Epistemic Responsibility for Undesirable Beliefs 3031418573, 9783031418570

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Epistemic Responsibility for Undesirable Beliefs Deborah K. Heikes

Epistemic Responsibility for Undesirable Beliefs

Deborah K. Heikes

Epistemic Responsibility for Undesirable Beliefs

Deborah K. Heikes Department of Philosophy University of Alabama - Huntsville Huntsville, AL, USA

ISBN 978-3-031-41857-0    ISBN 978-3-031-41858-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41858-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

For Mom, Ron, and Augusta, my support team

Contents

1 Epistemic  Responsibility: An Overview  1 1.1 The Trouble with “Facts”   4 1.2 How Epistemology Undermines Responsibility  10 1.3 Exculpatory Ignorance  15 1.4 The Problem of Culpability  23 1.5 Three Questions  26 References 31 2 What  Is Undesirable Belief? 35 2.1 Truth and Undesirability  38 2.2 Whose Undesirability?  43 2.3 Finding Fact in the Midst of Conflicting Value  47 2.4 Transformational Criticism and Undesirability  54 2.5 The Challenge of Intellectual Authority  62 2.6 Undesirable Belief and Exculpatory Reasons  67 2.7 Taking Social Acceptability Seriously  77 References 82 3 Can  There Be Epistemic Responsibility? 87 3.1 Epistemic Voluntarism? Belief as Habits of Action  90 3.2 The Intractability of Undesirability  94 3.3 Salvaging Epistemic Responsibility  97 vii

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3.4 Doxastic Intentions and Epistemic Responsibility 105 3.5 Doxastic Influence and Responsibility 110 3.6 Epistemic Humility/Epistemic Hubris 116 3.7 Epistemic Communities and the Possibility of Voluntarism125 3.8 Joint Epistemic Responsibility 130 References138 4 What  About the Exculpatory Effects of Ignorance?143 4.1 Varieties of Ignorance and Exculpation 145 4.2 Immersion and Responsibility Within Socially Constructed Ignorance 152 4.3 Deliberate Ignorance and Responsibility 157 4.4 Anti-individualism and Epistemic Heroism 162 4.5 Holding Out for Epistemic Heroes 171 4.6 When Should We Know? 177 4.7 Whose Ignorance? Whose Responsibility? 183 References190 5 I t’s Not My Fault193 5.1 Epistemic Individualism Be Damned 195 5.2 Epistemic Dependence and Individual Responsibility 205 5.3 Epistemic Bubbles, Echo Chambers, and Becoming a Cognitive Newborn 211 5.4 It May Really Not Be My Fault 222 References223 A  uthor Index225 S  ubject Index229

1 Epistemic Responsibility: An Overview

Epistemology has a problem locating epistemic responsibility. Of course, those concerned with problems of epistemic involuntarism are well aware of the difficulty, but few express awareness of the deeply moral import such problems present. All of us have a wide variety of beliefs, from basic ones relating to what our senses tell us about what is outside our windows to much more socially complex ones relating to the effect of skin color on one’s intelligence. The former beliefs are widely discussed within epistemological circles, the latter are rarely discussed, unless in the context of feminist and race-based liberatory epistemologies. These liberatory epistemologies tend to be social in nature, but social epistemology has its own issues with epistemic responsibility: making epistemic communities primary makes individuals knowers dependent and vulnerable and potentially much less responsible for their beliefs than most of us like to think. To make matters far, far worse, our world is one in which both communities and individuals are often held to have “their own truth.” While such an expansion of truth can be liberating insofar as it helps overturn narrow, oppressive, totalizing conceptions, it can also make truth a very difficult achievement. When truth—and warrant and justification—are communally determined, they may be determined quite differently in © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. K. Heikes, Epistemic Responsibility for Undesirable Beliefs, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41858-7_1

