Decolonizing epistemic justice: on inter-epistemology

ABSTRACT

This article responds to the challenge of decolonizing epistemic injustice by offering the project of inter-epistemic thought or ‘Inter-Epistemology'. The point of departure is a critical epistemology of Western science, which seeks to go beyond the negative moment of self-critique. Instead, it seeks to confront Western science with actually existing divergent systems of knowledge. This kind of confrontation implies epistemic plurality and requires the theory and methodology of inter-epistemic knowledge. The paper argues that a main challenge to inter-epistemic theory is the paradox of knowing the epistemic other. To face this challenge, it is proposed that the preliminary task of inter-epistemology is not to overcome the absence of the epistemic other but to overcome the simulated other, through operations of un-knowing.

KEYWORDS:

• Epistemic injustice
• inter-epistemology
• epistemicide
• de-epistemization
• decolonization
• critical epistemology

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Other authors have occasionally used this term, see for instance Mignolo (2010). More recently, Alcoff (2022), drawing on Boaventura de Sousa Santos, explicitly acknowledged the need to develop the concept of inter-epistemology in very much the same way that I am using this term here. See also da Agra (2022).

2 I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer who justly noted that some of these disciplines, which today adopt a decolonizing approach to epistemic difference, originally emerged from the colonial approach of Western science.

3 To be sure, this passage deals with a specific problem, namely of science’s encounter with a presumed epistemic otherness, and it problematized this encounter from the perspective of science. It does not extend to other aspects of this encounter, namely the agency of the epistemic other, and it certainly does not exclude the possibility of resistance. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer who indicated this aspect.

4 Of course, in individual cases, integration and assimilation may have positive effects. I am, however, concerned with integration that generates the effacement of knowledge.

5 It should be clear that I am not promoting a simply negative approach to knowledge or any form of anti-science, etc. On the contrary, I claim that setting the epistemic limit will enable to free the horizon for new possibilities of knowledge.