaker is a child, however, the adult must often respond by extending a level of trust greater than that warranted by the evidence of past epistemic performance. Such trust, which I call ‘hopeful trust,’ is not extended on the basis the child’s extant credibility, but on the basis of their epistemic potential. Hopeful trust communicates to the speaker that she has reason to trust her own epistemic capacities and thereby enables her to do so. Extensions of hopeful trust are thus a method of causal construction; by treating individuals as if they are reliable, hopeful trust enables those individuals to become reliable. While not all adults bear the responsibility to extend hopeful trust to children, those who occupy positions of educational authority do. Failure to discharge this responsibility constitutes a distinct kind of epistemic injustice that can take both transactional and structural forms.

KEYWORDS:

• Trust
• hope
• education
• epistemic injustice

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. That hopeful trust is always inappropriate in the face of such evidence is not something I claim here. However, such cases, I am assuming, differ from the more common kind that I’m interested in. In the more common kind of case, evidence of occurrent exploitation is lacking. Thank you to an anonymous reviewer for encouraging me to consider this point.

2. Given that the epistemic injustice I’m identifying consists in the wrongful denial of trust, it may be conceived of as a kind of trust injustice. The term ‘trust injustice’ is not new in the literature, as Gerald Marsh has argued that testimonial injustice ought to be conceived of as a variety of trust injustice – one involving epistemic trust, in particular. However, insofar as Marsh is concerned only with evidence-based trust, whereas I am concerned only with wrongful denials of hopeful trust, he and I have different projects. A further difference consists in the fact that the kind of injustice Marsh discusses is not necessarily epistemic. The injustice I identify here is, on the other hand, obviously epistemic. See Marsh (2011).

3. I suspect this is partly why receiving overly positive feedback on one’s intellectual performance can sometimes feel like your intellect is not being taken seriously – like you are either not respected enough to receive real attention or not viewed as capable of responding appropriately to criticism.

4. Thank you to an anonymous reviewer for pushing me to sharpen the ideas in this paragraph.

5. Thank you to an anonymous referee for this point.

6. Thank you to an anonymous referee for pushing me to consider this objection.

7. I am indebted to Miranda Fricker’s very helpful comments on this paper and her willingness to read multiple drafts. I am also very grateful to two anonymous referees.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Shannon Brick

Shannon Brick is a PhD candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research is in moral philosophy and epistemology. She has a strong secondary interest in aesthetics.