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different communities. The result is that my truth, within my epistemic community, may not be your truth, within your epistemic community. So where does “the truth” lie when it comes to epistemic responsibility for our beliefs, especially beliefs that have moral import and that lead to genuine suffering in the world? The answer is far from clear. Consider, for instance, what is happening in the United States with the culturally driven battle over transgender youth and access to gender affirming care. At the time of this writing, a majority of states have pursued or attempted to pursue policies that deny rights and services to transgendered youth. Given the way some of us epistemically situate ourselves in the world, such policies intuitively strike us as quite harmful and just plain wrong. “We” consider the suffering of these very vulnerable members of society and are deeply moved by the injustice of the policies. “We” might ask: how can politicians and other community leaders be so hateful, so closed-­ minded, so vindictive, so hurtful toward children? However, ours is not the only epistemic community to be had. Those who pursue these policies would surely disagree with this characterization of their actions. They are not being hateful, closed-minded, vindicative, or hurtful. Rather, they are, in their estimation, defending important values on which our very society depends. They tell the story differently. Consider the following version of the conflict, one which unfortunately captures much of the tone of the debate across the United States. In a smallish town in Alabama, a LGBTQ+ pride event happened to be organized and publicized. In response to this event, a history instructor at the local community college called for the “you know what” (i.e., the Ku Klux Klan) to put an end to the event. As she explained on her social media account, The devil is attacking our beautiful town of Cullman now apparently … and the police chief is in on it? I hear he was a crazy-ass liberal but this??? We need a rally by the you-know-what to put an end to this foolishness. Of course, it may be as well-attended as the Juneteenth event the white liberal weirdos tried to do a few years ago in Hanceville. (Hedgepeth 2022)

Hers may be an especially extreme expression of the idea, but that LGBTQ+ events are promoting the work of the devil is not an unusual or

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isolated view.1 As an instructor at a community college, this woman is a position of some epistemic power and influence, which may make her more responsible for her beliefs, especially in the eyes of those of us who disagree with her. She speaks from a position of some power. Surely, though, this women is a member of yet another community (perhaps faith-based) that endorses and justifies this belief. There is very little chance she holds this belief in isolation from other epistemic communities to which she belongs. When it is pointed out to her how undesirable and deeply hurtful this belief is—and this was pointed out to her as she was eventually placed on leave by her college—her reaction, like many others, could legitimately be one of frustration that so many of the rest of us fail to see the truth of her belief. After all, some part of her epistemic community endorses it. The suffering of LGBTQ+ youth may (if it is recognized at all) be an unfortunate consequence of defending a moral ground that is threatened by shifting expectations of gender norms. While it is difficult for many of us to fathom the plausibility of a claim to truth for such seemingly undesirable comments, the fact remains that many, many political and religious leaders do promote the underlying ideas, even if their expression of them is (sometimes) more tactful and (sometimes) appeals less directly to violence. Not only is there a genuine difference of opinion, there is a genuine conflict in claims to truth. How did we get ourselves into a position in which the ramblings of homophobes and racists and sexists and xenophobes maintain a seemingly defensible claim to being justified true belief, not just by the individual spouting these ideas, but by large communities of people who take these ramblings quite seriously? The answer is, in part, to be found in the story of epistemology. Of course, as with everything else in our post-­ Enlightenment, post-modern world, there is no definitive narrative and there are a variety of figures, from James and Dewey to Wittgenstein and Heidegger, who play a role. Perhaps, however, the least suspecting of these figures is Quine and his naturalized epistemology. With Quine the epistemological world changed in ways that he surely never envisioned,  It is important to note, the instructor expresses a highly racist viewpoint as well, but in the interests of simplicity, I am focusing on the LGBTQ+ comment since that is the event that sparked the outrage in this particular case.

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ways that made Truth more truthy and that opened the world to competing epistemological communities. Making room for undesirable beliefs may not be the legacy naturalized epistemology was designed to have, but it is the legacy it has in part left.

1.1 The Trouble with “Facts” Our world has come to be a place where there is serious and vehement disagreement on what constitutes morally undesirable belief. Sure, moral disagreements have always existed, but our current epistemological situation is one in which we radically fail to agree upon the practices and procedures to resolve disagreement. While some of us might point to the suffering of transgendered children as a intuitively unjust circumstance, others fail to share our intuition, pointing instead to the intuitiveness of gender binaries and the social necessity of maintaining them. What makes this disagreement—and all such disagreements—especially challenging is that appeals to so-called objective truths to resolve such disputes are seemingly a thing of the past. Instead, we are surrounded by claims that the situation and locatedness of knowers matters, that knowledge is fundamentally perspectival. These claims unhinge the notion of truth from objectivity in important ways. How the situation of the knower becomes relevant to knowing is in many ways a tale of epistemology over the past century. The story can be told from many different angles: Wittgensteinian language-games, Heideggerian Dasein, Deweyan democracy. However, within the most philosophically conservative field (and the field most highly suspect to feminists and other liberatory epistemologists), the so-called analytic tradition, the door to social epistemology was opened by Quine’s naturalized epistemology. Naturalized epistemology (perhaps unwittingly) undermines epistemic individualism and creates a circumstance in which communities become relevant to the practice of knowing. Taking as a model scientific investigation, no a priori epistemological prescriptions are possible. Instead, we are called to undertake an explanatory project that examines, naturalistically, how it is we come up with successful theories to explain the evidence. In advance of this empirical investigation, we

