Epistemic Care (Routledge Studies in Epistemology) [1 ed.] 0367473291, 9780367473297

Citation preview

Routledge Studies in Epistemology

EPISTEMIC CARE VULNERABILITY, INQUIRY, AND SOCIAL EPISTEMOLOGY Casey Rebecca Johnson

Epistemic Care

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. Casey Rebecca Johnson is an assistant professor at the University of Idaho, USA. Her research focuses on the effects of social position and power on knowers’ ability to do what they want with their words and their knowledge. She edited the volume Voicing Dissent (Routledge, 2017).

Routledge Studies in Epistemology Edited by Kevin McCain University of Alabama at Birmingham, USA

Scott Stapleford St. Thomas University, Canada

The Social Epistemology of Legal Trials Edited by Zachary Hoskins and Jon Robson Intellectual Dependability A Virtue Theory of the Epistemic and Educational Ideal T. Ryan Byerly Skeptical Invariantism Reconsidered Edited by Christos Kyriacou and Kevin Wallbridge Epistemic Autonomy Edited by Jonathan Matheson and Kirk Lougheed Epistemic Dilemmas New Arguments, New Angles Edited by Kevin McCain, Scott Stapleford and Matthias Steup Proposition and Doxastic Justification New Essays on Their Nature and Significance Edited by Paul Silva Jr. and Luis R.G. Oliveira Epistemic Instrumentalism Explained Nathaniel Sharadin New Perspectives on Epistemic Closure Edited by Duncan Pritchard and Matthew Jope Epistemic Care Vulnerability, Inquiry, and Social Epistemology Casey Rebecca Johnson The Epistemology of Modality and Philosophical Methodology Edited by Anand Jayprakash Vaidya and Duško Prelević For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/Routledge-Studies-in-Epistemology/book-series/RSIE

Epistemic Care Vulnerability, Inquiry, and Social Epistemology

Casey Rebecca Johnson

First published 2023 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Taylor & Francis The right of Casey Rebecca Johnson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Johnson, Casey Rebecca, author. Title: Epistemic care : vulnerability, inquiry, and social epistemology / Casey Rebecca Johnson. Identifiers: LCCN 2022039214 | ISBN 9780367473297 (hbk) | ISBN 9781032431628 (pbk) | ISBN 9781003036753 (ebk) Subjects: LCSH: Social epistemology. | Epistemics. | Caregivers. Classification: LCC BD175 .J636 2023 | DDC 121/.6‐‐dc23/eng/ 20221207 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022039214 ISBN: 978-0-367-47329-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-43162-8 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-03675-3 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003036753 Typeset in Sabon by MPS Limited, Dehradun

To Owen and Olive

Contents

Acknowledgments

viii

Introduction

1

1

Epistemic Interdependence

8

2

Communities of Inquiry

32

3

Epistemic Vulnerability

56

4

Evaluating Communities of Inquiry

81

5

Epistemic Maternalism

115

Index

133

Acknowledgments

I first presented a nascent argument for care epistemology at the Wellesley Workshop on Language and Law at Wellesley University in 2017. I am grateful for helpful feedback from all the participants, including Lynne Tirrell, Mary Kate McGowan, Miranda Fricker, Raff Donelson, Susan Brison, and others. That feedback encouraged me to pursue the idea of a care-based epistemology. I was able to attend that workshop thanks to support from Michael Lynch and the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut. I also received helpful comments from audiences at the North American Society for Social Philosophy meeting in Rochester, MI in 2018, at Lewis and Clark College’s philosophy department colloquium in 2019, at the University of Idaho’s CETL Faculty Spotlight Series talk in 2019, and at the workshop on Epistemic Autonomy at the University of North Florida in 2021. I drafted most of these chapters while on a Fulbright Fellowship at the University of Calgary. I would like to thank Jeremy Fantl for encouraging me to apply for that fellowship, for organizing research groups when I arrived, and for his help working through some of these ideas. Other philosophers I’d like to thank at the University of Calgary include Alexandra Cunningham, Nicole Wyatt, Anne Levey, Mark Migotti, Megan Delehanty, Ronald Wilburn, Luke Neilson, Alexander Wentzell, Bonnie Chin, Chantal Bazinet, and David Liebesman. Graham Hubbs, Bert Baumgaertner, Matthew Chrisman, Nate Sheff, Laura Sprecker Sullivan, Hanna Gunn, Aleta Quinn, Scott Stapleford, Kevin McCain, and several anonymous reviewers provided detailed comments on various chapters. Their work was invaluable in improving my ideas and the text. I am grateful to the many people with whom I’ve discussed these ideas (sometimes over many years) including Ian James Kidd, Catherine Elgin, Philip Stevens, Becko Copenhaver, Nicole Dular, James Foster, Emily Batey Blackman, Annie Rorem, Karen Johnson, Myisha Cherry, Deb Tollefson, Lavender McKittrick-Sweitzer, Ben Sherman, Stacey Goguen

Acknowledgments

ix

and the members of my Spring 2021 and Spring 2022 Feminism and Philosophy classes, especially Allyson LeForce. I first started thinking along these lines while working with educators I met in Philadelphia who continue to inspire me including Matthew Sherman, Caitlin Townes, Alesha Simmons, Jackson Fongsouvan, Cece Dejesus, Morrison Fairbairn, Matthew Prochnow, Tina Zavitzanos, Monica Gomery, Catherine Daly, and Alex Cookman. Omni Francetich, Nicolette Salas, and Emily Dorigo at the University of Idaho; Carolina Bamforth and Brigitte Clarke at the University of Calgary; and Brad Hector at Fulbright Canada helped me to navigate various requirements at the institutions that made this work possible. I’m also grateful to the teachers and staff at Kids and Co. Eau Clare in Calgary and at Moscow Day School in Moscow, ID for providing childcare during my work on this book. As is right and epistemically proper, I had a huge amount of help with this project – I’m sure I’m missing key people in these acknowledgments – apologies to those I’ve missed! Finally, I am grateful for my conversations with Ross Vandegrift whose feedback, ideas, insights, and support make doing this work a joy.

Introduction

In the two years between finishing my B.A. and starting my Ph.D., I worked in public schools in Philadelphia, PA. The School District of Philadelphia enrolls over 200,000 students at more than 300 schools. I worked at only two of these. I have not done or read any empirical work on the school district as a whole. I cannot offer evidence for claims about how representative my experience was. Instead, I’ll tell this story: In my first year in Philadelphia, I worked at Frankford High School as part of a City Year team. City Year is an AmeriCorps program that places young adult “corps members” in public schools to help teachers, provide tutoring, and run after-school programming. I was assigned to a ninth-grade math classroom. I worked with small groups of students, trying to teach them the state-mandated curriculum. We were working on factoring polynomials, which was lucky because factoring was one of the few skills I actually remembered from my own high school math experience. I had no formal pedagogical training, nor was I certified to teach anything. I did, however, have a copy of the state curricular requirements, which stated what material was to be presented on what day of the school year. Unfortunately, nearly all of the students I worked with were not ready to learn about polynomials. Some had some understanding of multiplication, some had some understanding of exponents, but most did not. One of my sweetest students – I’ll call her Shae – was really struggling. Shae had come to high school, excited to be out of middle school,1 excited to learn. Shae was struggling, though, because she did not have a grasp of some basic mathematical facts. For example, Shae did not understand, in any deep way, the relationship between 8 and 4. Shae had been advanced, grade to grade, from elementary school to high school. She could recite all sorts of true facts about 8 and 4. She could tell you the order of operations. But without actually understanding any of the basic but abstract concepts, factoring polynomials was simply out of reach for Shae. The system, I think we can all agree, had failed her. I was not a good high school teacher. I lacked the patience, training, maturity, and passion necessary for that work. School-day teachers DOI: 10.4324/9781003036753-1

2

Introduction

deserve so much respect. The effort and empathy that so many teachers put into their work is heroic. Teaching is incredibly hard. Teaching in a broken system, in a city and country scarred by decades of systematic racism and patriarchy, can feel Sisyphean. Yet teachers do it (though teachers are leaving the profession at alarming rates (Emma, 2018; Gabbatt & Elk, 2018; Hursh, 2007; McCarthey, 2008)). So, I’m not claiming that Shae’s teachers have failed her. Indeed, after working at Frankford High, blaming any individual teacher seemed both grossly unfair and grossly inadequate. Maybe some teachers were failing to do as they ought, but how could they help it in such a system? So, I started thinking about the school system as a whole, and about education more generally. This was the conceptual starting point for this project, but this book (perhaps unfortunately) will not primarily be about our system or systems of education. I left Philadelphia and school-day teaching to braver and more dedicated teachers. I left for graduate school and specialized in social epistemology, and the observations and considerations that grew out of my experience in Philadelphia broadened. I read Charles Mills’ work on alternative epistemologies, and Catherine Elgin’s work on inquiry and trust (Elgin, 2011; Mills, 1988). I started thinking about the ways that social systems and epistemic norms interact. Mary Kate McGowan has described her work as “the linguistic approach to groupbased injustice” (McGowan, 2019). My interest in social epistemology is in the social-epistemic approach to group-based injustice. I have written some about education and education policy (Johnson, 2019, 2020), but this book is about inquiry more generally. It is about the ways the systems and communities in which we do epistemic work can meet our needs or fail us. The other main source of inspiration for this book came from my more current teaching. In my upper-division feminism and philosophy course at the University of Idaho,2 I teach feminist approaches to major areas of analytic philosophy. We do a section on the metaphysics of gender, a section on feminist philosophy of science and epistemology, and a section on feminist ethics. For the feminist ethics section, I always teach care ethics. It was in more learning about care ethics in order to teach it that I started to get a feel for some conceptual tools that helped me make sense of a question I’d had for some time. Starting during my pre-doctoral fellowship at Northwestern University and my post-doc at the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut, I’d puzzled over the intuition that we can have epistemic obligations to take action. I’d come to believe in what social epistemologists call “epistemic interdependence”. Epistemic interdependence describes the ways that knowers3 rely on one another for some of their beliefs and some of their belief-forming processes. Despite this, at that time, none of the social epistemology I was reading investigated the epistemic obligations we might have to other knowers.4

Introduction

3

I started to work on what this interdependence might mean for our epistemic obligations (Johnson, 2018a, 2018b). Care ethics, as I conceive of it, offers a way to think about moral norms, obligations, and evaluations that are based on relationships of interdependence. A care-based epistemology, then, seems to promise a way to capture something that the social epistemologist is committed to but hasn’t yet noticed or fully embraced: our interdependence yields obligations. Because care ethics works at the level of relationships, care-based epistemology also offers a way to diagnose and attempt to address some things that can go wrong in communities of inquiry. While such a theory could not hope to capture everything that has gone wrong in the Philadelphia school system, it might, nonetheless, illuminate some ways in which that community of inquiry is failing to adequately care for students like Shae.5 In epistemology, even social epistemology, we tend to abstract away from actual knowers. We tend to idealize and homogenize in order to build theories. This kind of idealization has its uses. However, to the very best of my ability, I will, in this book, focus on concrete knowers. In part, this is a methodological preference of mine – I tend to find these kinds of examples both more compelling and more illuminating. But it is also because my project, in this book, is to test out a new kind of epistemology – one that is based on and inspired by the tools from care ethics. And care ethics, as Eva Kittay writes, “understands moral reasoning to be contextual and responsive rather than a calculus performed on rights or utilities. And an ethic of care centers not on impartial judgments but on judgments partial to participants within a caring relation” (Kittay, 2013). If I am going to be able to create a care-based epistemology, it will need to be grounded in the material reality of actual knowers in their real communities of inquiry. As a quick terminological note, I want to explain why I use the term “knower” rather than the more frequently used “epistemic agent”. I follow Lorraine Code in using this terminology, and I use it because I want to be careful what conditions I claim or imply are necessary and sufficient for epistemic notice (Code, 1987). That is, I want to take care not to suggest or imply that the subjects of my theory, the subjects who are worthy of inclusion in my epistemology, need to be agents in anything like the Kantian sense.6 The category of knowers, on my way of thinking, includes epistemic agents, and also includes those subjects who are not now and perhaps will not ever be autonomous. It includes children and the not-fully-rational. And while “knower” might seem like a success term, this success might be quite minimal. If someone is epistemically evaluable, if someone knows something or is coming to know something, that is sufficient for membership in the category. Knowers are simply those who are candidates for epistemic evaluation – who participate in inquiry, broadly construed. It is the material reality of their inquiry with which we’ll be concerned.

4

Introduction

I use this language of “material reality” deliberately. The theory I’ll be developing in this book is not ideal theory. It will not tell you what epistemically proper belief is. It will not give you the norms of testimony. It will not tell you which of your beliefs is immune from doubt. Instead, it will ask: given the material conditions in which actual knowers are forming their beliefs, how should we behave? What can we do to help inquiry go well in this real, non-ideal, context? This will mean that in some places, my theory may be unsatisfying. It will mean that in some places I’ll write that there is no optimal move available to a particular knower. It will mean that my prescriptions for communities of inquiry should be read as ameliorative, rather than ideal. But I hope that it can still be illuminating. Importantly, because there is no one way in which actual knowers form their beliefs, the position of this book is pluralistic. That is, there are many ways for a community of inquiry to provide epistemic care well. This is a consequence of being non-ideal theory and is in line with my generally pluralistic inclinations. This pluralism is important, though, because it means that it is as proper as can be to attempt what Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, a queer, disabled, non-binary writer, educator, and disability/transformative justice worker, describes as experiments in creating care collectives, even if the resulting collectives are temporary and imperfect (Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2018). Accepting these flawed options as proper requires letting go of some commitments from ideal theory. We need to let go of simplistic understandings of fairness, justice, equality, independence, autonomy, and even inquiry and epistemic propriety. This is not easy, and the results will be messy. For epistemic care, this might mean that some research has to take a back seat, that some grant proposal goes unfinished, that some concept is never made clear to a student, and that some mentoring is cut short or badly done. The claim from care epistemology is not that x, y, and z are the good ways to provide epistemic care. Instead, the claim is that, given our starting point with limited, embodied, and interdependent knowers, there are better and worse ways to structure the kind of communities in which we engage in inquiry. For those of us who are participating in communities of inquiry, as all or nearly all inquirers are, we should attend to the distribution and quality of the labor that goes into creating, maintaining, and repairing those communities. Evaluating these things should be part of our epistemic evaluations. The structure of the book is as follows. In chapter 1, I present a sketch of care epistemology, and argue that social epistemologists should be care epistemologists. That is, I argue that social epistemologists are, by and large, committed to epistemic interdependence, and that epistemic interdependence is normative. This means that relationships of epistemic interdependence generate obligations for those in the relationships.

Introduction

5

In chapter 2, I argue that all knowers like us are interdependent. Building on work from care ethics and feminist epistemology, I argue that epistemic interdependence is ineliminable for knowers like us. I also define and explain the notion of a community of inquiry, which is central to the rest of the book. In chapter 3, I give some more details about how and when epistemic obligations to others are generated. I use the language and conceptual tools from care-based accounts of vulnerability to explain the nature and boundaries of our epistemic obligations to one another. I also use Kittay’s notion of doulia and introduce the concept of epistemic reproduction. In chapter 4, I recommend a new measure of epistemic evaluation. Instead of asking how well individuals (or even groups) are forming and revising their beliefs, I recommend asking how well communities of inquiry are meeting their members’ needs. Care ethics has, to my way of thinking, two related projects. First, care ethics describes the conditions under which care work is done in patriarchal and racist systems like ours. These descriptions help us understand and diagnose inadequacies in the communities in which care work is performed. Second, care ethics offers prescriptions for how to organize communities to allow for adequate care provision. Following these prescriptions can help us ameliorate the conditions under which care is given and received. In this chapter, I draw out analogs for each of these within a care-based epistemology. As it turns out, what I’m calling epistemic reproductive work has a similar profile to traditional care work when they’re performed in systems of oppression. And so, I argue, the prescriptions from an account of epistemic care should be helpful for us as well. Chapter 5 takes up a question: when are knowers permitted to turn down epistemic care? If a knower is epistemically dependent on me in a way that generates an obligation for me, but doesn’t want my epistemic care, what does that do to my obligation? In this chapter, I argue for what I call the criteria for maternalism in community as a measure for epistemically proper non-consensual interventions. The main aim of this book is to explore the potential of a care-based epistemology. I’m of the view that social epistemology has made progress in moving toward an understanding of a knower that is less idealized and more realistic. Knowers, according to most social epistemologists, are embodied, socially embedded, and involved in communities that make their inquiry possible. Care epistemology promises to explain how those communities should be structured to provide adequately for those knowers’ inquiry-related needs. The goal is not to supplant social epistemological projects. We will still want to know how justification is conferred through testimony, and what we should do in the face of peer disagreement. Instead, the central claim from care epistemology is that we, as the kind of knowers we are, are ineliminably vulnerable to one

6

Introduction

another in ways that mean that we are sometimes obligated to perform what I’m calling epistemic care. To be as we epistemically ought, we must meet the care needs that present themselves in our communities of inquiry. It is not enough to present Shae with true mathematical facts or reliable procedures. Her actual needs must be met for inquiry to be going well. In addition to concerns about truth and justification, we must also be concerned about the epistemic needs of those in our communities. We don’t get to be epistemically excellent alone. The social epistemologists knows this. Care epistemology helps illuminate what it means.

Notes 1 See Gootman (2007) for more on the particular challenges of middle schools. 2 I inherited this course name. I don’t know its etiology, but I heard a rumor that, once upon a time, a member of the Idaho State Board of Education thought that “feminist philosophy” sounded too … something. 3 My use of knowers here is a bit idiosyncratic. I offer some justification for this terminology below. 4 There has been some more recent work on these kinds of obligations ( Goldberg, 2020; Lackey, 2020). 5 Let me be emphatic that I will at best only illuminate some of these ways. My discussion will barely scratch the surface of the ways that racism, the schoolto-prison pipeline, militarized policing of black and brown communities, capitalistic exploitation of care-workers, and underfunding of social programs have produced a system that harms students like Shae. 6 Chapter 3 of Code’s What Can She Know has a nice discussion of the conceptual relationship between autonomy and full moral agency. I’m assuming an analogy holds for full epistemic agency ( Code, 1991).

References Code, L. (1987). Second persons. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 17(suppl 1), 357–382. Code, L. (1991). What can she know?: Feminist theory and the construction of knowledge. Cornell University Press. Elgin, C.Z. (2011). Science, ethics and education. School Field, 9(3), 251–263. Emma, C. (April 12, 2018). Teachers are going on strike in Trump’s America. Politico. Gabbatt, A., & Elk, M. (April 16, 2018). Teachers’ strikes: Meet the leaders of the movement marching across America. The Guardian. Goldberg, S. (2020). What we owe each other, epistemologically speaking: Ethico-political values in social epistemology. Synthese, 197, 4407–4423. Gootman, E. (2007). For teachers, middle school is test of wills. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/17/education/ 17middle.html Hursh, D. (2007). Exacerbating inequality: The failed promise of the No Child Left Behind Act. Race Ethnicity and Education, 10(3), 295–308. Johnson, C.R. (2018a). For the sake of argument: The nature and extent of our obligation to voice disagreement. In Voicing dissent (pp. 97–108). Routledge.

Introduction

7

Johnson, C.R. (2018b). Just say “no”: Obligations to voice disagreement. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements, 84, 117–138. Johnson, C.R. (2019). Teaching as epistemic care. In B.R. Sherman & S. Goguen (Eds.), Overcoming epistemic injustice: Social and psychological perspectives (pp. 255–268). London: Rowman and Littlefield. Johnson, C.R. (2020). Teaching to the test: How schools discourage phronesis. In Vice epistemology (pp. 225–238). Routledge. Kittay, E.F. (2013). Love’s labor: Essays on women, equality and dependency. Routledge. Lackey, J. (2020). Epistemic duties regarding others. In Epistemic duties (pp. 281–295). Routledge. McCarthey, S.J. (2008). The impact of No Child Left Behind on teachers’ writing instruction. Written Communication, 25(4), 462–505. McGowan, M.K. (2019). Just words: On speech and hidden harm. Oxford University Press. Mills, C.W. (1988). Alternative epistemologies. Social Theory and Practice, 14(3), 237–263. Piepzna-Samarasinha, L.L. (2018). Care work: Dreaming disability justice. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press.

1

Epistemic Interdependence

1.1 Introduction In this chapter, I will present a sketch of the view that I will develop and defend in the rest of the book. I call this view care epistemology, because it, like care ethics, focuses our attention on needs, vulnerabilities, and caring relationships. After sketching the view, I will argue that the commitments that motivate social epistemologists to study knowledge as it appears in social creatures like us should also motivate them be care epistemologists. This is because our actual epistemic practices are affected by our relationships. I cannot do as I epistemically ought on my own – I need a community on which I can depend. These relationships of interdependence, and the related ways that knowers1 act toward one another, should be part of our epistemic evaluations. I will also begin to argue that the best way to evaluate these relationships is using a carebased framework. This is the basic argument for a central claim of the book: theories that conceive of knowers as socially embedded or that countenance group epistemology are committed to knowers having epistemic obligations to address the epistemic vulnerabilities that are generated by interdependence. Care epistemology offers a promising way to understand these obligations. I’ll close this chapter by considering and addressing three objections.

1.2 Care Epistemology Care epistemology is the view that, in addition to evaluating individual knowers, we should also evaluate how well communities of inquiry meet the epistemic needs of their members. This means that, to be epistemically excellent, we need to believe well and we need to work to address the epistemic needs of some other knowers who are depending on us for their inquiry to go well. This approach draws its name from and is inspired by care ethics. Care-based ethical theories differ from other ethical theories by being focused on evaluating relationships and interdependence, instead of, or DOI: 10.4324/9781003036753-2

Epistemic Interdependence

9

in addition to evaluating independent individuals’ actions (or habits or reasons etc.). According to care ethics, obligations are generated by particular relationships and the vulnerabilities of those in them. A carebased epistemology, then, moves from focusing on individual knowers to focusing on knowers in relationships. Knower’s epistemic vulnerabilities can generate obligations for those other knowers on whom they depend. That is, I recommend understanding our epistemic obligations to other knowers as obligations to meet epistemic needs. A care-based approach to epistemology is committed to evaluating communities of inquiry for how well the epistemic needs of members are met. That will mean that, in addition to examining how well a knower revises their beliefs in light of new evidence, we must also examine how well that knower’s community meets their care needs. Let’s start with an example to motivate the view. Imagine that Mr. Thompson is a high school algebra teacher who works in a public school in Philadelphia that has failed to meet state standards for several years.2 This means that an insufficient number of the students is passing the tests and that the test scores have not shown sufficient improvement as specified by state legislation.3 These standardized tests are designed to measure whether and how many of the students are working with gradeappropriate skills. There is some evidence, then, that the students in Mr. Thomson’s classroom do not have the skills to do work at their grade level. We can also infer from normal U.S. public school practice that these students have very little control over who teaches their algebra class. If they’re unhappy in their classroom or with this teacher, the students have little recourse. Imagine that Mr. Thomson conducts his class by running through the state-specified curriculum and exercises. He dutifully solves problems on the board, hands out work sheets, distributes, collects, grades, and returns tests in a timely manner. He performs all of requirements of his position as described by the state and the school – he is fulfilling his professional obligations. Indeed, if he were found to be deviating too far from the curricular requirements, he could be subject to professional sanctions.4 By proceeding in this way, however, Mr. Thomson fails to address or even acknowledge what his students know, don’t know, and need to know. He presents the material required by the state curriculum, and his students make little to no progress, in large part because they lack the skills necessary to benefit from his lessons. I think it is broadly intuitive that something about inquiry, belief formation, and knowledge has gone wrong here. I further think that most social epistemologists would agree that Mr. Thomson’s students depend on him epistemically. The analysis from care epistemology helps to link and explain these two features of the case. The care epistemologist’s claim is that Mr. Thomson’s students are epistemically vulnerable to his behavior; in other words, the students’ beliefs, belief-forming

10

Epistemic Interdependence

processes, and other epistemic outcomes stand to be improved or degraded by Mr. Thomson’s behavior. Therefore, Mr. Thomson has, ceteris paribus, an obligation to meet that vulnerability. Because he is inattentive to the actual needs of his students, he fails to meet this obligation. I’ll discuss this further and specify what is required for adequate provision of epistemic care in chapter 4. I want to emphasize some important features of this case. Mr. Thomson is doing as he legally and, probably, prudentially ought. His contract and his employer require that he teach the state-determined curriculum. This is part of how the United States and the State of Pennsylvania have decided to arrange their public schools. Nonetheless, the students’ needs are not being met. We don’t have to imagine that Mr. Thomson is ill-motivated or vicious. For whatever reason, he is simply failing to properly address the epistemic vulnerabilities of his students, despite being particularly wellplaced to do so. We can argue about how best to understand epistemic vulnerabilities and if algebraic knowledge is the right place to start (I’ll return to epistemic vulnerabilities in chapter 3). Whatever we think about the importance of algebra, Mr. Thomson’s behavior is not epistemically beneficial to his students and it could be. He is well placed to meet their needs, they’re depending on him to do so, and he doesn’t. So, that’s at least part of what has gone epistemically wrong here. And, using the framework of vulnerabilities and obligations helps us to capture the relationships in the example and to diagnose this failing. I am not the first to notice that there is an interesting connection between social epistemology and the care-based framework. In her 1983 paper on feminist epistemology, Hilary Rose argued that science must incorporate and be informed by women’s experience of care provision. Rose rightly, in my view, criticizes western science (and, by extension, mainstream analytic epistemology) for being a tool of capitalism and imperialism. It is, and has been, a system of domination. Fixing this, she argues, requires a new feminist science. She writes, “bringing caring labor and the knowledge that stems from it into the analysis becomes critical for a transformative program equally within science and within society” (Rose, 1983). Rose’s work is insightful and her critiques are convincing, but as she points out, her position is a call for a caring science rather than a full-blown care-based theory of knowledge. More recently, Vrinda Dalmiya argues in her paper, “Why Should a Knower Care?” that care is significant in some areas of social epistemology (Dalmiya, 2002). In particular, Dalmiya argues that care is an intellectual virtue that should be recognized by both virtue reliabilists and virtue responsibilists. For virtue reliabilists, care is a virtue when forming beliefs about our relationships with others, as contributes to reliable belief forming processes in that domain. For virtue responsibilists, care is a virtuous motivation because a caring character, “signals an effort necessary for both knowledge of things and of selves” (Dalmiya, 2002).

Epistemic Interdependence

11

For these reasons, Dalmiya defends a care-based epistemology – one that includes care as a virtue. I am, of course, friendly to Dalmiya’s motivations and to some of her conclusions. I agree with her that there is a deep connection between knowing well and living well, and that this connection is illuminated by using tools from care ethics (Dalmiya, 2016). However, my approach in this book will not be virtue-theoretic. This is in part because I’m convinced by arguments by those care ethicists who conclude that care is not a virtue (Held, 2006; Noddings, 2013). Further, the most pertinent difference between contemporary virtue-theoretic approaches and care-based approaches is that virtue theory has long been primarily individualistic while care-based approaches take relationships to be central.5 As Held puts it, “virtue ethics focuses especially on the states of character of individuals, whereas the ethics of care concerns itself especially with caring relations. Caring relations have primary value” (Held, 2006). That is, when we’re investigating who has the right character traits or correct motivations or habits, we’re examining which individuals are virtuous.6 When we are investigating care we are examining which relationships, communities, or social organizations7 are properly structured. This difference, focusing primarily on relationships rather than primarily on individuals, will appear again and again in this book. The shift from the individual framework to the relationship-based framework is a tricky one, especially given our intellectual heritage. Indeed, it is the biggest shift that I’m asking the social epistemologist to make. I will try to motivate that shift in the next section.

1.3 Social Epistemologists Should Be Care Epistemologists By moving away from what Charles Mills calls, “modern mainstream anglophone epistemology” (Mills, 2007, p. 13), which Alvin Goldman describes as “highly individualistic, focusing on mental operations of cognitive agents in isolation or abstraction from other persons” (Goldman, 1999), social epistemologists give us better tools for understanding our actual knowledge and knowledge practices. In this section, I will argue that the motivations that moved social epistemologists away from this individualistic epistemology should take them one step further. I will argue that, by and large, social epistemologists are committed to knowers being epistemically obligated to one another, and that a care-based theory helps us understand those obligations. In other words, social epistemologists should be care epistemologists. To see why, we will start with this dominant tradition in epistemology and examine social epistemologists’ reasons for moving away from that tradition.

12

Epistemic Interdependence

1.3.1 Modern Mainstream Anglophone Epistemology The questions in dominant modern mainstream anglophone epistemology have to do with the nature of knowledge. Traditionally, these epistemologists ask: “what is knowledge?”; “what amount or quality of evidence justifies a belief?’; ‘what should we do when presented with reasons to doubt?”. And, as we might expect, epistemologists ask many different precise and specified versions of these questions. Many accounts of this kind of epistemology take Descartes as a classic traditional epistemologist. In the Meditations, Descartes investigates certainty. He reflects on his beliefs, subjects them to doubt, and builds back up an account of justification that is paradigmatic of the approach that today we call rationalism. Famously, this process is completed on his own, with only imaginary interlocutors. Empiricism, that other mainstream approach to investigating the foundations of knowledge, also takes as its subject an independent inquirer. The philosopher (Hume, to take the classic example) constructs a theory according to which the knower is justified primarily by their sensory experiences. In both cases, the philosopher and his beliefs are alone, battling against evil demons and popular superstitions. Other people are relevant in these literatures mostly as distractions or deceivers. These sketches verge on caricatures, and this is obviously a very partial history. Nonetheless, the traditional starting point for mainstream epistemology has been the independent philosopher, alone, deep in thought about his beliefs. This individualistic approach has come under pressure from several different fronts. Philosophers of science have pointed out that scientific discovery is social in at least two ways. First, the theoretical framework in which we inquire is determined by where we are in scientific history. That is, what we ask and what we take to be an answer depends on what standards, norms, and starting assumptions the inquirers around us have adopted (Kuhn, 2021; Longino, 1987, 2002, 2021). Second, to make scientific progress, we must rely on the work of others. Inquiry is just too hard and too big for any one individual to proceed all alone (Elgin, 2008, 2011; Goldberg, 2011b; Hall, Vogel, & Croyle, 2019; Pritchard, 2015). Modern mainstream anglophone epistemology has also been criticized for the homogenizing effect of focusing on the experiences of the traditional epistemologists, as if those experiences were unproblematically generalizable. Descartes and Hume, despite disagreeing about the nature of justification, were more similar to each other than they each were to most people who have lived in the world. Yet both assume that their experiences, certainties, and doubts generalize for the rest of us. This assumption has been challenged as well. Mills and José Medina have each argued that experiences of oppression place members of oppressed groups in different and better epistemic positions than members of

Epistemic Interdependence

13

privileged groups (Medina, 2013; Mills, 1988). Loraine Code has argued that there is a distinct kind of women’s knowledge that mainstream or traditional epistemology has an interest in denigrating – precisely because mainstream epistemology has been designed to serve the interests of privileged white men (Code, 1991). Standpoint theorists, like Rose, argue that women’s epistemic practices offer a distinctive kind of feminist theory of knowledge – one that mainstream patriarchal epistemology cannot access (Rose, 1983). A third critique leveled at this traditional approach is that it ignores an obvious and important fact about us as knowers: we are all reliant on others for some of our most basic beliefs. I cannot have direct empirical access to, for example, the circumstances of my birth. I cannot deduce my birthdate rationally. I can’t know, a priori, that I am not a robot, or a clone, or that any number of strange and surprising things haven’t happened to me. I have to rely on others – witnesses, experts, parents, teachers, community members – to tell me many things that are important for me to know. I further rely on others to teach me what is knowable. And I did not spring fully formed into the world as an autonomous epistemic agent. As a child, and every time I try to learn something new, I rely on others to guide me. Our humble beginnings as deeply reliant protoknowers goes largely ignored by traditional epistemologists (Burroughs & Tollefsen, 2016; Carel & Györffy, 2014; Elgin, 1999; Kotzee, 2017). Finally, the individualistic approach has been criticized for overidealizing.8 In some ways, the charge of over-idealization could be an umbrella critique under which to group the first three criticisms. However, one emphasis of this critique is slightly different. Individualistic epistemology is sometimes criticized for using the methodology of ideal theory in a way that puts it out of touch with the practices and projects of actual knowers. The contrast between ideal and non-ideal theory (sometimes labeled as ideal vs. material theory or as ideal vs. ameliorative) can be found in ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology. The differences between ideal theories and non-ideal theories include both starting point and aim. The goal of an ideal theory is to specify what things should be like and then to measure the distance between our existing reality and that ideal. So, an ideal theory might start, for example, by specifying what justice is. With that done, the theory allows us to measure the gap between our actual social arrangements and that ideal. Or, to take a different example, we might specify the necessary and sufficient conditions are for something to be a woman in a way that eliminates patriarchy and transphobia. Then we can say what our concept of woman should be, and explain how our problematic notion falls short of that ideal. These are examples of constructing and using ideal theories.9 In contrast, non-ideal theories start from material reality. That is, they start from the messy and complicated conditions of the actual, historical, real targets of their theories. Specifying what is unjust in our actual social

14

Epistemic Interdependence

arrangements can then allow us to find ways to materially alter those arrangements. Sorting out how pernicious social conditions form our concept of woman, for example, can help us address those conditions. The starting point and the goal of these non-ideal theories are different from the armchair starting point of the ideal theories. And, if you want your theory to make obvious contact with the actual world, this starting point is better. One problem with ideal theories is that they are predicated on the assumption that the theorist can discover the ideal. For an ideal theory to be accurate would require that a finite, socially embedded, biased theorist be able to discover or construct some unbiased idealization about the matter at hand. This is not something that real theorists can obviously do. There is, as feminist philosophers of science have pointed out, no view from nowhere (Harding, 1995; Longino, 2002). And worse, ideal theories are often, if not inherently, tools of oppression (Mills, 2005; O’neill, 1987) because they are necessarily myopic while claiming to be objective. Serene Khader has a helpful discussion of this point: Nonideal theorists, in the sense that I use the term here (following Elizabeth Anderson, Charles Mills, and, to some extent, Amartya Sen), claim that a desideratum for moral and political concepts is that they should help us diagnose and respond to existing injustices. Anderson and Mills argue that one defect of ideal theories – that is, those that imagine a just world instead of offering directives about how to improve our unjust one – is their tendency to direct our evaluative gazes toward the wrong normative phenomena. Mills … argues that the idea that the just society is one inhabited by equally positioned individuals, rather than by members of groups who have been subject to historical injustice, trains our evaluative focus on phenomena other than racism. (Khader, 2018, p. 36) Starting from the reality of knowers as socially embedded, embodied, historical, and political helps us to develop a more accurate epistemology that is able to diagnose and respond to existing epistemological problems and difficulties. In particular, it helps us to diagnose and respond to those epistemological difficulties that stem from our historical, political, and social embedding. Ideal theory, because it ignores some features of material reality for the sake of simplicity, clarity, or a preferred methodology, will have a harder time grappling with the complicated and messy lives of real interdependent knowers. So, modern mainstream anglophone epistemology has been criticized on several fronts. First, it is criticized for ignoring the social features of scientific practice, both in the ways that biases inform inquiry and the ways that inquirers rely on one another. Second, it has been criticized for its homogeneity. The third criticism leveled at this tradition is that it

Epistemic Interdependence

15

ignores the ways in which we become knowers. Finally, and related to each of the first three criticisms, mainstream epistemology is criticized for being an ideal theory that is myopically focused on the wrong normative features of the epistemic landscape. Social epistemologists do better on each of these fronts. 1.3.2 Social Epistemology Social epistemology is social in two central ways.10 First, social epistemologists are interested in the ways that groups know, believe, testify, etc. Coauthored papers, committee decisions, and open letters with multiple signatories all give us evidence that groups do things epistemologists care about. Second, social epistemology is interested in the ways that knowers are socially embedded. Knowers live, acquire beliefs, believe, and conduct their inquiry within social groups. The relationships that we have affect what we believe, what questions interest us, and what evidential requirements we place on belief. Social epistemologists are not focused on the independent idealized subject, S, who might or might not know some proposition, P. Instead, social epistemologists are interested in the knowledge-related states and behaviors of social beings with all their messy interdependence. Many social epistemologists also believe that, because knowers are interdependent, there are ways that they should and should not behave toward one another. Almost as soon as social epistemology entered the mainstream, philosophers began to explore the ways that knowers could do better or worse in their epistemically relevant relationships. Standpoint theorists argue that knowers ought to start from the questions and methods that had historically been excluded (Harding, 2013). Miranda Fricker’s work on epistemic justice, Jose Medina’s work on epistemologies of resistance, Kristie Dotson’s work on epistemic violence, and Nora Berenstain’s work on epistemic exploitation proscribe certain epistemic behaviors (Berenstain, 2016; Dotson, 2011; Fricker, 2007; Medina, 2013). Virtue epistemology, when it is concerned with socially embedded agents, recommends certain epistemic habits (or character traits, or dispositions, or motivations) depending on social context (Battaly, 2006; Kidd, 2015; Watson, 2018; Whitcomb, Battaly, Baehr, & Howard‐Snyder, 2017). Catherine Elgin has argued for epistemic interdependence and the requirements on those interdependent knowers, such as trust, trustworthiness, and autonomy (properly conceived) (Elgin, 1999, 2011). Both Sandford Goldberg and Jennifer Lackey have recent work focusing on our epistemic obligations to one another (Goldberg, 2020; Lackey, 2020). Social epistemologists, by and large, acknowledge our epistemic interdependence, and agree that this interdependence has normative import. Social epistemology is still epistemology. Social epistemology is still the project of inquiring into knowledge, belief, justification, etc. Social

