Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-p9bg8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T09:27:54.439Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Relational Knowing and Epistemic Injustice: Toward a Theory of Willful Hermeneutical Ignorance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2020

Gaile Pohlhaus Jr.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

I distinguish between two senses in which feminists have argued that the knower is social: 1. situated or socially positioned and 2. interdependent. I argue that these two aspects of the knower work in cooperation with each other in a way that can produce willful hermeneutical ignorance, a type of epistemic injustice absent from Miranda Fricker's Epistemic Injustice. Analyzing the limitations of Fricker's analysis of the trial of Tom Robinson in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird with attention to the way in which situatedness and interdependence work in tandem, I develop an understanding of willful hermeneutical ignorance, which occurs when dominantly situated knowers refuse to acknowledge epistemic tools developed from the experienced world of those situated marginally. Such refusals allow dominantly situated knowers to misunderstand, misinterpret, and/or ignore whole parts of the world.

Type
Articles
Information
Hypatia , Volume 27 , Issue 4 , Fall 2012 , pp. 715 - 735
Copyright
Copyright © 2012 by Hypatia, Inc.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Alcoff, Linda Martín. 2000a. On judging epistemic credibility: Is social identity relevant? In Women of Color and Philosophy, ed. Zack, Naomi. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers.Google Scholar
Alcoff, Linda Martín. 2000b. What should white people do? In Decentering the center, ed. Narayan, Uma and Harding, Sandra. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Alcoff, Linda Martín. 2006. Visible identities: Race, gender, and the self. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Alcoff, Linda Martín. 2009. Sotomayor's reasoning. Huffington Post. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/linda-martin-alcoff/sotomayors-reasoning_b_208338.html (accessed March 10, 2011).Google Scholar
Collins, Patricia Hill. 2008. Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Dotson, Kristie. 2010. On 200 years of epistemic bad luck. Paper presented at the American Philosophical Association, Central Division. Chicago.Google Scholar
DuBois, W.E.B. 1989. The souls of black folk. New York: Bantam.Google Scholar
Fricker, Miranda. 2007. Epistemic injustice: Power and the ethics of knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grasswick, Heidi. 2004. Individuals‐in‐communities: The search for a feminist model of epistemic subjects. Hypatia 19 (3): 85–120.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harding, Sandra. 1991. Whose science? Whose knowledge?: Thinking from women's lives. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Intemann, Kristen. 2010. 25 years of feminist empiricism and standpoint theory: Where are we now? Hypatia 25 (4): 778–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mills, Charles. 1997. The racial contract. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Mills, Charles. 1998. Blackness visible: Essays on philosophy and race. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Nelson, Lynn Hankinson. 1990. Who knows? From Quine to a feminist empiricism. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Obama, Barack. 2008. A more perfect union (presented in Philadelphia, PA). Reprinted at http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/hisownwords (accessed March 1, 2011).Google Scholar
Pohlhaus, Gaile. 2003. Knowing communities: An investigation of Harding's standpoint epistemology. Social Epistemology 16 (3): 283–93.Google Scholar
Sobstyl, Edrie. 2004. Re‐radicalizing Nelson's feminist empiricism. Hypatia 19 (1): 119–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sotomayor, Sonia. 2001. A Latina judge's voice. Paper presented at the Raising the Bar Symposium at the University of California, Berkeley. Reprinted at http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2009/05/26_sotomayor.shtml (accessed March 1, 2011).Google Scholar
Sullivan, Shannon, and Tuana, N., eds. 2006. Feminist epistemologies of ignorance. Hypatia 21 (3).Google Scholar
Sullivan, Shannon, and Tuana, N. 2007. Race and epistemologies of ignorance. New York: State University of New York Press.Google Scholar