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cannot say how it is we should account for the evidence. All we can do is align our theories and data in some sort of reflective equilibrium. What this entails is that social constructs do matter to what we count as knowledge because we have no means of getting outside of the ways we actually go about knowing and see what the world is really, truly like. This is very much along the lines of early Wittgenstein’s “the limits of the language (the language which I understand) mean the limits of my world” (1922, 5.62), and later Wittgenstein’s various possibilities of language-games, which require practices or forms of life to flesh them out. It is also reminiscent of Heidegger’s being-in-the-world, which signifies a residing or dwelling such that we cannot escape to some transcendental perspective. Quine certainly would not have put the matter of social situatedness in these ways, but within a naturalized epistemology the question of social situation does matter to our epistemological endeavors. This emphasis on social situatedness changes everything when it comes to considering the role epistemology has to play in oppression and in the overcoming of oppression. Feminist philosophers, even those not especially enamored of Quineian (or Wittgensteinian or even Heideggerian) ways of approaching epistemology, have nevertheless adopted a concern with the social emphasis Quine (and others) make possible within mainstream epistemological endeavors. Not only do most feminists promote some version of anti-­ foundationalist epistemology, they also tend to uniformly assert that questions of truth and knowledge depend on the question, “whose knowledge?” The idea most feminists wish to emphasize is that traditional epistemology has far too narrow a scope because it dismisses the identity of the knower, an identity that makes a genuine difference to what is known—and an identity that can hide the means of oppressing those who lie outside the mainstream. This attitude toward epistemic endeavors is one reason many feminists pick up on themes found especially in Foucault, who maintains that power infiltrates our lives, and our ways of knowing. As a result, we always have to consider the perspective from which claims to knowledge are offered. We cannot afford to ignore the situation of the so-called knower. Of course, the power structures Foucault is interested in may enforce a dominant view, but he also allows that “where there is power, there is

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resistance” (Foucault 1978, 95)—and resistance offers a path toward opening up epistemology to new voices. This offers hope. It gives us an opportunity to expand the domain of knowledge to those who have heretofore been excluded. When the situation of the knower matters, when we have to ask “whose knowledge,” knowledge can no longer come from one (privileged) perspective. It can no longer be uniform. Instead, it requires that we consider those from the epistemic margins. Women, people of color, colonized peoples, those who identify as LBGTQ+, all these groups can find room within a social epistemology to resist dominant frameworks. This is a great and glorious thing—but it is also a very sharp double-edged sword. Not every marginalized group is a defender of liberation. Those who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, for example, also lie outside mainstream power structures (as a series of criminal convictions and incarcerations have demonstrated). Yet despite their marginality, their message is not one of greater openness, acceptance, or inclusiveness. Here, then, is part of the problem with appeals to Foucault: he may challenge dominant epistemic structures, but he fails to offer a means for distinguishing “good’ from “bad” resistance to power. Furthermore, the ways in which power affects our lives are ones that we are individually subject to but that no one person can control. The result is that Foucault’s understanding of power undermines individual epistemic responsibility. Knowledge—or, better, what we take to be knowledge—depends upon our social circumstances, but these social circumstances lie beyond us. We are bound to them, but we cannot directly control them. Thus, if we answer the question “whose knowledge?” along Foucaultian lines, the answer shifts to the community in a way that makes truth and individual epistemic responsibility far more slippery. Less and less is knowledge a matter of getting at “facts” that can be accessed independently of the ways we come to know those so-called facts. This shift of perspective has changed the epistemic landscape considerably. Of course, Foucault and Quine are philosophical worlds apart, but while Quine is silent on the topic of power, his naturalized epistemology does not in the end make so-called facts any less slippery or make it any more clear which of many epistemological perspectives should dominate