16

Epistemic Interdependence

epistemologists are, however, variously committed to avoiding the critiques of individualistic epistemology mentioned earlier. Some social epistemologists are interested in investigating the ways that our beliefs are shaped by our intellectual contexts (Kidd, 2017; Medina, 2013). Some social epistemologists are interested in the ways that our social positions make a difference in what we can know and what we can do with that knowledge (Berenstain, 2016; Dotson, 2011; Fricker, 2007). Some social epistemologists are interested in understanding how knowledge is transmitted through testimony (Goldberg, 2011a; Lackey, 2008). And some social epistemologists are interested in how protoknowers become knowers (Baehr, 2015; Battaly, 2006; Burroughs & Tollefsen, 2016; Elgin, 2011; Kidd, 2015; Kotzee, 2017; Pritchard, 2013; Siegel, 2004). Many social epistemologists are interested in some combination of these questions. This is because social epistemologists are all committed to the claim that knowers affect one another epistemically. This means that we cannot ask questions about actual knowers or make claims about knowledge as it exists in the world outside of Descartes’ study without factoring in the ways that knowers (and proto-knowers) interact. This is a fairly minimal commitment – one that even our individualist epistemologist might accept. After all, we are affected by deceivers which is how we know that testimony can’t always be trusted. To really capture the central commitment that sets most social epistemologists apart from traditional epistemology, we must make some additions. First, social epistemologists are committed to understanding knowers as inextricably linked to their social groups. What we know and how we learn and what we believe are all tied up in our relationships with other knowers. As Medina puts it, I know myself in the social world and I know myself contextually with and through others. It is with them that I count my years and can tell my age (with the calendars they have supplied me, with the birthdays I have celebrated, etc.); it is with them that I divide the territories of the world into discrete countries and recognize policed boundaries through which I am checked when I travel; and so on. It is through them that I start looking at myself and at my life in a particular way; it is through them that I can check certain things about myself and about my life, that I can maintain my memories and contrast my experiences, and so on. (Medina, 2013) Our most basic and central knowledge – knowledge of ourselves and our world – is only possibly through other knowers. What we know, how we know, what we ask, and what we believe are all determined, in part, by whom we know. As knowers, we are constituted by our relationships with others (Code, 1987).11

Epistemic Interdependence

17

The second major addition the social epistemologist makes is that this is not (or not always) a bad thing. Nearly all social epistemologists are committed to the claim that we do better as knowers when we are able to rely on epistemically good others. We acquire more true beliefs, or more useful true beliefs, or are able to share and disseminate our true beliefs in ways that serve us (however you want to measure epistemic goodness) when the other knowers around us are cooperative, attentive, knowledgeable, etc.12 The one exception, the social epistemologist who keeps me from being able to attribute this commitment to all social epistemologists, is the social epistemologist who defends the “steadfast” view of peer disagreement. The peer disagreement debate is classed as social epistemology because it involves the ways that knowers’ ought to behave in light of the beliefs of others. The question of peer disagreement arises when two knowers who are epistemic peers (equally good at gathering and assessing evidence), disagree about some particular claim. What should these epistemic peers do? The conciliationists claim that the peers should take their peer’s belief as evidence and so should relinquish or at least down grade their belief in the controversial claim. Those opposed to conciliation argue that the peers should remain steadfast. Relinquishing your belief in the face of peer disagreement is not necessary to be justified, or to behave as you epistemically ought. Proponents of the steadfast view are exempted from the argument I’m about to give. Or rather, if one is a proponent of the steadfast view and holds no other views in social epistemology, one is exempted from the argument I’m about to give. This is because, unlike other social epistemologists, such a person is not committed the claim that sometimes knowers’ interactions are epistemically beneficial. I include the proponent of the steadfast view in the collection of social epistemologists because the peer disagreement literature is often cited as central to social epistemology. However, it would be reasonable to ask to what extent such a person, with no other socially relevant epistemic commitments, should count as a social epistemologist. Most social epistemologists do believe the more substantive claims above, or something like them. Most social epistemologists believe that knowers are influenced or even constituted13 by their interactions with one another in deep and important ways, and that these interactions are both formative and (when things go well) beneficial. Because of these beliefs, I argue, these social epistemologists should also believe that relationships of epistemic interdependence can generate epistemic obligations between knowers. My reasoning is as follows. If we are epistemically interdependent in the ways that the social epistemologists claims, then other knowers’ behavior affects how well I can do epistemically. If that’s the case, then I am (likely14) in a symmetric situation – that is, other knowers are

18

Epistemic Interdependence

epistemically affected by my behavior. If that is the case, then how well they do epistemically depend, in part, on my behavior. In this situation, the dependent knower is vulnerable to the knower on whom she depends. And, ceteris paribus,15 if someone is vulnerable to my behavior, then I ought to do well by them – I ought to make sure that the effects of my behavior on other knowers is that they are in a better epistemic position than they otherwise would have been. As Catherine Elgin has pointed out, “epistemic interdependence creates vulnerability” (Elgin, 2011). This will be my focus in chapter 3, but for now note that vulnerability, at least sometimes, generates obligations. Put another way, modern mainstream anglophone epistemology assessed individual beliefs, credences, or epistemic habits for epistemic propriety. Social epistemology typically assesses those same things, as had by knowers who are socially embedded. As Sanford Goldberg puts it, epistemic assessment, from the vantagepoint of tradition, focuses exclusively on how one’s beliefs conform to the evidence currently in one’s possession, or on the reliability of the cognitive processes on which one actually relied, or on the effects of acquiring a belief on the evolving coherence of one’s belief-corpus. (Goldberg, 2021, p. 51) This assessment, however, ignores the normative import of interdependence. That we rely on one another for our epistemic projects means something for how we, as knowers, ought to behave. Social epistemology shifted the focus from the individual knower in isolation to the knower as affected by their community. Care epistemology shifts the focus again, from the individual in a community to the individual as a member of a community, and to the community itself. As a knower, I am obligated to other knowers – members of my community (or communities) of inquiry – who depend on me for their inquiry to go well. If I am right about this, a key question is how we are to understand these obligations. Are they epistemic obligations? Are they moral obligations to do something epistemic? What are we obligated to do? Are we always so obligated? The project of the rest of this book is to answer these questions in more detail. First, though, I’ll close this chapter by addressing three immediate and related objections.

1.4 Objections and Answers I am going to take some time to dispense with some objections here in the first chapter before all of the details of my position are clear. This is for a couple of reasons. First, if these objections stand, it is not clear why anyone should care about the details. The objections I will look at in this section are objections to the very project. So, if I can’t answer these, the

Epistemic Interdependence

19

position is pretty well sunk. Second, I will address these three objections here because doing so will help delineate the boundaries and commitments of my position. It will, I think, help to locate the view relative to other positions. This is because these objections are motivated by different background commitments but are also closely related. First, one might object that while we do have obligations in the cases I’ve mentioned, the obligations are moral. That is, we might accept that Mr. Thomson, the math teacher, is obligated but deny that he has an epistemic obligation – he merely has a moral obligation to do something epistemic, namely testify. Chase Wrenn defends a view like this, claiming that so-called epistemic obligations coincide with moral obligations and so are theoretically superfluous (Wrenn, 2007). Call this the “moral obligations” objection. The second objection comes from a slightly different set of considerations. Instead of objecting to the details of my position, one might object that my approach is too derivative – or worse, that it is merely a restatement of the commitments of care ethics. After all, care ethicists have a long history of critiquing mainstream philosophy. Feminist philosophers have noted the hyper-individualism of epistemology for a long time. Care ethicists already focus on education. Yes, we should care for one another, this objection goes, care ethicists have been saying that for a long time! Call this the “objection from care ethics”. The third objection has to do with the meaning of “care”. One might object that my account ignores something important about care or caring. Care is or involves a feeling. The word “emotion” has yet to appear. A real alternative to the individualist epistemology with its obsession with rationality would be a theory of knowledge that focuses on emotions, like the one offered by Allison Jaggar (among others) (Jaggar, 1989; Little, 1995). Why am I not defending that sort of view? Call this the “care involves emotion” objection. I’ll address each of these objections in turn. 1.4.1 The Moral Obligations Objection One straightforward reading of the “moral obligations” objection is that all purportedly epistemic obligations are moral. As Wrenn puts it, “every situation that imposes a supposedly epistemic duty … morally requires the very same thing” (Wrenn, 2007), so there is no theoretical benefit to countenancing epistemic obligations over and above moral ones. This strikes me as straightforwardly false for two reasons. First, even if moral and epistemic obligations were coextensive in the way Wrenn suggests, this does not mean that there would be no theoretical benefit to countenancing epistemic obligations. Theories are tools used by people in inquiry. Epistemologists regularly inquire into the epistemic status of knowers and their beliefs. When they do this, they are evaluating

20

Epistemic Interdependence

knowers epistemically and not morally. If we only attend to epistemic concerns in our theory and all obligations are understood to be moral, we will miss something in our evaluations. Second, I am not convinced by Wrenn’s argument that moral and epistemic obligations are coextensive. Our disagreement is due, at least in part, to Wrenn’s fairly narrow understanding of epistemic duties and obligations.16 Wrenn’s examples of allegedly epistemic duties all involve duties to believe (or disbelieve) some proposition in light of available evidence. I’ve argued elsewhere that we should understand epistemic obligations more broadly (Johnson, 2018a). We sometimes have epistemic obligations to object, to testify, and to inquire. And there are cases in which inquiry would be epistemically fruitful but morally fraught. Take, for example, the Tuskeegee syphilis experiment – a classic case illustrating the necessity of informed consent and the racism that informs decades, if not centuries, of western medical research. For nearly 40 years, the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) conducted a study on the effects of untreated syphilis. The PHS selected more than 400 black men living in and around Tuskeegee, Alabama. The subjects were not informed about the nature of their disease nor were they offered adequate treatment. The PHS was interested in the serious complications of advanced-stage syphilis and so allowed the disease to run its course in poor, black, uninformed subjects (Jones, 2008). This was clearly immoral. Nonetheless, the knowledge gained from the study was and is epistemically valuable. The PHS officials had an epistemic obligation to inquire into advanced-stage syphilis. They had a moral obligation not to or at least not to do so in that way. This, and other similar cases, demonstrates that epistemic and moral obligations come apart. The force of the “moral obligations” objection need not be that there are no epistemic obligations – though this is Wrenn’s view. One could also voice this objection while holding that there are self-regarding epistemic obligations to, for example, believe in accordance with the evidence. The core of the objection is that the obligations we have to other knowers are moral, not epistemic. This would mean that when we’re evaluating knowers as epistemic agents, we check on the justification they have for their beliefs (or something similar), and when we’re evaluating them as moral agents, we check on their behavior to others. Someone who poses this objection might agree with my claim that knowers are vulnerable to one another but deny that the obligations generated by those vulnerabilities are epistemic. If I have to offer testimony to meet that obligation, then it is a moral obligation to do something with my knowledge, rather than an epistemic obligation proper. Another way to understand this objection is as the claim that epistemic goodness only requires having justified true beliefs or apportioning one’s beliefs to the evidence. To be a good epistemic agent, then, has little to do with what you do to others. What matters is believing only reliable

Epistemic Interdependence

21

testimony, relying on the right kind of experts, etc. In other words, according to this objection, epistemic norms are self-regarding. There may well be other-regarding obligations, but those obligations are moral (or aesthetic or prudential, etc). As Jennifer Lackey puts it, the objection maintains that “I have the duty to manage my own doxastic life, not that of others” (Lackey, 2020, p. 285). The kinds of commitments that motivate this sort of objection are waning in popularity due, in part, to social epistemology’s success. Elgin’s work on epistemic vulnerability and trust (Elgin, 2011), Goldberg’s work on social expectations and epistemic normativity (Goldberg, 2020), and Lackey’s work on epistemic duties to others (Lackey, 2020) are evidence of this. However, I’ll also answer this objection with an argument that doesn’t simply rest on authority. I think that it is an open position to insist that epistemic norms are self-regarding. Traditional epistemologists only really considered selfregarding epistemic obligations, or requirements about how to form one’s belief in the face of different kinds of evidence. Epistemic theories can be pretty austere regarding epistemic norms. Beyond just denying that there are other-regarding epistemic obligations, one might hold that doxastic volunteerism is false – we might not be able to choose what to believe, in which case the most robust epistemic norm would be a prohibition against believing contrary to evidence. This position, then, would hold that epistemic evaluation is purely individualistic, and that epistemic obligations have only to do with avoiding false or unjustified beliefs. That’s a fine position. It is not, however, a position that is comfortable for the social epistemologist. Social epistemologists, committed as they are to the claims about interdependence above, tie our doxastic options to the epistemically relevant actions and behavior of the knowers we know. The strict division of normative labor that this objection requires just does not fit well with the observation that we are epistemically interconnected. If testimony and the giving and asking for reasons are governed by epistemic norms and not just practical or moral ones, then at least some behavior can be epistemically evaluated. This means that the austere position is not available. To believe that we are epistemically interdependent but not believe in other regarding obligations requires that one think that this interconnection has no normative import – in other words, this objection requires that we are epistemically interdependent but not in a way that matters for our epistemic evaluations. This is implausible. The second response to an objection like this one is to point out that while the obligations that the care epistemologist argues for are most obviously other-regarding, they are not (or are not all) exclusively so. When we are interdependent, there are many cases in which I can help myself by helping others. Catherine Elgin offers convincing arguments that this is the case in science and education – we do better at inquiry

22

Epistemic Interdependence

when the people around us are good inquirers, so we can improve our own epistemic circumstances by helping our students and colleagues to develop epistemically (Elgin, 2011). The objects of our inquiry are complicated and vast. There is far too much to understand for one person to keep track of it all. We have no choice but to rely on the competent inquirers around us. Because of this, we ought to make sure we have the best possible inquirers around us, just was we ought to make sure we have the best possible tools and instruments. So, while care is directed at others, and the obligations are generated by other knowers’ vulnerabilities, addressing these vulnerabilities at least sometimes makes us epistemically better off. And it is very plausible that many of the requirements that social epistemologists are happy to place on knowers are requirements to make themselves epistemically better off. The social epistemologist likely thinks we have epistemic obligations to, for example, critically assess our sources, or to investigate the sincerity of the experts we consult. This is because doing so puts us in a better epistemic position. So too does addressing the vulnerabilities of the knowers who depend on us.17 Of course, Elgin herself argues that inquiry is always and inherently both epistemic and ethical. In that 2011 article she writes, Science requires collaboration. That collaboration requires trust. Since trust is unreasonable in the absence of trustworthiness, scientists need to be, and to consider one another, trustworthy. Since trustworthiness is a moral characteristic, morality figures in science. That being so, science education should inculcate trustworthiness and an appreciation of the ways it contributes to and figures in science. (Elgin, 2011) And further, In agreeing to work together, people engender obligations in one another – obligations whose content is determined by the objective they jointly pursue. Ceteris paribus, they owe it to one another to discharge those obligations. In science, the goal is understanding. So the obligations are in the first instance epistemic; they pertain to generating and sustaining the understanding that science seeks. But because scientific inquiry is a joint epistemic venture, the epistemic obligations are also ethical obligations. Scientists owe it to one another to satisfy the epistemic requirements, and to make it manifest that they do so. (Elgin, 2011) This brings us to the third response to this objection: perhaps it is, at least in part, correct. Perhaps I’m highlighting moral obligations that are relevant for epistemic ends. Or, perhaps they are moral obligations to do epistemic things. I don’t think this is correct, but I also don’t think it fully

Epistemic Interdependence

23

undermines the project if there is something importantly right about it. This is because I’m not sure how useful it is to demarcate with thick lines the divisions between the epistemic and the moral. Like Elgin, Miranda Fricker also thinks that the epistemic and moral are not so clearly separable. In her work on epistemic injustice, Fricker recommends that we cultivate the virtue of testimonial justice. This virtue will help us avoid treating members of marginalized groups with credibility deficits. Fricker argues that testimonial justice is a “hybrid virtue”. It is both epistemic and moral. She says, Testimonial justice considered either as an intellectual virtue or as an ethical virtue contains the very same individuating motivation: to neutralize prejudice in one’s credibility judgement. I conclude that they are one and the same virtue, even while the ultimate end that is most appropriately attached (truth or justice) will change according to the context. (Fricker, 2007) If Fricker is right about the possibility of hybrid virtues than our objector must argue for a stronger claim. It is not enough to argue that the obligations I’m picking out are moral. The objector must argue that they are moral and not epistemic. And, as I’ve argued elsewhere, I don’t think our intuitions of rightness and wrongness are always or ever clearly epistemic or moral. We have intuitions of goodness/badness, but they’re rarely honed to the point that we can tell what kind of norm is being obeyed/violated (Johnson, 2018b). I want to resist fully conflating the moral and the epistemic, for reasons I’ll get to below. But if some, or even most of our epistemic obligations to others turn out to be also morally relevant, that’s okay with me. To summarize this section, then, the “moral obligations” objection claims that the obligations that the care epistemologist highlights are moral rather than properly epistemic. I don’t think that that is a position which is available to (most) social epistemologists. 1.4.2 The Objection from Care Ethics This second objection comes from a different perspective, but is related. I can imagine a care ethicist reading my sketched argument above and thinking: yes, vulnerabilities generate obligations; yes, we are interdependent; yes, we know this. We’ve been saying this all along. Education work is care work. This is nothing new. Nel Noddings has worked for decades on the relationship between care ethics and education. “Cite Noddings”, this objector might say, “and call it a day” (Noddings, 1995, 2002, 2003, 2013). The force of this objection is twofold. First, and as above, the objection calls into question that there is anything distinctively epistemic

24

Epistemic Interdependence

about the obligations I’m highlighting. Care ethics, after all, is an ethical theory. If there is nothing distinctive about either the vulnerability or the obligations, then I’m not saying anything that care ethicists haven’t been saying for decades. However, one might also read this objection as a kind of meta-commentary. Care ethics, as a part of feminist theory, has been historically ignored by mainstream analytic philosophy. Mainstream analytic philosophy, informed by its homogeneous patriarchal white supremacist cannon, continues to do as it has always done – ignore the contributions that marginalized people make to theory and theorizing until they can be co-opted and claimed. My “care epistemology”, one might object, is just care ethics made more palatable to the analytic social epistemologist (who may only reluctantly have added the “social”). This would be pretty bad for my theory, given that I’m committed to illuminating historically marginalized epistemic perspectives (Johnson, 2019, 2020b). So, what can I say to this second objection? First, as above, I do think there is something distinctly epistemic about the obligations I am highlighting. We have obligations to one another as knowers that will improve our ability to understand and to inquire. And if these are moral obligations, they are not merely so. Second, while Nel Noddings, Joan Tronto, and other care ethicists do write extensively about education, their focus is on educating students to be good morally, or democratically, rather than good epistemically (Tronto, 1993, 2013). I agree with much of what has been said on this front: we have obligations to provide quality public education. Education must be aimed at more than STEM proficiency. Public education must also aim to help children to be well-informed, healthy, happy, and good. A society that aspires to be egalitarian, liberal, and/or a democracy must provide equitable educational opportunities for its members. As Noddings puts it, “a democratic society needs an education system that helps to sustain its democracy by developing thoughtful citizens who can make wise civic choices” (Noddings, 2005, p. 6). I agree that societies have a moral and a political duty to educate. But my claim, here, is different. I don’t just want to claim that we’re morally better when we educate children. I want to claim that we’re epistemically better when we meet the epistemic needs that present themselves within our communities of inquiry. If we set up our educational systems to care for “the whole child” and make happy, healthy, civically wise young people, we will be doing quite well – this would be a significant improvement over the current U.S. educational system taken as a whole. But even if we manage that, it is not at all clear that we will be inquiring well. It is not clear that such a system would do well when evaluated epistemically. And further, our epistemic obligations don’t end when students graduate. We have epistemic obligations to knowers who will never go to traditional school because the schools are not equipped to teach students with profound cognitive

Epistemic Interdependence

25

disabilities. We have epistemic obligations to knowers who are (sometimes forcibly) kept from participating fully as members of our communities, like people who are displaced or incarcerated. So, it is not so much that I disagree with my imagined second objector. I just think that our obligations to provide epistemic care go beyond those focused on by the care ethicist both in number and in aim. We have wide ranging epistemic obligations, and meeting them is a matter of epistemic goodness. See chapter 4 for further discussion of the requirements care epistemology places on our epistemic communities and institutions. That’s the answer to the first version of the second objection. The answer to the second version, the meta-commentary version, is related. I am inspired by the care ethicist’s framework. I think the care ethicist gets something deeply and importantly right about our obligations and relationships. I am not motivated to repackage an existing theory to make it more palatable for the analytic epistemologist. Instead, I’m interested in the ways that the observations and insights from care ethics help to illuminate a question at the cutting edge of social epistemology. Social epistemologists need to change their epistemic evaluations. The move away from an individualistic conception of epistemic goodness is progress toward a realistic epistemology but is, so far, incomplete. To countenance interdependence fully, we need to acknowledge and address vulnerability. Care epistemology gives us a framework in which to do so. I agree that observations about vulnerability and interdependence are already out there in the philosophical literature. We, analytic social epistemologists, should pay attention to them. And as we do so, we may find, as social epistemologists have been finding since Charles Mills’ work on alternative epistemologies, that doing so pushes us further and further from mainstream anglophone epistemology’s Cartesian theoretical roots (Mills, 1988). 1.4.3 Care and Emotion The objection that care involves emotion is, perhaps, best understood as a demand for clarification. What am I doing calling this a “care-based epistemology” when almost nothing about my position has to do with affect or emotion? After all, there are existing accounts of feminist epistemology that advocate for the incorporation of emotions, and for the movement away from the assumption that to be emotional is to be a suboptimal knower. This assumption buys into and reinforces the patriarchal bifurcation between the masculine-rational-autonomous-knower and the feminine-emotional-dependent-feeler. As Jaggar puts it, Not only has reason been contrasted with emotion, but it has also been associated with the mental, the cultural, the universal, the public and the male, whereas emotion has been associated with the

26

Epistemic Interdependence irrational, the physical, the natural, the particular, the private and, of course, the female. (Jaggar, 1989)

Feminist theorists have taken great pains to undermine and reject this bifurcation, and the development of care ethics has been part of that work. So, where are the emotions in the story I’m telling? I don’t deny that emotions, like relationships, are vitally important for knowers like us. Feminist philosophers have argued convincingly that scientific inquiry is informed by our values and that our values are affected by our emotions, and I don’t think this is universally deleterious to our epistemic projects. Indeed, given that values are inescapable for knowers, it would be very odd if we could only do our epistemic projects well without them. So, I’m in no way against emotion. Nor am I against partiality. As we’ll see in chapters 2 and 3, the idea of epistemic obligations I’m recommending in this book is not an impartial or impersonal account. My epistemic obligations, according to care epistemology, will be rooted in my actual relationships and those will involve emotions. I’m not, however, focusing on emotions in my account. Instead, when I talk about taking a care-based approach to epistemology, I’m interested in care as one sort of approach or practice. I follow Joan Tronto and Bernice Fisher in conceiving of care as a kind of activity (Fisher & Tronto, 1990). Care is what we do to maintain our communities, relationships, and spaces. When we attend to the needs and vulnerabilities of members of our communities, we are doing care work. Care-based theories then make this work central to their account. A care-based epistemology makes care work central to a theory of knowledge. This work sometimes involves emotions in deep and important ways, but those emotions are not my focus. My sense is that there is probably a rich and interesting investigation to be made into the emotions that are proper, useful, healthy, or otherwise good within different communities of inquiry. In addition to the work from feminist epistemologists like Jaggar, Code, and Noddings, mentioned above, work from, i.e., Maria Lugones, Audre Lorde, and Myisha Cherry could be good resources for that inquiry (Cherry, 2021; Lorde, 2012; Lugones, 1987). This book, for better or for worse, does not pursue that project.

1.5 What’s Next If the above sketch of the care epistemologist’s position and the defense against these three initial objections has been convincing, then we’re starting to need more detail. After all, a sketch is not a theory, and I haven’t given much of an argument that care epistemology is distinctively promising as an account of our epistemic obligations to one another. Of course, I think it is. So, in the next few chapters, I will spell

Epistemic Interdependence

27

out some more details of care epistemology. Care epistemology views knowers like us as ineliminably interdependent. We are made into knowers by being in communities with other knowers who teach us to inquire and help us do so. In the next chapter, I’ll explain this conception of knowers, basing my account in work from care ethicists and feminist epistemologists.

Notes 1 See the introduction for an explanation of my use of “knower” rather than “epistemic agent”. 2 I’ve adapted this example from Johnson (2020a). 3 For further discussion on this, see Hursh (2007), McCarthey (2008), Rushton and Juola-Rushton (2008), and Volante (2004). 4 Some school districts and states attempt to improve student performance on standardized tests by outsourcing curricular and planning decisions to various agencies and educational counsels and consortia. See, for example, the Principles and Standards literature from the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, or Pennsylvania’s Core Standards in English Language Arts and Mathematics documentation. 5 Dalmiya is aware of the fact that some care ethicists reject reading care as a virtue. In particular, Dalmiya addresses the concern that care is not a virtue, but a source of virtues. While Dalmiya avoids this objection to a care/virtue hybrid approach, she does not address the concern that virtue theories are individualistic. 6 It is important that this is a complaint against contemporary virtue-based accounts. There is some work claiming that Aristotle is a (very) early defender of a care-based approach to ethics ( Curzer, 2007; Komter, 1995). I won’t engage with these claims here. 7 As I’m understanding them, social organizations are composed (or are ways of describing) interrelated relationships. That is, the parts of a social organization are people related to one another in various ways. These ways might be officially described, or implicit within the social organization. If the members of some set of relationships are not interrelated in any substantial way, then the set is not a social organization. Here’s an example. My sister and I are in a relationship. Isabel’s sister and she are also in a relationship. My relationship with my sister is not related, in any substantial way, with Isabel’s relationship with her sister. We could, however, join a social organization of sisters. Imagine “Supporting Sisters” a social organization made up of and lead by pairs or groups of sisters. I don’t mean anything more ontologically committed than this by distinguishing relationships and social organizations. I’ll discuss this further in chapter 2 in the section on communities of inquiry. 8 I’m grateful to Jeremy Fantl and Graham Hubbs for helping me think through the issues in this section. 9 I’m drawing here from discussions in Haslanger (2012), Khader (2018), Mikkola (2018), and Mills (2014). 10 Helen Longino has identified five possible meanings for the term “social”, and argues for nuances beyond what I state here, but she agrees that, “The task of social epistemology is to extend the principles of fundamental or basic epistemology to encompass individuals among other individuals or for groups of individuals” ( Longino, 2021). I think that much of what appears to

28

11 12 13 14

15 16 17

Epistemic Interdependence be a disagreement between Longino’s view and my own on this subject will dissolve over the course of the chapter. We have, I think, different ways of discussing similar commitments. I’ll return to this claim in the next chapter. Different social epistemologists have different ways of spelling out these commitments, and I’ll argue for my preferred ways in chapters 2 and 3. I’ll return to further discussion of the claim that knowers are ineliminably interdependent in chapter 2. It is important to my position that not all knowers are necessarily in this situation. And certainly not all knowers are in this situation all the time. That is, there might be knowers who are affected by others but do not have the opportunity to affect others. I will return to this issue in chapter 3. This is a big ceteris paribus. I don’t focus on it here, but see chapter 3 for more. I also disagree with Wrenn that conflicting epistemic and moral obligations can always intuitively be understood as conflicting pro tanto moral obligations. This answer is somewhat complicated by Joan Tronto’s claim that care is always directed outward ( Tronto, 1993), and by questions about epistemic autonomy, and I’ll address those in chapters 4 and 5, respectively.

References Baehr, J. (2015). Intellectual virtues and education: Essays in applied virtue epistemology. Routledge. Battaly, H. (2006). Teaching intellectual virtues: Applying virtue epistemology in the classroom. Teaching Philosophy, 29(3), 191–222. Berenstain, N. (2016). Epistemic exploitation. Ergo, an Open Access Journal of Philosophy, 3, 569–590. Burroughs, M.D., & Tollefsen, D. (2016). Learning to listen: Epistemic injustice and the child. Episteme, 13(3), 359–377. Carel, H., & Györffy, G. (2014). Seen but not heard: Children and epistemic injustice. The Lancet, 384(9950), 1256–1257. Cherry, M. (2021). The case for rage: Why anger is essential to anti-racist struggle. Oxford University Press. Code, L. (1987). Second persons. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 17(suppl 1), 357–382. Code, L. (1991). What can she know?: Feminist theory and the construction of knowledge. Cornell University Press. Curzer, H.J. (2007). Aristotle: Founder of the ethics of care. Journal of Value Inquiry, 41(2–4), 221. Dalmiya, V. (2002). Why should a knower care? Hypatia, 17(1), 34–52. Dalmiya, V. (2016). Caring to know: Comparative care ethics, feminist epistemology, and the Mahabharata. Oxford University Press. Dotson, K. (2011). Tracking epistemic violence, tracking practices of silencing. Hypatia, 26(2), 236–257. doi: 10.1111/j.1527-2001.2011.01177.x Elgin, C.Z. (1999). Education and the advancement of understanding. The Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy, 3, 131–140. Elgin, C.Z. (2008). Trustworthiness. Philosophical Papers, 37(3), 371–387. Elgin, C.Z. (2011). Science, ethics and education. School Field, 9(3), 251–263.

Epistemic Interdependence

29

Fisher, B., & Tronto, J. (1990). Toward a feminist theory of caring. In E.K. Abel & M.K. Nelson (Eds.), Circles of care: Work and identity in women’s lives (pp. 35–62). Albany: SUNY Press. Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic injustice: Power and the ethics of knowing. Oxford University Press. Goldberg, S. (2011a). Putting the norm of assertion to work: The case of testimony. In Assertion: New philosophical essays. Oxford University Press. Goldberg, S. (2011b). The division of epistemic labor. Episteme, 8(1), 112–125. Goldberg, S. (2020). What we owe each other, epistemologically speaking: Ethico-political values in social epistemology. Synthese, 197, 4407–4423. Goldberg, S.C. (2021). Normative expectations in epistemology. Philosophical Topics, 49(2), 83–104. Goldman, A.I. (1999). Knowledge in a social world, Vol. 281. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hall, K.L., Vogel, A.L., & Croyle, R.T. (2019). Strategies for team science success: Handbook of evidence-based principles for cross-disciplinary science and practical lessons learned from health researchers. Springer Nature. Harding, S. (1995). “Strong objectivity”: A response to the new objectivity question. Synthese, 104(3), 331–349. Harding, S. (2013). Rethinking standpoint epistemology: What is “strong objectivity”? In Feminist epistemologies (pp. 49–82). Routledge. Haslanger, S. (2012). Resisting reality: Social construction and social critique. Oxford University Press. Held, V. (2006). The ethics of care: Personal, political, and global. Oxford University Press on Demand. Hursh, D. (2007). Exacerbating inequality: The failed promise of the No Child Left Behind Act. Race Ethnicity and Education, 10(3), 295–308. Jaggar, A.M. (1989). Love and knowledge: Emotion in feminist epistemology. Inquiry, 32(2), 151–176. Johnson, C.R. (2018a). Just say “no”: Obligations to voice disagreement. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements, 84, 117–138. Johnson, C.R. (2018b). What norm of assertion? Acta Analytica, 33(1), 51–67. Johnson, C.R. (2019). Teaching as epistemic care. In Overcoming Epistemic Injustice: Social and Psychological Perspectives, 255. Johnson, C.R. (2020a). Epistemic vulnerability. International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 28(5), 677–691. Johnson, C.R. (2020b). Teaching to the test: How schools discourage phronesis. In Vice epistemology (pp. 225–238). Routledge. Jones, J.H. (2008). The Tuskegee syphilis experiment. In E.J. Emanuel, C. Grady, R.A. Crouch, R.K. Lie, F.G. Miller, & D. Wendler (Eds.), The Oxford textbook of clinical research ethics (pp. 86–96). New York: Oxford University Press. Khader, S.J. (2018). Decolonizing universalism: A transnational feminist ethic. Studies in Feminist Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press. Kidd, I.J. (2015). Educating for intellectual humility. In Intellectual virtues and education (pp. 54–70). Routledge. Kidd, I.J. (2017). Capital epistemic vices. Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective, 6(8), 11–16.

30

Epistemic Interdependence

Komter, A.E. (1995). Justice, friendship and care: Aristotle and Gilligan-two of a kind? European Journal of Women’s Studies, 2(2), 151–169. Kotzee, B. (2017). Education and epistemic injustice. In I.J. Kidd, J. Medina, & G. Pohlhaus (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of epistemic injustice. Routledge. doi: 10.4324/9781315212043.ch31 Kuhn, T. (2021). The structure of scientific revolutions. Princeton University Press. Lackey, J. (2008). Learning from words: Testimony as a source of knowledge. Oxford University Press on Demand. Lackey, J. (2020). Epistemic duties regarding others. In Epistemic duties (pp. 281–295). Routledge. Little, M.O. (1995). Seeing and caring: The role of affect in feminist moral epistemology. Hypatia, 10(3), 117–137. Longino, H.E. (1987). Can there be a feminist science? Hypatia, 2(3), 51–64. Longino, H.E. (2002). The fate of knowledge. Princeton University Press. Longino, H.E. (2021). What’s social about social epistemology? Journal of Philosophy, 119(4), 169–195. Lorde, A. (2012). Sister outsider: Essays and speeches. Crossing Press. Lugones, M. (1987). Playfulness, “world”-travelling, and loving perception. Hypatia, 2(2), 3–19. McCarthey, S.J. (2008). The impact of No Child Left Behind on teachers’ writing instruction. Written Communication, 25(4), 462–505. Medina, J. (2013). The epistemology of resistance: Gender and racial oppression, epistemic injustice, and the social imagination. Oxford University Press. Mikkola, M. (2018). Feminist metaphysics as non-ideal metaphysics. The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism, 80, 81–102. Mills, C. (2007). White ignorance. In S. Sullivan & N. Tuana (Eds.), Race and epistemologies of ignorance (pp. 11–38). Albany: State University of New York Press. Mills, C.W. (1988). Alternative epistemologies. Social Theory and Practice, 14(3), 237–263. Mills, C.W. (2005). “Ideal theory” as ideology. Hypatia, 20(3), 165–183. Mills, C.W. (2014). White time: The chronic injustice of ideal theory. Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race, 11(1), 27–42. Noddings, N. (1995). Care and moral education. In W. Kohli (Eds.), Critical conversations in philosophy of education (pp. 137–148). New York: Routledge. Noddings, N. (2002). Educating moral people: A caring alternative to character education. ERIC. Noddings, N. (2003). Happiness and education. Cambridge University Press. Noddings, N. (2005). What does it mean to educate the whole child? Educational Leadership, 63(1), 8. Noddings, N. (2013). Caring: A relational approach to ethics and moral education. University of California Press. O’neill, O. (1987). Abstraction, idealization and ideology in ethics. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements, 22, 55–69. Pritchard, D. (2013). Epistemic virtue and the epistemology of education. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 47(2), 236–247.

Epistemic Interdependence

31

Pritchard, D. (2015). Epistemic dependence. Philosophical Perspectives, 29(1), 305–324. Rose, H. (1983). Hand, brain, and heart: A feminist epistemology for the natural sciences. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 9(1), 73–90. Rushton, S., & Juola-Rushton, A. (2008). Classroom learning environment, brain research and the no child left behind initiative: 6 years later. Early Childhood Education Journal, 36(1), 87. Siegel, H. (2004). Epistemology and education: An incomplete guide to the social-epistemological issues. Episteme, 1(2), 129–137. Tronto, J.C. (1993). Moral boundaries: A political argument for an ethic of care. Psychology Press. Tronto, J.C. (2013). Caring democracy. New York University Press. Volante, L. (2004). Teaching to the test: What every educator and policy-maker should know. Canadian Journal of Educational Administration and Policy, (35). Watson, L. (2018). Curiosity and inquisitiveness. In H. Battaly (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of virtue epistemology (pp. 155–166). New York: Routledge. Whitcomb, D., Battaly, H., Baehr, J., & Howard‐Snyder, D. (2017). Intellectual humility: Owning our limitations. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 94(3), 509–539. Wrenn, C.B. (2007). Why there are no epistemic duties. Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review/Revue Canadienne de Philosophie, 46(1), 115–136.

2

Communities of Inquiry

2.1 Introduction In the last chapter, I argued that by moving away from an individualistic perspective of knowers to a social one, social epistemologists made progress. I further argued that this social perspective of knowers can be helpfully illuminated by a care-based approach. One feature of this approach is a shift in focus from independent individuals to interdependent communities of knowers. In this chapter, I will explain this difference. What does it mean for knowers to be ineliminably interdependent? How does who we know affect what we know? What does it take for a community to create and maintain knowledge producers? What conditions and what labor are required for knowers in those communities to do well? The goal of this chapter is to understand knowers as members of communities of inquiry.

