This book uses the framework of care ethics to articulate a novel theory of our epistemic obligations to one another. It presents an original way to understand our epistemic vulnerabilities, our obligations in education, and our care duties toward others with whom we stand in epistemically vulnerable relationships. As embodied and socially interdependent knowers, we have obligations to one another that are generated by our ability to care – that is, to meet each other’s epistemic vulnerabilities. The author begins the book by arguing that the same motivations that moved social epistemologists away from individualistic epistemology should motivate a move to a care-based theory. The following chapters outline our epistemic care duties to vulnerable agents, and offer criteria of epistemic goodness for communities of inquiry. Finally, the author discusses the tension between epistemic care and epistemic paternalism. Epistemic Care will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in social epistemology, ethics, feminist philosophy, and philosophy of education.

In this exploration of new territory between ethics and epistemology, Miranda Fricker argues that there is a distinctively epistemic type of injustice, in which someone is wronged specifically in their capacity as a knower. Justice is one of the oldest and most central themes in philosophy, but in order to reveal the ethical dimension of our epistemic practices the focus must shift to injustice. Fricker adjusts the philosophical lens so that we see through to the negative space that is epistemic injustice. The book explores two different types of epistemic injustice, each driven by a form of prejudice, and from this exploration comes a positive account of two corrective ethical-intellectual virtues. The characterization of these phenomena casts light on many issues, such as social power, prejudice, virtue, and the genealogy of knowledge, and it proposes a virtue epistemological account of testimony. In this ground-breaking book, the entanglements of reason and social power are traced in a new way, to reveal the different forms of epistemic injustice and their place in the broad pattern of social injustice.

This collection showcases the most influential published essays by philosopher Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski. One of the most distinguished thinkers working in epistemology today, particularly where the theory of knowledge meets ethics and the philosophy of religion, Zagzebski is well-known for broadening epistemology and refocusing it on epistemic virtue and epistemic value. Her work has greatly influenced the trajectory of contemporary epistemology, opening up new fields in analytic epistemology. The papers collected here are organized into six sections to underline the scope of her impact on six key subject areas of epistemology: (1) knowledge and understanding, (2) intellectual virtue, (3) epistemic value, (4) virtue in religious epistemology, (5) intellectual autonomy and authority, and (6) skepticism and the Gettier problem.

Prejudice influences people’s thoughts and behaviors in many ways; it can lead people to underestimate others’ credibility, to read anger or hysteria into their words, or to expect knowledge and truth to ‘sound’ a certain way—or to come from a certain type of person. These biases and mistakes can have a big effect on everything from an institutional culture to an individual’s self-understanding. These kinds of intellectual harms are known as epistemic injustice. Most people are opposed to unfair prejudices (at least in principle), and no one wants to make avoidable mistakes. But research in the social sciences reveals a disturbing truth: Even people who intend to be fair-minded and unprejudiced are influenced by unconscious biases and stereotypes. We may sincerely want to be epistemically just, but we frequently fail, and simply thinking harder about it will not fix the problem. The essays collected in this volume draw from cutting-edge social science research and detailed case studies, to suggest how we can better tackle our unconscious reactions and institutional biases, to help ameliorate epistemic injustice. The volume concludes with an afterward by Miranda Fricker, who catalyzed recent scholarship on epistemic injustice, reflecting on these new lines of research and potential future directions to explore.

Epistemic injustice was conceptualized by Fricker as a form of social injustice, which occurs when people’s authority ‘as a knower’ is ignored, dismissed, or marginalized. It is attracting increasing interest in the mental health field because of the asymmetries of power between people using mental health services and mental health professionals. People experiencing mental health distress are particularly vulnerable to epistemic injustice as a consequence of deeply embedded social stigma, negative stereotyping, and assumed irrationality. This is amplified by other forms of stereotyping or structural discrimination, including racism, misogyny, and homophobia. Consequently, individual testimonies may be discounted as both irrational and unreliable. Epistemic injustice also operates systemically reflecting social and demographic characteristics, such a race, gender, sexuality or disability, or age.

This volume considers forms of information manipulation and restriction in contemporary society. It explores whether and when manipulation of the conditions of inquiry without the consent of those manipulated is morally or epistemically justified. The contributors provide a wealth of examples of manipulation, and debate whether epistemic paternalism is distinct from other forms of paternalism debated in political theory. Special attention is given to medical practice, for science communication, and for research in science, technology, and society. Some of the contributors argue that unconsenting interference with people’s ability of inquire is consistent with, and others that it is inconsistent with, efforts to democratize knowledge and decision-making. These differences invite theoretical reflection regarding which goods are fundamental, whether there is a clear or only a moving boundary between informing and instructing, and whether manipulation of people’s epistemic conditions amounts to a type of intellectual injustice. The collection pays special attention to contemporary paternalistic practices in big data and scientific research, as the way in which the flow of information or knowledge might be curtailed by the manipulations of a small body of experts or algorithms.

Believing the wrong thing can have drastic consequences. The question of when a person is not only ill-guided, but genuinely at fault for holding a particular belief goes to the root of our understanding of such notions as criminal negligence and moral responsibility. This book explores the conditions under which someone may be deemed blameworthy for holding a particular belief, drawing on contemporary epistemology, ethics and legal scholarship.