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our attention—although this is much more difficult to see on the surface. The drumbeat of social influence, of which Quine strikes some influential notes, affects our understanding of truth in ways that has other, potentially sinister, consequences. While it is not surprising that the grip of so-called truth might be lessened in deeply social liberatory epistemologies that follow a Foucaultian path, the effects of a more social understanding of our epistemic lives affects even more mainstream epistemologies, epistemologies which have actually moved away from many of the last vestiges of foundationalism and away from more traditional notions of realism. The focus is instead on the idea of conceptual schemes. A philosopher such as Catherine Elgin can say, quite seriously, that “truth is relative to the system in effect” and that “facts are objective” (1996, 6). She avoids outright contradiction by adding this caveat: “once the system is in place, there is no room for negotiation” (1996, 6). Elgin is not alone. Lots and lots of epistemologists these days do accept that epistemic systems are chosen, not given. Of course, if liberation is one’s goal, such a shift can be exceedingly useful for it gives ground for expanding our epistemological world. In fact, as the grounds of epistemology have shifted towards epistemic communities, real gains have been made in opening up the engagement in epistemic practices to those who have historically been excluded. Naturally, feminists have been eager to highlight this sort of epistemic flexibility. Standpoint epistemologists, for example, argue that those on the epistemic margins may very well have a clearer and better epistemic perspective than those in the center. One of the favorite targets of standpoint epistemology is the “objective facts” to which Elgin appeals. After all, as a great many feminists will argue, “science has played as a tool of oppression used by White heterosexual males against Indigenous people, women, homosexuals etc., [so] a key aim of standpoint thinking was to disrupt the very notion of ‘scientific facts’” (Paradies 2018, 122). For philosophers concerned with oppression, the issue is, of course, who gets to choose the system and the facts. The goal is to greatly expand the “who” in order to create greater diversity in our ways of knowing. This implies that so-called facts will depend on the system put in place by various epistemic communities, making “fact” a much more elusive and

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disruptive concept. However, as suggested by Elgin’s interest in the social systems that establish facts, mainstream epistemology has also moved toward skepticism concerning epistemological givens and the ultimate stability of facts. Instead, talk of conceptual schemes entails that while we may have to accept facts once a system has been chosen, the choice of epistemic values, standards, and practices is an open-ended endeavor. Knowing becomes bound to our epistemic communities—and there are no givens in what values our communities adopt. This opens the domain of epistemology in important ways, but it also creates problems with advocating for justice. The problem with all this expansion of epistemic agency beyond previously dominant perspectives is that claims about our responsibility to create a more just world depend, in some measure, on their being stable facts, not only about what counts as justice but about the existence of silencing and oppression and marginalization. The disruption of facts cuts both ways—it opens the door to those who have been marginalized, excluded, and silenced, but it also undermines justificatory practices that seek to ground moves towards greater justice. After all, if “fact” is a concept that depends upon the practices of our epistemic communities and if there are epistemic communities that systemically deny the “factual” reality of sexism and racism, then perhaps it is not as easy to establish the reality of oppression as “we” (within “our” epistemic practices) might hope. One of the more radical results of this opening up of epistemological endeavors is that we are often said to live in a post-truth world, a world "in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief."2 Post-truth, alt-fact, or any kind of claim to knowledge that depends upon purely socially determined warrant, threatens to undermine moral claims, especially those related to oppression and injustice. After all, human history is full of communities that have agreed upon beliefs that allowed them to commit all sorts of atrocities against other human beings. As some people today (especially women, both men and women of color, and LBGTQ+ people) struggle to achieve certain rights, others collectively struggle to deny them those  Oxford English Dictionary https://languages.oup.com/word-of-the-year/2016/. “Post-truth” was hailed as the word of the year in 2016. For more on post-truth see McIntyre 2018. 2

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rights. If all we have is the system in effect, communally grounded warrant, a this-is-what-we-agree-to notion of justification for our beliefs, then post-truth is perhaps the best for which we can hope. But post-truth is hardly truth, the epistemic value of yesteryear. The case for our beliefs concerning justice and injustice will not be effectively made if we have only emotional conviction and not epistemic force. We very much want to say that racism is wrong, that sexism is wrong, that homophobia is wrong, that xenophobia is wrong, that religious intolerance is wrong. All these things create injustice in the world. Furthermore, we very much wish to say that all of us have an obligation to resist these wrongs.3 Undermining all these sorts of belief and undermining the actions associated with these beliefs—actions like unwarranted police shootings or driving a car into a group of peaceful protesters—require that we take seriously that there are, at the very least, better and worse ways of representing the world, ways that have nothing to do with how we (whomever “we” is) take it to be. In other words, those concerned with justice should not be satisfied with post-truth but should resist it as well. That is, we must be committed to a notion of truth substantive enough to defeat alternative ways of thinking rather than posit some subjectivist true-for­me version of reality. To stand for justice is to stand for a picture of truth in which it is true that racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, religious intolerance is wrong. Undesirable beliefs must be undesirable for reasons (not merely emotional or personal ones) that we can articulate, and in ways that may not transcend epistemological communities but that can cut across those communities along certain axes. This way of putting the matter may make truth (especially concerning social or moral claims) sound more bivalent than it is. Matters of social justice are rarely either/or affairs. Often there are multiple stands that one can take and a variety of people who occupy these positions on a given issue. Yet the more extreme and opposing forces often get the lion’s share of the attention. For instance, in opposition to Black Lives Matter stands Police Lives Matter or All Lives Matter. These views do not necessarily have to stand in direct opposition to one another. It is possible to believe  See Medina (2013, 16–17).