2.2 Thoroughly Fundamental Interdependence When social epistemologists say that knowers are social, one thing they mean is that what we know and how we know it are affected by whom we know. What propositions we’re exposed to, what we take to be good evidence, what questions we’re curious about are all influenced by the epistemic practices of the people around us. This was thrown into sharp relief for me when I was in graduate school. I had the opportunity, while completing my Ph.D. at the University of Connecticut, to visit Northwestern University’s Philosophy Department. I was in the department for a year and I sat in on classes and worked on my research. One of the courses I attended included some discussion of logic, during which someone said something innocuous like “and we all know you cannot have a true contradiction”. This was widely accepted by the participants in the seminar, and the class moved on. But I was struck. My graduate work at UConn had included course work and many talks defending nonclassical logic. There, we most definitely did not all know we could not have a true contradiction. This made the claim in the Northwestern DOI: 10.4324/9781003036753-3

Communities of Inquiry

33

classroom false (I did not believe it, so we did not all know it), but it also demonstrated something about the ways that social groups and the relationships between group members can affect us epistemically. I was in an epistemic environment that was different from my home environment, and so there were different presuppositions, different propositions in the common ground, different questions that seemed worth asking, and different things we all “knew” (albeit not so different, given that they were both philosophy Ph.D. programs).1 Even in these largely similar environments, it was clear: who we know affects what we know because of the ways our relationships shape the context of our inquiry. Another way that my social relationships affect me as a knower is in my own estimation of my epistemic abilities. The literature on epistemic injustice is rife with examples of the ways in which being recognized and treated as a knower in a context or community can help one to feel and then to behave like a knower within that context or community (Dotson, 2011; Fricker, 2007; Gunn, 2020). Being treated as a reliable informant can be crucially important to one’s self-conception as a knower. And, insofar as we are interested not only in how individuals apportion their beliefs to the evidence but also in what they are able to do with their knowledge, internalized self-doubt can have all kinds of deleterious effects on knowers as knowers. This, too, is well known from the literature on epistemic injustice (Berenstain, 2016; Dotson, 2011; McKinnon, 2017; Pohlhaus, 2014; Wanderer, 2017). A third way that my social relationships affect me as a knower concerns the ways that a social group, qua social group, can know. The idea of group belief and group knowledge has received quite a bit of attention (Boyd, 2021; Gilbert, 1992, 1996; Kugler, Kausel, & Kocher, 2012; Lackey, 2021; Langton & West, 1999; Palermos & Tollefsen, 2018; Raymond Harris, 2020; Sheff, 2020; Tollefsen, 2015). One need not, however, accept any particular view about group agency in order to get an intuitive idea that what my group knows affects what I know. Think of any case in which you can’t think of the answer to some question but you know just whom to ask (Sloman & Fernbach, 2017). Or, think of a case in which you learned something together with some other group members, and while you’ve each forgotten it, you’re sure you can reconstruct it through conversation. Or, think of a case in which you share some memory of a collective experience and you contact a group member to help you recall the details. All of these are cases in which who you know affects what you know and what you can do with that knowledge. These sorts of cases motivate the commitment that many social epistemologists have to the claim that knowers as knowers are importantly interdependent. The claim that I want to make as part of a care-based epistemology, however, is less familiar: as knowers we are ineliminably members of communities of inquiry, and this fact about us has normative import.

34

Communities of Inquiry

Before we develop this idea, however, a caveat is in order2: I am not trying to give necessary and sufficient conditions for being a knower. I am not trying to do metaphysics in any deep way. Despite the occasional use of words like essential, necessary, and ineliminable, I don’t take my account here to tell us much of anything about the epistemic status of all possible knowers,3 or to adjudicate disagreements about how best to model group doxastic attitudes.4 This is not because I think these aren’t worthy projects. They’re just not the project I’m engaged with here. Instead, I want to start with the material reality of knowers like us. We do, in fact, rely on one another. We are, in fact, affected by others in our inquiry. The question is, what do we learn about knowing (as we in fact do it) from these facts? The idea that people are fundamentally interdependent has a long history in feminist theorizing. To get at the core insight, it might help to contrast two views we might have of people and society. The first, which is the received view from canonical social contract theory, involves an individual who may decide to become (for various reasons) a contributing and contractually obligated society member (Hobbes & Missner, 2016; Locke, 1988; Mill, 1869; Rawls, 1971). Grown up, independent, and desirous of living peacefully, these individuals seek (or perhaps ought to seek) to make agreements either with each other or with some more powerful group member. This stands in contrast to the view that many feminists defend. Motivated by the observation that we all begin as dependent children in relationships with care providers, these feminists take relationships and communities as their theoretical starting point. According to this feminist account, we are all, always, members of social groups. The individual does not precede the group. Instead, the group creates the individual as a member of an interconnected community. As Virginia Held puts it: Every person starts out as a child dependent on those providing us care, and we remain interdependent with others in thoroughly fundamental ways throughout our lives. That we can think and act as if we were independent depends on a network of social relations making it possible for us to do so. And our relations are part of what constitute our identity. (Held, 2006) Rather than envisioning fully formed individuals choosing to enter social arrangements, the care ethicist sees social arrangements as producing group members. Annette Baier offered an early articulation of this conception of persons as deeply interdependent (Baier, 1981). In a paper on Cartesian persons, Baier puts her position as follows: It is today part of commonly received wisdom that distinctive human phenomena, including language and other cultural activities, as well

Communities of Inquiry

35

as mathematics and science, depend upon the relatively long period of human maturation … if, as Davidson, Dennett, and others suggest, self consciousness depends upon exercise of the cultural skills, in particular linguistic ones, acquired during our drawn-out dependency on other persons. A person, perhaps, is best seen as one who was long enough dependent upon other persons to acquire the essential arts of personhood. Persons essentially are second persons, who grow up with other persons. (Baier, 1981) The label “second persons” comes from the use of the second-personal pronoun. Community members use “you” to address children and each other. Children then use “you” to address these members. This creates children, on Baier’s account, as speakers among speakers – as members of a community in which there are other important members. This is her way of capturing this idea that people are, ineliminably, interdependent. Second persons are, from the very beginning and definitionally, people among people. Ignoring, eliding, or discounting this important fact is the deep mistake of traditional moral theory, according to Baier, Held, and other care ethicists. Traditional moral theories do not properly attend to interdependence, mistaking interdependence for a temporary condition that adults leave behind in becoming moral subjects. Where traditional moral theorists do discuss relationships, proper relationships are those that adults enter into voluntarily. But this covers only a small portion of our proper and, on the care ethicist’s view, necessary relationships. Baier’s phrase “the essential arts of personhood” is evocative, but it is not terribly clear. Baier has in mind those practices that are central to people as people – language and cooperation are mentioned in her work. We don’t get to be practitioners of these “essential arts” without being helped, trained, or taught by other practitioners. Again, I want to avoid debates over the metaphysics of persons. Instead, I understand these arts as necessary for us to live as we in fact do. To have a life that is recognizably like ours, we need social groups. It may be contingent that we live in social groups, but we do, and doing so requires certain kinds of training. Training in the arts of personhood is, to my way of thinking, closely related to what Nancy Fraser, following feminist and Marxist scholars, calls “social reproduction”. Social reproduction, for Fraser, includes all the processes necessary for “birthing and raising children, caring for friends and family members, maintaining households and broader communities, and sustaining connections more generally” (Fraser, 2016, p. 99).5 This work is indispensable. Without it, we cannot have society, or an economy, or a culture. For us to live as people, this work must be done. We don’t all need to do this work, or at least not all to the same degree, but the work is indispensable. This makes social reproduction a necessary art of personhood.

36

Communities of Inquiry

It is also worth pointing out that social reproduction has a lot in common with Joan Tronto and Bernice Fisher’s definition of care. Care, according to Tronto and Fisher, “includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible” (Tronto, 2013). Tronto and Fisher’s account of care and Tronto’s descriptions of the conditions under which communities adequately provide care will become central to the discussion in chapter 4. What is useful for our purposes here is that care and social reproductive work are necessary for us to live, work, and inquire as we do. The work is essential for our economies, and communities, and our culture. This observation about the connection between social reproduction and society more generally suggests a critique of a traditional way of viewing the domestic as it relates to the social. In theorizing about social organization, the liberal and neoliberal tradition has been to make a sharp distinction between the norms for private domestic relationships and those that are properly public. Here’s a characterization of this distinction that is, perhaps, a bit of a caricature: while there are some rules and norms for the home, those rules are not properly moral – they are emotional, or proto-moral, etc. The properly moral rules are for fully formed agents, who emerge from the home ready to pursue their self-interest, only engaging in associations with what Mill calls “free, voluntary, and undeceived consent and participation” (Mill, 1869). However, as care ethicists argue, this distinction makes the most sense with a patriarchal view of the masculine subject as the social subject. This observation is foregrounded in many feminist works and sits in the background in many others. Virginia Held gives it a clear annunciation: Dominant moral theories have seen “public” life as relevant to morality while missing the moral significance of the “private” domains of family and friendship. Thus the dominant theories have assumed that morality should be sought for unrelated, independent, and mutually indifferent individuals assumed to be equal. They have posited an abstract, fully rational “agent as such” from which to construct morality, while missing the moral issues that arise between interconnected persons in the contexts of family, friendship, and social groups. (Held, 2006) This bifurcation between the public and the private is clearly related to the conceptualization of the moral agent as first independent and then entering into morally relevant relationships with others. And this, in turn, depends on conceptualizing the moral agent as adult, able-bodied, autonomous (and male).6 Part of the solution to these mistaken conceptualizations is to dissolve the distinction between public and private at least insofar as moral evaluation and consideration are concerned. The “private sphere” is just

Communities of Inquiry

37

as worthy of moral consideration as the “public” one. Indeed, to see the two as separable at all is a manifestation of what Joan Tronto calls “privileged irresponsibility” (Tronto, 1993) – those who see the work it takes to maintain a household as unpolitical or separate from one’s moral life likely enjoy enough privilege to avoid imminent care work.7 Care ethicists’ recommendation is to see unchosen relationships, that is, those between children and parents, as central. These unchosen relationships are necessary for social reproduction, are not (all) immoral, and can place legitimate requirements on all parties so related. In other words, we need not enter into a relationship voluntarily for it to give us obligations. I did not choose my sisters, but if they needed me, I would be obligated help them (given that the history of our actual relationship doesn’t involve abuse – for more on this see chapters 3 and 5). And the details of that obligation would be different from the details of the obligations I might have to help someone else’s sisters. The actual particular relationships I have, with their attendant histories, affect what my obligations are. Care ethics starts from these relationships. And, for some care ethicists, the relationship is the (or at least a central) unit of moral evaluation. This is related to another, arguably deeper way to understand subjects as deeply interdependent. According to this way of thinking, being a dependent subject is not just a causal fact about how we become adults. Instead, it is a fact about what it takes to be a person. As Catriona MacKenzie puts it, “[t]o be a person is to be a temporally extended embodied subject whose identity is constituted in and through one’s lived bodily engagement with the world and with others” (Mackenzie, 2009, p. 119). The so-called “relational views of the self” maintain not only the developmental story sketched above but also a more fundamental and controversial claim that “selves exist only in relation to other selves, that is, that they are fundamentally relational entities” (Brison, 2017, p. 218). This commitment to more fundamental dependency is based on the observation that we are constantly making and remaking ourselves within the contexts of our relationships, often with explicit input from others with whom we’re in relationships (Brison, 2002; Potter, 2013). There is a healthy debate in care ethics about the paradigm example of a morally relevant relationship. Some, following Eva Kittay and Sara Ruddick, argue that the maternal relationship is central and that good mothering is the moral model (Kittay, 2013; Ruddick, 1982). In light of the marginalization of the feminine private and maternal activities, it makes some sense to illuminate and champion maternal relationships. (Idealized) maternal relationships, too, offer clear cases of many features that care ethicists want to emphasize: the deep dependency and vulnerability of some care receivers, the importance of non-coercive care relationships, and the propriety of partiality, among other things. However, not all feminists and care ethicist are convinced to take

38

Communities of Inquiry

maternal relationships as paradigmatic. This is for several reasons. First, people of all genders can provide care well. Championing the parenting done by mothers might make sense as a reaction against patriarchal dismissals, but it risks casting women as care providers as a matter of their nature or essence. This, feminists argue, should be resisted. Second, while patriarchal ideals tend to dismiss women’s activities and practices as sources of knowledge and value, patriarchy also insists that women have their primary value as mothers (Code, 1991). If care ethics champions motherhood and maternal relationships it risks reinforcing this ideology. These two related reasons to resist the maternal paradigm can be understood as objections to a kind of gender essentialism lurking behind this paradigm (O’Neill, 2005). Rather than championing the maternal, Code prefers the paradigm of friendship (Code, 1991), a position picks up on themes in Arendt (1981), and that is echoed in Lugones and Spelman’s (1983) work. Code’s view is that, while imperfect, a paradigm of friendship avoids the gender essentialism concerns and has some major benefits. Friendship, unlike mothering, offers a model relationship that is free of necessary power differentials, requires knowledge and trust of the other, and can be politically engaged. This kind of relationship is productive, creative, and can be a kind of chosen interdependence. Lugones and Spellman also make a compelling case for taking friendship as a model. In their work addressing white feminists engaging in anti-racist work they write, “if you enter the task out of friendship with us, then you will be moved to attain the appropriate reciprocity of care for your and our wellbeing as whole beings” (Lugones & Spelman, 1983). This sounds like a promising paradigm! For our purposes, in understanding knowers’ epistemic care obligations, the model of maternal thinking is helpful in drawing our attention to the relationship between vulnerability and obligation. However, I am sensitive to the concerns about gender essentialism and the reinforcement of harmful gender norms. I am also sensitive to the undervaluing of epistemic and educational work that is associated with women (Johnson, 2019). I want to take care not to exacerbate these harmful preconceptions. The model of friendship offering a reciprocal, chosen, cognitively engaged paradigm is also attractive. However, I also want to resist the analogy with friendship. This is for two reasons. The first is precisely because the friendship model is reciprocal. We don’t like to think of our friendships as one-sided; however, many relationships in which proper care occurs are not reciprocal. Similarly, friendship is typically a chosen relationship, and so many of our epistemically relevant relationships are unchosen. Mr. Thomson’s algebra students did not choose him, but their relationship is still epistemically relevant. And, as we will see in the next chapter, many epistemic vulnerabilities arise in unchosen relationships. In that regard, the relationship between sisters

Communities of Inquiry

39

is, perhaps, a good illustration. But so too would be the relationship between an eldest daughter-in-law and her dependent in-laws; or a custodian and the office workers who rely on a safe and clean workplace. Relations of dependency arise in all parts of our lives and can be obligating whether we choose them or not. Our unchosen relationships can be perfectly proper. They aren’t worse for being unchosen. The ubiquity of our epistemic relationships will make clear that this is, in fact, a benefit. As we’ll discuss in the next chapter, the members of our communities of inquiry are obligated to help meet our vulnerabilities when they are well placed to do so, independent of how much they like us or would choose to be in relationships with us. I don’t have a ready alternative to maternal or friendly thinking for understanding relationships of epistemic care. I considered and rejected the teacher/student relationship and the relationship between co-authors as paradigmatic. I think that part of why these don’t work well for my purposes is that our epistemic relationships are multifarious. We stand in relations of epistemic interdependence that have vastly different profiles depending on the social situations in which we find ourselves. So, in lieu of a satisfying replacement, let me just disavow all commitments to gender essentialism and emphasize, again, that unchosen relationships can be both proper and obligation-generating.8 Care ethics places relationships at the center of analysis. The question for care ethicists is not “is this individual behaving justly? (or virtuously, or to maximize utility, Or in accordance with principles he would reflectively endorse, etc.)”. The question is, “is this community meeting the needs of its members? Are we all okay?”. I want to encourage social epistemologists to be concerned with the epistemic analogs of these questions.

2.3 Epistemic Reproduction The above discussion has largely focused on morally relevant relationships, and their importance to social reproduction. Here I’ll apply some of the lessons and tools to epistemically relevant relationships and epistemology. Let’s start with the essential arts of personhood for knowers. Code picks up this theme in her essay “Second Persons” and in her book What Can She Know (Code, 1987, 1991). Code’s goal is to critique the liberal ideal of the autonomous man who can be morally and ethically evaluated in isolation. While most of Code’s position is critical, what she says about knowers is instructive. About epistemic second persons, Code says: one of the most essential arts of personhood that must be learned before one can aspire to be a knower (and an art that one is constantly learning and modifying) is the art of discerning whom one

40

Communities of Inquiry can trust, how one can know that someone else knows, what human sources of knowledge are trustworthy. (Code, 1987, p. 377)

We can only learn this essential art by participating in community with other knowers. Putting together the idea of social reproduction and the epistemic bent of Code’s work, we can begin to construct something we might call epistemic reproduction. This is the indispensable work without which a community of inquiry is impossible.9 Indeed, lasting communities of inquiry depend on this work being done. As is the case with social reproduction, the details of epistemic reproduction are highly context-dependent. However, Code’s work starts to outline one important feature of social reproduction – teaching knowers whom to trust. And, in addition to the activities named by Code above, we, as knowers, need teachers who encourage curiosity (Watson, 2018), we need trustworthy, friendly, supportive communities in which to inquire (Battaly, 2006; Elgin, 2008; Kidd, 2019), and we need to know that our inquiry can make a meaningful difference to our lives (Dotson, 2011, 2013, 2014). The work that goes into teaching, maintaining healthy inquiring communities, and developing inquirers in their capacities as knowers all qualifies as epistemic reproduction. Thinking about epistemic reproductive work helps to illuminate that all knowers depend on other knowers – which is not surprising when you consider the epistemic dependence of young children or novices. However, the claim from care epistemology is stronger than that. Those knowers who are on the cutting edge of inquiry and discovery depend, deeply and ineliminably, on epistemic reproductive work that is often done by others. Like social reproductive work, a large portion of epistemic reproductive work is done by women and members of other marginalized groups (Gibney, 2017; Guarino & Borden, 2017; Johnson, 2019; Wilson, 2021). As I argued in my paper, “teaching as epistemic care”, this is an important point of analogy between traditionally recognized care work and the epistemic labor involved in maintaining communities of inquiry (Johnson, 2019). I’ll discuss this at length in chapter 4. The fact that inquirers depend on others who do the work of epistemic reproduction is perhaps best illustrated by an example that will be familiar to academics. Imagine two different philosophy departments. The first has first-class researchers but no graduate students, no speaker series, and no shared space. Adjunct instructors do all teaching work, and the researchers’ time is maximally protected. At the second, researchers advise graduate students; the department hosts a series of visiting speakers; researchers are periodically tasked with teaching an undergraduate course or two. The department meets for weekly work-inprogress discussions. I haven’t done empirical work on this, but my

Communities of Inquiry

41

hunch is that many readers find the second department much more attractive. And this is not just because most of us like interacting with others (a fact that the COVID-19 pandemic and attendant isolation has thrown into sharp relief). In addition to just enjoying interactions, we often feel that we learn something from them. And these things that we learn are often useful in our research. However, a lot of labor goes into the attractive features of department 2. Graduate students must be recruited, vetted, and selected. Courses and speaker series must be organized. Funding must be secured. Administrators must be kept at bay. Spaces must be acquired and maintained. All of these tasks, though more immanent and less transcendent than the belief-forming processes epistemologists typically consider, are part of the work of maintaining our communities of inquiry. One might object, here, that while this work is necessary for epistemic goods, it is not, itself, epistemic labor. What, then, do we mean by epistemic labor? Goldberg describes epistemic labor as “the work that underwrites the acquisition of certain kinds of knowledge” (Goldberg, 2011). Nora Berenstain includes educational labor in her understanding of epistemic labor (Berenstain, 2016). Emilia Wilson’s conception is even broader, as she includes emotional labor under the umbrella category of epistemic labor – and for good reason (Wilson, 2021). Emotional labor is cognitive, and our cognitive states affect our epistemic abilities. When Elgin discusses epistemic labor, which she calls “cognitive labor”, she says this: Instead of starting from scratch, scientists build on previously established findings, use methods others have devised and tested, employ instruments others have calibrated, and analyze data using mathematical and statistical techniques others have validated. Research teams rather than solitary investigators frequently generate results. Such teams can do more than any one of their members can do alone, not only because teams can cover more ground, but also because team members typically have different cognitive strengths and often have different areas of expertise. Collectively a team brings to bear a broader range of talents and training than any individual scientist possesses. The sort of understanding modern science supplies is grounded in epistemic interdependence. Science as we know it is a cooperative endeavor. (Elgin, 2011) This suggests that, that is, the testing of methods, the calibrating of instruments, the statistical analyses of data all count as epistemic labor. Scientists need to test methods in order to generate the evidence they need for their findings to count as knowledge. The practices are epistemic labor because of the ways they underwrite and contribute to what is known. If that is the case in a hard science where such practices are

42

Communities of Inquiry

necessary to produce knowledge, then we should expect that the practices necessary to produce knowledge in other areas will count as well. In the humanities, for example, we count on feedback from other knowers to generate evidence that our conclusions are well justified. That means that in the humanities, setting up a speaker series, vetting graduate students, and maintaining archives are clearly included. It is probably more contentious to claim that organizing coffee clubs and maintaining the building facilities are examples of epistemic labor, but this work is clearly necessary for the production or acquisition of knowledge for embodied people (at least those of us with coffee addictions). It might be helpful to work out sharp boundaries between activities that are epistemic labor and those that are not, but it is not necessary for our purposes here. I’m generally dubious about the importance of necessary and sufficient conditions for concepts, especially concepts like epistemic labor. There are central cases of epistemic labor, such as hypothesizing, theorizing, and investigating, and then there are cases that are clearly far outside of the center of the concept of epistemic labor – buying one’s favorite marmalade, for example. Other activities will lie somewhere in between.10 What is important about epistemic labor, for our purposes, is that the work that goes into inquiry, discovery, and dissemination of knowledge goes far beyond original research. The labor that is necessary to maintain our communities of inquiry is epistemic labor. And, if that’s right, we should pay attention to who is doing that labor. I will discuss this further in chapter 4. For now, note that understanding this work as necessary for our community of inquiry helpfully illuminates the ways in which we are reliant on communities to do our epistemic work. Knowers are interdependent in that knowledge production does not and cannot take place independently – at least for knowers who are limited in the ways that we are. These limitations render us vulnerable. These observations about epistemic labor also motivate a dissolution of the sharp distinction between what we might call education work and inquiry work (Johnson, 2019). Like the bifurcation of the public and the private, which care ethicists argue cannot be sustained, there is a bifurcation in our understandings of inquiry and education. Feminist philosophers have already noted that the same bifurcation exists in epistemology. Sandra Harding, for example, writes: The androcentric ideology of contemporary science posits as necessary, and/or as facts, a set of dualisms – culture vs. nature; rational mind vs. prerational body and irrational emotions and values; objectivity vs. subjectivity; public vs. private – and then links men and masculinity to the former, and women and femininity to the latter in each dichotomy. Feminist critics have argued that such dichotomizing constitutes an ideology in the strong sense of the term: in

Communities of Inquiry

43

contrast to merely value-laden false beliefs that have no social power, these beliefs structure the policies and practices of social institutions, including science. (Harding, 1986, p. 136) To Harding’s list of dichotomies, I’d add the dualism of discovery vs. teaching. This bifurcation is especially apparent in those areas of inquiry that are perceived to require a great deal of talent (Leslie, Cimpian, Meyer, & Freeland, 2015). The impulse seems to protect the time of apparent geniuses from the teaching work that any minimally trained person could allegedly do.11 Add to this the gendered expectations that people have about teaching work and brilliance, and it is no surprise that teaching is thought to be separate from discovery – to be the soft option, better suited to women than to geniuses (Bian, Leslie, & Cimpian, 2017; Elmore & Luna-Lucero, 2017). As psychologist Rodolfo MendozaDenton puts it: As a graduate student, I was taught implicitly and explicitly that the deep thoughts came first and that, ultimately, teaching takes time and energy away from this important work … I continue to find that the primary concern among a sizeable number of students is how to teach as little as possible so as to privilege their research. (MendozaDenton, 2019, pp. 101–102) If care epistemology is right, this separation cannot be strictly maintained. The work we do to develop thinkers is epistemic as is the work we do to generate new knowledge. I’ll return to this further in chapters 3 and 4. One might object, at this point, that, given that epistemic care work is unfairly distributed, and that epistemic care is reproductive – that is, reproducing those communities of inquiry that are unfair – that epistemic reproduction should cease. To put it more concretely, if members of marginalized and exploited groups are being tasked with sustaining the very communities of inquiry that marginalize and exploit them, shouldn’t they (or rather, we) just stop12? If communities are bad, do we have an obligation to stop reproducing them? We have excellent evidence that epistemic care work is unfairly distributed (Gibney, 2017; Guarino & Borden, 2017; Johnson, 2019). That should, as I’ll argue in chapter 4, be remedied. We are, indeed, putting epistemic reproductive work into maintaining institutions that purport to support inquiry but are failing to do so equitably, and which exploit and marginalize the people doing the bulk of the epistemic reproductive work. That’s all true. However, as the kinds of creatures we are (according to the social epistemologist) we need communities of inquiry of some kind or other, in order to begin and to make progress on our epistemic projects. Epistemic reproductive work is necessary for the

44

Communities of Inquiry

communities to exist and be maintained at all. We cannot simply abandon the work of maintaining epistemic communities. One important observation that might motivate an objection like this, though, is that some epistemic communities might be more worth reproducing than others. An epistemic community that is inadequate or exploitative may not be worth a marginalized group member’s time and labor. We should, perhaps, create new ones, structured in entirely different ways. I’ll return to this notion of inadequacy and to the concern about exploitation in chapter 4. One further objection might be that the examples I’ve used to prompt intuitions about epistemic care demonstrate that I’m making one of the same mistakes that the care ethicists criticize in traditional moral theories. I’m championing the obligations of the epistemic care-provider and emphasizing the dependence of their less capable, needy students. The worry is that I am, thereby, reinforcing a simplistic idea of the experience of a knower as adult, independent, and fully formed. Here’s Code on this front: It is disconcerting to find in this putative repudiation of self-sufficiency and oppositionality a concern to present a paradigm of selfhood which is equally dependent upon taking human selves to be unified and in some sense ‘complete’. It begins to look as though ‘maternal thinking’ might, in fact, amount to an attempt to replace one unified individual/agent with another, who differs mainly in being collectively or altruistically, rather than individualistically oriented. So although ‘maternal’ thinking may not posit an autonomy-based conception of human nature, it does, nonetheless, appear to posit an ideal of ‘wholeness’ for maternal caregivers which has prescriptive dimensions with a potential to oppress women by making them feel just as guilty as older, autonomy-prescriptive positions have done. Indeed, in suppressing the ambivalence often characteristic of the exemplary relationships it extols, ‘maternal’ feminism makes assumptions about human nature which, despite their difference, risk being as reductivist and essentialist as those made in autonomycentered theories. (Code, 1987) This concern is separate from the accusation of gender essentialism. Instead, the concern is that I’m making a mistake about what epistemically relevant relationships are like. Just a few paragraphs above, I rejected the friendship paradigm for being too reciprocal. So, I may seem to be focusing on epistemic reproduction as something that fully formed experts do for proto-knowers, rather than countenancing the various ways we are all interdependent. Many of my examples have focused on the obligations of experts and the vulnerabilities of those who are in need of that expertise. Some of my

Communities of Inquiry

45

examples have, I hope, demonstrated that epistemic obligations can and often do arise for those who are more vulnerable. Indeed, I think that epistemic vulnerability is ubiquitous for knowers who are involved in inquiry. This will become clearer in chapter 4, but at the very least, care receivers have obligations to avoid abusing or exploiting those who teach them. Beyond that, though, I’m committed to the claim that members of communities of inquiry do better when epistemic care work is welldistributed and well-performed in that community. In these communities, fewer epistemic needs go unmet. This is, in part, because of the deep reliance members have on their interactions with others. If care work is well-distributed and well-performed, responsibility for care work will be assigned appropriately, and care providers will be competent (more on this in chapter 4). As I argue elsewhere, though not in these terms, researchers are regularly dependent on their interlocutors to meet their epistemic needs (Johnson, 2018). This is true for those who are deeply and obviously vulnerable, and for those who see themselves as “whole”. Indeed, as I argued earlier, the illusion of wholeness is a sign of privilege; one that this work attempts to interrupt by calling attention to epistemic vulnerabilities and the obligations they generate. I follow Code, therefore, in wanting to resist thinking that persons who are trained in the relevant epistemic skills are “finished”. We do not develop from dependent needy proto-knowers into finished autonomous actualized knowers. We are all more or less dependent on one another. Vulnerability is ubiquitous and is only deleterious in unfriendly environments.13 There is an epistemic analog of the relational view of the self. This is the view that knowers are deeply or constitutively interdependent. This means that being a knower – participating in epistemic activities like inquiry – only happens with other knowers. This more controversial conception of knowers as fundamentally relational appears in some places in social epistemology. Some discussions of epistemic autonomy and communicative agency, for example, emphasize the ways that these capabilities require the right sorts of relationships (Grasswick, 2018; Gunn, 2020). I’ll return to this further in chapter 5. I bring up this conception here, though, with two goals in mind. First, if we understand knowers as constituted by their relationships, then being in the right sorts of relationships is a precondition on epistemic activity. It is necessary for being a knower that one be in communication, conversation, and trusting relationships with some other knowers. There is some empirical evidence for this in studies on language acquisition, executive function, and working memory (Botting et al., 2017; Hall, Eigsti, Bortfeld, & Lillo-Martin, 2017; Marshall et al., 2015). Each of these is a building block that we need in order to know and inquire as the kinds of knowers we are. And more empirical work, here, would be useful. My claim, though, is that our abilities to participate in epistemic activities,

46

Communities of Inquiry

such as making discoveries, checking our inferences against norms, communicating our beliefs, and sorting out what questions we should investigate, are all predicated on being in relationships with others who are involved in these sorts of activities. I cannot inquire all alone. I might be able to form beliefs all on my own, if we can believe without language, but all of the other epistemic activities we care about require other knowers. Without our relationships these things would not be possible – or at least would not be recognizable. Second, this conception of the knower as ineliminably dependent on other knowers serves as a reminder that we do not outgrow our interdependence. Despite the emphasis that care epistemology places on the important care work dedicated to meeting the needs of students, we are all, even mature developed experts, also constituted in relation to others. We must avoid the temptation to think that we are only dependent temporarily. We must not theorize as if dependence is a kind of deficiency and that meeting vulnerabilities somehow heals us and changes us to independent inquirers. Some kinds of social privilege make some vulnerabilities easy to ignore but interdependence is ubiquitous. Because of this fact about interdependent subjects, vulnerability is central to both care ethics and care epistemology, so I’ll turn to epistemic vulnerability in the next chapter. I’ll finish this chapter by explaining what I mean by a community of inquiry. This concept has already appeared in this and earlier chapters and will be key going forward.

2.4 Communities of Inquiry As we move toward understanding knowers like us as ineliminably interdependent, the care epistemologist recommends a shift from a focus on the knower alone to the knower as she inquires with others. This chapter, so far, has attempted to motivate that shift. We now need to develop a viable alternative to the individual. We know that we want to focus on interdependent groups of knowers. We know that dependence is not a deficit but is instead a fundamental fact about us as knowers. And we know that epistemic reproduction is necessary for us to know and inquire. These pieces are all important to our alternative focus. I recommend that we focus at least some of our epistemic evaluations on what I call communities of inquiry. On my view, a collection of individuals is a community of inquiry to the extent that (1) the members, as members of the community, are inquiring; and (2) the members are interdependent in that inquiry. I’ll explain and motivate this understanding in this section. Let’s start with inquiry. As Robert Stalnaker puts it, inquiry is “the enterprise of forming, testing, and revising beliefs” (Stalnaker, 1984, p. ix). He further says that inquiry is “the cluster of rational activities which are directed toward answering questions about the way the world is”

Communities of Inquiry

47

(Stalnaker, 1984). Of course, it often serves our cognitive purposes to aim at beliefs that are true enough, rather than strictly true – we are often only concerned to ask roughly how the world is (Elgin, 2017). Put more precisely, then, an inquirer is engaged in inquiry when she forms, tests, and revises her beliefs with the goal of having true enough beliefs. This is similar to Avery Archer’s understanding of inquiry as constitutively aimed at improving one’s epistemic standing with regard to some subject (Archer, 2021). And we can inquire into any subject. All epistemic projects, regardless of the content, can count as inquiry. This means that theoretical physics, legal theory, celebrity gossip, and entomology all count. So do more self-focused inquiries, such as documenting one’s ancestry, finding one’s favorite local pizza place, or discovering one’s star chart.14 For a collection of knowers to be a community of inquiry requires that the members, as members of that group, are inquiring. Not every member needs to be inquiring at every moment, but inquiry must be part of what makes the collection a collection. That is, part of what groups these people together is that they, or enough of them, are engaging in belief formation, testing and revision that is aimed at true enough beliefs. This means that algebra classrooms, life science labs, and philosophy departments are central cases of communities of inquiry. Gossip columnists and their readers are also communities of inquiry. So are confused tourists and the people who could meet their need for directions. Perhaps classrooms and labs are closest of these to the center of the concept of a community of inquiry, but as discussed above and in the previous chapter, it is not my goal to give necessary and sufficient conditions for the concept – central cases help us understand and fringe cases need not be sorted strictly. So, we can understand Condition 1 for communities of inquiry: members, as members, must be engaging in belief formation, testing, and revision, aimed at true enough beliefs. But that is not enough. Condition 2 is key to understanding communities of inquiry as well. This is, in part, because of that “as members” bit. What is it that makes it the case that an inquirer is inquiring “as a member” of a group? One is inquiring as a member of a group when one’s inquiry depends on and is depended on by other inquirers. This means that, on my way of thinking, we can pick out community members by looking at relationships of interdependence. That is, I am in communities of inquiry with those knowers I depend on while inquiring and those who are dependent on me. This is why classrooms, labs, and philosophy departments are such central cases – it is easy to see that the members of those communities depend on one another in their inquiry. As Elgin writes in her passage quoted earlier, scientists cooperate with members of their labs, with members of their subfields, and they rely on work from earlier scientists. There are relationships of interdependence that make it possible for scientists to inquire.

48

Communities of Inquiry

Communities of inquiry also overlap in ways that matter for the members’ interdependence.15 Members of a particular local community, say a lab, will also be members of other communities of inquiry.16 Take, for example, Karen,17 a virologist, who researches herpes simplex 1. Karen is part of the community of her lab, part of the community of herpes researchers, part of the community of virologists, part of the community of microbiologists, etc. And, as Karen’s discoveries stand to advance our knowledge of the ways that herpes viruses function and how we might treat cases, Karen is a member of the community of medical researchers. And this does not exhaust Karen’s communities, even with regard to her professional inquiry – she is also a member of her university, of the medical school, etc. Epistemic reproduction is required to keep each of these communities functioning. And, each of these communities involves interdependence in ways that, I’ll argue, generate obligations. We will discuss this further in the next chapter, but notice that Karen has clear obligations to members of her lab insofar as she can benefit them in their inquiry. And they, in turn have obligations to her. When she attends conferences she is also likely well placed to address vulnerabilities for the members of her communities she interacts with. This might be an obligation to object to a line of inquiry (Johnson, 2018). It might be an obligation to invite a graduate student to say more in a colloquium session. Sometimes the obligations she has as a member of the community of microbiologists might conflict with the obligations she has as a member of her particular lab. This will be complicated – but so are our epistemic lives. The details of care work and obligation are deeply context dependent. However, in each of Karen’s communities, the members are involved in interdependent inquiry that renders them vulnerable to one another. Communities of inquiry are neither exotic nor unfamiliar. We are all involved in a variety of overlapping communities of inquiry. If I’m right about the fundamentality of our epistemic interdependence, communities of inquiry formed us as knowers, rather than the other way around. We each became inquirers by participating in – by being second persons in – communities of inquiry. And these communities are complex, sometimes ephemeral, and as the example of non-classical logic from the start of this chapter illustrates – all a little different. So, these communities are hard to specify. Like membership in many communities, membership in a community of inquiry is not always obvious, explicit, durable, or simple. One can be a member of a community of inquiry without knowing it, and without knowing who the other members are. Membership in a community of inquiry can be brief. Communities of inquiry can exist within other communities, even within other communities of inquiry. We are often in communities without knowing it, and without knowing the other members. Consider the community of users of a trail system.

Communities of Inquiry

49

In Moscow, Idaho, private landowners on Moscow Mountain have granted users access to a system of trails, maintained by the Moscow Area Mountain Bike Association (MAMBA). MAMBA supplies maps, organizes trail maintenance projects, and acts as a liaison between the landowners and the runners, hikers, mountain bikers, and snowshoers who use the trails. Sometimes, portions of the trail system are closed due to misuse. When this happens, MAMBA communicates this closure and asks for help spreading the word. When I first moved to Moscow, I found a MAMBA trail on the popular app, AllTrails. The app didn’t mention anything about MAMBA, or the landowners. I didn’t know about the system of trails or the various people who use, own, or are otherwise involved with the Moscow Mountain trails. Nonetheless, when I took my dog Olive to the mountain to run, I was participating in the community of trail users. I was benefitting from their work – so I was vulnerable to the other community members, and they, in turn, were vulnerable to me. If I’d misused the private land, the other users might have been restricted from recreating in that area. As a trail runner and a hiker, I knew that someone had to maintain the trails, and that other people used them, but I was totally unaware of the particulars of the Moscow Mountain trails community. Nonetheless, I became part of it. The same can happen in a community of inquiry. Sometimes, communities of inquiry are joined deliberately and officially. Sometimes they are not. I remain part of the community of Moscow Mountain trail users. However, if I had only hiked the mountain one time, I would have been a very temporary member. Like with other communities, membership in communities of inquiry can have a short or a long duration. That is, I might be in a fleeting community of inquiry with someone who asks me for the time. That person is epistemically vulnerable to me and is seeking some true information. On the other hand, insofar as we are epistemically vulnerable to many people in much of our inquiry, our communities of inquiry can be huge. The community of biologists is large and durable, especially when we consider the dependence current scientists have on the work of biologists before them (Elgin, 2011). I think it is helpful, at this point, to consider some remarks that Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha makes in her book, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, as her work has been influential on my thinking. Piepzna-Samarasinha writes about the care webs that she and other disabled people use to access what they and other members of their communities need. She writes: In the face of systems that want us dead, sick and disabled people have been finding ways to care for ourselves and each other for a long time. As Vancouver’s Radical Access Mapping Project says, “Able-bodied people: if you don’t know how to do access, ask disabled people. We’ve been doing it for a long time, usually on no

50

Communities of Inquiry money, and we’re really good at it”. Sometimes we call them care webs or collectives, sometimes we call them “my friend that helps me out sometimes”, sometimes we don’t call them anything at all – care webs are just life, just what you do. The care webs I write about here break from the model of paid attendant care as the only way to access disability support. Resisting the model of charity and gratitude, they are controlled by the needs and desires of the disabled people running them. Some of them rely on a mix of abled and disabled people to help; some of them are experiments in “crip-made access” – access made by and for disabled people only, turning on its head the model that disabled people can only passively receive care, not give it or determine what kind of care we want. Whether they are disabled only or involve disabled and non-disabled folks, they still work from a model of solidarity not charity – of showing up for each other in mutual aid and respect. (Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2018, pp. 57–58)

These care webs, as she puts it, are just life – what you do to live and access the care you need. Sometimes what you do can be clearly explained, and made institutional. Here we might think of formal education, or a reading group, as an epistemic analog. Sometimes what you do is informal, and harder to specify. Similarly, communities of inquiry are just epistemic life – what knowers like us do to access what we need in order to inquire. Piepzna-Samarasinha is, I think, clearly writing about care webs as communities that are working more or less well. We can imagine cases in which the community that attempts to facilitate access is not working from a model of solidarity – indeed we have many historical examples of that. What makes Piepzna-Samarasinha’s remarks so exciting and generative is that the care webs she describes in the book are successful without being perfect, permanent, or ideal. In her chapter on care webs, she writes that these are experiments in creating collective access. Sometimes these communities, or webs, come into and then go out of existence. Permanence and homogeneity are not the measures of success. In these ways, Piepzna-Samarasinha’s care webs are an excellent model of non-ideal theorizing about care provision within real communities. Community of inquiry, then, is a technical term for the collection of knowers on whom we depend and who depend on us for inquiry. We form these collections as we inquire. They can be varied, overlapping, and embedded in one another. Sometimes members of our communities of inquiry don’t know they’re members – either because they’re dead (I rely on dead philosophers regularly), because they’re very young, because they don’t know that we’re well positioned to help them, or for a variety of other reasons. Sometimes we can be obligated to help someone in virtue of their dependence on us, and it can be hard to discover that

Communities of Inquiry

51

fact. Membership in a community of inquiry is not always obvious, so neither are the obligations that are generated by vulnerabilities within those communities. One important difference between my notion of a community of inquiry and Piepzna-Samarasinha’s idea of a care web is that I don’t conceive of community of inquiry as a success term. That is, a group of interdependent knowers in which no one’s needs are being met still counts as a community of inquiry on my view. This community of inquiry is just very inadequate. This is a point we’ll return to in chapter 4. There I’ll claim that one important epistemic assessment is of the adequacies of these communities.

