160. EPISTEMIC INEQUALITY - Why Should We Care About Inequalities in Knowledge?
This week I’m doing something a little different on Philosophy Unleashed and releasing a lecture I gave last week to Year 12 students at a Sixth Form interdisciplinary conference on the theme of inequality held at an independent school in the UK.
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When talking about inequality it might seem strange that I have chosen to talk about inequality in the area of knowledge. That’s what the ‘epistemic’ means in the title to this talk – epistemology is a theory of knowledge - and I didn’t put that in the lecture description because I wanted to give a small example of epistemic inequality right there at the start: those of you who know what ‘epistemic’ means and those who don’t. Because even knowing now that this lecture is about knowledge inequality it might still seem reasonable to ask why should we care about inequalities in knowledge? Don’t we, after all, know there are inequalities in knowledge? Not just between those who know what ‘epistemic’ means and those who don’t. You lower-sixth students, for example, will have more knowledge in certain subjects than those students currently studying the in Year 7. I, with a PhD, a Masters degree and a Bachelors degree in Politics and Philosophy, will likely have more knowledge about those things than some other people do. People are more likely to have knowledge if they are educated, or if they have the resources to buy books or other means to gain new knowledge, or if they live in a country where those books and schools are common. And due to inequalities in education, economics, and global equity in general, access to knowledge faces all the same hurdles which lead to inequality everywhere else. Of course knowledge isn’t equal. Why worry about it?
I worry because I’m not talking only about inequality in the amount of knowledge one might have, but inequality in what counts as knowledge in the first place. Inequality in who gets to define knowledge. Knowledge is supposed to be something which isn’t subject to the same sort of whims, biases and motivations that lead to inequality in so many other areas of human life. Knowledge is supposed to be objective. Truth. Facts. Not just opinion or belief – both of which are subjective and flawed lesser states – but KNOWLEDGE. Information out there waiting in the world to be found by anyone. It shouldn’t matter if you are rich, poor, male, female, non-binary, gay, straight, trans, black or white – if you search for knowledge then there should surely be no barriers to discovering such information.
And yet, as we will see, there are. It turns out that knowledge is a deeply unequal business indeed, because knowledge, as philosophy shows us, is not an objective, value-free, thing out there in the world, waiting to be discovered, at all. Knowledge is a theory. A construct. What counts as knowledge and what doesn’t is subject to conceptual gatekeeping. And such gatekeeping inevitably keeps some people out.
For instance – you all have exams coming up next year which, we have all agreed as a society, tell us whether you sufficiently know your chosen A-level subjects or not. Even though much of what you will be asked to do is really about memorisation and recall of certain arbitrary pieces of information that many of you will not be able to recall a month, let alone a year, after examination, rather than any meaningful metric of knowledge, you will always be able to say you have an A-level, and therefore knowledge, in your subject. And future employers will take that A-level seriously, despite the fact that it is highly likely someone who does not have the qualification might actually know far more than you do about that subject once your education is over. The self-taught autodidact who actually knows something about your subject but does not possess the socially agreed symbol – the academic qualification – has their knowledge dismissed even as someone with the A-level, but without any real knowledge, is given a place at university, or a job, on the assumption they possess some knowledge they no longer do.
This is what I really want to talk about today when it comes to the issue of epistemic inequality. The dismissal of knowledge and how decisions about who knows what, and who is capable of knowing anything at all, are all areas in which knowledge construction has been historically, and continues to be, unequal.
In 2007, philosopher, Miranda Fricker, coined the term ‘epistemic injustice’ in her book of the same name, to ‘bring to light certain ethical aspects of two of our most basic everyday epistemic practices: conveying knowledge to others by telling them, and making sense of our own social experiences.’ (Fricker, 2007). Fricker made the argument that there are two types of epistemic injustice – ‘testimonial injustice’ and ‘hermeneutical injustice’ – which both leave some individuals or groups, usually those like women, members of ‘ethnic minorities’, or members of certain social classes who have historically suffered from power inequalities in society (and more so those who meet at the intersection of several of these identities, such as being a poor woman from an ‘ethnic minority’), less likely to be given the social status of ‘knower’ compared to more dominant individuals or groups, such as powerful white men.
