Epistemic Injustice against Communities and an Epistemology of Communitarian Contextualism

McFarland Student Union, Room 218

After the initial section on the socio-individualistic nature of human cognitive life, we look at recent discussions about the status of groups or communities as epistemic agents. It is argued that groups have an autonomous epistemic status because their collective judgments cannot be reduced to the judgments of their members on pain of paradox. This implies that groups or communities with internal structure, meeting the requirements of the epistemic agency, exist independently of their individual members. We develop a sketch of an epistemology which can ensure epistemic justice to the doxastic attitudes of communities, particularly the vulnerable ones that have been exploited in the past or are being oppressed currently. This epistemology of communitarian contextualism has the following elements to it: communitarian doxastic attitudes supervene over the doxastic attitudes of individual members and can be multiply realized, there can be irreducible differences between the doxastic attitudes of different communities and groups, such communities also have a broad range of shared beliefs about the world, and finally, knowledge-ascription across such communities can be carried out with testimonial and hermeneutical justice only through the exercise of what I call dual intellectual virtuosity.