2.5 What’s Next In this chapter, I developed a conception of knowers as ineliminably interdependent. This interdependence is a pre-condition for being a knower and for inquiry. I also introduced epistemic reproduction, and highlighted the unfair distribution of epistemic care work. Finally, I presented and defined community of inquiry. Each of these will be important in the next chapters. Conceptualizing knowers as interdependent in these deep and important ways complicates one traditional use for social epistemology. Social epistemology has, for the most part, focused on what knowers should do with their beliefs or credences given the behavior of other knowers. Given that I disagree with my peer, for example, what is the proper change in belief? For care epistemology, epistemic evaluation is not just about the individual and their beliefs. It is about communities of inquiry. How, then, should we evaluate these communities? In chapter 3, I will develop the idea that our vulnerabilities generate obligations for other members of our communities. For epistemology, this means that membership in a community of inquiry will often come with responsibility to meet the vulnerabilities of other members.

Notes 1 This phenomenon seems widespread. An example from Cohen (2000) has also received attention in Kelly (2011) and White (2010). 2 Thanks to Jeremy Fantl for helping me see the necessity of this comment. 3 I won’t comment, for example, on the epistemic status of Swampman ( Davidson, 1987). 4 See Gilbert (1987). 5 See also Rose (1983). 6 While I’ll return to this below, note that the move from independent autonomous male focus to a more socially embedded interdependent subject is similar to the move from mainstream anglophone epistemology to social epistemology. Thanks to Nate Sheff for pointing this out. 7 More on this in chapter 4.

52

Communities of Inquiry

8 Another related worry might arise here for readers familiar with critiques of care ethics: this is the worry that care-based theories unfairly burden members of already marginalized groups. While I don’t address this worry here, I touch on it in chapter 4 and discuss it in more detail in chapter 5. 9 I’m not suggesting a sharp distinction between social and epistemic reproduction. 10 I’m borrowing, here, from Ruth Millikan’s method and work on unicepts ( Millikan, 2017). 11 I’m leaving aside, here the increasing prevalence of MOOCs, online courses, companies that provide “boot camps”. This is for space reasons, not because I think these are disconnected. See Bannon and Smith (2022), for example. 12 Thanks to Alexandra Cunningham for raising this objection. 13 Depending on one’s social context, many or most environments might be unfriendly. Patriarchy creates hostile environments for those group members gendered as women, or as non-conforming, or as improperly male. White supremacy’s environment is hostile to everyone who is not white. Some disabilities are accommodated in our environment so that, while near-sightedness and Ehlers-Danlos syndrome are both genetic, the later vulnerability is particularly difficult to manage in our current environment ( Barnes, 2016). 14 There is an interesting question, here, about whether we are inquiring when we’re seeking know how. I am inclined to say that we are. This would mean that I’m in a community of inquiry when I go to a community bike shop to learn how to repair bike breaks (but not when I drop my bike off at the repair counter and leave). 15 Kevin Zollman’s work on epistemic networks is relevant here ( Zollman, 2007, 2013). It would be interesting to see how some of the formal models of epistemic networks might be useful in capturing our obligations to provide epistemic care within and across our communities. 16 Thanks to Megan Delehanty for this example. Thanks to Megan, Nicole Wyatt, Alexandra Cunningham, and Jeremy Fantl for helping me see the need for this subsection. 17 Thanks to Karen Johnson for the details of this example.

References Archer, A. (2021). The aim of inquiry. Disputatio, 13(61), 95–119. Arendt, H. (1981). The life of the mind: The groundbreaking investigation on how we think. New York: Harcourt Press. Baier, A.C. (1981). Cartesian persons. Philosophia, 28(5), 677–691. Bannon, L., & Smith, R. (2022). University courses sometimes come from a company. Wall Street Journal, July 6, 2022. Barnes, E. (2016). The minority body: A theory of disability. New York: Oxford University Press. Battaly, H. (2006). Teaching intellectual virtues: Applying virtue epistemology in the classroom. Teaching Philosophy, 29(3), 191–222. Berenstain, N. (2016). Epistemic exploitation. Ergo, an Open Access Journal of Philosophy, 3, 569–590. Bian, L., Leslie, S.-J., & Cimpian, A. (2017). Gender stereotypes about intellectual ability emerge early and influence children’s interests. Science, 355(6323), 389–391.

Communities of Inquiry

53

Botting, N., Jones, A., Marshall, C., Denmark, T., Atkinson, J., & Morgan, G. (2017). Nonverbal executive function is mediated by language: A study of deaf and hearing children. Child Development, 88(5), 1689–1700. Boyd, K. (2021). Group understanding. Synthese, 198(7), 6837–6858. Brison, S.J. (2002). Aftermath: Violence and the remaking of a self. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Brison, S.J. (2017). Personal identity and relational selves. In The Routledge companion to feminist philosophy (pp. 218–230). New York: Routledge. Code, L. (1987). Second persons. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 17(suppl 1), 357–382. Code, L. (1991). What can she know?: Feminist theory and the construction of knowledge. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Cohen, G. A. (2000). If you’re an egalitarian, How come you’re so rich?. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Davidson, D. (1987). Knowing one’s own mind. Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 60, 441–458. Dotson, K. (2011). Tracking epistemic violence, tracking practices of silencing. Hypatia, 26(2), 236–257. doi: 10.1111/j.1527-2001.2011.01177.x Dotson, K. (2013). How is this paper philosophy? Comparative Philosophy, 3(1), 121. Dotson, K. (2014). Conceptualizing epistemic oppression. Social Epistemology, 28(2), 115–138. doi: 10.1080/02691728.2013.782585 Elgin, C.Z. (2008). Trustworthiness. Philosophical Papers, 37(3), 371–387. Elgin, C.Z. (2011). Science, ethics and education. School Field, 9(3), 251–263. Elgin, C.Z. (2017). True enough. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Elmore, K.C., & Luna-Lucero, M. (2017). Light bulbs or seeds? How metaphors for ideas influence judgments about genius. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 8(2), 200–208. doi: 10.1177/1948550616667611 Fraser, N. (2016). Contradictions of capital and care. New Left Review, 100, 99–117. Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic injustice: Power and the ethics of knowing. New York: Oxford University Press. Gibney, E. (2017). Teaching load could put female scientists at career disadvantage. Nature, 10, 1–2. Gilbert, M. (1987). Modelling collective belief. Synthese, 73(1), 185–204. Gilbert, M. (1992). On social facts. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gilbert, M. (1996). Living together: Rationality, sociality, and obligation. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Goldberg, S. (2011). The division of epistemic labor. Episteme, 8(1), 112–125. Grasswick, H. (2018). Epistemic autonomy in a social world of knowing. In The Routledge handbook of virtue epistemology (pp. 196–208). New York: Routledge. Guarino, C.M., & Borden, V.M.H. (2017). Faculty service loads and gender: Are women taking care of the academic family? Research in Higher Education, 58(6), 672–694. doi: 10.1007/s11162-017-9454-2 Gunn, H.K. (2020). How should we build epistemic community? The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 34(4), 561–581.

54

Communities of Inquiry

Hall, M.L., Eigsti, I.-M., Bortfeld, H., & Lillo-Martin, D. (2017). Auditory deprivation does not impair executive function, but language deprivation might: Evidence from a parent-report measure in deaf native signing children. The Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, 22(1), 9–21. Harding, S.G. (1986). The science question in feminism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Held, V. (2006). The ethics of care: Personal, political, and global. New York: Oxford University Press on Demand. Hobbes, T., & Missner, M. (2016). Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan (Longman library of primary sources in philosophy). New York: Routledge. Johnson, C.R. (2018). Just say ‘no’: Obligations to voice disagreement. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements, 84, 117–138. Johnson, C.R. (2019). Teaching as epistemic care. In B.R. Sherman & S. Goguen (Eds.), Overcoming epistemic injustice: Social and psychological perspectives (p. 255). London: Rowman and Littlefield. Kelly, T. (2011). Peer disagreement and higher order evidence. In A. Goldman & D. Whitcomb (Eds.), Social epistemology: Essential readings (pp. 183–217). New York: Oxford University Press. Kidd, I.J. (2019). Epistemic corruption and education. Episteme, 16(2), 220–235. Kittay, E.F. (2013). Love’s labor: Essays on women, equality and dependency. New York: Routledge. Kugler, T., Kausel, E.E., & Kocher, M.G. (2012). Are groups more rational than individuals? A review of interactive decision making in groups. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 3(4), 471–482. doi: 10.1002/ wcs.1184 Lackey, J. (2021). The epistemology of groups. New York: Oxford University Press. Langton, R., & West, C. (1999). Scorekeeping in a pornographic language game. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 77(3), 303–319. Leslie, S.-J., Cimpian, A., Meyer, M., & Freeland, E. (2015). Expectations of brilliance underlie gender distributions across academic disciplines. Science, 347(6219), 262–265. Locke, J. (1988 [1690]). Two treatises of government. Edited by P. Lassett. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Lugones, M.C., & Spelman, E.V. (1983). Have we got a theory for you! Feminist theory, cultural imperialism and the demand for ‘the woman’s voice’. Women’s Studies International Forum, 6(6), Pergamon. Mackenzie, C. (2009). Personal identity, narrative integration, and embodiment. In S. Campbell, L. Meynell, & S. Sherwin (Eds.), Embodiment and agency (pp. 100–125). University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Marshall, C., Jones, A., Denmark, T., Mason, K., Atkinson, J., Botting, N., & Morgan, G. (2015). Deaf children’s non-verbal working memory is impacted by their language experience. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 527. McKinnon, R. (2017). Gaslighting as epistemic injustice. In G. Polhaus Jr., I.J. Kidd, & J. Medina (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of epistemic injustice (p. 167). New York: Routledge.

Communities of Inquiry

55

Mendoza-Denton, R. (2019). I also teach. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 14(1), 101–104. Mill, J.S. (1991). On liberty and other essays, edited by John Gray. New York: Oxford University Press. Millikan, R.G. (2017). Beyond concepts: Unicepts, language, and natural information. Oxford University Press. O’Neill, O. (2005). Justice, gender and international boundaries. In International justice and the third world (pp. 56–81). Routledge. Palermos, S.O., & Tollefsen, D.P. (2018). Group know-how. Socially Extended Epistemology, 112–131. Piepzna-Samarasinha, L.L. (2018). Care work: Dreaming disability justice. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press. Pohlhaus Jr, G. (2014). Discerning the primary epistemic harm in cases of testimonial injustice. Social Epistemology, 28(2), 99–114. Potter, N.N. (2013). Narrative selves, relations of trust, and bipolar disorder. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, 20(1), 57–65. Rawls, J. (1971). A theory of justice. In A theory of justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Raymond Harris, K. (2020). Group minds as extended minds. Philosophical Explorations, 23(3), 234–250. Rose, H. (1983). Hand, brain, and heart: A feminist epistemology for the natural sciences. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 9(1), 73–90. Ruddick, S. (1982). Maternal thinking. In Philosophy, children, and the family (pp. 101–126). New York: Springer. Sheff, N. (2020). Intra-group disagreement and conciliationism. In F. BroncanoBerrocal & J.A. Carter (Eds.), The epistemology of group disagreement (pp. 90–102). Routledge. doi: 10.4324/9780429022500-5 Sloman, S., & Fernbach, P. (2017). The knowledge illusion. New York: Riverhead Books. Stalnaker, R. (1984). Inquiry. Cambridge: MIT Press. Tollefsen, D.P. (2015). Groups as agents. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press. Tronto, J.C. (1993). Moral boundaries: A political argument for an ethic of care. New York: Routledge. Tronto, J.C. (2013). Caring democracy. New York: New York University Press. Wanderer, J. (2017). Varieties of testimonial injustice. In The Routledge handbook of epistemic injustice (pp. 27–40). New York: Routledge. Watson, L. (2018). Curiosity and inquisitiveness. The Routledge handbook of virtue epistemology (pp. 155–166). New York: Routledge. White, R. (2010). You just believe that because … . Philosophical Perspectives, 24, 573–615. Wilson, E.L. (2021). The dual erasure of domestic epistemic labour. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 121, 111–125. Zollman, K.J.S. (2007). The communication structure of epistemic communities. Philosophy of Science, 74(5), 574–587. Zollman, K.J.S. (2013). Network epistemology: Communication in epistemic communities. Philosophy Compass, 8(1), 15–27.

3

Epistemic Vulnerability

3.1 Introduction In the last chapter, I argued that we, as knowers, are deeply interdependent with other members of our communities of inquiry. I also claimed that this interdependence can, sometimes, generate obligations. In this chapter, I will specify the conditions under which those obligations are generated. To do this, I will borrow, yet again, tools from care ethics. In particular, I’ll make use of the idea of vulnerability. I’m certainly not the first to try to theorize epistemic vulnerabilities. Recent work on epistemic vulnerability highlights the vulnerabilities introduced by social media (Sullivan et al., 2020), and the vulnerability of disaffected youth to radicalization (O’Donnell, 2018). Vulnerability, in these contexts, seems like a pretty bad thing. However, Logue’s (2013) and Gilson’s (2011) work on ignorance and my own work on epistemic vulnerability (Johnson, 2020) conceive of vulnerability as both an inevitable facet of the human experience and as a place for potential epistemic benefit. As Lorraine Code puts it, “The point is to approach the fact of human interdependence so as to discern its enabling possibilities rather than to concentrate upon the constraints it might present” (Code, 1987). Let’s start with an example to illuminate these enabling possibilities. The spring that my child was two, he started to insist on walking around our neighborhood on his own. The stroller was out, and slow walks, punctuated with questions, were our new norm. My child, like many toddlers, deeply wanted to be a competent navigator of his environment. That spring, that meant he wanted to know the names and functions of the plants blooming in our neighborhood. As we walked, I would respond to his questions as best I could. I’m not a botanist, but I like plants and know a bit: “that’s a tulip”, “those are snow drops”, “that’s the flower’s pistil – if it is pollinated the seeds will grow from there”,1 etc. Sometimes he asked questions that went beyond my knowledge. “I don’t know what that one is called. We’ll have to look it up”, and then we would. DOI: 10.4324/9781003036753-4

Epistemic Vulnerability

57

This all worked pretty well. I learned to leave early to walk to day care, and he learned about the springtime plants. It was really rewarding to hear him say, “look at those beautiful tulips!”. I got to know more about the plants growing in our neighborhood and made frequent use of plant identification websites. When the mushrooms showed up, though, we hit a snag. A lot of mushrooms came up that spring and the best I could usually do was “that mushroom is white. It’s not food”.2 I tried to research and look up different mushroom species, but it turns out that mycological distinctions are mostly beyond me. There are just a lot of very similar mushrooms and, luckily for me, my child’s interest moved on. This example shows some important things about epistemic interdependence. First, it is clear that my child depends on me, here. He is a toddler and is not in a position to seek the information he needed without help. And, as his parent, and as someone with some relevant knowledge, with nothing more pressing going on, I was particularly wellplaced to meet that need. Second, these features (our relationship, my knowledge/ability to research, the lack of competitors for my epistemic attention) mean that if I don’t answer his questions, something has gone wrong. He can’t find out what a tulip is called on his own, so without my help his inquiry will fail. He won’t be able to revise his beliefs to better approximate knowledge. The features of the case, taken together, make it the case that I ought to answer him or help him find the answer. This would not be true if the case were different. A random person with tulip-relevant knowledge might not be so obligated. A local botanist who happens to be walking by, perhaps thinking about her own research, or trying to work out what to make for dinner, would not be obligated to answer my child’s questions, especially if I’m able to. But my child’s inquiry, together with these other features that make me able to help with that inquiry, makes it the case that I ought to help. And, his interests obligate me not to try to distract him with some other information. If, given that background, I respond to his request for botanical information by directing his attention at our neighbor’s truck, or by talking about my work day, I’m failing to do as I ought. This example illustrates some ways that inquiry, dependence, vulnerability, and obligation fit together. This example includes a child – a knower who is deeply dependent on a person with whom they have an antecedent relationship. In those ways it is quite far from a typical modern mainstream analytic epistemology example. However, neither my child’s age nor the particulars of our antecedent relationship are necessary for epistemic dependence, vulnerability, or obligation. These features make my obligation more likely, but the relationships that render knowers epistemically vulnerable to one another are varied and diverse. And we are all deeply dependent on some other knowers sometimes.

58

Epistemic Vulnerability

The idea is this: We all need other knowers’ help and input (or at the very least not to be harmed) to be at all successful in our inquiry. This need is a way in which we are vulnerable to those other knowers. When those knowers can help us, without undue epistemic cost or sacrifice, they ought to. In other words, we, as the kinds of knowers we are, are vulnerable to the behavior of others, and some of those vulnerabilities generate obligations for those others (and, in turn for us when we are in a position to benefit or harm some other). Further, we are harmed by the traditional epistemologist’s idealization of the invulnerable, independent knower because it leads us to ignore both our own vulnerabilities and the needs of those who depend on us. This account is, of course, compatible with claims that exploiting vulnerabilities in other knowers is a bad thing and having one’s vulnerabilities either ignored or exacerbated is a harm. In this chapter, I will expand on the ideas introduced by this example. I will offer some details about this understanding of epistemic vulnerability and about the obligations that epistemic vulnerabilities generate, explaining along the way what I mean by an “undue sacrifice”.

3.2 Epistemic Vulnerability Those theorists who assume that epistemic vulnerabilities are bad are typically thinking of the ways that our situations, social groups, or individual characteristics make us less-than-optimal belief formers. When Emily Sullivan and her co-authors enumerate the various kinds of epistemic vulnerabilities we can have, they focus on those that come from our social networks but claim that there is a wide range of sources of epistemic vulnerability: “from low intelligence to poor education to malnutrition to simply being sleepy and tired” (Sullivan et al., 2020). For Sullivan et al., a knower is vulnerable to the extent that they are likely to be led astray. Similarly, Catherine Elgin’s use of the term “vulnerability” picks out the ways in which we are at risk for harm if those we rely on are untrustworthy (Elgin, 2011). I’m not claiming that these uses of the term are mistaken or counterintuitive – vulnerability is negatively connoted, generally thought to be a thing we want to mitigate or avoid. However, the way I’m using the term is less vernacular and more technical. Here’s how I’m understanding epistemic vulnerabilities and the obligations they generate: Epistemic Vulnerabilities: X is epistemically vulnerable to Y just in case X stands to be benefitted or harmed by Y’s actions in pursuit of X’s epistemic goals. Epistemic Obligations due to Vulnerabilities: Y is obligated to ϕ by X’s epistemic vulnerability just in case (1) ϕ-ing would address X’s vulnerability, (2) Y is particularly well-placed to ϕ, and (3) ϕ-ing would not require a selfsacrifice on Y’s part that is commensurate with X’s vulnerability.

Epistemic Vulnerability

59

Readers will no doubt notice that this is a broad definition of epistemic vulnerability. It may seem to prove too much. But note that 1–3 in the second definition substantially limit the obligations that vulnerabilities generate. Returning to the tulip and mushroom example, then, my child is vulnerable to me because I can harm or benefit him in pursuit of his botanical knowledge. I’m epistemically obligated to tell him what I know about tulips because I’m particularly well-placed to do so in virtue of both our relationship and my antecedent knowledge. I’m not obligated to become a mycological expert (though I might be obligated to go find one) because doing so would require me to sacrifice other epistemic goals and projects. I’ll expand on and motivate all of these claims in this chapter. In this section, I will motivate this understanding of epistemic vulnerabilities and the obligations they generate using care ethics as a guide. 3.2.1 Care-Based Theories and Vulnerability According to care theorists, vulnerability, or the need for care, is ubiquitous. As Martha Albertson Fineman puts it, “vulnerability is – and should be understood to be – universal and constant, inherent in the human condition” (Fineman, 2008, p. 1). We can understand vulnerabilities generally, as those ways in which one subject might be harmed or benefitted by another. These harms and benefits are most easily grasped by considering physical vulnerabilities inherent in our embodiment. I am vulnerable to the cyclist who commutes on my running route because my relationship with him (unofficial and merely geospatial as it may be) puts him in a position to harm me. He is also vulnerable to me. These potential physical harms and benefits also come with other potential harms and benefits. If the cyclist and I collide and I need medical treatment, this will come with financial harms. This is the case in the United States, at least, because of the structure of our system of medical insurance and care. This is a way in which I’m vulnerable because of the larger system of relationships. Moving beyond physical benefits and harms, if the cyclist nods with a smile as he goes by, I get the benefit of a friendly interaction. If he shouts out a misogynistic cat-call, I’m harmed. All of these harms and benefits matter to the care ethicist because of the ways that they can generate morally relevant obligations. The cyclist is obligated not to cat-call. I ought to stay out of his lane. If we do collide, we’re both obligated to mitigate the resulting harms as much as we can. Our relationship, ephemeral as it is, makes us vulnerable to one another and these vulnerabilities generate obligations. If we fail to meet these, we’re doing worse, morally, than we otherwise would be (ceteris paribus, of course). This is because these vulnerabilities have, as Virginia Held puts it, “compelling moral salience” for us when we are in relationships (Held, 2006). The vulnerabilities of those with whom we are

60

Epistemic Vulnerability

in relationships should (again, ceteris paribus) be motivating for us and do generate prima facie obligations. Let me make explicit something that is implicit in the last paragraph: for the purposes of this book, I’ll understand evaluation and obligation as inter-defined. There is a surfeit of philosophical work on the nature of obligation and its relationships to reasons and to permission. I’m (perhaps unfortunately) not going to engage with that literature here. I’m going to simply stipulate that if A is obligated to ϕ then A prima facie ought to ϕ, and failing to ϕ makes A worse on some measure. This means that a person is obligated, on my view, just in case they are subject to some norm. Having a moral obligation to ϕ just means that one is morally worse if one fails to ϕ. So, if Alex has an ethical obligation to save a drowning baby, then Alex prima facie ought to save the drowning baby and failing to do so means that Alex is morally worse than Alex would otherwise be.3 If Bailey has an epistemic obligation to believe that Joe Biden won the election on the balance of the available evidence, then Bailey prima facie ought to believe that Joe Biden won the election, and failing to do so means that Bailey is epistemically worse than Bailey would otherwise be. Readers who object to “obligation” talk or who mean something else by “obligation” are welcome to substitute “has a reason to ϕ” or “should ϕ” or “is worse for failing to ϕ” for “is obligated to ϕ” in all relevant places in this text.4 The care epistemologist is interested in epistemic obligations that knowers have to other knowers with whom they’re in relationships. Our relationships make us vulnerable to one another in forming our beliefs, seeking evidence, choosing a direction of inquiry, and deciding what sources are trustworthy. Like the morally relevant vulnerabilities, these harms and benefits are ubiquitous but are easiest to identify in some sorts of contexts. Take, for example, the relationship between the math teacher, Mr. Thompson, and his students, as discussed in chapter 1. That relationship was formal, dictated by course assignments, school schedules, and curricula. It was also not optional.5 The students are not in a position to easily opt out of the class or into another. The students are vulnerable to the teacher in ways that matter to the care epistemologist because he is in a position to harm or benefit them in their acquisition of knowledge. The teacher is also vulnerable to the students in many ways, though his most obvious vulnerabilities are not clearly epistemic. To see a more reciprocal relationship of epistemic vulnerability, consider the following case. Emily6 is a Senior Planner for her county’s land planning department. Emily oversees conservation efforts for the county, helping citizens allocate land donations and planning and executing land restoration projects. In this role, Emily has a number of epistemically relevant relationships. She relies on information from farmers, landowners, and program participants to design, execute, and assess her efforts. She also relies on a kind of uptake from new potential participants.

Epistemic Vulnerability

61

She cannot execute her projects without their participation, and they cannot participate unless they know about the programs and their benefits. If no one knows about these programs, and so no one uses them, the funds aren’t distributed, and future budgets are likely to reflect that. If the incentives aren’t designed to meet the needs of the landowners, they won’t be motivated to participate in the programs. The landowners are vulnerable to Emily, though they may not know it, because she can help them take advantage of government incentives and other programming. Emily and the past and potential landowners are in relationships of reciprocal epistemic vulnerability. This means they are members of a community of inquiry. I think that Emily’s situation is clearly epistemically relevant because part of her activity is inquiring into how best to meet the various needs of the county and the landowners. However, perhaps one might object that the community she’s involved in is not a community of inquiry. The vulnerabilities, this objection goes, are not properly epistemic, they’re just needs for good information. Perhaps the program participants are not inquiring as members of this community. As I’ve said in previous chapters, I’m not motivated to make sharp distinctions between the epistemic and non-epistemic. I’ll also say more about how I’m understanding communities of inquiry below. However, I can offer an example of reciprocal relationships of epistemic vulnerability within what is uncontroversially a community of inquiry. Recent work by neuroscientists interested in prosthesis for visually impaired patients made a great deal of progress working with Bernardeta Gómez, who is blind. The experiment involved implanting a microelectrode array into Gómez’s visual cortex. She then wore camera on a pair of glasses, and the data from the camera were interpreted and sent to the microelectrode array. Gómez was then able to identify lines and simple shapes like letters. Gómez was extensively involved and offered such insight to the scientists that she is listed as a co-author on the paper (Fernández et al., 2021). Here, in a clear case of inquiry, we have a case of reciprocal epistemic vulnerability. No participant could have created this new knowledge on their own. They had to make this discovery together, and so they relied on one another for their inquiry. This renders them mutually vulnerable.7 And this is, by no means, unique to this case. The benefits to science and discovery from involving citizens are well documented, and authorship models may be beginning to change to reflect this (Ward-Fear, Pauly, Vendetti, & Shine, 2020).8 If the picture of epistemic interdependence I’ve been working with is correct, then knowers find themselves in situations relevantly similar to Emily’s or to Fernández et al. with some regularity. This is because knowers are deeply interdependent. Interdependence means that knowers are positioned to harm or benefit other knowers in epistemically relevant ways. This means knowers are epistemically

62

Epistemic Vulnerability

vulnerable to one another. And, as I’ll argue in the next section, these vulnerabilities can generate obligations. 3.2.2 Vulnerability and Obligation Care-based theories do not just attempt to describe interdependence and vulnerability. They also prescribe certain responses and proscribe others. According to Held, this is what makes care ethics an ethical theory. She writes “The various aspects and expressions of care and caring relations need to be subjected to moral scrutiny and evaluated, not just observed and described” (Held, 2006). The same holds for care epistemology. Interdependence and vulnerability are fundamental facts about us as knowers and they also have normative import. We can do better and worse with regard to meeting our obligations to other knowers. Eva Kittay’s work on vulnerability has been central to care ethicists’ understanding of the relationship between vulnerability and obligation. In Love’s Labor, Kittay builds on Robert Goodin’s vulnerability model of moral obligation (Goodin, 1986; Kittay, 2013). According to the vulnerability model, I have an obligation to someone else if that person is vulnerable to me and I’m able to respond. In Kittay’s words, “the needs of another call forth a moral obligation on our part when we are in a special position vis-à-vis that other to meet those needs” (Kittay, 2013). This obligation is generated, on the vulnerability model, by the relationship between the vulnerable person and the person to whom she is vulnerable. These relationships are central not only for development but also for people to function. Vulnerabilities generate obligations, on Kittay’s view, when we are particularly well-positioned to meet them.9 In the cyclist case, the cyclist is particularly well-placed to meet my vulnerability because of our geospatial relationship. In Emily’s case, she is particularly well-placed to meet the needs of the farmers because of her expertise in county conservation policy. If Emily is too busy, some other member of her team might be better placed to address some particular farmer’s vulnerability. And, since one ought to meet a vulnerability insofar as one is particularly well-placed to do so, this other team member would then be obligated. The details of how each person is vulnerable to those around them will depend on the details of the context and relationships in question, as became clear in the example with the cyclist above. However, some predictable patterns emerge. For epistemic vulnerability, people with expertise are likely to be well-positioned to meet certain kinds of vulnerabilities. This expertise, however, might not be well recognized, or institutionally marked (Medina, 2013). Like office workers who do not recognize their dependence on the custodial staff,10 we don’t always recognize those on whom we depend for our epistemic practices – we’re not always even in a position to recognize our vulnerabilities as such.

Epistemic Vulnerability

63

Further, while we are able to meet some of our epistemic vulnerabilities on our own, we are not always able to do so. If I am inquiring about art history, I am vulnerable to my friend Alexis, the art historian. Her expertise can help me, so perhaps she should share it with me. However, I can also go and read her published works, find an art history textbook, or otherwise meet that vulnerability myself. Depending on the context, Alexis may or may not be particularly well-positioned to meet my vulnerability. Mr. Thompson’s students could teach themselves the basics of mathematics, if they had sufficient time and resources to do so, but Mr. Thompson is much better placed to meet this particular vulnerability.11 One concern about emphasizing the ubiquity of vulnerabilities is that we might make the mistake of thinking that since everyone is vulnerable, everyone is equally so. If we were all equally vulnerable, then our obligations to care for one another might seem to be evenly distributed. This is clearly false. It is false for obvious developmental reasons, but it is also false because of pernicious social structures. As Fineman puts it, “Undeniably universal, human vulnerability is also particular: it is experienced uniquely by each of us and this experience is greatly influenced by the quality and quantity of resources we possess or can command” (Fineman, 2008). This is true of the morally relevant vulnerabilities that Fineman has in mind, and it is true of the epistemic vulnerabilities that the care epistemologist calls to our attention. One helpful distinction is that between what Michael Flower and Maurice Hamington call natural precarity and market-based precarity.12 The idea is that some of our vulnerabilities are inevitable as a result of our physical embodiment – this is natural precarity. However, marketbased precarity is “the precarity we see and experience [that] results from how the complex processes of neoliberalization construe and assign value” (Haminton & Flower, 2021, p. 2). In other words, some of our vulnerabilities are ineliminable, and others are the result of our social organization. To see how this works for epistemically relevant vulnerabilities, imagine an oil company whose sponsored research suggested in the 1970s and 1980s that anthropogenic climate change was caused by burning fossil fuels.13 Imagine that this company has consistently stood by while its competitors sow public distrust of that very science. The company has not worked to deceive anyone. The company has not done anything at all with the knowledge generated by the research, beyond requiring that the scientists involved sign a non-disclosure agreement. The company has some information, and they aren’t sharing it. This information is important for a variety of reasons. First, it could make a difference to individuals as they inquire about decisions they are making. Decisions about whether to move to a beachfront community, or buy a gas or electric vehicle, or have children, for example, could be

64

Epistemic Vulnerability

affected. Second, the information could make a difference to public policy and group-level decision making. We might use it to decide, for example, what legislation to support, and what infrastructure projects to pursue. We have a natural epistemic precarity that limits our ability to research all relevant information on our own. None of us are able to get firsthand all of the information we need for our inquiry or other purposes. We have something like a market-based epistemic precarity that limits our ability to coerce powerful corporations into publicizing important findings. If our society were structured differently, this information might be more readily available. It is important to remember that many of the ways that we structure our world are built to help privileged group members ignore or overcome their vulnerabilities. Much in the same way that our physical infrastructure is organized to help nearsighted people overcome or ignore their vulnerabilities, our communities of inquiry are organized to protect, for example, senior faculty from noticing that they rely on excellent questions from eager graduate students to write their papers. Our communities of inquiry are also structured to allow people who enjoy social privilege to ignore the epistemic vulnerabilities of those who do not. Most of my examples here and in chapter 1 have focused on a particular kind of epistemically relevant relationship: a knower has an existing relationship with someone who is epistemically vulnerable to them, and that knower is thereby obligated to provide epistemic care. Sometimes, however, the relationships and obligations are not at all obvious. One such case is the epistemic vulnerability of knowers who are largely ignored. I’m thinking here of knowers who are displaced and knowers who are incarcerated.14 Taking incarcerated knowers as our example, I want to suggest that the carceral system is structured in such a way that epistemic vulnerability is nearly inescapable for those within the system, and nearly invisible to those outside of it. And I want to further argue that this creates a diffuse kind of obligation. Some epistemic needs of incarcerated persons come to mind immediately. If I am incarcerated, I need to know some facts about my case, the evidence against me, the terms of my sentence, how to reach my attorney, etc. I am unlikely to be able to access most of this information on my own, leaving me vulnerable to the behavior of others. As discussed above, this vulnerability will generate obligations for some people who are well-positioned to meet these needs. For some, it might require too much epistemic sacrifice to meet these needs. For these people, no obligation is generated. To see this, consider a fellow inmate whose lawyer is attempting to meet her case-relevant epistemic needs. It may be that that inmate is well-positioned to meet my epistemic needs by diverting her lawyer’s attention to my case, or by using that connection to get information about my sentence, rather than hers. She is not obligated to

Epistemic Vulnerability

65

do this because doing so would require a comparable epistemic sacrifice on her part. Meeting my needs would not require a comparable epistemic sacrifice on the part of my attorney (in most cases). My attorney is especially well-placed to meet my epistemic needs, can do so without commensurate epistemic sacrifice,15 and so is obligated to do so. It is more or less obvious that incarcerated persons have these situation-specific epistemic vulnerabilities. I think, however, that many incarcerated persons also face a less obvious kind of epistemic vulnerability. For the remainder of our discussion of this case, I want to consider the epistemic needs of a person who has been incarcerated for a period with limited epistemic input. Prisoners who are placed in solitary confinement experience this to a debilitating extreme, but many prisoners are bored. I want to suggest that some kinds of boredom render prisoners epistemically vulnerable in specific and obligation-generating ways.16 In studies on prisons and prison psychology, mentions of boredom are ubiquitous. Boredom has been linked, in recent studies, to worsening health of aging prison populations (Marquart, Merianos, & Doucet, 2000), to the inability among prisoners to quit smoking (Richmond et al., 2006), and to suicide rates of male prisoners (Liebling, 1994) (among other things). While some argue that occasional boredom can be beneficial, frequent boredom (or boredom proneness) is at least associated with many factors that make the lives of the bored go less than ideally well (Elpidorou, 2014). Incarcerated persons are at serious risk of frequent boredom for several reasons. First, boredom is associated not only with lack of stimulation and stringent routine but also with negative affect toward one’s situation (Martin, Sadlo, & Stew, 2012; Steinmetz, Schaefer, & Green, 2017). Prisoners typically face all of these unrelentingly. Psychologists disagree about how best to address boredom. Some advocate that the bored engage in activities they find meaningful (Calhoun, 2011); others suggest mindfulness training (Martin et al., 2012); still others suggest that the bored be taught to identify what stimulation their environments have to offer (Elpidorou, 2018). However well these strategies work, it is striking that few of them are available to incarcerated persons. Incarcerated persons are not able to make many choices about how to occupy their time. They are not usually offered mindfulness training. And their environments are typically deliberately limited in stimulation. This means that incarcerated persons are largely unable to address their own boredom. Being bored, then, constitutes a kind of need that incarcerated persons are not able to meet on their own. And I think it is intuitive that boredom constitutes an epistemic need in at least some cases. While the bored do not need information per se, they do need mental engagement. They need to have something to think about, to

66

Epistemic Vulnerability

engage with, or at least a different way to engage with what they’re currently considering. The bored have an epistemic need. And the incarcerated bored have an epistemic need that they’re largely unable to meet on their own. This renders them epistemically vulnerable to others. Many things can help alleviate boredom for prisoners: education and employment opportunities, religious services, changes in routine, contact with friends and family outside of the prison, violence, social machinations, destruction of property, etc. Some of these will be more responsive to the prisoner’s epistemic needs than others. If this is correct, we must consider who is especially well-placed to meet this epistemic need? For whom does this vulnerability generate an obligation? In the U.S. context, many of us are well-placed to meet the needs of bored incarcerated people without commensurate epistemic costs. We might, therefore, call this a diffuse obligation – it is one that falls on many of us. An objection might arise here from readers who recall the discussion of communities of inquiry from the last chapter. In chapter 2, I defined a community of inquiry. On my view, a collection of individuals is a community of inquiry to the extent that (1) the members, as members of the community, are inquiring; and (2) the members are interdependent in that inquiry. Can I really claim that many of us are in a community of inquiry with incarcerated knowers such that their needs can generate obligations for us? I think so. Recall that interdependence and vulnerability are to be understood as being well-positioned to benefit or harm someone. The ease with which many of us could alleviate the boredom of incarcerated knowers means that we are well-positioned to benefit those knowers in their inquiry. And, insofar as those knowers are inquiring and are dependent on us for that inquiry, we are members of their community and they, as members of that community, are inquiring. If this is right, then my view claims that we are obligated to attempt to meet those knowers’ vulnerabilities when we can without sacrificing our own epistemic projects. Just how to do that will vary, as it should, from relationship to relationship. Meeting the epistemic needs of incarcerated and bored knowers will be situation specific but we can make some general observations. Advocates have made progress and prison education programs do exist. There are even a number of philosophy in prison programs run by social epistemologists.17 However, 58% of prisoners do not complete an education program while they are in prison (Oakford et al., 2019). It is well documented that prison education programs have positive effects on recidivism rates and rates of violence among prisoners (Hrabowski III & Robbi, 2002; Skorton & Altschuler, 2013). However, if I’m right that boredom constitutes an epistemic need, and prisoners are largely unable to meet that need, and further, if educational programming does allow us to meet that need, then we – those of us who can do so without undue

Epistemic Vulnerability

67

sacrifice – have an epistemic obligation, in addition to good practical incentive, to encourage prisons to provide these programs.18 Another way to meet this diffuse epistemic obligation is to be in contact with incarcerated persons. For those of us who are not incarcerated, we can help meet the epistemic needs that bored prisoners have by engaging with them. Prison pen pal programs19 are one way to do this. Insofar as doing so would not require an epistemic sacrifice, and insofar as we are especially well-placed to meet this need (i.e., are aware of the need, have the necessary epistemic resources), we are epistemically obligated to do so. One important feature of epistemic vulnerability that this case brings out is that epistemic needs are not always for justified true information. Elgin’s work provides many examples to motivate the general claim that beliefs and testimony only need to be true enough to be candidates for knowledge and knowledge transmission (Elgin, 2017). But beyond that, there are cases in which meeting an epistemic need attentively would involve not providing particular information. Lani Watson has a nice discussion of a case like this. In her discussion of epistemic rights, Watson reviews examples involving “a woman’s right to know” certain facts and “facts” about abortion (Watson, 2020). Watson’s discussion of these cases is nuanced and informative, but for our purposes here, note that attentively meeting the epistemic needs of a patient seeking an abortion may not obligate that patient’s doctor to broadcast the fetus’ heartbeat. That broadcast might communicate true information, but that information may or may not meet the patient’s actual epistemic needs. This is because epistemic needs are determined by a knower’s actual epistemic projects. In the case that Watson describes, a doctor treating a pregnant person seeking an abortion has a duty to provide certain kinds of epistemic goods to that pregnant person. This duty, according to Watson, is based in the institutional role that that doctor plays, and the stated missions of the institutions for which the doctor works and from which the patient is seeking treatment. These epistemic goods include, but are not limited to, accurate information. So, for example, if a provider only discusses the instances of psychological harm experienced by people who have had abortions, and not the instances of relief or other positive emotional outcomes, that provider is failing to do their duty. However, providers can also fail to do their duty when they provide information that distracts from or is otherwise deleterious to the patient’s epistemic projects. When a patient has waived their right to knowledge about, for example, the fetus’ heartbeat, they have a right against receiving that information (Watson, 2020). While Watson puts the case in terms of rights, we can understand it in the care framework as well. The pregnant person is epistemically vulnerable to the doctor. The information about the fetal heartbeat, despite

68

Epistemic Vulnerability

being true, is not going to meet the pregnant person’s needs unless the pregnant person is inquiring about that information. It is fairly uncontroversial that not all true information is epistemically good for us. My epistemic state is not improved by knowing how many haircuts Frida Kahlo’s doctors had between 1930 and 1951. It may be more controversial that not all relevant information is epistemically good for me. However, consider the case of an addict who is in recovery. The availability of the addict’s drug of choice might well be relevant, but it is not clear that it is epistemically good for her. If she is inquiring about recovery programs, it does not meet her epistemic needs to tell her how her dealer can be reached. What it takes to meet a knower’s needs depends on what their epistemic projects are. We know from chapter 2 that when we inquire we attempt to improve form, test, and revise our beliefs on some subject matter. And, for all of the reasons offered in chapter 2, we depend on other knowers in all, or nearly all, cases of inquiry. This reliance means that the behavior of others has the potential to make our inquiry go better or worse. This is what I mean by epistemic vulnerability: we are epistemically vulnerable when and to the extent that other knowers will harm or benefit us in our attempts to improve our epistemic standing with regard to some subject about which we are inquiring. When true but distracting information is presented to the pregnant person, she is harmed in her attempt to improve her epistemic standing with regard to her project of learning how to safely terminate her pregnancy. One final aspect of vulnerability that bears emphasis is that potential benefits and harms come in different magnitudes. Some harms are more severe than others. Some benefits are more advantageous. They are also more or less frequent. Some harms are commonplace, and some are rare. The harms caused by Mr. Thompson’s inattention to his students’ actual needs are, sadly, fairly commonplace. The details of those students’ lives will determine whether or not those harms are severe. It will make sense to attend to our epistemic obligations in ways that reflect this. My obligation to help prevent a severe harm might well outweigh an obligation to bring about some small benefit. This will be complicated, but so is knowing what we (epistemically) ought to do. In the next section, I’ll give more details on the boundaries of our obligations to meet vulnerabilities.