The first injustice – testimonial injustice – has as its paradigmatic case a police officer not believing testimony from a black person about what they were doing that they would have otherwise believed had it come from a white male. But this type of injustice should also be familiar to any of you who have ever had your words dismissed simply because of your age. When a teacher or parent ignores what you have to say simply because you are too young to know what you are talking about, you are experiencing testimonial injustice. We adults have denied you the possibility of having knowledge simply because of your age.
As well as criminal injustices stemming from testimonial injustices, testimonial injustice has been the cause of significant social injustices and inequalities in areas of medicine too. For years, women and people of colour had their own first-hand testimonies of what they were experiencing in their own bodies – especially around the issue of pain – dismissed by doctors who believed they knew better and discounted important testimony which could have improved treatments and medicine for many.
Even a phrase I have been using in the last few minutes – ‘ethnic minority’ – could be an example of testimonial injustice. Speaking globally, as Rosemary Campbell-Stephens has pointed out, these so-called ‘minorities’ are, in fact, the global majority…making up 80% of the world’s population. (Campbell-Stephens, 2020). But we frame our conversations about race by excluding global voices and objective facts and focus only on the dominant white voices in Europe whose words count as ‘knowledge’. Say ‘ethnic minority’ and people understand what you mean. Say ‘global majority’ and your claim to knowledge, despite it being factually accurate, will likely be ignored.
Returning to the paradigmatic case of racist testimonial injustice, what Fricker was doing in 2007 was giving name to something my subject – Philosophy – has systematically done throughout history. Just as much as Fricker’s archetypal racist cop not listening to a black man, or, in another common example, a sexist husband not believing the testimony of his wife simply because she is a woman, we have, as a discipline, excluded the voices of non-white people and women from the canon of what counts as philosophical ‘knowledge’ since that canon’s first construction. Philosophy, so the familiar story goes, begins in Ancient Greece. Usually, Thales is noted as the first philosopher, with his suggestion that everything is ultimately made of water, and after the famous pre-Socratics we get to the traditional tryptic of Socrates; his student, Plato; and Plato’s student, Aristotle. However, this narrative of philosophy’s origins is simply not true. Philosopher, Lea Cantor, notes how this story of Philosophy originated much later than the Ancient Greeks themselves, who never claimed to have invented Philosophy, in the ‘problematic, and in some cases manifestly racist, eighteenth-century historiography of philosophy’. (Cantor, 2022). Scholar, Kehinde Andrews, takes this criticism of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment even further: ‘The Enlightenment emerged,’ Andrews tells us, ‘at a time when Europe had laid waste to much of the world through genocide and slavery and was asserting its dominance through colonial expansion…The ‘great thinkers’ found themselves on top of the world as a result and theorized about their apparent supremacy…to provide the justification for the genocide, slavery and colonialism that was utterly indispensable to Western progress.’ In essence, ‘the whole basis of the Enlightenment is that rational thought is the sole possession of the White man. Even the idea of bringing light to the world – that Europe is the beacon to shine its torch on the dark and savage concerns of the globe – is instructive.’ (Andrews, 2021) Importantly, Andrews tells us, ‘imperial violence created the blank slate, the intellectual terra nullius (empty land) from which the Enlightenment thinkers emerged with their claims to a unique form of rationality and understanding’. One which completely ignored the non-European history of philosophy that had occurred in other parts of the world both in parallel with European thought, and long before it. For instance, Egyptian philosophy, maths, science, and medicine, which preceded the Ancient Greeks, was erased from the European Enlightenment narrative, and most subsequent histories of thought. (Allais, 2016; Schuringa, 2020).
