Knowledge, public policy, and epistemic injustice: A response to Moisés Wasserman

Alejandro Mantilla Quijano
Colombian educator and social researcher

Some people believe the Earth is round. Unfortunately, not everyone holds this belief, so the appropriate quantifier is 'some' and not 'everyone'. Those of us who believe the Earth is round have good reasons to defend this thesis; we can justify it, we can explain why this belief is true, proving Aristarchus of Samos or Carl Sagan right and why flat-Earthers are wrong. The definition of knowledge as justified true belief dates back to Plato's Sophist and has been the basis of epistemological discussions developed by analytic philosophy in the last century. It is common to fall into the temptation of arguing that knowledge does not depend on beliefs, but on what we actually know—that we don't believe 'the Earth is round,' but that it is. But this leads us to the risk of assuming that certain statements are not revisable, that we must accept them without question. In contrast, the scientific vocation demands that we consider all our beliefs fallible, that no scientific statement is immune to revision. If we do not examine our beliefs, we may forget that knowledge is a human activity, which depends on practices carried out by fallible and finite individuals.
This definition of knowledge has been challenged (Gettier's counterexamples are famous, but I don't have space to elaborate). Over the last forty years, approaches focused on the practices and achievements of knowing have gained importance. These approaches promote epistemic values, such as intellectual virtues, understanding, and wisdom. Such intellectual virtues, for example, will allow a virtuous knower to arrive at justified belief. This leads us to two distinct issues. On the one hand, we find the importance of individuals' intellectual virtues. On the other, we have the problem of how socially situated people, in specific contexts, have practices of knowing that we can only understand if we consider aspects such as social identity and power. The two problems are distinguishable but inseparable.
Let's consider a scientist who discovers new evidence linking lung cancer and nicotine, but whose work isn't published due to flawed peer review processes that are biased by sexism and funded by the tobacco industry. Let's consider an Indigenous scientist who understands the use of medicinal plants in their community and has evidence of their effectiveness in treating certain illnesses, but whose knowledge goes unrecognized because they lack a university education. In societies marked by inequality, racism, or patriarchy, it's common for people with intellectual abilities who belong to marginalized groups to be overlooked, for their knowledge to be invalidated, or for their findings to be dismissed. This is what the question of epistemic injustice is all about.
Following Pohljaus, we can speak of three broad senses of epistemic injustice. 1. The grievance suffered by people whose testimony is discredited for unjustified reasons stemming from discrimination. Have you heard of cases where Black people are convicted in criminal proceedings despite their innocence? Have you heard of female professors whose voices are not heard even though their work is of higher quality than that of their male colleagues? This is what testimonial injustice is all about. 2. Hermeneutical injustice refers to biases, resulting from social power relations, that either distort or hinder the shared interpretation of social reality and of one's own experiences. Fricker exemplifies this with the first lawsuits concerning sexual harassment. The victims of such practices, mostly women, lacked the conceptual resources to make sense of the offensive experience they had endured. The employee harassed by her employer felt ashamed of the injustice she had suffered, but lacked the hermeneutical resources to name the offensive treatment she had received. 3. Cases in which such grievances occur due to the typical functioning of our epistemic institutions.

In a recent work, Hana Samaržija has argued that public institutions can generate initiatives to confront epistemic injustice, including ensuring that all social groups enjoy fair and equitable access to education and the opportunity to acquire socially recognized credibility. She also advocates for marginalized groups to have access to the public sphere, such as state institutions and mass media, to express their views. Furthermore, she proposes equal access to public office, enabling members of discriminated groups to achieve fulfilling careers that allow them to publicly assert their epistemic resources. Finally, she proposes institutional mechanisms to address inequality in formal epistemic exchanges, such as those that occur within the education system and research settings. Some of these tasks could well be supported by the Ministry of Science in a progressive government.

In a recent column, Professor Moisés Wasserman dismissed the concept of epistemic injustice, claiming it is an oxymoron. Unfortunately, he offered no reasons to justify his reservations, nor did he make any reference to the growing theoretical framework that has emerged since 2007, thanks to the publication of Miranda Fricker's book, *Epistemic Injustice*. In my view, Wasserman defends an understanding of scientific work in which sound reasoning always prevails, good research always wins, and intellectual virtues have no social limits. However, this is not the reality of actual scientific research, nor does it reflect the typical cases of knowledge production in societies marked by inequality. Disconnecting scientific work from the social context in which it occurs can not only lead to a flawed, reified understanding of knowledge production, but it can also mislead the public policy on science and technology that Colombia needs.