3.3 The Boundaries of Our Obligations to Care As explained above, on Goodin’s vulnerability model of moral obligations, I am obligated to help address vulnerabilities when I am able to do so. Kittay adds some important details and caveats to this account. First, on Kittay’s view, I am obligated to meet a vulnerability if I am particularly well-placed to do so. However, being particularly well-placed is not always a unique position. Two swimmers equidistant from a drowning child

Epistemic Vulnerability

69

are, ceteris paribus, both particularly well-placed to help. This is because they are both able to respond. This ability, which Tronto calls responsibility, will become central in the next chapter. Second, Kittay emphasizes that an obligation can be defeated if meeting it would require undue self-sacrifice. Of course, meeting almost any obligation will require some self-sacrifice. The key is that if this selfsacrifice is commensurate with the importance of the vulnerability, then the obligation is defeated. Kittay offers an example to illustrate this: a slave holder might have some basic needs that the person she’s holding as a slave is particularly well-placed to meet. The person held as a slave is not, however, under a moral obligation to meet those needs, because of the coercive nature of her relationship to the slave holder. Meeting this need would require an “undue sacrifice” or a “diminishment of self” and so the obligation is defeated. Taking the epistemic analog of these conditions we can see what it takes for an epistemic vulnerability to generate an obligation. You might be vulnerable in virtue of needing some information, and I might be particularly well-placed to meet that vulnerability in virtue of having that information and being aware of your need, etc. I might be able to meet your epistemic need for information but only by relinquishing my own epistemic projects. In some cases, this might not be a big deal. I can put my epistemic projects on hold in order to give you information about the fire evacuation route. However, sometimes this will involve a sacrifice of something of comparable epistemic importance. If I am on the verge of a breakthrough in my research, I am not obligated to stop and teach my undergraduate student J.J. Thomson’s views on abortion. At least, I am not obligated in virtue of the student’s vulnerability. I might be contractually obligated, insofar as I am teaching an applied ethics course. However, once I can teach my student about Thompson’s example without comparable epistemic sacrifice, their vulnerability does generate an obligation for me.20 Two more conceptual tools from care ethics will be useful for our purposes in this chapter. The first is the concept of the attentiveness. Tronto’s account of attentiveness, which is inspired by Simone Weil’s work, requires that a care provider’s own goals cannot be at the forefront of her concerns if she is to provide exemplary care. Tronto says, “one needs, in a sense, to suspend one’s own goals, ambitions, plans of life, and concerns, in order to recognize and to be attentive to others” (Tronto, 1993). This is similar to the regulative ideal for the care provider that Kittay calls the transparent self. A care provider approaches this ideal to the extent that, “the perception of and response to another’s needs are neither blocked out nor refracted by [her] own needs” (Kittay, 2013). One is attentive, then, to the extent that one can be motivated by the needs of the other when providing care. For the epistemic care provider, this will require meeting the care receiver where they are epistemically. This will require attentiveness to the

70

Epistemic Vulnerability

epistemic goals and ambitions of others – it will require, in other words, attentiveness to what the care receiver believes, is curious about, etc.21 I’ll discuss a case in which this becomes relevant, and the relationship between attentiveness and autonomy in chapters 4 and 5. For now, note that this is something that seems to be lacking in many instances of experts communicating their expertise. Take, for example, communication about science. While a lot of work has been done to help scientific experts communicate their research to laypeople, these efforts are not always successful. In climate science communication, for example, one complaint is that scientists and policy makers who want to pursue mitigation strategies fail to make those strategies of concrete importance to the citizens from whom they need buy-in (Pidgeon & Fischhoff, 2011). As one article on climate science communication put it: Successfully reframing climate change means remaining true to the underlying science of the issue, while applying research from communication and other fields to tailor messages to the existing attitudes, values, and perceptions of different audiences, making the complex policy debate understandable, relevant, and personally important. (Nisbet, 2009, p. 14) To be able to be properly attentive, however, often means rendering yourself (more) vulnerable. If I suspend my epistemic goals and plans in order to recognize and attend to another’s epistemic vulnerability, I run the risk of pernicious self-sacrifice. We know, from empirical work, that many members of socially subordinated groups in the academy perform epistemic reproductive labor at the expense of their research work (or perform both at the expense of the rest of their activities) (Guarino & Borden, 2017). As I’ll argue further in chapter 4, this inequitable distribution of epistemic care work is a symptom that the community of inquiry is not functioning well. As we saw in the last section, such self-sacrifice is not epistemically obligatory. It might be professionally or prudentially obligatory, but no knower has an epistemic obligation to meet the vulnerabilities of others to the point of sacrificing something of equal epistemic import, or a diminishment of themselves as a knower (Johnson, 2020). It is worth noting that the idea that teaching others sometimes requires a diminishment of one’s self as a knower may already be familiar to some readers, though it has not yet been put in precisely these terms. Kristie Dotson’s work on epistemic smothering is one example (Dotson, 2011). Epistemic smothering occurs, according to Dotson’s definition, when a would-be testifier omits testimony because the content is unsafe or risky, the audience has failed to demonstrate that they are competent to hear that content, and the failure of competence is due to pernicious ignorance. Dotson’s paper on testimonial smothering is worth reading in its

Epistemic Vulnerability

71

entirety. For our purposes here, though, her central example will be most illustrative. Dotson draws our attention to Cassandra Byers Harvin’s article “Conversations I can’t have”, in which Harvin describes her experience with what Dotson calls testimonial smothering. Harvin offers many examples of conversations that involve risky or unsafe content that would have to be expressed to an audience rendered incompetent by racism. Here’s Dotson’s account of one of these examples: She describes one encounter in a public library with a white woman, “early-50s-looking” who asks Harvin what she is working on. Harvin responds by indicating she is researching “raising Black sons in this society” (16). The white woman promptly asks, “How is that any different from raising white sons?” Harvin notes that it is not only the question that is problematic, as it indicates a kind of lack of awareness of racial struggles in the United States, but also the tone of the question that indicated the white woman believed that Harvin was “making something out of nothing” (16). Harvin explains that in response to the question she politely pretended that she was running out of time in order to extricate herself from the situation. This is a situation where the audience of potential testimony demonstrated, through a racial microaggression, testimonial incompetence. Racial microaggressions take on different forms. One of the forms is microinvalidations. A micro-invalidation is “characterized by communications that exclude, negate, or nullify the psychological thoughts, feelings, or experiential reality of a person of color” (Sue et al., 2007, p. 274). The unnecessarily skeptical question concerning the possible differences between raising Black sons and white sons in a U.S. context can operate to effectively negate the experiential reality of many people of color. The insult, which is carried not only by the question, but also by the tone of the question, indicates a testimonial incompetence with respect to potential testimony on the difficulties of raising Black sons in a U.S. context. (Dotson, 2011, emphasis added) Being asked to meet the epistemic needs of someone who excludes, negates, or nullifies your psychological thoughts, feelings, or experiential reality is, in effect, being asked to diminish yourself as a knower. This is not obligatory. Another place we find discussion of this kind of phenomenon in the literature is in Nora Berenstain’s work on epistemic exploitation. According to Berenstain, “epistemic exploitation occurs when privileged persons compel marginalized persons to produce an education or explanation about the nature of the oppression they face” (Berenstain, 2016). Epistemic labor is exploitative when it is not properly acknowledged or valued, when the

72

Epistemic Vulnerability

educator does not have any real choice about whether to perform it, and when it is met with default skepticism. Berenstain argues that while performing this kind of labor is often valorized within the academy and in other communities, this valorization occludes the ways that epistemic exploitation is oppressive. This is similar to the valorization of care work when it is performed by members of socially subordinated groups. This valorization, too, occludes the ways in which compulsory and inequitably distributed care work is oppressive. I’ll return to this more in chapter 4. To put Berenstain’s observations in the vocabulary of this chapter, a white person might really be epistemically vulnerable insofar as she is ignorant of the nature of the oppression that Black people face. A Black person in her community might have the information that would address this need. However, insofar as the Black knower is coerced by social pressures into being well-positioned to provide epistemic care, that Black knower is not obligated to meet the vulnerability. Doing so would require a diminishment of herself as a knower. Of course, sometimes the needs that present themselves are extreme. Sometimes a potential collaboration could be so beneficial that I should put aside my inquiry to help someone else. Sometimes it is epistemically appropriate for the researcher to help his graduate student with her dissertation proposal, rather than perform some time-sensitive experiment. These are sacrifices. But such a sacrifice does not need to be dire. This brings us to the second of the tools I want to borrow from care ethics: Kittay’s notion, doulia (Kittay, 2013). Kittay introduces the notion of doulia to capture the reliance that care providers have on non-reciprocal relationships. Some dependents are not and will never be in a position to provide care to those from whom they’ve received it. And to demand this kind of reciprocity from our children or from others who depend on us seems to miss the mark, both in morally and in epistemically relevant cases. A nurse should not hold a patient hostage to a promise that they will someday provide care in return. While I often learn from my students, their teaching me should not be a condition of my working to meet their epistemic needs as their professor. Nonetheless, as discussed above, providing care attentively renders the care provider vulnerable, and this vulnerability generates obligations for some member of the community. Building on Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s idea of a care web, as discussed in the last chapter, we can understand doulia as requiring a kind of web (Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2018). Doulia requires that communities be structured as webs of care provision – someone who is providing care for a dependent renders herself vulnerable in ways that generate obligations for third parties. As Asha Bhandary explains it, the principle of doulia, “states that fairness requires conditions of support for caregivers so that they can perform dependency work without incurring undue burdens” (Bhandary, 2010, p. 145). The central idea is that someone cannot be

Epistemic Vulnerability

73

properly attentive and meet the needs of those who are depending on her if she cannot rely on others to help her meet her needs. When applied to the epistemic context, and to epistemic reproduction, this principle dictates that we must attend to who is doing the epistemic labor and how well they are supported. I think that Bhandary’s explanation is helpful, but I want to take care to stave off a possible misunderstanding. One might think that it is surprising to talk about “fairness” in a care ethics context. After all, the obsession with simplistic commitments to fairness, justice, and rule following are targets of critique by many care ethicists (Baier, 1987; Held, 2006; Kittay, 2013). We should keep in mind that Bhandary’s notion of “fairness” is anything but simple. For our purposes, however, we don’t need to wade into this particular debate within care ethics. We can understand doulia as a necessary condition for care providers to begin to approximate the regulative ideal of attentiveness, and for social organizations to be functioning as they ought. More on that second conjunct and institution-level epistemic obligations is given in chapter 4. What does doulia look like in the epistemic context? Doulia prescribes a web of supportive caring relationships. So, in the mycological case with my kid, if I can’t answer his questions about mushrooms, I should be able to find someone who can. If my child’s interest in mushrooms returns, I should find him a book at the local library, email a horticulturalist, or download a plant-identification app. If doing this means that I don’t have the capacity to plan dinner, someone should take up that mental task. If I have to give up philosophy and become an expert myself in order to help him, or if we have no plan for dinner because we’ve been at the library, doulia has failed. This is because the basic requirement of doulia is that care provision must not require an undue burden. Remember that doulia is a regulative ideal. We should expect that we won’t meet the ideal most of the time. Sometimes there is no one else to do the epistemic reproductive work necessary to maintain a community of inquiry and something has to give. Doulia encourages us to attend to the needs of those who provide care to others, even without direct benefit to ourselves. If we’re able to help someone who is providing epistemic care to some third party, we should. As with many of the details within a care-based theory, the particular requirements for doulia will depend on context. We can imagine, though, a community of inquiry in which some members provide most of the epistemic reproductive work. Recall from the last chapter, that this work is, in actual communities of inquiry, unfairly distributed. But imagine that those doing this care work are recognized and compensated for advising, teaching, and social organizing. Imagine that this did not come at the cost of their research because expectations, timelines, and compensation schemes were structured to reflect that this work is vital to

74

Epistemic Vulnerability

the epistemic community in which these knowers are inquiring. Further, imagine that other members of the community stepped up to help when doing this work would be too onerous. Imagine being able to say to a colleague, “Can you teach my class on Euthyphro this week? I have a conference presentation to finish” without this costing you unduly. Further, imagine not having to ask – imagine that the knowers around you are attentive to your epistemic needs and take responsibility for meeting them when you are absorbed by the needs of others. This imagined community is approximating doulia.22 Just what it takes to do this, and how we can move our actual communities toward emulating this imagined one remains to be specified – I’ll work toward that in the next chapter. Let me note one more thing about the requirements of attentiveness and doulia. These requirements mean that socially situated subjects will sometimes be in unchosen yet obligation-generating relationships. This is not surprising, within the vulnerability model of social obligations, but it bears emphasis. The most obviously intuitive epistemically relevant obligations come from more or less voluntary relationships: teachers are obligated to their students. Lab-mates are obligated to one another. However, the kind of epistemic evaluation recommended by the care epistemologist is going to require a nested set of obligations. Doulia requires that we participate in these relationships of vulnerability and care provision even when we have not volunteered to do so, even when we aren’t intimately connected to the other relevant knowers. This, further, means that the requirement of attentiveness – particularly the aspect of attentiveness that involves recognizing needs – applies very broadly. One might object, at this point, that the emphasis on meeting vulnerabilities and the focus on interdependence rules out the importance of independent thinking and discovery. This objection might go something like this: care ethics is right that care is important, and social epistemologists are right that we are interdependent, but if we overemphasize epistemic care to the exclusion of individual epistemic goods, we will impoverish our inquiry and fewer important discoveries will be made. We have good epistemic reasons involving increasing our store of relevant true beliefs, to protect independent inquirers’ time and mental energy from epistemic care work, and care epistemology doesn’t make room for this. I’ve discussed this kind of position briefly in chapter 1 and elsewhere (Johnson, 2019). When presented with this objection, I think, perhaps unfairly, of professors who attempt to avoid teaching to pursue their research – myself included. I have not clamored for increased teaching loads, more advisees, or less research time. Nor have I quit my academic job to stay home and attend to the epistemic (and other) needs of my child. I understand and feel the need to reserve time for thought and research. However, I want to point out two things in response to an objection like this.

Epistemic Vulnerability

75

First, we should note that it is easier to avoid epistemic care work when one enjoys a position of social privilege. Even just within the academy, the lion’s share of epistemic care work is done by members of marginalized groups (Guarino & Borden, 2017). I’ll discuss this further in chapter 4, but this is precisely what the care epistemologist would predict for care work done in a patriarchal society. As Joan Tronto puts it, “those who are least well off in society are disproportionately those who do the work of caring and that the best off members of society often use their positions of superiority to pass caring work off to others” (Tronto, 1993). Further, for people who do not do care work, that work becomes invisible. While many who perform care work see its value, those who do not are more likely to discount it. Again, Tronto says, these ‘self-made’ figures would not only find it difficult to admit the degree to which care has made their lives possible, but such an admission would undermine the legitimacy of the inequitable distribution of power, resources, and privilege of which they are beneficiaries. (Tronto, 1993) So, my first answer to the objection that we must protect individualistic inquiry is to ask “whose?” The work of epistemic reproduction must be done in order to sustain communities of inquiry. This is true whether we emphasize that labor or not. The current distribution of epistemic care work already protects the inquiry of members of privileged groups. What we risk by calling attention to the work that goes into the epistemic reproduction required for creatures like us to inquire is the inequitable distribution of epistemic resources that allows some members of communities of inquiry to ignore care work. In other words, our current inequitable distribution of epistemic labor already fails to protect discovery by some knowers. Knowers who have been coerced into giving up their own epistemic projects in order to perform epistemic reproductive work are not given room to inquire. My second response is related. If it is correct that performing epistemic care work requires the care provider to sacrifice themselves epistemically, if it puts the care provider in an unduly vulnerable situation, then doulia has failed. This would serve as a symptom that the community of inquiry has not been well-organized to support epistemic reproduction. If I have to put my epistemic projects on hold in order to mentor a grad student and this puts me in a position where I don’t have the resources necessary to take back up that project, then this is an undue burden. Doulia has failed. This is something that care epistemology has the tools to address and should count as a point in its favor. This answer does not address all parts of this objection. In particular, I’ve not addressed the importance of truth. After all, care epistemology is

76

Epistemic Vulnerability

supposed to be an epistemology – a theory of knowledge. And knowledge is supposed to have something to do with truth (or truth approximation). I’ve focused here on the question of the distribution of epistemic labor and vulnerability because that is our topic in this chapter. I do, however, address the “what about truth” objection in chapter 4.

3.4 What’s Next My goal in this chapter has been to develop my account of epistemic vulnerabilities and the obligations these generate. In short, my view is that the epistemic needs of members of communities can constitute vulnerabilities when those group members are not well-positioned to meet the needs themselves. These vulnerabilities generate obligations in other group members. For some particular group member to be obligated to meet such a vulnerability, the group member needs to be particularly well-placed to do so, and to be able to do so without commensurate epistemic cost. It is important that the obligation and the cost are epistemic. This is because our epistemic obligations sometimes conflict with other kind of obligations. That is, my epistemic obligation to meet a group member’s need might be outweighed by other considerations. I might, for example, be legally obligated to be a less-thanoptimal knower. When we put the claims in this chapter together with the claims in chapter 2, however, we get a surprising result. In chapter 2, I argued that knowers’ interdependence means that they are best understood in relation to other knowers. I argued that care epistemologists should focus on knowers as interdependent members of communities of inquiry. Here, though, I’ve been using individualistic language about vulnerabilities and obligations. The community may seem to have fallen out of the picture. In the next chapter, I will focus again on communities. I will offer an account of how we can evaluate communities of inquiry for epistemic adequacy.

Notes 1 Here is an example in which communicating true enough content being sufficient for meeting an epistemic obligation. Of course, not all flowers that are pollinated grow seeds. But many do that, it is still a useful thing for my kid to know. For more examples and discussion, see Elgin (2011, 2017). 2 This was important because we would occasionally find morels while hiking and those are food – food that he was quite excited to eat. 3 It will be controversial that failing to do something one only prima facie ought to do makes one worse. If, after all, my prima facie obligation to save the drowning baby is overridden by my obligation to save a different, closer, also mortally endangered baby and I do so, then perhaps we think I haven’t done anything wrong. I’m not morally worse for failing to meet my prima facie obligation. I confess that here, my intuitions get muddled. No doubt,

Epistemic Vulnerability

4

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

17

18 19 20 21

77

some careful ethicist can explain this case to us. As will become clear in chapter 4, my real concern is not with obligation, causal responsibility, or blame, but rather with assessing communities/relationships. And certainly, a community in which insufficient resources are allocated for the saving of mortally endangered babies is doing worse than it would otherwise be. Staying quiet on this literature includes staying quiet on some issues that might come to mind here, including the details of the relationship between obligations, in this sense, and concepts such as blame and duty. I return to some of these questions in chapter 4. Or, if students could opt out by not attending school at all, it is not possible to continue that particular inquiry without relying on Mr. Thomson. Their relationship with Mr. Thomson is meaningfully compulsory. I am grateful to Emily Batey Blackman for letting me use her experiences as an example. This kind of case should prompt us to consider and critically evaluate cases in which non-institutionally recognized participants are integral to inquiry but left uncredited. Thanks to Aleta Quinn for pointing me to this literature and for other helpful comments on this chapter. As quoted above, Kittay says “when we are in a special position”. In Johnson (2020), I use “particularly” and I’ll stick with that vocabulary here. This example is borrowed from Tronto (1993). I’m grateful to Catherine Elgin and to Luke Neilson for raising these considerations. This is not meant to be an exhaustive list of the varieties of precarity. I first discussed this example in Johnson (2020). Helpful places to start on the concerns of displaced and incarcerated people can be found in Espiritu and Duong (2018), Gruen (2014, 2018), Parekh (2016), and Saelua, Yi, Na, and Museus (2020). More on this below. This discussion leaves entirely aside discussion about the ways that boredom contributes to criminality. My focus, here, is on people who are incarcerated and the boredom they face. For more on boredom and how it contributes to criminality, see Steinmetz et al. (2017). Jennifer Lackey directs the Northwestern Prison Education Program, Duncan Pritchard and his colleagues ran a prison education program with the Scottish Prison Service, and M.M. McCabe helped found Philosophy in Prison. For more, see philosophyinprison.com and Pritchard (2021). We may have other more abolitionist obligations as well. But we have at least this obligation. Like the Prisoner Correspondence Project, the Write a Prisoner Program, Human Rights Pen Pals, etc. I’m borrowing this example from Johnson (2020). If the care receiver is curious about something I find idle, foolish, or otherwise unworthy of concern, then I am likely not well-placed to meet their epistemic needs. I might have some moral or institutional obligation to meet their vulnerability, but I probably don’t have an epistemic one. Put differently, I am probably not a member of that potential care receiver’s community of inquiry, at least vis a vis this question/subject matter. To give an example, if a student in my introduction to philosophy class has a genuine curiosity about the number of blades of grass in Fenway Park, I am neither obligated nor well-placed to meet this need. I might be obligated to tell them

78

Epistemic Vulnerability

what I think of this research project ( Johnson, 2018). However, attentiveness is a necessary but not a sufficient condition on care provision. 22 Here Kittay is engaged in something like ideal theory, and in explaining dolia, I do as well. We can engage in similar questions from a more material starting point by asking, “what makes care provision costly in our community of inquiry? How might those costs be distributed so that care work is not so costly? How can we support and compensate care providers or redistributed care work so that providing care does not require providers to give up their epistemic projects?” I’ll return to these questions in chapter 4. I’m grateful to Graham Hubbs for pointing out this slip into ideal theory.

References Baier, A.C. (1987). The need for more than justice. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 17(suppl 1), 41–56. Berenstain, N. (2016). Epistemic exploitation. Ergo, an Open Access Journal of Philosophy, 3, 569–590. Bhandary, A. (2010). Dependency in justice: Can Rawlsian liberalism accommodate Kittay’s dependency critique? Hypatia, 25(1), 140–156. Calhoun, C. (2011). Living with boredom. Sophia, 50(2), 269–279. Code, L. (1987). Second persons. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 17(suppl 1), 357–382. Dotson, K. (2011). Tracking epistemic violence, tracking practices of silencing. Hypatia, 26(2), 236–257. doi: 10.1111/j.1527-2001.2011.01177.x Elgin, C.Z. (2011). Science, ethics and education. School Field, 9(3), 251–263. Elgin, C.Z. (2017). True enough. MIT Press. Elpidorou, A. (2014). The bright side of boredom. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 1245. Elpidorou, A. (2018). The bored mind is a guiding mind: Toward a regulatory theory of boredom. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 17(3), 455–484. doi: 10.1007/s11097-017-9515-1 Espiritu, Y.L., & Duong, L. (2018). Feminist refugee epistemology: Reading displacement in Vietnamese and Syrian refugee art. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 43(3), 587–615. Fernández, E., Alfaro, A., Soto-Sánchez, C., González-López, P., Lozano Ortega, A.M., Peña, S., & Normann, R.A. (2021). Visual percepts evoked with an intracortical 96-channel microelectrode array inserted in human occipital cortex. The Journal of Clinical Investigation. doi: 10.1172/JCI151331 Fineman, M.A. (2008). The vulnerable subject: Anchoring equality in the human condition. Yale JL & Feminism, 20, 1. Gilson, E. (2011). Vulnerability, ignorance, and oppression. Hypatia, 26(2), 308–332. Goodin, R.E. (1986). Protecting the vulnerable: A re-analysis of our social responsibilities. University of Chicago Press. Gruen, L. (2014). The ethics of captivity. New York, USA: Oxford University Press. Gruen, L. (2018). Incarceration, liberty, and dignity. In The Palgrave handbook of practical animal ethics (pp. 153–163). Springer.

Epistemic Vulnerability

79

Guarino, C.M., & Borden, V.M.H. (2017). Faculty service loads and gender: Are women taking care of the academic family? Research in Higher Education, 58(6), 672–694. doi: 10.1007/s11162-017-9454-2 Haminton, M., & Flower, M. (2021). A care movement born of necessity. In Care ethics in the age of precarity (pp. 1–18). University of Minnesota Press. Held, V. (2006). The ethics of care: Personal, political, and global. Oxford University Press on Demand. Hrabowski III, F.A., & Robbi, J. (2002). The benefits of correctional education. Journal of Correctional Education, 53(3), 96–99. Johnson, C.R. (2018). Just say “no”: Obligations to voice disagreement. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements, 84, 117–138. Johnson, C.R. (2019). Teaching as epistemic care. In B.R. Sherman & S. Goguen Overcoming epistemic injustice: Social and psychological perspectives (p. 255). London: Rowman and Littlefield. Johnson, C.R. (2020). Epistemic vulnerability. International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 28(5), 677–691. Kittay, E.F. (2013). Love’s labor: Essays on women, equality and dependency. Routledge. Liebling, A. (1994). Suicide amongst women prisoners. The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice, 33(1), 1–9. Logue, J. (2013). The politics of unknowing and the virtues of ignorance: Toward a pedagogy of epistemic vulnerability. Philosophy of Education Archive, 1.1, 53–62. Marquart, J.W., Merianos, D.E., & Doucet, G. (2000). The health-related concerns of older prisoners: Implications for policy. Ageing & Society, 20(1), 79–96. Martin, M., Sadlo, G., & Stew, G. (2012). Rethinking occupational deprivation and boredom. Journal of Occupational Science, 19(1), 54–61. doi: 10. 1080/14427591.2011.640210 Medina, J. (2013). The epistemology of resistance: Gender and racial oppression, epistemic injustice, and the social imagination. Oxford University Press. Nisbet, M.C. (2009). Communicating climate change: Why frames matter for public engagement. Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development, 51(2), 12–23. O’Donnell, A. (2018). Contagious ideas: Vulnerability, epistemic injustice and counter-terrorism in education. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 50(10), 981–997. Oakford, P., Brumfield, C., Goldvale, C., Tatum, L., DiZerega, M., & Patrick, F. (2019). Investing in futures: Economic and fiscal benefits of postsecondary education in prison. Parekh, S. (2016). Refugees and the ethics of forced displacement. Taylor & Francis. Pidgeon, N., & Fischhoff, B. (2011). The role of social and decision sciences in communicating uncertain climate risks. Nature Climate Change, 1(1), 35–41. Piepzna-Samarasinha, L.L. (2018). Care work: Dreaming disability justice. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press. Pritchard, D. (2021). Philosophy in prisons and the cultivation of intellectual character. Journal of Prison Education and Reentry, 7(2), 130–143.

80

Epistemic Vulnerability

Richmond, R.L., Butler, T., Belcher, J.M., Wodak, A., Wilhelm, K.A., & Baxter, E. (2006). Promoting smoking cessation among prisoners: feasibility of a multi‐component intervention. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health, 30(5), 474–478. Saelua, N., Yi, V., Na, V.S., & Museus, S.D. (2020). Refugee life making: (Re) Centering the refugee narrative through feminist refugee epistemology. New Directions for Higher Education, 2020(191), 67–78. Skorton, D., & Altschuler, G. (2013). College behind bars: How educating prisoners pays off. Forbes, 25. Steinmetz, K.F., Schaefer, B.P., & Green, E.L.W. (2017). Anything but boring: A cultural criminological exploration of boredom. Theoretical Criminology, 21(3), 342–360. Sue, D.W., Capodilupo, C.M., Torino, G.C., Bucceri, J.M., Holder, A.M.B., Nadal, K.L., & Esquilin, M. (2007). Racial microaggressions in everyday life: Implications for clinical practice American Psychologist, 62(4), 271–286. Sullivan, E., Sondag, M., Rutter, I., Meulemans, W., Cunningham, S., Speckmann, B., & Alfano, M. (2020). Vulnerability in social epistemic networks. International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 28(5), 731–753. Tronto, J.C. (1993). Moral boundaries: A political argument for an ethic of care. Psychology Press. Ward-Fear, G., Pauly, G.B., Vendetti, J.E., & Shine, R. (2020). Authorship protocols must change to credit citizen scientists. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 35(3), 187–190. Watson, L. (2020). Epistemic rights in a polarised world: The right to know and the abortion debate. In Polarisation, arrogance, and dogmatism (pp. 229–246). Routledge.

4

Evaluating Communities of Inquiry

4.1 Introduction In the last chapter, I argued that some epistemic needs of members of our communities constitute vulnerabilities and that these vulnerabilities defeasibly obligate us to meet those needs. I am obligated to attempt to meet those needs that I’m particularly well placed to meet just in case doing so does not come at a commensurate epistemic cost. I also argued that these obligations can be outweighed by other considerations – I might, for example, be morally obligated to be less-than-optimal epistemically. It is worth noting that this account of vulnerabilities and obligations focuses on individuals, albeit individuals in relationships. It may be surprising, given the discussion of interdependence and community in chapter 2, that my focus has been on what individual knowers are obligated to do. Indeed, one important commitment from care-based theories is that the primary units of interest are communities rather than individuals. It has been helpful to start with individual obligations for two reasons. First, obligations talk can be intuitive for those of us who are used to thinking with an individualist framework. Once we move to thinking about groups and relationships, our focus will move away from individual obligations. However, I do not expect or suggest that obligations talk should disappear entirely. This is because of the second reason it can be helpful to start with individual obligations: this talk can be practically useful to help me decide what to do. Despite my commitment, discussed in chapter 2 to conceiving of knowers as members of communities, we also have to make decisions about how to behave in our relationships. For this purpose, obligation talk can be useful. In this chapter, however, I will focus on communities. Rather than evaluate whether a particular knower is meeting their epistemic obligations, this chapter will offer a way to evaluate communities of inquiry. How well are communities of inquiry meeting the epistemic needs of their members? Are members left with unmet epistemic vulnerabilities? And if so, how might the structure of the community be changed to ameliorate this? In answering these questions, it will be useful to take on DOI: 10.4324/9781003036753-5

82

Evaluating Communities of Inquiry

board some definitions and tools from Joan Tronto, whose work focused on care as a political activity – necessary for social organization and affected by political problems. In Moral Boundaries, Tronto uses a definition of care that she developed in earlier work with Bernice Fisher: On the most general level, we suggest that caring can be viewed as a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web. (Tronto, 1993) She further characterizes care as taking the needs of others as the basis for action – that is, as motivating proper action. This should be familiar – there is much in common between Tronto and Fisher’s definition of care and what I called epistemic reproduction in chapter 2. The idea is that some kinds of activities are necessary for us just because of the kinds of creatures we are. While Tronto and Fisher are focused on living as well as possible, the epistemic analog would be to inquiring as well as possible. The relationship between living well and inquiring well – that is, between morally relevant and epistemically relevant activities – was briefly mentioned in chapter 3 and will be relevant again in chapter 5. In this chapter, though, I’ll stay neutral on the relationship. One thing to note about Tronto and Fisher’s definition is that caring is an activity. We have to do work to maintain, continue, and repair the communities in which we live or believe well. A second important feature is that, while these activities are necessary for creatures like us, they are also activities we perform more or less well. That is, while we have to accomplish this reproductive labor to get along at all, there are further criteria for doing the work well. And, because of our interdependence and need for support in order to do care work well, Tronto’s focus is on the social organizations in which we do this activity. Understanding care work as an activity performed in and distributed by communities is helpful in making progress on two fronts. First, it allows us to examine the way care work is distributed. Tronto’s work, like the work of other care ethicists, describes the unfair gendered, racialized, and classed ways that care is currently accomplished. Second, Tronto prescribes changes in how we attend to and meet the care needs that present themselves in our communities. In this chapter, I will offer the epistemic analogs of these contributions. In the next section, I will use academic as a case study to examine the distribution of epistemic care work. As Tronto’s work makes clear, communities cannot provide adequate care when care work is distributed by oppressive systems. This is true for epistemic care as well. In section 4.3, I’ll use Tronto’s measures

Evaluating Communities of Inquiry

83

of adequate care to make suggestions for ameliorating communities of inquiry. I’ll close, in section 4.4, by examining the ways that care epistemologists can use these suggestions in their epistemic evaluations.

4.2 Distributions of Epistemic Care 1 Part of Tronto’s project is to describe the organization of care work within our patriarchal and racist political system. This is in order to explain how care work has gone unnoticed by traditional moral and political theorists for so long and to show how disproportionately distributed this work is. In this section, I will demonstrate that analogous claims hold for the organization of epistemic care. These can be used to diagnose and understand disproportionate distributions of epistemic care work. I want to draw two claims about the distribution of care work from Tronto’s project: 1 2

Care work is mostly done by members of socially subordinated groups. Care work is undervalued and under-rewarded.

I’ll discuss each of these in the epistemic context in the following subsections. Throughout this chapter, I’m going to take for granted that epistemic reproduction, as defined in chapter 2, is a kind of epistemic care work. This work includes the work of teaching, organizing speaker series, mentoring, and other labor aimed at meeting the epistemic vulnerabilities of others.2 So, while Tronto is focused on the care work like nursing, raising children, and environmental stewardship, I will be checking for analogous distributions of care work in communities of inquiry. I will take the academy as my test case. This is not because I think of the academy as the only or even the paradigm example of a community of inquiry. As I hope the work in the previous chapters has shown, I think that there are epistemically relevant communities and communities of inquiry in many and diverse areas of life. My reasons for focusing on the academy, then, are first, that I’m familiar with this kind of community of inquiry. Second, there is plenty of empirical work on divisions of labor and epistemic reproductive work within the academy, so I can offer data in support of my claims. And, third, I expect that for most of my audience, the academy is one place in which my readers may be able to make headway on the prescriptions detailed in section 4.3.3 I’ll return to a discussion of non-academic communities of inquiry in section 4.4. 4.2.1 Care Work Is Mostly Done by Members of Socially Subordinated Groups The first claim about care work under patriarchy and white supremacy is that most care work is done by members of socially subordinated groups.