Today, on the AQA A-level in philosophy that I teach, there are no named philosophers on the specification who are not white or European. While we are asked to teach the ideas of slave owners like George Berkeley and John Locke, who used their work in epistemology and political philosophy to explicitly justify the slave trade, and other racist philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, who once shockingly claimed the black skin of an African was all the proof he needed that the person was unintelligent, we have not been asked to teach the work of a single philosopher whose existence on the specification would disprove the despicable claims of these canonical Enlightenment thinkers.
Historically, the testimonial injustice non-white philosophers faced, by denying them the status of ‘knower’ (alongside all the other human rights they were denied), prevented them from entering that formal ‘canon’ of ‘great’ works in philosophy. Denied the status of ‘knower’, non-white philosophers were not given access to Western universities or intellectual circles. Their work was not published widely and discussed at great literary gatherings, but was produced and disseminated by alternative means, outside of dominant systems of academia – maybe orally, maybe in literature, maybe in languages never translated into English – and their ideas were extinguished. Something philosopher Boaventura de Sousa Santos has termed ‘epistemicide’. The murder of knowledge. (Santos, 2016). As de Sousa Santos’ reminds us ‘the understanding of the world far exceeds the Western understanding of the world’ but those living in the global South ‘are the educators with the fewest credentials in the world’ whose ‘bodies and…lives are the squandered knowledge of the world.’
Even our discussion of epistemic injustice so far has, within it, an example of epistemic inequality. White, Western, philosopher, Miranda Fricker is commonly credited with coining the idea, including in this talk. But long before Fricker’s work, in the 1980s, Indian scholar, Gayatri Spivak, wrote an influential essay entitled ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ which similarly described how the voices of non-Europeans – especially non-European women – are excluded from academic discussion of those very people, with European thinkers speaking for non-Europeans instead of letting non-Europeans speak for themselves. (Spivak, 1988 in Morris, 2010). Long before Spivak, and Fricker, in 1892, the Black American thinker, Anna Julia Cooper, wrote about the silencing of black female voices in public discourse and wrote ‘there is a feminine as well as a masculine side to truth’, which are ‘complements in one necessary and symmetric whole’. (Cooper, 2022). With a woman’s ‘strongest vindication for speaking’ being ‘that the world needs to hear her voice’ if it is interested in a full picture of knowledge instead of only a limited, male-centric, view.
Fricker’s significant and important work in epistemic injustice, and her name being well-known in philosophic circles today, is a vast improvement from the historic epistemic injustice women have received as ‘knowers’ in philosophy. While the AQA specification I teach has no non-white philosophers on its reading lists, it’s number of women is only marginally better. Women make up only a fifth of the thinkers named on the specification. Despite the existence of many excellent women working in philosophy, both now and historically, none of the women who made it onto the AQA specification have their own theories looked at purely in their own right. They are all included mainly in the capacity of the commentary they have made on the theories of men. The men of the ‘canon’. And sadly, this is common practice in a world of epistemic inequality. Just as the ‘canon’ of greats in English literature centre around white men like Shakespeare and Dickens, and events of historical importance taught in your History lessons centre around great white men at war, when white men are the ones producing the ‘canons’ they tend to produce canons that resembles themselves.
As philosophers, Lisa Whiting and Rebecca Buxton, reported in the introduction to their excellent book from 2020, The Philosopher Queens, while looking at recent philosophy books in their local bookshop, ‘In Philosophy: 100 Essential Thinkers only two women feature…In The Great Philosophers: From Socrates to Turing, no women made the cut. Each chapter in that particular book was written by a contemporary philosopher, all of whom were also men. At the time of writing, a newly published book by A. C. Grayling, boldly titled The History of Philosophy, includes no sections on women philosophers.’ (Buxton and Whiting, 2020). That same A.C. Grayling book came under fire this year from another female philosopher, Regan Penaluna, when she saw it too. As she reports after seeing the Grayling book and asking ‘how could this still be’ in the 21st century: ‘It’s not that there have been no women’ in philosophy, ‘It’s not that no one has cared. Many people have. Some men have…women philosophers weren’t exactly forgotten; they were just never integrated into the canon…’ (Penaluna, 2023).
