Against Knowing: The Rhetorical Structure of Epistemic Violence

ABSTRACT

Philosophers have theorized epistemic violence as a form of harm committed against people primarily in their capacities as knowers. In this essay, we apply a modal materialist perspective to understand epistemic violence as a rhetorical process that is made possible through binary, hierarchy, and perfecting tendencies of language. Taken together, such tendencies form a script in which interlocutors are divided into “rational” actors, who are legitimated to define knowledge in particular contexts, pitted against “irrational” actors, who are made enemies of knowledge and excluded from knowledge-creating processes. We then apply this script in a reading of two narratives about transphobia by philosopher Veronica Ivy that discuss forms of epistemic violence. We show how such violence is underwritten by our script at the rhetorical level, concluding with three counter-rhetorical strategies to epistemic violence: fomenting empathy, dislodging supremacist power structures, and practicing radical listening.

KEYWORDS:

• Epistemic injustice
• epistemology
• materialism
• gaslighting
• transphobia

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. Gaslighting refers to a form of emotional manipulation where one communicates in ways that deny and cause another person to doubt their sense of reality. While Ivy is not the only scholar to offer a theory of gaslighting, she is unique in linking the concept to the broader discussion of epistemic injustice and violence. For other prominent theories, see Abramson (2014), Stark (2019), and Stern (2007). For communication perspectives on gaslighting, see Graves and Spencer (2022) and Graves and Samp (2021).

2. The limitations of human knowledge to which we refer are many and have been well documented since at least Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (for discussion, see Condit, 2009). In essence, the “certainty” implied by a statement’s status as “the truth” is not always available for adjudication by processes of sufficient disinterest (e.g., analytical philosophy, empirical science). For example, questions of practical political action or evaluative opinion that involve a reasonable level of uncertainty are adjudicated most appropriately by logics of “better/worse” rather than “true/false.” Philosophers have classically distinguished these latter topics as “opinion” rather than “knowledge.” However, scholars of epistemic rhetoric have sought to demonstrate that “knowledge” and “opinion” operate, at least in part, via the same processes of language—ultimately rending a binary “true/false” criterion as a special case of a continuous “better/worse” criterion (for discussion, see Railsback, 1983). Emblematic of this disruption of the “knowledge/opinion” binary is the observation that “true/false” questions are, in their asking, only ever articulated in the context of value-laden, ideological discourse (Condit, 1996). The present essay follows in this tradition by exploring how common tendencies of symbolizing reinforce the limits of human knowledge that encourage actors to discount viable testimony.

3. One major component of Condit and Railsback’s (2005) analysis is the tendency of symbolizing toward narrative construction. Relying heavily on Burke (1969), Condit and Railsback observe that many of the language tendencies they describe (e.g., binaries, hierarchies, reifications) are recruited into narrative structures that encourage humans to organize reality into sequences of actions performed by actors using particular agencies in particular settings for particular purposes. Condit (2018) later adopted narrative as a central theoretical construct in the development of her “pentadic template” of public anger that serves as a partial precedent for our script of epistemic violence. As such, narrative could be explicated as a central component of our analysis; however, given constraints of space, we have opted to focus on how the pieces of the narrative (binaries, evaluations, perfections) come together at the expense of an elaborated framing of those pieces as subcomponents of a narrative, hence our preference for the more general term “script.”

4. A reviewer of this essay observed that our analysis works from Ivy’s eyewitness account of events rather than other potential evidences. As a result, they would suggest, we may commit our own epistemic violence by building a model that works exclusively on the premise that Ivy’s account must be believed as objective truth. Of course, we do believe Ivy’s accounts as presented. This belief stems not only from of our ethical commitment to granting epistemic agency to people most likely to report accurately on their own plausible lived experience but also because Ivy’s examples accord with research about transphobia. Consider for example, Miller’s (2015b) work showing that trans people regularly face a number of everyday microaggressions, like mispronouning or deadnaming, in addition to disbelief when they try to name transphobia. Additionally, however, we hasten to observe that the purpose of our paper—to show how rhetoric underwrites acts of epistemic violence—is accomplishable even if Ivy were to offer hypothetical or fictional narratives. The question of whether we believe Ivy is independent of the question: what rhetorical structures underwrite epistemic violence? The acts she describes, within the narrative structure she offers, are—necessarily and as reported—examples of epistemic violence according to her model and, as such, represent reasonable objects of analysis for the present essay that seeks to expand the theoretical repertoire useful in analysis of the concept.

5. At this juncture, we note that while our examples in this essay have focused on interpersonal epistemic violence, our theoretical model has implications for meso- and macro- analyses that focus on mass mediated and cultural contexts. Thinking about such implications, consider forms of trans disbelief carried out in larger social circuits described by Capuzza (2014), who argued that journalists writing about topics related to transgender people should be more intentional about finding transgender sources for their stories.

Further, epistemic violence as a concept also has a history in decolonial literature, exemplified by Brunner’s (2021) argument that scholars contending with epistemic violence must account for “the geopolitical and epistemic space of global colonial modernity itself” (p. 206; see also, Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018). On this point, we might consider the gender binary as an example of colonialist, macrolevel epistemic violence. As trans studies and Indigenous scholars have pointed out, western understandings of gender—including a rigid insistence on binarity and sexual dimorphism (always imagined as tethered to one another)—represent a colonial invention and violent imposition (DeVun & Tortorici, 2018; Driskill, 2016; LeMaster et al., 2019).

At more mesolevels of analysis, consider laws about transgender bathroom and sports access that rely on familiar binary impositions and perfect adherence to cultural norms of gender expression. So-called bathroom bills, aimed at limiting trans people’s access to public restrooms, inappropriately frame trans people as disposable, dangerous, less-than-human predators (Booth & Spencer, 2016; Spencer, 2019). Controversy over trans inclusion in sports reveals many of the same themes where a trans athlete’s success automatically proves their unfair advantage (from the perspective of the opponents they best; Fischer & McClearen, 2020).

In each case, one can see the effects of binary, hierarchy, and perfection that attend expressions of transphobia. While such analyses are beyond the scope of the present article, we invite future researchers to apply the script we have developed to enhance the comprehensiveness of media, decolonial, and legal arguments about epistemic violence as they intersect with rhetorical theory.

6. While we have focused on offering a rhetorical account of epistemic violence, we see rich potential in future research that brings rhetorical theory to bear on related concepts such as epistemicide, hermeneutical injustice, and the role of subjectivity and agency in epistemic encounters (among others).