84

Evaluating Communities of Inquiry

According to Tronto, “if we look at questions of race, class, and gender, we notice that those who are least well off in society are disproportionately those who do the work of caring, and that the best off members of society often use their positions of superiority to pass caring work off to others” (Tronto, 1993). Members of privileged social groups avoid care work which then is assigned to “others” – members of socially subordinated groups. Tronto’s work claims that this is true of morally relevant care work, but it is also true for epistemic reproductive work within the academy. Within the academy there are multiple axes along which one might be socially subordinated. There are all of the intersecting ways that one might be a member of a socially subordinated group,4 and then there are additional overlapping ways that are specific to the academy. One example of the latter kind of social subordination is within the ranking systems of the academic hierarchy. Graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, adjuncts, lecturers (in the U.S. system), and instructors all rank lower than tenured and tenure-track faculty. In some ways, this makes sense. After all, graduate students are, in many ways, still in training. This division of epistemic labor is necessary and not, by itself, inherently harmful. In other ways, though, graduate students are comparatively powerless, excluded from decision-making, and yet assigned to disproportionate amount of epistemic care work. For example, many life science undergraduates at research universities are mentored by graduate or postdoctoral researchers rather than faculty members (Aikens et al., 2017). Mentoring work in the context of a graduate program is clearly a kind of epistemic reproduction. It is necessary for the community of inquiry to continue, yet it is being done by comparatively unprivileged members of the community of inquiry. This may or may not be pernicious. More research is needed to determine if this distribution of labor is resulting in unmet epistemic needs. I have my intuitions on this question, but no empirical work. Kevin Zollman has some relevant work on the incentives that affect and perhaps justify academic hierarchies (Zollman, 2018), but the connection to epistemic reproduction is not yet clear. For the care epistemologist, the question is whether the epistemic care needs are being adequately met, as will be defined in the next section. When we add race and gender to our considerations of rank and care work distribution, the disparities are even more obvious. Academics of color and women tend to place more importance on mentoring than do their white male counterparts (Holmes, Land, & Hinton-Hudson, 2007). Women and members of subordinated racial groups prefer mentors of same gender and race. This is especially true for early career scholars and those who have never before had a mentor (Carapinha, Ortiz-Walters, McCracken, Hill, & Reede, 2016). There are probably a variety of explanations for this preference, including the belief that someone who shares some of your identities will be more competent to mentor you. I’ll

Evaluating Communities of Inquiry

85

return to this below. For our purposes here, notice that this preference places the mentoring work required for epistemic reproduction disproportionately on the shoulders of members of subordinated groups, especially when those groups are underrepresented in and excluded from the academy. Mentoring is not the only kind of epistemic reproduction necessary for academic communities of inquiry. Service work is also required. This includes committee work, serving as a department chair, taking responsibility for a speaker series, and other departmental practices. This work, too, is disproportionately done by members of socially subordinated groups. Recent studies have found that on average, women faculty perform significantly more service than men, controlling for rank, race/ethnicity, and field or department (Guarino & Borden, 2017, p. 672). Further, “female academics report spending more time on teaching and public-engagement tasks, and less time on research, than their male counterparts” (Gibney, 2017). Women do more of the epistemic reproductive work than men, and it affects their careers, as so much academic promotion and recognition of merit is based on research productivity. All of this epistemic reproductive work is piled on the top of other epistemic labor that is also disproportionately demanded from members of socially subordinated groups. In addition to epistemic reproductive work like teaching and mentoring, members of socially subordinated groups do a disproportionate amount of equity work – trying to make the academy a better, more equitable community. This sometimes comes in the form of education about systematic problems within the academy (Berenstain, 2016; Dotson, 2011, 2014). It sometimes comes in the form of emotional labor – the keeping track and anticipatory work required for a community of inquiry to run (Manne, 2020; Wilson, 2021). This is true in general, as well as within the academy. As Audre Lorde puts it, Black and third-world people are expected to educate white people as to our humanity. Women are expected to educate men. Lesbian and gay men are expected to educate the heterosexual world. The oppressors maintain their position and evade their responsibility for their own actions. There is a constant drain of energy which might be better used in redefining ourselves and devising realistic scenarios for altering the present and constructing the future. (Lorde, 2004, p. 854) This kind of work is regularly asked of subordinated group members outside of and within the academy, which can retraumatize these inquirers, damage their careers, and exploit them. When members of privileged groups do engage in care work, Tronto points out, it is often in the role of directing or planning that work, rather than practicing care itself. “The doctor is taking care of the

86

Evaluating Communities of Inquiry

patient, even though the nurses, orderlies, and lab technicians are the actual providers of hands-on care” (Tronto, 1993). I don’t have any empirical findings on this, but it would be useful to see how many teaching centers, advising departments, and mentoring programs within the academy are run by white men, but staffed by women and people of color. One telling observation from Tronto about the relationship that doctors have with care work is as follows: A subtle transference of the most care-giving aspects of the profession has heightened the status of the profession. The most prestigious aspects of doctoring derive not from medicine’s association with care, but from its claim to be on the forefront of science. Doctors who are the most prestigious do less tending to daily care work; the greatest prestige for doctors derives from their research status. (Tronto, 1993) The same seems to hold within the academic community of inquiry. The professors who are the most prestigious do less tending to epistemic reproductive work. And, by and large, those professors enjoy positions of social privilege. According to the U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics: Of all full-time faculty in degree-granting postsecondary institutions in fall 2018, some 40% were White males; 35% were White females; 7% were Asian/Pacific Islander males; 5% were Asian/Pacific Islander females; and 3% each were Black males, Black females, Hispanic males, and Hispanic females. Those who were American Indian/Alaska Native and those who were of Two or more races each made up 1% or less of full-time faculty. (U.S. Department of Education, 2022) And these statistics don’t explicitly address the fact that the majority of full-time faculty grow up in rich families with access to a lot of formal education (Morgan, Clauset, Larremore, LaBerge, & Galesic, 2022). So, members of the community of inquiry who enjoy the most prestige do less epistemic care work. More epistemic care work is done by members of groups that are marginalized both academically and socially. And this is what Tronto’s work should lead us to expect for care work performed in an oppressive context. A question might arise here as to whether care work is devalued because it is associated with member of marginalized groups, or whether it is associated with those groups because it is devalued. According to Tronto, this is a vicious circle. And it is exacerbated by the disdain we have for those who need and those who provide care. We’ll look at this prediction from care ethics next.

Evaluating Communities of Inquiry

87

4.2.2 Care Work Is Undervalued and Under-rewarded The second claim about care work under patriarchy is that care work is undervalued and under-rewarded compared to other kinds of work. This means that care work is less economically visible than other kinds of labor. It also means that we have what Tronto calls “disdain” for those who need care and those who provide it. We have this disdain, in part, Tronto argues, because recognizing the needs and vulnerabilities of our community members threatens the false view we have of ourselves as autonomous and independent. She says, “part of the reason that we prefer to ignore routine forms of care as care is to preserve the image of ourselves as not needy” (Tronto, 1993). This is true in communities of inquiry as well. To the extent that we are encouraged to think of our work as the product of our independent insights or efforts, we are likely to prefer to ignore routine kinds of epistemic care. If this is right, then, when looking at communities of inquiry, we should expect that epistemic reproductive work is less rewarded and less valued than other kinds of epistemic activities. Within the academy, the undervaluing of care work can show up in a couple of different ways. First, there are telling differences in the ways that different researchers’ work and comportment is perceived. Women are associated with academic care work, even within the academy. This may be, in part, because many early childhood educators are women. Those of us who received our formal educations in white western schools have more experience with women nurturing us as knowers. According to the Bureau of Labor statistics, 98% of preschool teachers in the United States are female, 87% of primary school teachers in the United States are female, and 62% of secondary school teachers in the United States are female – percentages in the European Union are similar (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2015). Women are perceived as having communal attributes, such as being nurturing, helpful, selfless, and gentle, whereas men are perceived as having agentic attributes, such as being assertive, dominant, independent, and selfconfident (Eagly, 2013). And these perceptions are not merely opinions quietly held. They are policed and enforced by socialization and unofficial (and sometimes official) incentives (Manne, 2017). Further, they affect our expectations about who does what kinds of work, and in expectations students have of their teachers (Sprague & Massoni, 2005). In studies of student evaluations of teaching (SETs), for example, students were more likely to criticize women instructors for failing to be sufficiently friendly and nurturing. Out-of-class socializing has no effect on SETs of men lecturers, but women lecturers who are unfriendly out of class receive lower ratings (Andersen & Miller, 1997; Boring, Ottoboni, & Stark, 2016). And one recent study found that in SETs, “students tend to comment on a woman’s appearance and personality far more often than a man’s. Women are referred to as ‘teacher’ [as opposed to professor] more

88

Evaluating Communities of Inquiry

often than men, which indicates that students generally may have less professional respect for their female professors” (Mitchell & Martin, 2018, p. 5). The fact that students use the epistemic honorific “professor” less for their women instructors also suggests that they see men instructors as more expert and their women professors as more suited to the kind of role served by students’ early education teachers. While calling someone “teacher” is not always a mark of disdain, failing to use an earned honorific is, when one should or does know better. These differences aren’t restricted to SETs. Perceptions of talent and ability are also gendered within the academy. Women’s academic achievements are often taken to be the result of diligence and collaboration rather than of insight or genius. In one study, participants were presented with stories of discovery with two changing variables. The stories featured researchers with either a man’s name or a woman’s name, and a discovery that was either the result of nurturing an idea – treating an idea like a seedling, or the result of a stroke of insight – like a lightbulb moment. The stories that paired a man’s name with a lightbulb metaphor were reported to be more plausible, and the researcher was rated as more talented than the stories that paired a woman’s name with strokes of insight. The stories that paired a woman’s name with nurturing a seed were taken to be as plausible, but the researcher was perceived to be less talented (Elmore & Luna-Lucero, 2017). And we know that students’ perceptions of talent necessary for a field affect which students pursue advanced degrees in that field (Lee, 1998; Leslie, Cimpian, Meyer, & Freeland, 2015; Thompson, Adleberg, Sims, & Nahmias, 2016). This can lead to under-representation of marginalized groups in the field, which can further exacerbate some of the difficulties that members of socially subordinated groups have in the academy – including their disproportionate responsibility for care work. Tronto also predicts that people in positions of privilege within a patriarchal and racist community, will try to distance themselves from care work. She says, “those who are relatively privileged are granted by that privilege the opportunity to simply ignore certain forms of hardships that they do not face: I suggest we call this form of privilege ‘privileged irresponsibility’” (Tronto, 1993). We can see this in a couple of forms within the academy. As mentioned above, members of subordinated groups do the bulk of teaching and mentoring work. When privileged group members do mentor, they often pick students who are also members of privileged groups. One study of mentoring networks in life sciences found that women undergraduates were less likely to receive direct mentoring from (mostly men) faculty members than were men undergraduates. The study found that many undergraduates were involved in “mentoring triads” with one faculty member, and one doctoral or postdoctoral member. Undergraduate men were more likely than undergraduate women to

Evaluating Communities of Inquiry

89

enjoy a “closed triad” where they had direct contact with and mentoring from the faculty member. Women also interacted significantly less frequently with their faculty member than did men. Further, “Women’s lower likelihood of being in closed triads was associated with their reports of lower scientific identity, a lower likelihood of increasing their intentions to pursue a STEM PhD, and their lower scholarly productivity compared with men” (Aikens et al., 2017). Given that graduate students and postdocs enjoy less privilege than faculty members and given the way that social privilege predicts academic privilege, this is a case of privileged irresponsibility that comes at the detriment of members of marginalized groups within the academy. Further, notice that privileged members of the community of inquiry benefit epistemically from the epistemic reproductive work that less privileged members do. As discussed in chapter 2, the work involved in organizing speaker series, recruiting promising graduate students, and teaching developing inquirers benefits the members of the community in which this work takes place. This is true even if the knowers who do that work are treated with implicit or explicit disdain. And, indeed, this is one way that Tronto claims we can track privilege – “those whose basic needs to be cared-for are met by others are privileged” (Tronto, 1993). When administrative coordinators, junior faculty, graduate students, post-docs, and minority members of the community do the work of sustaining the community of inquiry, the privileged members benefit. Importantly, the claim is not that these privileged faculty members are deliberately undermining the careers of women or academics of color in their fields. Instead, the claim is that privileged irresponsibility makes the need for care work invisible, and that patriarchy, white supremacy, and the association of care work with “others” makes this work unattractive. To do care work one must first notice that such work is needed. One must first pay attention to the vulnerabilities of others. When members of communities have been socialized or otherwise incentivized to attend inequitably, and there is no organizational correction for this (insufficient incentives to do care work, no mechanism by which vulnerabilities are brought to privileged attention), meeting the vulnerability will frequently fall to marginalized group members. This is reinforced by the idealization of the autonomous, independent researcher championed by traditional epistemology and buoyed and exacerbated by the obsession with talent and genius within academic communities of inquiry. Epistemic reproductive work is ignored by members of privileged groups but it is necessary. Someone has to notice and perform this care work. Membership in a marginalized group socializes those group members to notice care work that is associated with subordination. And being socialized to pay attention to the vulnerabilities of others will often be sufficient to place marginalized group members particularly well to meet those needs. This is Tronto’s vicious circle. In our non-ideal world, we

90

Evaluating Communities of Inquiry

need social organizations to help re-distribute epistemic care work in order for our communities of inquiry to adequately meet the care needs of their members.

4.3 Prescriptions for Communities of Inquiry A second major benefit of understanding care work as it is performed within and distributed by communities is that care ethics makes prescriptions for how we should arrange our communities to adequately provide care and equitably distribute care work. These are not practical suggestions for performing care work. They are the criteria for performing work adequately which is a necessary condition for moral goodness, or what Tronto calls being “morally admirable”. According to Tronto, “for a society to be judged as morally admirable, it must, among other things, adequately provide for care of its members and its territory” (Tronto, 1993). She specifies four elements of adequate care provision. Having these elements is clearly a necessary condition for a morally admirable community, rather than a sufficient one. As Tronto points out, other moral requirements, i.e. for justice, are also necessary for moral adequacy. I’ll return to what else might be required for epistemic adequacy at the end of this chapter. In this section, I will use epistemic analogs of Tronto’s elements of adequate care provision to make the community of inquiry the locus of epistemic judgment. Tronto’s conditions are conditions on social arrangements. Adequate care provision has the following four elements: 1 2 3 4

Attentiveness: a society must be structured to allow care providers to be attentive to the needs of those who depend on them Responsibility: a society must have someone be responsible for caring when a care demand presents itself Competence: a society must prepare providers to be competent to provide care Responsiveness: a society must balance the needs of care providers and those in need of care

These elements, should not be thought of as entirely discrete. Instead, according to Tronto, they are mutually supporting, fitting together into what Tronto calls the integrity of care. Keeping in mind the principled distance between traditional moral theories and care ethics, Tronto is careful that these elements of care are not rules or moral precepts. They are, instead, requirements for being a caring society. They are the demands we ought to strive to meet. “The ethic of care is a practice,” she writes, “rather than a set of rules or principles” (Tronto, 1993). And practices of care are complex and nonideal. Starting from the material and real contexts of care work, these

Evaluating Communities of Inquiry

91

requirements offer ways to ameliorate our communities where they are inadequate. They also provide measures to diagnose how well our community is doing at meeting the vulnerabilities of its members. For communities of inquiry, these elements are necessary for adequate epistemic care, which in turn is necessary for a community to be epistemically admirable. Failing to have these elements indicates that some epistemic vulnerability is going unmet, and the community is not doing as well as it ought. In this section, I will discuss how each of these elements might obtain in a community of inquiry. 4.3.1 Attentiveness For a community of inquiry to be meeting its epistemic requirements – for it to be providing adequate epistemic care – that community must be structured to allow and encourage care providers to be attentive to the needs of those who depend on them. Attentiveness involves “suspend[ing] one’s own goals, ambitions, plans for life, and concerns, in order to recognize and to be attentive to others” (Tronto, 1993). This requirement is similar to the ideal of the transparent self from Kittay, as discussed in chapter 3. And like that ideal, meeting this requirement is an imperfect duty – one need not be maximally attentive to all persons at all times. Recall, from chapter 3, that we are not always obligated to attempt to meet vulnerabilities when doing so would require a commensurate self-sacrifice. Further, recall that members of some marginalized groups have been socialized to be too attentive to the needs of others. However, taking interdependence seriously, treating other knower’s needs as motivating for us, and doing the work to arrange our communities to meet epistemic vulnerabilities requires that we attend to those vulnerabilities. Tronto is clear that this requirement will not be met by a simple improvement in understanding. We cannot theorize or medicalize or analyze others needs and thereby become attentive. To be caring properly we must turn out attention to others. Without this, Tronto argues, we have no chance of adequately responding to their needs. In the context of a community of inquiry, this requires seeing ourselves as involved in one another’s epistemic lives. It requires seeing the needs of those in my community as relevant to me and motivating for me. To meet this requirement, I must suspend my own projects (sometimes) to be able to recognize the needs of others. If I only ever teach courses in the areas I’m currently researching, or only ever advise graduate students who spell out the details of my grand theory, I am not being properly attentive. Worse, if I’m unable step away from working on my own research project to even notice that there are teaching needs to be met, I’m not being properly attentive. To be properly attentive I must suspend my own projects, and take as relevant for me the epistemic projects and needs of others.

92

Evaluating Communities of Inquiry

To recognize that the needs of others generate obligations for me, it helps to first recognize my own relationships of dependence. That is, to properly see others’ needs as relevant for me, and to avoid falsely viewing them as deficits, I need to recognize the ways that my inquiry relies on the work of others. I need to see how dependent I am on the epistemic reproductive work that other knowers do. Tronto claims that this will require that “caring become more prominent in social life” (Tronto, 1993). For our purposes, it will require that caring become more prominent in our understanding of the practice of inquiry. This, in turn, will require a restructuring of the community of inquiry. A community of inquiry structured around interdependence and care work would have to allow for members to be attentive to each other’s vulnerabilities. It would have to grant prestige to epistemic reproductive work. This might require changing incentive and rewards structures. It would certainly require acknowledging the ways that our inquiry depends on a well-functioning community, including graduate students, administrative coordinators, and janitorial staff. An example might help here. Imagine Joe, a white cis man whose father was also a professor. Joe is a full professor in a department with a graduate program. Donna, a Black first-generation graduate student, does research in Joe’s area of specialization. Joe and Donna are members of at least one shared community of inquiry. Joe might be aware of the paucity of women and scholars of color in his field. He might, upon reflection, endorse diversity and inclusion programming. But if he is so engrossed in his own research, if he never puts aside his own projects to see Donna’s (or some other graduate student’s) needs as relevant to him, he is failing to be attentive, and is failing to adequately provide epistemic care. Insofar as their community places them in positions of interdependence, the community is unable to be epistemically admirable, no matter how important or novel Joe’s other epistemic work may be. Just because Joe ought to be more attentive does not mean that everyone should be more attentive. As discussed above, there is a risk that we might be overly attentive to the needs of others. This has been a longstanding worry about care-based theories, especially given our patriarchal and racist systems that encourage members of marginalized groups to subsume their needs in favor of the needs of the privileged. Championing attentiveness in these groups risks exacerbating existing oppression. And this isn’t just a morally relevant risk. We might take too much responsibility for epistemic reproductive work and fail to pursue our own interests. If Shelly, a colleague of Joe’s, is attentive to all of the mentoring needs in their department and so has no time for her own research, her care work, no matter how good, will not make their community adequate because her own epistemic needs are going unmet. Any system that requires that of a member or a kind of member (members of some races or genders for example) is not going to be

Evaluating Communities of Inquiry

93

adequate. So, attentiveness alone is insufficient to render a community epistemically admirable. We’ll need some other requirements. 4.3.2 Responsibility For a community of inquiry to be epistemically admirable, that community must have some member or members be responsible for meeting the care needs that present themselves. We should be careful about the notion of responsibility at work here. Responsibility, in the technical sense we’re using it, is not a backward facing notion. I’m not responsible for meeting some vulnerability in virtue of having caused it. Recalling the algebra class example, no one person – certainly not Mr. Thompson – caused Mr. Thompson’s students to have unmet arithmetic needs.5 Yet, Mr. Thompson is responsible to meet those needs, because he is able to respond. He is particularly well-placed to do so. This is not to say that causing a vulnerability has nothing ever to do with being responsible for addressing it. Indeed, in many cases in which someone has caused a vulnerability they may well be the best-placed to meet it. Returning to the oil company example from chapter 3, recall that the oil company had evidence of anthropogenic climate change and withheld that information to the detriment of the public. The oil company caused the vulnerability in the general public – they withheld the information. This means they had the information. This means they are well placed to provide it. However, others who have the information who also enjoy the public’s trust might well be better placed to meet the vulnerability. I’ll discuss the ways that trust can be important for epistemic care more in section 4.3.5 of this chapter and in chapter 5. As Tronto notes, who should be responsible for what, in the sense in question, is “embedded in a set of implicit cultural practices, rather than in a set of formal rules or series of promises” (Tronto, 1993). Because this is a non-ideal theory and we will be pluralist about permissible organizations, care epistemology will not specify just how responsibility should be allocated. There are, however, some things we should guard against. It is important, for example, that no one person or type of person is made responsible for care work for pernicious reasons. In academic communities of inquiry, for example, women and members of minority groups are responsible for most of the mentoring work. As discussed above, there are two reasons for this. First, there is the perception that women are more nurturing than men. And second, the academy has a long history of being unfriendly and even violent toward minority group members, meaning that these students/mentees are more comfortable with mentors who share their social identity. These are pernicious causes. This is not to say that these mentees need to be forcibly removed from their existing relationships. It does mean that where members of privileged groups can develop mentoring relationships, more

94

Evaluating Communities of Inquiry

work should be done to do so. Mentors who enjoy more privilege should take more responsibility for mentoring work. If no one is responsible for some key care needs within a community, or if one or one sort of person is responsible, that community is unlikely to be able to provide adequate care. This is, in part, because if one person or one sort of person is meeting all of the care needs within a community, they will have to be attentive to the needs of others to the point that their own needs are likely to go unmet. In the language of chapter 3, this means that doulia – the requirement that care not unduly burden the care provider – has failed. This is what has gone wrong in Shelly’s case, above. Such a community needs to be rearranged in order to be epistemically admirable. This means that even communities in which those members who enjoy privileged irresponsibility are producing new knowledge are not doing what they epistemically ought, if there are unmet care needs within that community. Members of privileged groups can do more to meet the requirements of doulia within their communities of inquiry. Attentiveness and responsibility alone are insufficient. Returning to our mentoring example, imagine that a privileged group member wants to take on more mentoring responsibility. Imagine that Joe is attentive to the needs of members of his community of inquiry and takes responsibility for mentoring Donna. Joe, if asked, would say he is committed to diversity and equity. Indeed, he is aware of and distressed over the history of inequality and discrimination in the academy. He is aware of the ways that his social privilege has enabled his career and wants to improve the prospects for members of marginalized groups within the academy. Joe tries to be attentive to Donna’s epistemic needs by putting his own projects aside during their interactions. Joe responds dutifully to her emails, answering her questions and directing her to university resources, just as he does for the white men he mentors. However, Donna does not send a lot of emails. She does not make a lot of appointments. She suspects or has discovered that Joe is not competent to meet her epistemic needs, and so those needs go unmet. For this care relationship to be adequate, Joe must also be competent. 4.3.3 Competence For a community of inquiry to be epistemically admirable, it must prepare care providers to be competent to meet the care needs in that community. This means that, while Joe’s incompetence is problematic, it is not clear that Joe is the problem – or at least that he’s the whole problem. We may want to blame Joe, and depending on the structure of his community of inquiry, he may well bear some fault. Incompetence can be highly motivated, especially in communities that undervalue care work. Changing the culture or structure of the community can change these motivations. This is why it is more useful, in my view, to

Evaluating Communities of Inquiry

95

look at the community of inquiry in which Joe and Donna are interacting and which makes her vulnerable to his actions. Jose Medina’s discussion of culpable ignorance is helpful here.6 Here’s how Medina might describe Joe’s ignorance: “The intellectual communities that have participated in the subject’s cognitive development as well as particular individuals who have played a special role in it, have to take responsibility for a specific educative failure: failing to teach him about particular others he was going to interact with” (Medina, 2013). Joe and Donna’s community has not prepared Joe to be competent, because the members of the community don’t properly value epistemic care work. Since the community hasn’t been structured to make competent care provision a value for people like Joe, at least some of the negative evaluation should be of the community. And Tronto makes clear why that is important. She writes, “imagine a teacher in an inadequately funded school system who is ordered to teach mathematics even though he doesn’t know mathematics. Isn’t there something wrong with morally condemning a teacher who does his best, since the fault is not of his own making?” (Tronto, 1993). We should also not epistemically condemn such a teacher. Evaluating communities of inquiry rather than individual members helps us to avoid this. The idea of epistemic competence is familiar from social epistemologists’ discussions of testimony. The importance of competent testifier is obvious. I cannot gain knowledge, on most views, from a very incompetent person’s testimony because if it is true, it is true by luck. Jennifer Hornsby and Kristie Dotson, however, each draw our attention to the importance of the competence of the audience. Hornsby observes that speakers rely on a kind of reciprocity from their audience members. They rely on the audience to take their testimony as it is meant to be taken (Hornsby, 1995). Dotson builds on this observation to argue that audiences need to demonstrate what she calls testimonial competency. She writes: From a speaker’s perspective, audiences demonstrate a testimonial competence with respect to some domain of knowledge when they demonstrate the ability to find proffered testimony clearly comprehensible and defeasibly intelligible. The label of accurate intelligibility refers to a state possessed by the audience in a linguistic exchange. Testimonial competence, then, in this analysis, refers to the speaker’s positive assessment of an audience’s ability to find potential testimony accurately intelligible. As such, when proffered testimony is accurately intelligible to an audience, then the audience can clearly comprehend the testimony and, if required, would be able to detect possible inaccuracies in her/his comprehension. When an audience is testimonially competent in a given testimonial exchange, then the audience has demonstrated to the speaker that she/he can find proffered testimony accurately intelligible. (Dotson, 2011)

96

Evaluating Communities of Inquiry

When audiences fail to demonstrate testimonial competence, speakers are motivated to smother their own testimony, especially when the truths they would be expressing are risky for them. For an example of this, recall the Cassandra Byers Harvin case from chapter 3. The white woman who interrupted Harvin in the library failed to demonstrate the competence necessary, and Harvin smothered her testimony. To put this case in the current framework, the white woman made Harvin vulnerable by interrupting her work to ask questions. She demanded Harvin’s attention and epistemic labor. Then, because the white woman expressed skepticism and failed to demonstrate competence, she was unable to provide the kind of reciprocity on which Harvin, as a speaker and knower, was depending. Harvin’s vulnerability went unmet. So did the white woman’s – she would have more true beliefs if she’d learned from Harvin’s testimony. However, the white woman’s failure to demonstrate competence led Harvin to smother her testimony. That community of inquiry failed to adequately provide epistemic care and so failed to be as it epistemically ought. Testimonial competence is plausibly just one kind of competence one might need to meet the epistemic needs in one’s community of inquiry. One thing that is clear from Tronto’s discussion of competence is that meeting to be competent one must actually meet the epistemic needs in question. That is, the actions taken to provide care must materially alleviate the vulnerability. This is why it helps us to diagnose what has gone wrong in Joe the mentor’s case. Joe has good intentions, he is attentive and is taking responsibility, but he is not competent to meet Donna’s needs. Dotson’s discussion of Harvin’s case points out that Harvin, and testifiers in Harvin’s position, need to be able to detect competence in their interlocutors if they’re going to be willing to offer their testimony. Demonstrating competence frequently facilitates epistemic care work and so sometimes competence must be detectable. If my students recognize me to be competent, they are more likely to believe my testimony and get the epistemic benefits of my care work. However, it is not always necessary to demonstrate competence in any easily detectable way. I may have no particular beliefs about the competence of the committee who organizes colloquia for my department, and they may be brand new to the job and so have not demonstrated any competence, nonetheless, I still enjoy the epistemic benefits of their reproductive work. What matters, in this sort of case, is that they are in fact competent. Let’s return to Joe and Donna’s case. Joe is not competent to do the epistemic care work that Donna requires. This is, in part, because he doesn’t know how to help people navigate a system he’s never needed help navigating. His familiarity with the social and structural features of the university renders the difficulties Donna has invisible to him. His incompetence stems from not understanding what mentoring a student

Evaluating Communities of Inquiry

97

like Donna actually takes. And this is because mentoring students like Donna has, historically, not been a valued part of the job. To become a professor, Joe was trained in what his field valued – research. And further, Joe is incentivized to continue to do those parts of his inquiry that are seen as prestigious – publication. If Joe didn’t research or publish, he would not keep his position in his community of inquiry. Working with historically marginalized students is not something for which Joe has received training or which Joe’s institution incentivizes him to do. This suggests that this kind of epistemic reproductive work is not valued or incentivized.7 It would help Joe to develop the competence necessary to provide adequate care work if he had a deeper relationship with Donna. They are interdependent knowers, as discussed in chapter 2. But even awareness of their interdependence won’t make Joe competent. For Joe to be competent to meet Donna’s epistemic needs, it might help to have a relationship that resembles those described by Maria Lugones in her discussion of world traveling. World traveling, or shifting between ways of constructing society and experience, is, according to Lugones, something that members of marginalized groups do out of necessity. To live in a system of racism and patriarchy, women of color travel between worlds constructed by dominant and oppressive narratives, and worlds they themselves construct. So, Lugones writes: Most of us who are outside the mainstream of, for example, the U.S. dominant construction or organization of life are “world travellers” as a matter of necessity and of survival. It seems to me that inhabiting more than one “world” at the same time and “travelling” between “worlds” is part and parcel of our experience and our situation. One can be at the same time in a “world” that constructs one as stereotypically latin, for example, and in a “world” that constructs one as latin. Being stereo- typically latin and being simply latin are different simultaneous constructions of persons that are part of different “worlds”. One animates one or the other or both at the same time without necessarily confusing them, though simultaneous enactment can be confusing if one is not on one’s guard. (Lugones, 1987, p. 11) World traveling, though, is not just something that we do for survival. It is also how we relate to one another with loving perception. In the current vocabulary, it is the way that we can be attentive to someone’s needs and become competent to meet them. Here is Lugones again: The reason why I think that travelling to someone’s “world” is a way of identifying with them is because by travelling to their “world” we can understand what it is to be them and what it is to

98

Evaluating Communities of Inquiry be ourselves in their eyes … Knowing other women’s “worlds” is part of knowing them and knowing them is part of loving them. Notice that the knowing can be done in greater or lesser depth, as can the loving. Also notice that travelling to another’s “world” is not the same as becoming intimate with them. Intimacy is constituted in part by a very deep knowledge of the other self and “world” travelling is only part of having this knowledge … Also notice that some people, in particular those who are outsiders to the mainstream, can be known only to the extent that they are known in several “worlds” and as “world”-travellers. Without knowing the other’s “world”, one does not know the other, and without knowing the other one is really alone in the other’s presence because the other is only dimly present. (Lugones, 1987)

Joe needs to be able to know Donna as someone who is, for survival, having to shift between different ways of constructing social space. To be competent to meet her epistemic needs, he needs to know what it is to be her and what it is to be himself in her eyes. Notice that Lugones’ conception of world traveling comes in degrees – it can be done to a “greater or lesser depth”. It will also take more or less effort, depending on the distance or difference between the worlds in question. It may not take much for Joe to travel to the worlds of his students who share his social identities. Traveling to Donna’s world may be harder. Joe has to do this work, though, to be competent to meet her epistemic needs. When I write this and reflect on the ways that I have failed to know some of my students in this way, I hear an objection that I suspect many in the academy want to make to this point. I don’t have time! I don’t have time to learn to see my students as they are in their world, and to see myself as I am to them. I barely have time to prepare to teach, do my research, fulfill my service obligations, and meet the criteria for promotion and tenure. How can this be required of me as a member of my community of inquiry? This objection is precisely why the inadequacy we’re attending to is an inadequacy of social organizations – of communities – and why Tronto calls for caring to become more prominent. Of course, we don’t have time to do the work necessary to become competent carers when caring is seen as an informal part of the job, that comes naturally to those members of the community who have been historically marginalized and undervalued. Of course, epistemic reproductive labor is not recognized or given due attention when the structure of our community protects those who enjoy “privileged irresponsibility”. We don’t have time to do as we ought, and because of this, we need to change the structures in which we inquire. Again, the details of what it takes to be competent will vary across different contexts and different communities. I’m not claiming that one

Evaluating Communities of Inquiry

99

always has to have a close relationship with a member of one’s community of inquiry in order to competently meet their epistemic needs. I don’t think, for example, that I always have to know a participant at a social epistemology conference deeply in order to competently answer their question. Maybe this is because there is enough overlap in our worlds. Maybe it is because by asking the question they make their needs sufficiently clear to me. But, as the case of Joe and Donna makes clear, actually meeting someone’s care needs requires more than being responsible and attentive. One must also be competent. Attentiveness, responsibility, and competence go a long way toward specifying what it takes to adequately provide care. However, even in a community in which these requirements are met, there are still risks of inadequacy. In part, this is because there is still a risk that there will be disdain toward care providers and care receivers. One might imagine a community in care providers are attentive, responsibility is equitably distributed, and care providers are competent, yet the care provision is not valued. It might still be seen as a kind of chore, or vulnerability might still be perceived as a kind of deficit. In a community like this, care provision is likely to involve alienation and objectification between care providers and care receivers. If resentment of care receivers is widespread, then when, inevitably, each of us needs care, we are likely to be defensive and abusive toward our care providers. Here, then, we need the further requirement of responsiveness. 4.3.4 Responsiveness For a community of inquiry to be epistemically admirable, it must balance the needs of care providers and care receivers. A lot goes into this requirement. First, this requirement is the first place we see obligations for care receivers as such. Many care receivers also provide care, but even those who do not are obligated by the responsiveness requirement. The responsiveness requirement is not met if care providers are abused, dehumanized, or otherwise harmed by providing care. If a care receiver is not able to receive care without being abusive etc. to their care provider, the system is not well structured. Someone else, perhaps, should provide the care. Or, perhaps, the system, and the values it reflects, need to be restructured to avoid casting vulnerabilities as defects. A system that acknowledged the ubiquity of vulnerabilities seems likely to do better on this front. In addition to acknowledging vulnerabilities, a community that meets the requirement of responsiveness, “remain[s] alert to the possibilities for abuse that arise with vulnerability” (Tronto, 1993). We cannot do this while pretending to be independent autonomous knowers. We can identify many failures of responsiveness in the systems and contexts of the kinds of care on which Tronto is focused. Abuse and dehumanization of health care workers has been well documented in

100

Evaluating Communities of Inquiry

many settings and is especially clear in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. With these in mind, we can also start to think of some examples of analogous failures within the academy. When faculty members fail to learn the names of graduate students who attend weekly colloquia, when overburdened department coordinators are asked to take on yet another set of tasks, when instructors are pressured into over-enrolling their courses, recipients and beneficiaries of epistemic care are failing to be responsive to the providers of that care. When students fail to use the honorific “professor” for their women professors, or demand that their instructors respond to emails after hours or meet them on the weekends, they’re not being properly responsive. Returning to Joe and Donna, Donna might fail to be properly responsive to Joe’s attempts to provide care, even if Joe is attentive, responsible, and competent. When he reaches out to her, tries to mentor her, etc, her attitude toward him might be affected – she might come to think of him as a less serious researcher because he is engaged in epistemic care work. She might question his research aptitude, or his ability to help her network. If their community of inquiry is not structured to appreciate care work, Donna might become disrespectful, abusive, or avoidant when Joe demonstrates his competence. These examples might give the impression that failures of responsiveness are somehow the fault of the care receiver – if the care receiver just valued care sufficiently, they would respond properly. However, failures of responsiveness are not always so simple, and we should be cautious about assigning fault. The elements of care are, again, not meant to be ways to blame individuals. To see this, consider the case of a student whose home life does not give him the opportunity to learn well in school. We can imagine that his school is well funded, that his teacher is well trained and well intentioned, etc. If that student, because he is unhoused or because his parent is very sick, cannot focus in school, he will not be responsive to the epistemic care his teacher is attempting to provide. His vulnerability is not just his need for, say geographic or historical facts. To participate in this community of inquiry, other needs must be met. To be responsive to the epistemic care requires that his community address other vulnerabilities as well. One further characteristic of responsiveness bears emphasis here. While responsiveness measures the response of the care receiver to the care, it also “suggests a need to keep a balance between the needs of the care-givers and care-receivers” (Tronto, 1993). Here, again, we should recall Kittay’s notion of doulia. If the care-giver is rendering herself vulnerable to abuse or dehumanization by providing care, our community is not structured as it should be. Something about the structure needs to change. We can also see this within the academy. The attitude that anyone can mentor, organize, or teach (or anyone can teach the humanities or the so-