As I said at the start – the question to keep in mind is why should we care about inequalities in knowledge? Well, because if construction of knowledge itself has historically been both sexist and racist, then in its embedded prejudice we will continue to leave problematic epistemic blind-spots in what we believe that we know. In the words of black feminist, Audre Lorde, ‘what does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy? It means that only the most narrow perimeters of change are possible and allowable.’ (Lorde, 2019). Or, as philosopher, Sara Ahmed put it more recently: ‘if those with privilege are those who philosophize, so much material will be missing’. (Ahmed, 2023).
Which brings us to the second of Fricker’s forms of epistemic injustice: ‘hermenutical injustice’. Put simply, hermeneutics are methods of interpretation and, in this case, Fricker is talking about the resources we have to interpret – and thus know – the world in which we exist. Imagine, for example, simply being dumped in a school for the very first time and no-one having explained to you what a school is, what a teacher is, what a class is, what a bell signifies, how a timetable works. You would simply experience all these things happening to you, and have no way of properly understanding what it all means. We need to have concepts in place to be able to explain and make sense of our experiences.
As Fricker puts it, ‘relations of unequal power, can skew hermeneutical resources so that the powerful tend to have appropriate understandings of their experiences ready to draw on as they make sense of their social experiences, whereas the powerless are more likely to find themselves having some social experiences…with at best ill-fitting meanings to draw on in the effort to render them intelligible’, leading to epistemic inequalities. (Fricker, 2007) The paradigmatic case here is something like sexual harassment in a time before things like the #MeToo or #TimesUp movements gave women the epistemic tools to name the violence that was happening to them for what it was. Before such movements, sexual harassment and sexual abuse in the workplace from those in positions of power against those without it was happening, but when it happened it was, shamefully, simply considered an unfortunate part of ‘how things are’. Women were being harassed, made uncomfortable, forced out of workplaces, physically attacked, and rightly felt that the way they were being treated was wrong, but were denied the status as ‘knowers’ of what was happening to themselves because the conceptual language wasn’t there to describe what was happening, either to themselves, or to others, as harassment.
We see this too with examples of structural racism. When the dominant knowledge paradigm tells people racism is the sort of thing only individuals can do to you, there are no tools for knowledgably interpreting the persistent structural disadvantages experienced by people of colour – people from the ‘global majority’ – that don’t come from any one individual, but are experienced nevertheless. Such people had to develop the hermeneutics of recognising systemic and structural racism, and the conceptualisation of white privilege, to be able to properly have knowledge of their own life experiences.
Today, we are seeing active attempts at continuing to deny victims of such structural disadvantage knowledge of their own experiences through bans on the teaching of things like critical race theory in schools and even, in this school, being told not to use phrases such as ‘white privilege’ to you students for fear it may be triggering. Such a phrase can only be triggering if you don’t understand it properly – and you won’t understand the concept properly if you are not taught it; a further form of hermeneutical injustice to protect white fragility at the expense of epistemic equality and justice for victims of structurally racist systems.
When I ask ‘why should we care about inequalities in knowledge today?’, I am asking us, specifically, in this room, in the context of this school. Why should we care about the voices and people denied their status as ‘knower’ ‘knowledge’ or their ability to know? I am asking because education has a massive role it could play in overcoming epistemic inequality rather than perpetuating it. Yet schools continue to be sites of epistemic inequality. Not only in the way we routinely dismiss the status of young people as ‘knowers’, but in failing to provide all the epistemic tools to give students – you – the proper hermeneutics to navigate your world.
