Epistemic Dependence and Oppression: A Telling Relationship

Abstract

Epistemic dependence refers to our social mechanisms of reliance in practices of knowledge production. Epistemic oppression concerns persistent and unwarranted exclusions from those practices. This article examines the relationship between these two frameworks and demonstrates that attending to their relationship is a fruitful practice for applied epistemology. Paying attention to relations of epistemic dependence and how exclusive they are can help us track epistemically oppressive practices. In order to show this, I introduce a taxonomy of epistemic dependence (interpersonal – communal – structural). I argue that this particular taxonomy is useful for tracking epistemically oppressive practices in institutional contexts. This is because, first, the forms of epistemic dependence in this taxonomy yield, what I call, diagnostic questions. These are questions that help us track how relations of epistemic dependence could become exclusive and that thus help reveal epistemic oppression in institutional contexts. Second, the forms of epistemic dependence in the taxonomy are interrelated. Paying attention not just to each of three forms of epistemic dependence but also to the way in which they are interrelated is useful for illuminating epistemically oppressive practices. I conclude by demonstrating how the diagnostic questions can be used in analyses of concrete institutional practices in asylum law and higher education.

Epistemic Dependence, Cognitive Irrationality, and Epistemic Conflicts of Interests

“…This ought to be rectified. Second, ECOI related to cases of epistemic injustice (Fricker 2007), exploitation (Berenstain 2016), corruption (Kidd 2019), oppression (Sertler 2022), or even entitlement (Manne 2020) should be considered. In these and related cases there plausibly are both personal and social interests that hinder individuals from forming and/or sharing true beliefs.…”

Germany's silence: Testimonial injustice in the NSU investigation and willful ignorance in the NSU trial

“…The current literature on problematic epistemic practices is divided into roughly two camps; one side focuses—in line with Fricker's analyses—on interpersonal cases of epistemic injustice and strategies that individuals can employ to act epistemically just, the other side focuses on systemic epistemic oppression that results from a colonial design “constructed to preclude certain forms of knowledge” (Berenstain & Ruíz, 2021, p. 284; cf. Dotson, 2021; Sertler, 2022). While both sides of the debate are grounded in structural injustice, they direct their attention to very distinct forms of epistemically problematic practices.…”

Notes from a Structural Epistemologist

“…“Structural epistemic injustice” (for example, Doan 2017), for instance, calls our attention to the institutional ability to set up and maintain economies of credibility, which systematically assigns credibility deficits and excesses. Other times, the word structural becomes a way of paying attention to our reliance on how social and political arrangements and institutions manage ignorance and knowledge, that is, how they influence “what's considered to be relevant” for knowledge-production and how we should understand that relevance (for example, “structural epistemic dependence” [Sertler 2022]). In the case of “structural gaslighting,” for instance, the word further emphasizes the ability of conceptual works to consistently obscure the “nonaccidental” relationships between structures of oppression and the “patterns of harm” they enable and produce (Berenstain 2020, 733).…”