Evaluating Communities of Inquiry 101 called soft-sciences – the feminized parts of the academy) devalues epistemic reproductive labor. This devaluing makes such labor invisible when we’re making epistemic evaluations. The devaluing also encourages abuse or what, in the academic context, is often called disrespect. The attitudes we have toward teaching and other kinds of epistemic care work are apparent to our students. Here I am speculating, as I have no empirical work to back this up, but one hypothesis is that business students who resent taking an ethics course, graduate students who complain that their teaching work is taking time from their research, and state university alumni who vote to reduce funding for public early childhood education are, to some extent, reflecting the ways that our communities are structured with regard to epistemic reproductive work. Of course, I don’t think that changing our perceptions of epistemic care within the academy will be enough to solve the political and budget crises facing many schools. Instead, the suggestion is that our system remains epistemically inadequate at least to the extent that epistemic care work is devalued. Changing incentives, prestige, and compensation to reflect the epistemic value of care work could be one part of ameliorating this inadequacy. 4.3.5 Integrity of Care In her discussion of the relationship between the elements of care, Tronto is clear that these elements are mutually reinforcing. We should not be surprised when someone is both inattentive and incompetent. Failures of responsiveness likely point us to failures of responsibility, or competence, or some combination of the other elements. The elements of care, attentiveness, responsibility, competence, and responsiveness taken together measure what Tronto calls the integrity of care. As we should now come to expect, the details of this whole depend on the details of the context in which the community of inquiry is practicing (or failing to practice) care work. Whatever the details, however, we should expect that things will get a bit messy. As Tronto puts it: Such an integration of these parts of caring into a moral whole is not simple … those who engage in a care process must make judgments; judgments about needs, strategies for achieving ends, the responsiveness of care-receivers, and so forth. (Tronto, 1993) The same will be true for care epistemology. The integrity of the care will be complicated, and importantly, non-ideal. Take, as a concrete case, Canadian indigenous communities’ inquiry into the abuses and undisclosed graves at residential schools. Some indigenous groups are inquiring into these losses but also resist trusting the Canadian government to investigate and disclose findings about the

102

Evaluating Communities of Inquiry

residential schools. The Canadian government removed approximately 150,000 First Nations, Métis, and Inuit children from their homes between the 1870s and the mid-1990s. These children, some as young as three years old, were forced into residential schools that aimed to “assimilate” them, often by means of violent abuse (Wesley-Esquimaux & Smolewski, 2004). While the government has begun to investigate and publicize this abuse and the unmarked graves of children at the schools, some indigenous groups have called for these investigations to be led by members of the First Nations rather than by the government itself (Slepian, 2021). Distrust of the government who sponsored the programs that led to genocide seems reasonable. Indeed, “Indigenous communities distrust researchers from all disciplines because of past exploitations, which include treatment of Indigenous peoples as research subjects without consent, misuse of health data, theft of cultural resources, and manipulation of wildlife” (Wong, Ballegooyen, Ignace, Johnson, & Swanson, 2020). So, even if the Canadian government were willing to disclose the facts they know about the abuses at the residential schools, the government might not be well-placed to meet the vulnerabilities of the members of the indigenous communities that are most in need of this information. Being well-placed to perform epistemic care work is not just a matter of having the right kind of information. One must also have the right kind of relationship with the knower for whom one is caring. Given the violent foundation of the relationship between the Canadian government and the indigenous groups, it would be surprising if the government were competent to provide epistemic care, even if they were attentive and responsible. We should not, perhaps, expect indigenous group members to be properly responsive to information from the Government that colonized and abused them. This is not to say that those indigenous group members are at fault. The fault is with the system that renders them epistemically dependent on a government that has historically colonized and grossly mistreated them. The lack of trust and the abuse and dehumanization in this relationship undermines the possibility of proper epistemic care. A better system would support epistemic care work by those who are competent to provide it. Indigenous elders and communities have demonstrated that they are properly attentive, responsible, competent, and could be economically supported to balance the needs of care providers and care receivers. Part of the harm of the residential schools was the separation of the children from their culture. Children were punished for speaking their language, housed apart from friends and relatives, and stripped of their familiar clothes and belongings. As Carol Ann Heart Looking Horse puts it: the historical grief we bear [as a people] and its relation to not only the attempted eradication of our cultures, but also the trauma our parents experienced as they were forced through this (residential

Evaluating Communities of Inquiry 103 school) [experience] … As tribal nations regain control over the education of their own children … Indian teachers have been able to teach our young people about the relationship between this history and our parents’ personal experience. (As cited in Morrison, 1997, p. 65) People who are inquiring into their own histories, accounting for their lost relatives, and attempting to understand their lived experience have a need to know facts about their parents and their communities. Adequately meeting this epistemic need requires all four elements of care. Those who are most competent, most attentive, and most responsible (in the sense discussed above), should be supported in providing the care so that the receivers of the care can be responsive. The Canadian government is not competent to provide the epistemic care directly to those who need information about the residential schools, but they are, we might hope, competent to provide funding and support to those who are. This is not to say that non-indigenous scholars and epistemic care providers have no place in meeting epistemic vulnerabilities in these communities. Adequate allocation of care responsibilities is complicated. And this should not be surprising. The overlapping and sometimes competing communities of inquiry that are relevant, here, should be expected to produce a complicated network of vulnerabilities and interdependence. In their work on educational sovereignty, Vanessa Anthony-Stevens, Philip Stevens, and Sheila Nicholas write that: Our work in the public academy occurs in whitestream space (Grande, 2003), where dominant identities and social structures obfuscate the inherent colonial and racialized narratives. These colonial and racialized narratives shape everything from the access and distribution of resources, to academic content and pedagogies. Situating our work in whitestream public academies positions our commitment to Indigenous educational sovereignty as a process of interrupting power structures that impede and delegitimize Indigenous efforts to enact educational sovereignty. (Anthony-Stevens, Stevens, & Nicholas, 2017)8 While these authors are writing about educational sovereignty within the United States, the situation in Canada is relevantly similar. And, of course responsibility for care work in such a context will be complicated. This is to be expected. The goal is not to specify the ideal distribution of care work. Instead, the goal is to help to diagnose and address existing vulnerabilities in our communities of inquiry. Tronto’s elements of care are useful as a measure, to help us diagnose what has gone wrong in cases of inadequate care provision. They are also useful as options to try when addressing existing unmet vulnerabilities. When there is an unmet vulnerability in one of my communities of

104

Evaluating Communities of Inquiry

inquiry, I can look to the elements of care to see how I might try to improve the situation. Do we need to change who is responsible for epistemic reproductive work? Should I push to recognize and valorize that work more? Are we balancing the needs of care providers and recipients? Are there needs I might be well-placed to meet but to which I’m not attending? How can the structure of this community be adjusted to more adequately provide care? As Tronto puts it, the central question, “is not – what, if anything, do I (we) owe to others? But rather – How can I (we) best meet my (our) caring responsibilities?” (Tronto, 1993). 4.3.6 Beyond the Academy: Communities and Communities of Inquiry I’ve used a lot of examples from within formal education systems and the academy. Even the example involving the Canadian Government and the First Nations inquirers involves formal institutions involved in inquiry. There are several reasons for this. First, as a professional philosopher with experience in teaching and learning in U.S. public and private schools, I have some familiarity with formal education systems. Second, there is a lot of easily accessible research on academia and academics. This allows me to reinforce my experiences with data. Third, in these contexts, knowers are clustered together in order to inquire. Inquiry is, or is supposed to be, the central project of formal education and research institutions. So, I’ve relied on these examples throughout. Of course, communities of inquiry exist outside of these formal education and research contexts. The academy does not have a monopoly on epistemic care needs or epistemic care work. As specified in chapter 2, a community of inquiry is a group of more than one knower in which some members as members of that group, are engaged in forming, testing, and revising their beliefs, aiming at true enough beliefs. This happens outside of the academy. Sometimes inquiry is the central purpose of the group, and sometimes the group members inquire as part of pursuing other purposes of the group. Sometimes the purpose of the group is merely to socialize, but the members may still do so by inquiring (into something or other). I’m in a group on social media dedicated to identifying wild birds from photos that members take in Idaho. The Idaho Birding group is truly a highlight of my social media consumption. The group’s administrators enforce some simple rules that keep the group focused on birds in a nonharmful way. For example, members can post up to three photos per day, and should include, when known, the common species name, the date, and the location of the photo. Photos of babies, nests, and some sensitive species are not permitted and are immediately deleted to discourage harassment of the subjects. Members sometimes weigh in to debate an identification or provide missing context for a photo. There

Evaluating Communities of Inquiry 105 was a lot of this during the avian flu outbreak in 2022, as wild birds sickened and displayed unusual behaviors. Members can also post asking for help identifying birds they’ve seen, heard, or photographed. The community response is usually quick, helpful, and encouraging. The discussion board is delightful and informative. Idaho Birding, then, is an example of a non-academic community of inquiry. One of the group’s central purposes is for members to form, test, and revise their Idaho-bird-related beliefs. And we can use the criteria for epistemic adequacy to assess this community. We should expect that the details of this assessment will look different from assessments of formal academic communities. The incentives, structures, and histories are different. Imagine, however, that Robert, a group member, mis-identifies a Grey Catbird as a female Brewer’s Blackbird. When Charlotte comments on the photo to correct the identification, Robert is defensive, rude, and belligerent. This is a failure of responsiveness, and so we ought to take some action to mitigate the harm to Charlotte from this abuse. Maybe Robert needs to be educated about the practices and function of the group. Maybe an administrator needs to weigh in on the propriety of Charlotte’s comments. Something about the care work being provided needs to change. The criteria are helpful, even outside of the academic context. Now imagine a community in which inquiry is not among the central purposes. The city of Moscow, Idaho established the Moscow Sustainable Environment Commission in 2008. The commission is tasked with making recommendations for the city council members so they can adopt sound environmental management practices.9 The central purpose of this group is to come up with a strategic plan for sustainability with regard to energy savings, safe weed control, and solid waste management. The commission also consults with the Palouse Basin Aquifer Committee to reduce water waste and protect the city’s non-refilling aquifer. In pursuing this task, the commission members, as members of this group, clearly need to inquire. They need to share their knowledge about city practices. They need to investigate energy and water consumption, so they can respond to real numbers. They need to know what recommendations have been successful in cities like Moscow. Thus, this is a community of inquiry. And here, too, we can use the criteria for epistemic adequacy to assess this community. Imagine that the epistemic reproductive labor necessary for this group is always and only done by members who are women.10 The other members of the group never volunteer, even when they are able and well-positioned to help. The women in the group make all the contacts and arrangements for meeting space, for coffee, and for the guest experts who speak to and inform the commission. The women are seen, within the group, as naturally having the requisite skills for this kind of work. As a result of doing all of this work, the women often have

106

Evaluating Communities of Inquiry

less time to devote to reading about and understanding policy decisions. And so, they have less to say about the issues at hand in meetings with city council members. The ideas and solutions they would otherwise imagine are never brought forward. In this case, responsibility is not well distributed in the group and so some epistemic needs are not met. We know that perceptions of women as more nurturing and communityminded are not restricted to the academy, so it should be no surprise that these kinds of pernicious assignments of responsibility are not either. This is an example of a group of knowers who are a community in virtue of some other goal or purpose, but who, as members of that community, inquire. And so, we can use the criteria developed in this chapter to assess that group for epistemic adequacy.

4.4 Epistemic Evaluations The last section offered criteria we can use to assess groups for epistemic adequacy. We might ask, however, how this assessment works in practice, and how it relates to more familiar epistemic assessments. We are used to assessing knowers for whether and how they revise their beliefs when they are exposed to evidence. In this section, I’ll discuss the ways that a care-based epistemic evaluation works and how it relates to more familiar epistemic evaluations. 4.4.1 What About Truth? In the above discussion of adequate care provision, I’ve listed necessary conditions for a community of inquiry to be epistemically admirable. Readers may notice, though, that truth has barely appeared. The competence condition, perhaps, gets us close – I’m not meeting my obligations for epistemic care provision if the care doesn’t produce true-enough beliefs. However, epistemologists are still likely to find these criteria lacking. No, these epistemologists might be thinking, to be epistemically admirable we must believe only that for which we have evidence. A community of inquiry is epistemically admirable insofar as it produces new discoveries and generates new truth beliefs. How do truth, understanding, and justification fit in to all of this? This question is analogous to a question asked of care ethicists: where does justice fit into all of this? And different care ethicists answer this question differently. There are two main kinds of responses a care ethicist might give: first, a care ethicist might argue that we’ve replaced the value of justice with the value of care, so that there is no place for justice on our new enlightened theory. The second kind of response is to argue that care and justice fit well together. As Annette Baier puts it, “the best moral theory … has to harmonize care and justice” (Baier, 1987).

Evaluating Communities of Inquiry 107 As some of my discussion of the responsiveness condition probably makes clear, I find this second response more attractive. The epistemic analog would claim that the best epistemic theory would harmonize care and true (enough) belief. We can evaluate beliefs for being true enough or justified enough, we can evaluate knowers for having the habits or motivations conducive for knowledge, and we can evaluate communities of inquiry for meeting their members’ epistemic vulnerabilities. Put slightly differently, to be epistemically admirable, it is necessary that a community of inquiry adequately provide for the epistemic care needs of its members, and it is necessary that that community in fact be inquiring, where that is a truth-seeking behavior, governed by truth-related norms. This might require some division of epistemic labor. Some members of communities of inquiry who adequately provide care might primarily focus on epistemic reproduction. Others might focus primarily on original research. The claim of this chapter is not that this division is always improper. Instead, the claim of this chapter, of this book more broadly, is that we need to evaluate how these different kinds of epistemic work are valued and distributed – not just as a matter of fairness, but because our communities of inquiry are worse off epistemically if care needs are not adequately met. Virginia Held claims that, “there can be care without justice … there can be no justice without care, however, for without care no child would survive and there would be no persons to respect” (Held, 2006, p. 17). Things are not so clear when it comes to epistemic care. Without epistemic care, a child might still survive. That child would not, however, become an inquirer. We might try to imagine a community in which care has been eschewed in favor of truth. This might be a community in which one member held all the knowledge and conducted all the inquiry. Maybe that knower could share their knowledge with the other members, in some ways, though it is not totally clear how, if there is no epistemic care work happening in the community. If that knower were sufficiently well informed then the members of the community could, at least in principle, acquire only true beliefs. And yet, I don’t think we would be tempted to say they are epistemically well off. Those community members would have no understanding of the beliefs the knower delivered. They would have no ability to form new ideas, or if they did, they would not have mentors to help them hone those into questions about which they might inquire. Even if they could somehow come to have doxastic attitudes toward propositions, it is not clear they could know in any way that would be familiar to us. They would not understand. They would not inquire. They would not be knowers. In this chapter, and in the book as a whole, I’m taking for granted that justified-enough, true-enough beliefs are the aim of inquiry.11 I’m then adding to that the observation from social epistemology that we each depend on others in inquiring. That interdependence means that we should

108

Evaluating Communities of Inquiry

organize our communities of inquiry to adequately provide care.12 Because of the kinds of knowers we are, these elements of care give us a measure for doing well something we must do for inquiry – care for one another. 4.4.2 Care-Based Epistemic Evaluations One major recommendation of a care-based epistemology is that epistemic evaluations should include measures of how well communities of inquiry are meeting the care needs of their members. This means that, in addition for assessing knowers for their belief-forming practices, their epistemic virtues, and/or their rationality, epistemologists should also be assessing communities of inquiry for the adequacy of their care. In practice, this means that we can use the criteria for epistemic adequacy laid out in this chapter to understand whether and why our communities are meeting or failing to meet the care needs of ourselves and their other members. If we find, for example, that only one or one kind of person is responsible for meeting all care needs, then we know two things are likely true. First, depending of the etiology of this arrangement, this might be a case of racialized or gendered care work. If the one person is a member of a subordinated group or groups, then we should be suspicious that pernicious social forces are playing a role. Second, we know that this is likely too much for any one or one kind of person to handle. It is likely that this person’s needs are not being well met. Knowers who are providing disproportionate amounts of epistemic care to other group members without receiving care themselves, are likely not able to pursue their own epistemic projects. We saw examples of this earlier in this chapter: recall the overburdening of faculty of color when it comes to mentoring students. One might object that we can’t make these inferences without more detail. Recalling the mycology example from chapter 3, it might seem, at first glance, like a community of inquiry that includes only myself and my child is perfectly adequate, even if I’m the only one providing epistemic care in that community. After all, I’m able to answer his questions about tulips and flower anatomy. I even enjoy doing it! And yes, I’m a woman providing the care, but so what? The two-year old is certainly not coercing me. What is the problem? Of course, I agree that a lot depends on the details. This is, after all, a theory that is supposed to start with material reality and material reality is messy. Indeed, part of the point of using a care-based theory is to countenance the partiality of real relationships, the needs of diverse knowers, and the creative ways that communities can be organized. To paraphrase Baier, so much the worse for strict rules and impartial principles (Baier, 1987). I think, however, that despite this messiness, we can make some informed inferences about how care provision is likely to go.

Evaluating Communities of Inquiry 109 I also think that in the mycology example, our community only appears to have two members. Recall that in that example, my child sometimes asks questions that I’m not knowledgeable enough to answer. So, I rely on plant identification websites. I also rely on the knowers who taught me the names of the plants in question. I imagine relying on a librarian or botanist, if my child’s interests persist and go beyond what I can address. All of this is part of the interdependent web that goes into meeting my kid’s epistemic needs. These sources, and the knowers who compile them, are members of our community of inquiry. I need, in order to adequately address his needs and my own, to depend on these other members. As this example makes clear, the criteria for epistemic adequacy can also help us to identify ways we can take action to improve the epistemic adequacy of our communities of inquiry. When we are members of communities of inquiry that are inadequate, where care needs are not being met, we can use the criteria from this chapter to think of ways to ameliorate the situation. We might try to think of ways to make members more attentive. We might try to reorganize who is responsible for meeting care needs. We might focus on increasing competence, etc. The example of Emily, the senior county planner, from chapter 3, is helpful here. Emily’s job involved communicating county conservation programs to landowners. We can now understand Emily as a member of a community of inquiry that is working to meet the care needs of its members. There are county-wide programs that the landowners need to know about, but they are not competent to navigate the county documentation on their own. Emily’s work is to meet some of those needs by providing them with information, but also to make them more competent to meet their own epistemic needs. Without her, the community of inquiry would not be adequately meeting the needs, and our epistemic evaluation would need to reflect that. The algebra teacher example we’ve returned to throughout the book is also helpful here. Remember the 9th grade math teacher, faithfully reciting the state-mandated curriculum to students without basic math knowledge. The school system in which Mr. Thomson teaches is not meeting the epistemic needs of its members. The students that Mr. Thomson teaches are struggling. And the actions of the state and national legislators can be read as attempting to incentivize responsibility and attentiveness on the part of the teachers and administrators. Legislation like No Child Left Behind and the Every Student Succeeds Act attempt to motivate attentiveness and responsibility by way of a schedule of punishments for teachers and administrators. And they are largely considered to be failures (Adler-Greene, 2019; DeSilver, 2017; Hursh, 2007). This is, admittedly, a simplification of a complicated issue. However, even this simple retelling is helpful because it emphasizes why we care about all four of the criteria. In Mr. Thomson’s case, several

110

Evaluating Communities of Inquiry

criteria are not met. The students are not responsive to epistemic care, the care providers are not able to attend to their students’ actual needs because of the state-mandated curriculum, many care providers may be incompetent to provide care to their students due to overcrowding, etc. Mr. Thomson is just one teacher in a massively complicated community. He is not in a position to change his students’ home lives, the broader school environment, or the state-mandated curriculum. Yet, in chapter 1, I claimed that he is failing to do as he epistemically ought. I claimed that he has obligations to his students that he is not meeting. How should we understand these obligations if we’re focused on the broader community of inquiry of which he is only one member? How, in other words, should we understand individual obligation if care epistemology is focused on evaluating communities? I touched on this briefly in the introduction to this chapter. Thinking about individual obligation is useful when we’re each trying to decide what to do. While we are, as argued in chapter 2, fundamentally, primarily, ineliminably members of communities of inquiry, we also each have to decide what projects to pursue, what evidence to double-check, what vulnerabilities to address first, etc. So, while Mr. Thomson is a member of a large community of inquiry, he also has the ability and the responsibility to take actions himself. Being a member of a group doesn’t absolve one of obligations. It might, however, play a role in who is to blame when epistemic care needs go unmet. So, while Mr. Thomson ought to attempt to teach his students the basics they need to do the algebra work they’re there for, he is not, or is not entirely to blame for failing to do so. He is failing to do as he ought, but perhaps he is doing the best he can in a broken system. If that is the case, then the criteria for epistemic adequacy can help us figure out where to start to ameliorate the system. When we have a care-based framework for thinking about knowers and their obligations we can consider the ways we can each contribute to our communities of inquiry. We can think of what changes we can make to our communities to better address member’s care needs. What changes we’re able to make will, of course, depend on our relationships and powers within our communities. Mr. Thomson is better able to flout the dictates of the curriculum to teach basic mathematical skills if he is well liked by his administration and protected by tenure and/or a powerful union. Emily is better able to change the ways that county programs are advertised now that she is a senior county planner rather than an intern. She has more relevant relationships and she also has more power. This makes her better able to attend to care needs, more competent to respond to them, and it makes it more likely that her beneficiaries will be responsive. They know her, so even if she has to take maternalistic action, it may well be permissible. Sometimes, too, communities of inquiry are well structured, and individuals still don’t do as they ought. Including an evaluation of the

Evaluating Communities of Inquiry 111 community in our epistemology does not obviate the need to assess the individual. Emily would be behaving epistemically improperly if she gave misleading information to the landowners who depend on her. And, if a teacher in a well-funded, equitable, education system simply ignored their students’ requests for help, instruction, and information, that teacher is failing to do as she epistemically ought. Finally, as discussed in the last section, I am not claiming that epistemic adequacy, as measured by the criteria from this chapter, is the only epistemically important measure. Epistemology should still investigate when and whether knowers should try to escape echo chambers. Epistemologists should still try to figure out the proper reaction to a disagreeing peer. These are important questions about our knowledgerelated lives. The care epistemologists simply wants to add in investigations into how well our communities of inquiry are meeting our epistemic needs.

4.5 What’s Next In this chapter I laid out one way we can go about changing our focus from individual knowers to communities of inquiry. Care epistemology conceives of our inquiry as a fundamentally joint exercise. Whether we like it, know it, appreciate it, or not, we’re all doing group work. In the first part of the chapter, I discussed the ways that the descriptions of the distribution of care work from care ethics can be used to diagnose problematic distributions of epistemic care work in communities of inquiry. In the second part, I discussed Tronto’s four elements of adequate care, suggesting that these elements can be used both as instructions for how to improve our communities of inquiry and also as diagnostic criteria when vulnerabilities are not being met. In the first section, I offered empirical findings in support of my claims. In the second section, I focused more on theory building. In the next chapter, I will turn to a real case in which a knower attempts to provide epistemic care in response to vulnerability in her community. The attempt does not go well, and I argue, Tronto’s elements of adequate care can help to illuminate why. To get a full picture of what goes wrong in the case, however, will require that we bring on board an idea from bioethics – that of maternalistic intervention.

Notes 1 I’m grateful to Jeremy Fantl, Nicole Wyatt, and Bert Baumgaertner for comments on this chapter. 2 See also Johnson (2019). 3 I recognize that this view of the academy is an idealization – that there are economic and social reasons to think that academics have limited control over conditions in which they inquire ( Kapur Siddique, 2021).

112

Evaluating Communities of Inquiry

4 See Crenshaw (1991) for discussion of intersectionality. 5 As discussed in chapter 1. 6 Medina and I disagree about the importance of agency; however, we have many commitments in common, i.e., the self as relational, the importance of social position for knowledge acquisition, and the deep relationship between the political, the moral, and the epistemic. Perhaps most importantly, we agree that “there are also more ordinary subjects who bear special responsibilities in the production of ignorance through a social division of cognitive laziness, namely, those who are in a position to educate and are charged with the task of being vigilant about epistemic lacunas, distortions, and cognitive deficiencies” ( Medina, 2013). It would be very interesting to trace the importance of our differences in light of these shared commitments – in other words, to sort out more precisely how our views are related, but doing so is beyond what I can address in this text. 7 I’m extrapolating, here, from my own formal preparation to be a professor, and from the studies cited in the first part of this chapter. 8 Citing Grande (2003). 9 https://www.ci.moscow.id.us/551/Sustainable-Environment-Commission 10 I have no reason to believe this is the case. I’m making this part up. 11 I’m following Catherine Elgin’s work here. Elgin’s claim has two parts. First, not all truths have epistemic value – I don’t need to know, for example, how many squirrels buried acorns in the University of Connecticut Quad in 1971. Second, some propositions that fail to be true but are otherwise useful for inquiry are epistemically valuable. Scientific theories offer a good example of this. 12 One way to understand this is that care, on this view, is merely instrumentally valuable. Truth is epistemically intrinsically valuable, and we need to do care work to get at the truth. I think this is right, but I don’t want to put it in the body of the text. Perhaps this is bad-faith or mistrust of the reader on my part. I think that characterizing epistemic care as merely instrumentally valuable runs the risk of suggesting that it is somehow eliminable. It might give the impression that the labor that goes into epistemic care is secondary or less valuable than that labor that attempts to discover truths. As I hope this chapter makes clear, I think this would be a mistake. Epistemic care work is a necessary and ineliminable part of inquiry for knowers like us. It is, I suppose, contingent that we are interdependent. If we weren’t then we would not need to evaluate for the adequacy of epistemic care. But, as a matter of our material reality we are, and we do. I’m grateful to Jeremy Fantl for helping me get clear on this point.

References Adler-Greene, L. (2019). Every Student Succeeds Act: Are schools making sure every student succeeds. Touro Law Review, 35, 11. Aikens, M.L., Robertson, M.M., Sadselia, S., Watkins, K., Evans, M., Runyon, C.R., & Dolan, E.L. (2017). Race and gender differences in undergraduate research mentoring structures and research outcomes. CBE—Life Sciences Education, 16(2), ar34. Andersen, K., & Miller, E.D. (1997). Gender and student evaluations of teaching. PS: Political Science & Politics, 30(2), 216–220. Anthony-Stevens, V., Stevens, P., & Nicholas, S. (2017). Raiding and alliances: Indigenous educational sovereignty as social justice. Journal of Critical Thought and Praxis, 6(1), 3.

Evaluating Communities of Inquiry 113 Baier, A.C. (1987). The need for more than justice. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 17(suppl 1), 41–56. Berenstain, N. (2016). Epistemic exploitation. Ergo, an Open Access Journal of Philosophy, 3, 569–590. Boring, A., Ottoboni, K., & Stark, P.B. (2016). Student evaluations of teaching (mostly) do not measure teaching effectiveness. ScienceOpen Research, 10, 1–11. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2015). Labor force statistics from the current population survey. Carapinha, R., Ortiz-Walters, R., McCracken, C.M., Hill, E.V., & Reede, J.Y. (2016). Variability in women faculty’s preferences regarding mentor similarity: A multi-institution study in academic medicine. Academic Medicine: Journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges, 91(8), 1108. Crenshaw, K.W. (1991). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review, 43(6), 357–383. DeSilver, D. (2017). US students’ academic achievement still lags that of their peers in many other countries. Pew Research Center, 15. Dotson, K. (2011). Tracking epistemic violence, tracking practices of silencing. Hypatia, 26(2), 236–257. 10.1111/j.1527-2001.2011.01177.x Dotson, K. (2014). Conceptualizing epistemic oppression. Social Epistemology, 28(2), 115–138. doi: 10.1080/02691728.2013.782585 Eagly, A.H. (2013). Sex differences in social behavior: A social-role interpretation. Psychology Press. Elmore, K.C., & Luna-Lucero, M. (2017). Light bulbs or seeds? How metaphors for ideas influence judgments about genius. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 8(2), 200–208. doi: 10.1177/1948550616667611 Gibney, E. (2017). Teaching load could put female scientists at career disadvantage. Nature. doi: 10.1038/nature.2017.21839 Grande, S. (2003). Whitestream feminism and the colonialist project: A review of contemporary feminist pedagogy and praxis. Educational Theory, 53(3), 329–346. Guarino, C.M., & Borden, V.M.H. (2017). Faculty service loads and gender: Are women taking care of the academic family? Research in Higher Education, 58(6), 672–694. doi: 10.1007/s11162-017-9454-2 Held, V. (2006). The ethics of care: Personal, political, and global. Oxford University Press on Demand. Holmes, S.L., Land, L.D., & Hinton-Hudson, V.D. (2007). Race still matters: Considerations for mentoring black women in academe. Negro Educational Review, 58(1/2), 105. Hornsby, J. (1995). Disempowered speech. Philosophical Topics, 23(2), 127–147. Hursh, D. (2007). Exacerbating inequality: the failed promise of the No Child Left Behind Act. Race Ethnicity and Education, 10(3), 295–308. Johnson, C.R. (2019). Teaching as epistemic care. In B.R. Sherman & S. Goguen (Eds.), Overcoming epistemic injustice. Rowman and Littlefield. Kapur Siddique, A. (2021). Campus cancel culture freakouts obscure the power of university boards. Teen Vogue.

114

Evaluating Communities of Inquiry

Lee, J.D. (1998). Which kids can“ become” scientists? Effects of gender, selfconcepts, and perceptions of scientists. Social Psychology Quarterly, 61(3), 199–219. Leslie, S.-J., Cimpian, A., Meyer, M., & Freeland, E. (2015). Expectations of brilliance underlie gender distributions across academic disciplines. Science, 347(6219), 262–265. Lorde, A. (2004). Age, race, class, and sex: Women redefining difference. In J. Rivkin & M. Ryan (Eds.), Literary theory: An anthology (pp. 854–860). Routledge. Lugones, M. (1987). Playfulness, “world”-travelling, and loving perception. Hypatia, 2(2), 3–19. Manne, K. (2017). Down girl: The logic of misogyny. Oxford University Press. Manne, K. (2020). Entitled: How male privilege hurts women. London: Crown. Medina, J. (2013). The epistemology of resistance: Gender and racial oppression, epistemic injustice, and the social imagination. Oxford University Press. Mitchell, K.M.W., & Martin, J. (2018). Gender bias in student evaluations. PS: Political Science & Politics, 1–5. doi: 10.1017/S104909651800001X Morgan, A., Clauset, A., Larremore, D., LaBerge, N., & Galesic, M. (2022). Socioeconomic roots of academic faculty. Nature Human Behaviour. doi: 10.1 038/s41562‐022‐01425‐4 Morrison, D.A. (1997). American Indian studies: An interdisciplinary approach to contemporary issues. Peter Lang Pub Incorporated. Slepian, K. (2021). Feds pledge $83M for residential school searches, $20M for monument honouring children. Victoria News. Sprague, J., & Massoni, K. (2005). Student evaluations and gendered expectations: What we can’t count can hurt us. Sex Roles, 53(11), 779–793. Thompson, M., Adleberg, T., Sims, S., & Nahmias, E. (2016). Why do women leave philosophy? Surveying students at the introductory level. Philosophers Imprint, 16.6, 1–36. Tronto, J.C. (1993). Moral boundaries: A political argument for an ethic of care. Psychology Press. U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics (2022). Characteristics of postsecondary faculty. The Condition of Education 2020. U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences. Retrieved September 30, 2022, from https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/csc Wesley-Esquimaux, C.C., & Smolewski, M. (2004). Historic trauma and Aboriginal healing. Ottawa: Aboriginal Healing Foundation, 3, 1–121. Wilson, E.L. (2021). The dual erasure of domestic epistemic labour. In Proceedings of the Aristotelian society (Vol. 121, pp. 111–125). Oxford University Press. Wong, C., Ballegooyen, K., Ignace, L., Johnson, M.J., & Swanson, H. (2020). Towards reconciliation: 10 calls to action to natural scientists working in Canada. Facets, 5(1), 769–783. Zollman, K.J.S. (2018). The credit economy and the economic rationality of science. The Journal of Philosophy, 115(1), 5–33.

5

Epistemic Maternalism

5.1 Introduction In the last chapter, I laid out criteria for care-based epistemic evaluations. I argued that communities of inquiry ought to be arranged so that the care needs of their members are met. I further argued our epistemic evaluations should reflect that this is a measure of epistemic goodness. I also argued that it is sometimes useful to think of individuals as obligated to meet the care needs of those who depend on them. This usually facilitates caring relationships and allows communities of inquiry to be epistemically admirable. Sometimes, though, relationships or social arrangements are lacking, and it is not simple or clear how to address that inadequacy. In this chapter, I will look at a case in which the real relationships of actual knowers are not adequate to meet their epistemic needs, and where there is not an obviously ideal way to address the relevant vulnerabilities. In particular, in this case, meeting the epistemic vulnerability of one agent would involve intervening against her will. Is this kind of intervention – one that is for someone’s own good – problematically paternalistic? Can it be justified? What are the desiderata from care epistemology for justified non-consensual interventions? Can we turn down epistemic care? In this chapter, I will start with a real example that will serve as our case study for the chapter. Next, I’ll explain the complicated relationship between care-based theories and the purported value of autonomy. Third, I’ll introduce epistemic maternalism as an alternative to paternalism. Fourth, I’ll return briefly to the notion of responsiveness as introduced in the last chapter, and use it, along with the other measures from Tronto, to diagnose the inadequacies of the communities of inquiry that appear in our starting case.1

5.2 Administering Facts Like Medicine One Saturday in February 2021, Celina Knippling created a spreadsheet documenting all of the court cases that former U.S. President Trump and his allies filed alleging election fraud. She noted the outcome of the case, DOI: 10.4324/9781003036753-6

116

Epistemic Maternalism

and whether the judge had been appointed by a republican or democrat. She then emailed the spreadsheet to her mother, Claire. In response, Claire emailed Celina a link to a video called “Absolute Proof”, promoted by Mike Lindell, CEO of MyPillow and loquacious Trump apologist. Claire is convinced that Celina and her siblings have been taken in by the media and the political left. Celina and her siblings are worried for their mother. A well-read woman with deep catholic commitments, Claire has recently become increasingly entrenched in online far-right communities. Celina and her siblings tried to administer facts to Claire “like medicine”. Claire resisted, firm in her belief that the “mainstream media” could not be trusted (Del Real, 2021). The stakes for Claire and Celina are high. Their relationship has suffered due to their disagreements, and they’ve gone months without speaking. Celina and her siblings are increasingly convinced that Claire cannot believe as she does and be in their lives. Celina wants to do something. She bought Claire a subscription to a mainstream news network, and has tried to talk her out of getting her political information from social media, but increasingly, more interventions seem needed. Claire consistently insists that they don’t respect her or her husband, and that they are blinded by their “anti-Trump hatred”. Celina wants to intervene because she loves her mother and is worried about what she believes, who she takes to be trustworthy, and how she handles disconfirming evidence. Claire is believing badly. The sources she takes to be trustworthy are not. She has placed or found herself in an epistemically relevant community that does not meet her epistemic needs – though it may meet other needs for her (more on this below). She has an epistemic vulnerability that Celina is well placed to meet, because Celina has superior sources, and because the two women have a preexisting relationship. Yet Claire is refusing Celina’s epistemic care, apparently with full awareness of the stakes. What should the care epistemologist say in a case like this? I suspect many readers have the intuition that Celina and her siblings are right – that if they could just get Claire to improve her beliefs, she would be better off. Many readers might also think that Celina is justified in trying to influence her mother’s belief-forming habits even against her mother’s will. Certainly, readers who are convinced by my account of care epistemology so far will be eager to point out that Celina is attempting to meet Claire’s epistemic vulnerability. Claire appears, at least, to be inquiring into the truth about the 2020 election. She is looking for “absolute proof”. And Celina has information that is relevant to that epistemic project. So, Celina seems particularly well placed to help Claire, given that she is attentive to this need, at least somewhat competent to meet it, and is taking responsibility for doing so. Celina, then, appears to be attempting to meet her epistemic obligations as the care epistemologist outlines them. Despite these motivations, we might hesitate. Claire has actively refused Celina’s help. Claire is a developed knower, and Celina is her child.

Epistemic Maternalism 117 Claire has a college education and is a voracious reader. One reasonable intuition is that there is something inappropriately paternalistic about Celina’s attempt to interfere with Claire’s inquiry against her wishes. And, one commitment that might motivate such an intuition is a commitment to the value of autonomy. It might seem obvious that autonomy is valuable. Since Kant, it has been taken, by some, to be a necessary condition of being a moral agent – or being worthy of moral consideration. Entire political systems are predicated on the notion that autonomy must be safeguarded. Epistemic autonomy, in particular, has seen recent a flurry of philosophical interest (Battaly, 2021; Elgin, 2021; Grasswick, 2018; Matheson & Lougheed, 2021; Priest, 2021; Ryan, 2021). Some theorists argue that it is necessary for epistemic virtue, others argue that it is necessary for inquiry to go well. If autonomy is, indeed, a good thing, then it seems worth protecting Claire’s. We should, perhaps, not intervene in other people’s inquiry against their will, particularly when those people are fully developed, independent adults. Care-based theories, on the other hand, focus on interdependence, rather than independence. So, what can care-based theories say about epistemic autonomy?