Educators are in a bind – we need to prepare you for the world that’s out there, but by doing so we often repeat norms without questioning if their status as norms came as a result of prior epistemic injustices. Philosopher, Cris Mayo, for instance, reminds us how ‘social categories of gender shaped the supposedly scientific story of the active sperm and the passive egg, bypassing entirely the activity of the cilia in the Fallopian tube that moves the sperm along.’ Embedded cultural beliefs about the supposed aggression and activity of males and passivity of females meant scientists holding those beliefs see only what they were expecting to see when they make their supposedly objective observations. Meanwhile, ‘feminist analyses of biology have long noted the tendency for observation to be skewed by expectations about what sex/gender an aggressive animal must be (male) and what sex/gender two animals must be if they are engaged in sexual behaviour, missing entirely the aggression of female animals and same-sex behaviour’. (Mayo, 2022). Even supposedly objective and neutral scientific observation can end up being loaded with values and biases which make the so-called knowledge it constructs an incomplete and inaccurate story.
As philosopher, Sally Haslanger, puts it: ‘If we take such existing gender differences as evidence for the different ‘natures’ of men and women, and so structure social arrangements to accommodate these natures, then we simply reinforce the existing gendered social roles…what appeared to be a ‘neutral’ or ‘objective’ ideal – namely, the procedure of drawing on observed regularities to set constraints on practical decision making – is one which will, under conditions of gender hierarchy, reinforce the social arrangements on which such hierarchy depends’. (Haslanger, 2012).
My hope with this brief talk, therefore, is that, by shining a light on just a few examples of epistemic inequality embedded within our society and, yes, within your own school, at least your education – your privileged, private, and inherently unequal education – has at least, today, started to give you particular students hearing this lecture just a few tools to recognise, call out, and begin to remedy some epistemic inequalities that, until this talk, you might not even have had the hermeneutic tools to know were there. That you’ll now be able to answer the question ‘why should we care about inequalities in knowledge?’ because you have started to see how those inequalities make our collective understanding of the world limited, dimmer, and further from the truth than real knowledge should be.
I’ll close now with one other reason that we should care. With the words of queer theorist, Jack Halberstam, who reminds us that ‘the social worlds we inhabit…are not inevitable; they were not always bound to turn out this way, and what’s more, in the process of producing this reality, many other realities, fields of knowledge, and ways of being have been discarded’ (Halberstam, 2011). We should care about inequalities in knowledge because there is so much that we don’t know as a result of those inequalities, and what we don’t know might be so much better than the current reduced and prejudiced distorted picture of reality we have been taught is all there is to know.
References:
- Ahmed, S. 2023. The Feminist Killjoy Handbook. Allen Lane.
- Allais, L. 2016. Problematising Western philosophy as one part of Africanising the curriculum. in South African Journal of Philosophy. 35:4.
- Andrews, K. 2021. The New Age of Empire: How Racism and Colonialism Still Rule the World. Allen Lane.
- Buxton, R and Whiting, L (eds). 2020. The Philosopher Queens. Unbound.
- Campbell-Stephens, R. 2020. Global Majority; Decolonising the language and Reframing the Conversation about Race. (accessed: 24/06/23. https://www.leedsbeckett.ac.uk/-/media/files/schools/school-of-education/final-leeds-beckett-1102-global-majority.pdf.)
- Cantor, L. 2022. Thales – the ‘first philosopher’? A troubled chapter in the historiography of philosophy. in British Journal for the History of Philosophy. 30:5.
- Cooper, A, J. 2022. The Portable Anna Julia Cooper. Penguin.
- Fricker, M. 2007. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford University Press.
- Halberstam, J. 2011. The Queer Art of Failure. Duke University Press.
- Haslanger, S. 2012. Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique. Oxford University Press.
- Lorde, A. 2019. Sister Outsider. Penguin.
- Mayo, C. 2022. Gender Diversities and Sex Education. in Journal of Philosophy of Education. 56:5.
- Morris, R. 2010. Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea. Columbia University Press.
- Penaluna, R. 2023. How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind. Grove Press.
- Santos, B. 2016. Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide. Routledge.
- Schuringa, C. 2020. On the Very Idea of ‘Western’ Philosophy. Medium. (accessed: 24/06/23. https://medium.com/science-and-philosophy/on-the-very-idea-of-western-philosophy-668c27b3677)
Author: DaN McKee (he/him)
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