5.3 Care and Autonomy The relationship between care and autonomy is complicated. Historically, care ethicists have been critical of views that champion or fetishize autonomy. And there are four main reasons for this criticism. First, it can occlude the material reality of our interdependence. Second, it can cause us to ignore relevant vulnerabilities or to de-humanize those who are not autonomous. These two concerns are well captured in canonical explanations of care ethics. Annette Baier, for example, says, What did Kant, the great prophet of autonomy, say in his moral theory about women? He said they were incapable of legislation, not fit to vote, that they needed the guidance of more “rational” males. Autonomy was not for them; it was for first class, really rational, persons … but where Kant concludes “so much the worse for women”, we can conclude, “so much the worse for the male fixation on the special skill of drafting legislation, for the bureaucratic mentality of rule worship, and for the male exaggeration of the importance of independence over mutual interdependence”. (Baier, 1987) And here is Joan Tronto: When we conceive of ourselves as autonomous, independent adults, it is very difficult to recognize that we are also needy. Part of the reason that we prefer to ignore routine forms of care as care is to

118

Epistemic Maternalism preserve the image of ourselves as not needy. Because neediness is conceived as a threat to autonomy, those who have more needs than us appear to be less autonomous, and hence less powerful and less capable. (Tronto, 1993)

Another criticism levied at theories that (over)-value autonomy is their emphasis on obligations generated by chosen or voluntary relationships. As discussed in chapters 2 and 3, care ethics countenances obligations from unchosen relationships. Volunteering to care for someone is not the only way to become obligated to them. We can be obligated to care for those who depend on us even without volunteering. And there is nothing necessarily pernicious about this – it is just the nature of interdependence. Here is Lorraine Code making a similar point: “theorists who see autonomy as a primary, fundamental trait posit a contradiction between selfsufficiency and interdependence, on the assumption that a person has to buy interdependence at the cost of some measure of autonomy” (Code, 1991, p. 79). These criticisms made by care ethicists also arise for the care epistemologist regarding epistemic autonomy. Like the care ethicist, the care epistemologist seems to be committed to the claim that autonomy is not valuable. And the care epistemologist should agree that fetishizing autonomy has led us to be harmfully ignorant of the nature of our interdependence. Fourth, the relationship between care and autonomy is complicated by the observation that performing care work can impede one’s autonomy. As Jean Keller puts it, Caring is inculcated in girls and women through socialization processes that curb their ambitions and abilities, make them excessively dependent on the approbation of others, and induce them to over-identify with the goals of others to the neglect of their own. (Keller, 1997, p. 153) For theorists who wish to tie autonomy closely with well-being and limitations on autonomy with oppression, care ethics seems to threaten women with even more oppression. Recall the discussion of the transparent self in chapter 3. If we ought to aim to be “transparent” (Kittay, 2013) in order to meet our obligations to be good care providers, and this work falls mainly on members of marginalized groups, then how can we champion care work without furthering oppression? Aren’t care theories and autonomy just in conflict? This question arises for both care ethicists and care epistemologists. Especially as recent attention is drawn to epistemic autonomy, the care epistemologist owes us an explanation of the relationship between epistemic care and epistemic autonomy. In more concrete terms, for Celina and Claire, we’d like to be able to have it both ways: Celina

Epistemic Maternalism 119 should be able to administer her medicinal facts, and Claire should be able to autonomously direct her own inquiry. Here, then, are some desiderata for a care-based approach to questions of intervention and autonomy. We want our account to: A B C D

Countenance the importance of relationships, chosen and unchosen Avoid treating autonomy as the measure of interest-worthiness Avoid costing care providers their autonomy Give criteria for non-consensual interventions

I’ll try to show, in this chapter, that such an account is available. Luckily, some progress has already been made toward meeting the first desideratum. Theorists focused on care and interdependence do not need to reject autonomy out of hand. As has been convincingly argued, independence and autonomy are not the same (Elgin, 2021; Grasswick, 2018; Mackenzie & Stoljar, 2000). According to these arguments, autonomy can be understood relationally. Unlike traditional individualistic conceptions of autonomy, relational autonomy sees agents as embedded in social groups and as developing and reshaping themselves in light of feedback from those groups. And, according to relational autonomy theorists, these social features of agents are instrumental to the development of autonomy. Interdependence, then, is not a threat to autonomy, but a necessary condition for autonomy properly understood. Catriona MacKenzie and Natalie Stoljar, in their introduction to a volume on the topic, explain that many approaches and definitions of autonomy fall under the umbrella of relational autonomy, all of which “analyze the implications of the intersubjective and social dimensions of selfhood and identity for conceptions of individual autonomy” (Mackenzie & Stoljar, 2000). Each of these, then, is an attempt at understanding interdependent subjects as candidates for autonomy. Being interdependent, in other words, does not preclude being autonomous. My preferred account of relational autonomy is from Laura Specker Sullivan and Fay Niker. Building on work from Diana Myers and MacKenzie and Stoljar, they characterize relational autonomy as follows: Our autonomy competencies, while utilized internally (reflection, self-knowledge, etc.), are shaped by our relationships with others … Causally, socialization and relationships can either impede or enhance the development and exercise of autonomy competencies. Constitutively, the concepts and values we use to identify ourselves are shaped by our social context, such that reflection on ourselves as authentic and inauthentic can never be independent of others’ influence. (Sullivan & Niker, 2018, p. 653)

120

Epistemic Maternalism

So, there is a notion of autonomy available that is compatible with one of the central commitments of a care account. We can be both autonomous and deeply interdependent. I want to be careful, though, to keep Tronto and Baier’s critiques in mind – I don’t want to over-value even relational autonomy. This is because there are some knowers who are not now and never will be in a position to exercise their autonomy competencies. Young children, some displaced persons, and knowers with severe memory loss are all in moments in which they would be best served by having someone else have a high degree of involvement in their lives. And there is nothing lesser, or deficient about them as a knower because of this. The competencies view of autonomy suggests that these people should be encouraged to develop what competencies are available to them. However, if interdependence is a normal, healthy, inescapable condition, it is not clear that autonomy is a value. Some knowers with disabilities or disorders should not aspire to autonomy – that would not be within reach or valuable for them. These knowers are well served by interference for their own good. Their situations therefore, seem to call for something like paternalism. There have been some recent defenses of the idea that epistemic paternalism can sometimes be justified (Ahlstrom-Vij, 2013; BroncanoBerrocal, 2020; McKenna, 2019). Despite these defenses, it is hard to escape paternalism’s negative connotations. Indeed, in bioethics, the label of paternalism is sometimes used to indicate that something has gone wrong in a case (Sullivan & Niker, 2018). This indicates that autonomy is highly valued, and that something intuitively goes wrong if we ignore someone’s autonomy. The question, then, is how to balance a commitment to care with a value of autonomy.

5.4 Maternalism To help make headway on this question, I want to adopt a concept from medical- and bio-ethics: the concept of maternalism as developed by Sullivan alone and in her work with Niker (Sullivan, 2016; Sullivan & Niker, 2018). Despite its gendered connotations, maternalism is not simply maternal thinking and there’s nothing essentially feminine about it. A technical notion is that maternalism differs from paternalism in two important ways. First, maternalistic action is not taken simply for the target’s own good, but with that person’s conception of the good in mind. Notice that this requires that the maternalistic actor has an understanding of her target’s conception of the good – she understands the target’s point of view. And second, maternalistic actions are done to enhance the target’s autonomy. I’ll return to this in a moment, but the idea is that a central goal of maternalistic action is to bring about an increase in autonomous capacities. While that may be a benefit of some

Epistemic Maternalism 121 accounts of paternalism, it is not usually conceived of as central. Sullivan and Niker describe maternalism this way: If paternalism is acting in another person’s best interests without due consideration of their autonomy, maternalism is acting for the benefit of another person in a way that takes that person’s autonomous agency into account, despite no explicit expression of consent or assent being given by the person on whose behalf the decision is made. (Sullivan & Niker, 2018) To see the distinction between maternalistic actions and paternalistic ones more clearly, consider the following examples. Brenda2 – Brenda, Jim’s oncologist, has been treating his cancer for 11 years. Brenda has Jim’s new results to share, so she calls Jim to ask him to come in. Knowing how close Jim is with Sarah, his spouse, Brenda also calls Sarah to let her know when the appointment is. When Jim arrives and sees that Sarah is there, Jim is relieved. Brian – Brian, a doctor in Brenda’s practice, has met Jim once or twice. Brian has Jim’s new test results to share, so he calls Jim to ask him to come in. Worried that Jim may forget the details, Brian also calls Sarah, Jim’s spouse, to let her know when the appointment is. When Jim arrives and sees that Sarah is there, Jim is relieved. In both cases the outcome is the same and the motivation is similar. Both Brian and Brenda are worried about Jim’s well-being. However, Brenda, but not Brian, has a significant relationship with Jim. This gives her an understanding of Jim’s perspective and values. She is also concerned that Jim have the emotional support he needs to respond as well as possible to the news. We might think that neither Brenda nor Brian is behaving ideally. It might be that the ideal action, here, would be to tell Jim to tell Sarah – or maybe to tell Jim and let him decide whether to tell Sarah. However, if we grant that Jim needs Sarah to be there, and that he will not tell her himself, Barbara and Brian are both left with no ideal options. In these non-ideal circumstances, then, we can see that Barbara’s behavior is better than Brian’s precisely because Barbara has the right kind of relationship with Jim to take maternalistic action. Depending on one’s understanding of paternalism, maternalistic actions might be a subset of paternalistic ones. As a technical term, however, maternalism has the advantage of discarding the connotations that seem to plague paternalism. If the characterization of maternalism in this chapter is identical, or nearly so, with some notion of paternalism, the chapter should be able to be read as defending that kind of paternalism and explicating its relationship to care-based theories. Sullivan and Niker offer six characteristics of maternalistic action.

122 1 2 3

4

5 6

Epistemic Maternalism The significance of the relationship – the relationship must be historical and on-going The character of the relationship – the relationship must embody and enable trust and understanding The epistemic dynamics of the relationship – maternalistic decisions must be grounded in a reasonable understanding of the target’s proattitudes3 Motivation for the intervention* – the intervention must be motivated by a desire to increase the target’s autonomy and further the target’s goals. Method of intervention – maternalistic interventions do not require consent to be justified Justification conditions for the intervention – maternalistic interventions are justified if the decision or action corresponds to target’s pro-attitudes and is performed by someone with the right standing

Brenda’s intervention has these characteristics, but Brian’s does not. Brenda has a significant ongoing relationship with Joe that enables trust between them and that allows Brenda to make decisions grounded in and motivated by an understanding of Joe’s pro-attitudes. Brenda’s actions can be justified despite lacking Joe’s consent because she has the right standing. Brian does not. Brenda’s intervention is maternalistic while Brian’s is (merely) paternalistic. I’ve left an asterisk by the fourth characteristic. This is because of desideratum B. That is, if we are to adopt maternalism as the criterion for non-consensual interventions under care epistemology, it will not make sense to require that the intervention be autonomy enhancing. This is because, for some knowers, autonomy is not or will never again be on the table. For knowers with severe memory loss or other symptoms of advanced dementia, for example, it does not make sense to attempt to increase their autonomy. And, in accordance with desideratum B, we don’t want to take autonomy as the mark of interest-worthiness. Thus, a knower with advanced dementia is still relevant to our epistemic community. They have vulnerabilities that obligate others and may be able to meet some vulnerabilities for other members of their communities. I recommend, therefore, that we modify our understanding of the fourth characteristic. Surely something important about the motivation for maternalistic action – I agree with Niker and Sullivan on that. An actor who understood their target’s pro-attitudes but was motivated by selfish material gain seems not to have their target’s pro-attitudes in mind in the right way. In light of this, I propose that we modify the fourth characteristic to require that the maternalistic actor be motivated by their reasonable understanding of the target’s pro-attitudes. Insofar as that enhances autonomy, and that enhancement is in line with the target’s pro-attitudes, so much the better. But such action may also be

Epistemic Maternalism 123 possible in cases in which neither autonomy nor autonomy enhancement is available.4 And it may be that some targets simply do not value autonomy. If we’re not assuming that autonomy is valuable, then it’s not clear why it should need to be enhanced in such a case. There is an immediate disanalogy that might suggest itself here. Brenda can just invite Jim’s spouse without Jim’s consent. A doctor might maternally administer medicine or perform surgery without their patient’s consent. However, Celina cannot, simply by presenting Claire with her careful spreadsheet of court cases, induce belief in Claire. Celina seems to have less control because the action is directed at Claire’s beliefs. The maternalistic action seems less likely to work precisely because it is epistemic.5 Fortunately, this is only an apparent disanalogy. To see why, first notice that Jim could easily respond to Brenda’s maternalistic action in ways that are relevantly similar to Claire’s response to Celina’s spreadsheet. Jim could scold Brenda, storm out of her office, email her a paper on the importance of patient consent, etc. Brenda can’t make him accept her intervention any more than Celina can force Claire to accept hers. Next, recall that we’re including a lot of activities in our understanding of epistemic care work that are not directly involved in belief formation in the way that presenting evidence is. Epistemic reproduction, that work that is necessary for communities of inquiry, can take many forms. As typically conceived, epistemically paternalistic action does not need to directly induce or cause the rejection of belief in some proposition. A key example in Alvin Goldman’s paper on epistemic paternalism is the restricted access of juries to certain types of evidence in the U.S. legal system. These restrictions are non-consensual, in that the rules will be followed with or without the juror’s consent. And the restrictions are explicitly epistemic, as Goldman makes clear: It is apparent that the framers of the rules, and judges themselves, often wish to protect jurors in their search for truth. If, in the framers’ opinion, jurors are likely to be misled by a certain category of evidence, they are sometimes pre-pared to require or allow such evidence to be kept from the jurors. This is an ex-ample of what I shall call epistemic paternalism. The general idea is that the indicated rules of evidence are designed to protect jurors from their own “folly”, just as parents might keep dangerous toys or other articles away from children, or might not expose them to certain facts. (Goldman, 1991, p. 118) Non-consensual epistemic action is, then, roughly like the action that Brenda takes. If Brenda’s case can be said to be maternalistic, then maternalism seems like a possibility in Celina and Claire’s case as well. Let’s now apply this idea of maternalism to Celina and Claire’s case. Does Celina’s intervention meet the characteristics of maternalistic

124

Epistemic Maternalism

action? Celina and Claire do have a historical and on-going relationship, so the first characteristic is met. They also have a relationship that allows for a degree of trust and understanding. Del Real mentions that Claire stayed with Celina several times as the latter underwent cancer treatment, and that the two women got along well during those times. So, while their relationship has involved a deterioration of trust, the second characteristic is plausibly still met. It is harder to make the argument that the other characteristics, those having to do with the target’s pro-attitudes, and the motivation, methods and justification for the intervention, are met in Celina and Claire’s case. This is because it is not clear that Celina has a reasonable understanding of Claire’s pro-attitudes. Celina is assuming that Claire is seeking the truth, and it is not clear to me that that she is. Let me be clear: Claire’s problematic beliefs are beliefs and are epistemically evaluable. In believing that p she is taking the proposition that p to be true. But this doesn’t mean that her goals in holding these beliefs are epistemic. Claire might not be involved in inquiry in the sense defined in chapter 3. She might well have social or emotional goals that are not truth related. And meeting these goals might require that she holds certain beliefs. To be a community of inquiry, at least some members of the community must, as members of the community, be engaged in inquiry. And, as Robert Stalnaker puts it, “inquiry in general is a matter of adjusting one’s belief in response to new information” (Stalnaker, 1984, p. 87). When political or social groups demand that members as members believe some claim regardless of its truth or against the evidence to the contrary, that group is very unlikely to be a community of inquiry. But that doesn’t mean that group membership is unmotivated or inexplicable. Social scientists researching radical political movements have proposed ways to interpret the appeal of groups like this. Looking at Claire’s views in particular, the far-right positions she’s consuming and integrating into her belief system offer her a kind of social benefit. We know that in-grouping is a powerful psychological force (Gonsalkorale & Williams, 2007; Johnson, 2016; Williams, 2007; Williams & Jarvis, 2006). Social scientists have hypothesized that women, in particular, are drawn to far-right groups as a way to express anger (Sparks, 2015). This is because the far-right offers “something more immediately transgressive, more responsive to destructive impulses and antisocial forces, and more proximate to the equality that it rejects and the freedom it renounces. It offers white women an account of their unhappiness and an affective arena to express their rage” (Marasco, 2021). As Tracy Llanera’s account of alt-right misogyny points out, propagandists attempting to recruit white women to the alt-right, “transform the anti-feminist agenda into attractive options for potential recruits by appealing, insidiously, to the intersectional particularity of whiteness and womanhood in their

Epistemic Maternalism 125 propaganda” (Llanera, forthcoming, p. 4). Claire’s beliefs, then, might be serving social and emotional needs rather than epistemic ones. If that’s right, then Claire isn’t really involved in inquiry. This, however, does not mean that she is not vulnerable. It just means that the sort of intervention that is called for may not be medicinal facts. Some other kind of care work might be required. And, if Celina has a reasonable understanding of Claire’s needs and pro-attitudes, she might be able to detect that. I think that consideration of this kind of case raises an interesting question for the care epistemologist. If Claire can be epistemically vulnerable but not have a pro-attitude toward believing the truth, what does that do to our obligations to meet her epistemic vulnerability? If some knower is epistemically vulnerable but that vulnerability is allowing her to meet other needs, what kind of care work are we obligated to provide? While this is not a complete answer, one thing to note is that this kind of case points to the ways that our various obligations might be incompatible. Claire’s emotional and social needs are being met by a group that requires her, as a member of the group, to be and remain epistemically vulnerable. In a case like this, in which Claire’s epistemic vulnerability is instrumental for meeting her emotional needs, we may not be able to meet all of our obligations. Celina might have to be less than optimally epistemically good. Or we might have to sacrifice Claire’s emotional needs for her epistemic ones. What exactly we should do in a case like this will be quite complicated. However, this might seem unsatisfying. After all, the project of this book is to offer an account of our obligations to other knowers. Shouldn’t I be able to say if Celina is epistemically obligated to help Claire? The difficulty with non-ideal theory is that sometimes the material reality of real knowers’ actual inquiry is quite complicated, to the point that there is no optimal answer. If we ignore the fact that Claire’s community of far-right facebookers is meeting some of her needs, we risk doing real harm to her. The loss of those relationships would be a real loss. Serene Khader, writing in a different but related context, points out that missionary neoliberal feminists are often quick to ignore the harms that come from dissolving relationships in the pursuit of freedom (Khader, 2018). We might worry about something analogous here – we don’t want to be too quick to dissolve or discount the value of relationships in our pursuit of epistemic goods (like true beliefs). Sometimes our epistemic obligations conflict with our moral obligations. It might sometimes be appropriate to do something immoral for epistemic goods, but it is not always so. Because this is non-ideal theory, our goal is not to specify ideal outcomes. Our goal, instead, is to improve vulnerable people’s material realities. It is an open question whether maternalistically intervening on Claire’s inquiry would do this.

126

Epistemic Maternalism

Taking on the commitment from the last chapter, we might try to move from evaluating what Celina should do to evaluating how we ought to organize our communities. Insofar as Claire’s community is epistemically relevant, then, there are needs and obligations that are truth directed in that community. Insofar as the members of the group, as members of the group, are depending on one another for epistemic goods in their epistemic projects this is a community of inquiry. Given what they take to be evidence, that community clearly needs to be reorganized to meet the requirements to be an adequate epistemic community. I’ll return to these requirements in the next section. For now, notice that just because Celina has attempted to take responsibility for Claire’s needs does not mean that she should be the one to do so. It may be that someone else in Claire’s community should be attending to her needs and responding to them. This is probably an unreasonable expectation in an epistemically relevant community in which members fail to have pro-attitudes toward believing the truth. However, if no one in the community is attending to the epistemic vulnerabilities of that community’s members, then it fails to be an adequate community of inquiry. This is an intuitive result, even if it doesn’t yield a satisfying plan of action for Celina. Let’s imagine a version of Celina and Claire’s case in which Celina does have a reasonable understanding of Claire’s pro-attitudes. Let’s imagine that Claire really is seeking the truth in forming beliefs about the 2020 U.S. election, and that Celina has a reasonable understanding of that goal. If Celina has this understanding, and is motivated by it, then, in this imagined case, her intervention might well meet the characteristics of maternalism. We can, then, imagine a case in which Celina’s intervention is maternalistic and is justified despite being against Claire’s expressed will. We might still have the intuition, in this imagined case, that something is not quite right. We might still have a kind of disquiet about Celina’s intervention. After all, Claire has not historically responded well to epistemic care from her children. It seems plausible that few people would respond well to maternalism from their children. Also, nothing I’ve said so far should reassure us that we can meet desideratum C. Indeed, maternalism might be seen to be requiring precisely the kind of sacrifice of autonomy on the care provider’s part that worried Keller. In the next section, I will address each of these concerns.

5.5 Responsiveness Here, I want us to recall Tronto’s requirement of responsiveness. We can use this notion to help meet desideratum C, and to explain away the intuition mentioned at the end of the last section – that something is not quite right about Cecelia’s intervention, even if it meets the criteria of

Epistemic Maternalism 127 maternalism. Recall from the last chapter that Tronto’s position is that, “for a society to be judged as morally admirable, it must, among other things, adequately provide for care of its members” (Tronto, 1993). Tronto argues that there are four elements of adequate care. These four elements are: attentiveness, which allows us to recognize the needs for care and to suspend our own goals to attend to these needs; responsibility, the details of which are defined relative to a culture, but the distribution of which can be assessed for equity and fairness; competence, which puts requirements on society to educate its members in care provision; and responsiveness, which measures the care receiver’s response to the care (Tronto, 1993). Responsiveness, according to Tronto, is a matter of the care receiver’s response to the care. Measuring the goodness of a social arrangement according to the responsiveness of care receivers requires that we attend to the possibilities of abuse and resentment that arise when care work is not supported and equitably distributed. It suggests that good arrangements are able to balance the needs of care givers and care receivers. If a care receiver is unable to receive care in a particular way or from a particular provider without becoming angry, abusive, or unresponsive, then the social arrangement in which that relationship is embedded is less than fully adequate. The structure of the community should be adjusted to change who is providing this particular care, or to change how care is valued in the community. Tronto’s notion of responsiveness also ties directly into the conflict between intervention and autonomy. This is because, as Tronto says, “responsiveness suggests a different way to understand the needs of others rather than put ourselves in their position. Instead, it suggests that we consider the other’s position as that other expresses it. Thus one is engaged from the standpoint of the other, but not simply by presuming the other is exactly like the self” (Tronto, 1993). Taking the standpoint or perspective of the other requires knowledge of that person’s values, goals, and point of view.6 One way to develop this knowledge is to be in an on-going and trusting relationship with that person. We can see, then, that responsiveness sits well with maternalism. Emphasizing the requirement of responsiveness will also help us to address the intuition that something is wrong with Celina’s intervention even if it meets the characteristics of maternalism. This is because the element of responsiveness focuses on the care receiver’s response. If Claire cannot respond to epistemic care without becoming abusive or without dehumanizing Celina, then the community in which that care is provided is not adequately meeting the needs of its members. Similarly, emphasizing responsiveness will help us meet desideratum C, that we avoid costing care providers their autonomy. Desideratum C is closely related to the requirement from chapter 3 that care provision not come with commensurate costs to the care provider. If I cannot meet

128

Epistemic Maternalism

some specific vulnerability without commensurate (or greater) cost to myself, then I am not obligated to meet that vulnerability. The responsiveness requirement helps to fill in some details of how that might go. If, to meet your vulnerability, I have to sacrifice my autonomy, or make myself the target of abuse, then these add to the cost to myself. If that cost is high enough, I am not obligated to provide care. A community that assigns this responsibility to me is inadequate. Here, too, it might help to recall Kittay’s notion of doulia. As discussed in chapter 3, doulia is the requirement that care providers not be unduly burdened by having to provide care. Plausibly, Celina is not able to invest the time and energy necessary to come to have a reasonable understanding of her mother’s pro-attitudes. This might be for practical, emotional, or epistemic reasons. If Celina’s own projects, including her own inquiry, would have to be sacrificed in order to develop this understanding, then doulia has failed. To improve on this, we’d want Celina’s own vulnerabilities, exposed by her attending to Claire’s, to be met. Some other member of the community would participate in this web of needs-meeting. This is what doulia prescribes. Given that Celina pays a high emotional, practical, and epistemic cost for intervening in Claire’s inquiry, even if Celina meets the requirements for maternalistic action, that does not mean that she is obligated to meet Claire’s vulnerability. She might not be able to do so without commensurate cost to herself because of how Claire will respond to her intervention. Importantly, though, if this is the case, Claire is still vulnerable. Celina is not well placed to meet that vulnerability despite meeting the criteria for maternalistic action because Claire won’t be able to be properly responsive to care from Celina. However, this doesn’t make her vulnerability go away. Claire still has an epistemic need that she is not equipped to meet. Celina is not well placed to meet it and perhaps is not obligated to. But Celina and Claire are in a relationship. Celina’s wellbeing is tied to Claire’s, so Claire’s vulnerability can render Celina vulnerable as well. If we epistemically evaluate a community of inquiry of which they’re both members, the care needs are not being met. The community of inquiry is not doing as it epistemically ought.

5.6 Measure of Non-consensual Epistemic Intervention Maternalism offers a good start toward a measure for non-consensual interventions for care-based theories. If someone does not consent to epistemic care but is epistemically vulnerable, then being more maternalistic is better. This fits nicely with our understanding of knowers as interdependent – maternalistic actions must take place in the context of the right kind of relationship. However, maternalistic actions are not guaranteed to be adequate for meeting the epistemic need in question.

Epistemic Maternalism 129 The other criteria for an adequate community of inquiry still apply. Just because one may intervene by taking maternalistic action does not mean that such an intervention takes place in an adequate community. Nor does it mean that such an intervention is obligatory. Call the criteria for maternalistic action together with the criteria for adequacy the criteria for maternalism in community (CFMC). CFMC offers an account of non-consensual interventions that meets the desiderata mentioned above. Because maternalistic action requires the right sort of relationships, it is clearly a set of criteria that countenances relationships. A theory that accepts CFMC can also value relational autonomy for all those knowers for whom autonomy is available. However, because of our adjustment to the fourth characteristic which required that maternalistic action increase the target’s autonomy, we don’t have to make autonomy necessary for interest. By adjusting the fourth characteristic to focus on the target’s values and pro-attitudes, we can attend to the needs of those knowers who are not and will not ever be autonomous. Desiderata C can also be met by a theory that accepts CFMC. While maternalistic care work, alone, might risk further diminishment of care worker’s autonomy, we addressed this concern by including the responsiveness requirement. This is because the responsiveness requirement on an adequate community measures how well we’re balancing the needs of the care provider and the care receiver. So, the measures specified by CFMC offer an account of nonconsensual epistemic intervention. Interventions that meet CFMCs might still be less than ideal. They will be adequate, and they will be permissible, but they might nonetheless be lacking in some way. In some ways this should be unsurprising. It would, perhaps obviously, be better if the target of maternalistic action consented to receiving care. It would be better if Claire recognized that Celina is doing this work to address an epistemic vulnerability that Claire is unable to meet for herself. But this is non-ideal theory. Real knowers sometimes fail to recognize when interventions are care work. And we’re not always good at recognizing our own needs.

5.7 Conclusion I have argued that, when epistemic care is obligatory and the target of that care does not consent to it, then the more maternalistic the action is, the better. That means that when a knower is vulnerable and does not or is not able to consent, the epistemically relevant intervention should be done by someone with whom that knower has a relationship. The relationship should have some history, should be trusting, and should allow the intervener to base her actions in a reasonable understanding of her target’s pro-attitudes. This may sometimes mean that we can provide epistemic care to other knowers in our communities even when they don’t consent. When my friend would rather not think about climate

130

Epistemic Maternalism

change, or my uncle doesn’t want to hear about his son’s boyfriend, or my student doesn’t want to acknowledge the racists commitments of her church, I might still feel some pull to influence their inquiry. Insofar as our relationship meets the characteristics for maternalistic action, I am permitted to do so. Moreover, insofar as I’m also particularly well placed to meet these epistemic needs, I am epistemically obligated to do so. This doesn’t mean I’m all-things-considered obligated to do so – sometimes I might be morally or legally or prudentially obligated to be a less-thanoptimal knower. This might be an uncomfortable result. After all, we’ve now come quite far from conceiving of our epistemic obligations as simple individualistic prohibitions of believing contrary to the evidence. However, this is what a deeply relational account of epistemology yields. When we understand knowers as interdependent and understand some of our epistemic labor as epistemic reproduction, when we understand the ways in which meeting epistemic needs requires a well-organized community of inquiry, we are left with a theory according to which the epistemic needs of members of my community of inquiry are my business. According to such a theory, epistemic evaluation involves evaluating a community. It requires locating vulnerabilities and tracking who is responsible for meeting them. And sometimes it requires accurately identifying when my epistemic obligations are outweighed by my moral, practical, legal or other obligations.

Notes 1 I am grateful to the participants of the Philosophy of Epistemic Autonomy conference hosted by the Epistemic Autonomy and Intellectual Humility project funded by the Templeton Foundation. I am also grateful to Alexandra Cunningham, Laura Specker Sullivan, and Hanna Gunn for helpful comments and feedback. 2 This example is adapted from Sprecker Sullivan and Niker’s work. 3 Importantly, this is not a requirement that we simply satisfy the desires of the target of our maternalism. As Vrinda Dalmiya puts it, “ignoring the caredfor’s desire-of-the-moment is quite consistent with acting for her good” ( Dalmiya, 2002). 4 Admittedly, weakening this condition brings this new definition of maternalistic actions closer to some definitions of paternalistic actions. This is actually okay with me as my goal, in this section, is not to capture our intuitive sense of paternalism or even maternalism (if we have one) but rather to define a technical notion and use it. Note too, that the requirement of a long standing and trusting relationship is absent from most philosophical definitions of paternalism. Thanks to Alexandra Cunningham for pointing this out to me. 5 I’m grateful to an anonymous referee for bringing this objection to my attention. 6 We can think here, too, about Lugones’ discussion of world traveling and loving perception ( Lugones, 1987) and Lugones’ and Spellman’s discussion of friendship ( Lugones & Spelman, 2018) which came up in chapter 4.

Epistemic Maternalism 131

References Ahlstrom-Vij, K. (2013). Epistemic paternalism: A defence. Springer. Baier, A.C. (1987). The need for more than justice. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 17(suppl 1), 41–56. Battaly, H. (2021). Intellectual autonomy and intellectual interdependence. In J. Matheson & K. Lougheed (Eds.), Epistemic autonomy (pp. 153–172). New York: Routledge. Broncano-Berrocal, F. (2020). Epistemic care and epistemic paternalism. In G. Axtell & A. Bernal (Eds.), Epistemic paternalism: Conceptions, justifications and implications (pp. 169–182). London: Rowman and Littlefield. Code, L. (1991). What can she know?: Feminist theory and the construction of knowledge. Cornell University Press. Dalmiya, V. (2002). Why should a knower care? Hypatia, 17(1), 34–52. Del Real, J.A. (2021). They’re worried their mom is becoming a conspiracy theorist. She thinks they’re the ones living in a fantasy world. Washington Post, March 12. Elgin, C. (2021). The realm of epistemic ends. In Epistemic Autonomy. New York: Routledge. Goldman, A.I. (1991). Epistemic paternalism: Communication control in law and society. The Journal of Philosophy, 88(3), 113–131. Gonsalkorale, K., & Williams, K.D. (2007). The KKK won’t let me play: Ostracism even by a despised outgroup hurts. European Journal of Social Psychology, 37(6), 1176–1186. Grasswick, H. (2018). Epistemic autonomy in a social world of knowing. In The Routledge handbook of virtue epistemology (pp. 196–208). Routledge. Johnson, C.R. (2016). If you don’t have anything nice to say, come sit by me: Gossip as epistemic good and evil. Social Theory and Practice, 42(2), 304–317. Keller, J. (1997). Autonomy, relationality, and feminist ethics. Hypatia, 12(2), 152–164. Khader, S.J. (2018). Decolonizing universalism: A transnational feminist ethic. Studies in Feminist Philosophy. Kittay, E.F. (2013). Love’s labor: Essays on women, equality and dependency. Routledge. Llanera, T. (forthcoming). The misogyny paradox and the alt-right. Hypatia. Lugones, M. (1987). Playfulness, “world”-travelling, and loving perception. Hypatia, 2(2), 3–19. Lugones, M.C., & Spelman, E.V. (2018). Have we got a theory for you! Feminist theory, cultural imperialism and the demand for “the woman’s voice”. In J.A. Kourany, J.P. Sterba, & R. Tong (Eds.), Feminism and philosophy (pp. 494–507). New York: Routledge. Mackenzie, C., & Stoljar, N. (2000). Relational autonomy: Feminist perspectives on autonomy, agency, and the social self. Oxford University Press. Marasco, R. (2021). Reconsidering the sexual politics of fascism. Retrieved from https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/blog/reconsidering-sexual-politicsfascism Matheson, J., & Lougheed, K. (2021). Epistemic autonomy. Routledge.

132

Epistemic Maternalism

McKenna, R. (2019). Persuasion and epistemic paternalism. In G. Axtell & A. Bernal (Eds.), Epistemic paternalism: conceptions, justifications and implications (pp. 91–106). London: Rowman & Littlefield International. Priest, M. (2021). Professional philosophy has an epistemic autonomy problem. Epistemic Autonomy, 71–91. Ryan, S. (2021). Autonomy, reflection, and education. Epistemic Autonomy, 41–54. Sparks, H. (2015). Mama grizzlies and guardians of the republic: The democratic and intersectional politics of anger in the Tea Party movement. New Political Science, 37(1), 25–47. Stalnaker, R. (1984). Inquiry. Cambridge: MIT Press. Sullivan, L.S. (2016). Medical maternalism: Beyond paternalism and antipaternalism. Journal of Medical Ethics, 42(7), 439–444. Sullivan, L.S., & Niker, F. (2018). Relational autonomy, paternalism, and maternalism. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 21(3), 649–667. Tronto, J.C. (1993). Moral boundaries: A political argument for an ethic of care. Psychology Press. Williams, K. (2007). Ostracism: The kiss of social death. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 1, 236–247. doi: 10.1111/j.1751-9004.2007.00004.x Williams, K.D., & Jarvis, B. (2006). Cyberball: A program for use in research on interpersonal ostracism and acceptance. Behavior Research Methods, 38(1), 174–180.

Index

adequate care 36, 82–83, 91–111, 126–129 attentiveness 69–74, 90, 91–93, 127 autonomy 15, 44–45, 117–123, 126–129 Baier, Annette 34–35, 106, 108, 117, 120 Berenstain, Nora 15, 41, 71–72 boredom 65–66 care ethics 8–9, 11, 19, 23–26, 37–39, 46, 62, 69, 73–74, 86, 90, 117–118 care provision 10, 50, 72–74, 90, 95, 99, 103, 106, 108, 127 care webs 49–51, 72 climate change 63, 70, 93 Code, Lorraine 13, 16, 26, 38–40, 44–45, 56, 118 communicative agency 45 community of inquiry 40, 42, 46–51, 61, 66, 70, 73, 75, 83–86, 89–101, 104–110, 124, 126, 128–130 competence 70–71, 90, 94–97, 99–101, 106, 109, 127 credibility deficits 23 criteria for maternalism in community 129 culpable ignorance 95 Dalmiya, Vrinda 10–11 default skepticism 72 Descartes, Rene 12, 16 distributions of epistemic care 83–90, 111 Dotson, Kristie 15, 70–71, 95–96 doulia 72–75, 94, 100, 128

education 19, 21–24, 42, 50, 58, 66, 71, 85–88, 101, 103–104, 111 educational labor 41 educational sovereignty 103 Elgin, Catherine Z. 15, 18, 21–23, 40–41, 47, 49, 58, 67, 117, 119 emotional labor 41, 85 empiricism 12 epistemic agent 20 epistemic autonomy 45, 117–118 epistemic duties 20–21 epistemic evaluation 8, 21, 25, 46, 51, 74, 83, 101, 106, 108, 115, 130 epistemic exploitation 15, 71–72 epistemic goods 67, 74, 125 epistemic injustice 23, 33 epistemic interdependence 8, 15, 17–18, 39, 41, 48, 57, 61 epistemic labor 40–42, 71, 73, 75–76, 84–85, 96, 107, 130 epistemic obligations 8–9, 17–26, 45, 58, 60, 67–68, 70, 73, 76, 81, 116, 130 epistemic paternalism 120, 123 epistemic peers 17 epistemic reproduction 39–40, 43–44, 46, 48 epistemic sacrifice 64–65, 67, 69 epistemic violence 15 epistemic virtues 108, 117 epistemic vulnerability 21, 45, 56, 58, 60–62, 64, 67–70, 91, 115–116, 125, 129 epistemologies of resistance 15 Fisher, Bernice 26, 36, 82 Fraser, Nancy 35 Fricker, Miranda 15, 23

134

Index

gender essentialism 38–39, 44 Goldberg, Sandford 15, 18, 21, 41 Goldman, Alvin 11, 123 Harding, Sandra 42–43 Held, Virginia 11, 34, 36, 59, 107 Hume, David 12 hybrid virtue 23 ideal theory 13–15 imperialism 10 in-grouping 124 incarceration 25, 51, 64–67 integrity of care 90, 101 Jaggar, Allison 19, 25–26 Justice 13, 15, 73, 90, 106–107 Khader, Serene J. 14, 125 Kittay, Eva 37, 62, 68–69, 72, 91, 100, 128 Lackey, Jennifer 15, 21 Lorde, Audre 26, 85 Lugones, Maria 26, 38, 97–98 mainstream analytic epistemology 10, 57 market-based precarity 63–64 maternalism 120–123, 126–129 Medina, José 12, 15–16, 95 mentoring 83–86, 88–89, 92–94, 97, 108 Mills, Charles 11–13, 25 moral obligations 18–20, 22–24, 60, 62, 68–69, 125 natural precarity 63 Noddings, Nel 23–24, 26 non-ideal theory 13, 93, 125, 129 paternalism 120–121, 123 patriarchy 13, 38, 83, 87, 89, 97 peer disagreement 17 Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi 49–51, 72

private sphere 36 privileged irresponsibility 37, 89, 94 proto-knowers 13, 16, 44–45 public sphere 36 relational autonomy 119–120, 129 reproductive labor 70, 82, 98, 101, 105 responsibility 69, 90, 93–96, 99, 101, 103, 106, 109, 116, 126–128 responsiveness 90, 99–101, 105, 107, 126–129 Rose, Hilary 10, 13 second persons 35, 39, 48 skepticism 72, 96 social epistemology 10, 15, 17–18, 21, 25, 45, 51 social reproduction 35–37, 39–40 social subordination 84 standpoint theory 13, 15, 127 teaching 40, 43, 70, 72–74, 83, 85, 87–89, 91, 101 testimonial competence 95–96 testimonial justice 23 testimonial smothering 70–71 testimony 16, 20–21, 67, 70–71, 95–96 transparent self 69, 91, 118 Tronto, Joan 24, 26, 36–37, 69, 75, 82–93, 95–96, 98–99, 101, 103, 111, 115, 117, 120, 126–127 true enough belief 47, 67, 104, 107 truth 75–76, 96, 106–107, 124–126 virtue epistemology 10, 15 vulnerability 10, 18, 24–25, 37–38, 45–46, 56–60, 62–64, 66, 68–69, 72, 74, 76, 89, 93, 96, 99–100, 103, 111, 128 vulnerability model 68, 74 Watson, Lani 67 world traveling 97–98 Wrenn, Chase 19–20