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in the worth of all lives and recognize the specific case of black lives in U.S. society. These positions are not mutually exclusive. In practice, though, these positions tend to sit on opposite ends of a political spectrum that makes them much more opposed than they would be in the absence of power structures and the politics surrounding the practice of power. Those who use the phrases Police Lives Matter or, more broadly, All Lives Matter typically do so with the intent of implicitly rejecting the claim that black lives do not and have not mattered in society and of explicitly rejecting the claim that black lives matter more than any other lives. By contrast, to be a proponent of Black Lives Matter is to say something like, “whatever you (i.e., those who stand in opposition to the movement) believe, it is true that black lives have been systematically disregarded and diminished in mainstream, white society.” Both sides find the other’s beliefs wrong-headed in important respects. Each thinks the other’s beliefs are, at minimum, false and, more to the point, fundamentally undesirable insofar as those beliefs lead to objectionable real-­ world consequences.4 How, then, if truth is negotiable and if facts are dependent upon the system, are we to figure out where the truth lies and under what circumstances a belief is actually undesirable?

1.2 How Epistemology Undermines Responsibility The socialization of facts, which produces vehement disagreements concerning what constitutes an undesirable belief, is only part of the problem with locating epistemic responsibility. Another problem is whether any of us can be responsible for our beliefs simpliciter. Is the Alabama history instructor’s views on gender and race ones over which she has control, either directly or indirectly? Most of us probably share an intuition that she bears some responsibility for her beliefs—but epistemic involuntarists would beg to differ. While we do appear to have some epistemic  Which real world outcomes are to be considered undesirable depends, of course, on one’s starting position in this debate. 4

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responsibility to the truth (whatever that ultimately turns out to be from within whatever epistemic community we happen to reside), epistemic responsibility more broadly is a difficult subject—and not just as a result of difficulties with truth. Consider the following three beliefs: The sun is shining. The lights are on in my office. Girls are not good at math and science.

The first of these beliefs is one that I seem to have no control over whatsoever. When the sun is shining, I will believe that the sun is shining; when it is not, I will not believe the sun is shining. Period. End of story. This sort of belief just happens to me. It is not something I choose. Compare that to the second belief, that the lights are on in my office. This belief also tracks the environmental conditions rather strongly, but in this case, I can indirectly control the belief (at least most of the time) by switching the lights on or off as desired. What about the third belief about girls not being good at math and science? This belief, like the former two, may have an involuntary quality, but do I have some (or any) control over it? This is the problem of epistemic involuntarism, the possibility of which weakens, if not undermines, the very possibility of being responsible for any of our beliefs. After all, if we accept the principle that “ought implies can,” then to deny that we choose our beliefs (or have, minimally, some control over them) is to call into question whether we can be responsible for those beliefs. Put differently, the extent to which we have an epistemic responsibility to hold desirable beliefs is by no means clear because it is by no means clear what sort of responsibility we have for any of our beliefs. It is possible, after all, that we have no genuine epistemic responsibility because we lack direct or even indirect voluntary control over our beliefs. Consider, for instance, that I do not choose to believe that it is raining or that I am hungry. Some ideas are, as Locke pointed out, forced upon us. I typically just believe these matters on the basis of rather overwhelming sensory evidence. Case in point, I recently spent some time in the desert during an extreme heat warning. At no time did I or could I

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have simply decided to believe it was pleasantly cool while in the scorching desert sun. Clearly, we fail to have epistemic free will in the strong sense that Descartes suggests in his Meditations (although even Descartes does not hold that we can change our sensory impressions—he just thinks we can withhold assent). Still, this need not mean that I have no control whatsoever over my beliefs, especially more socially complex ones. Most of us would at least like to take credit for our more enlightened beliefs, especially when we worked for the enlightenment. I grew up in an environment in which so-called ethnic jokes were acceptable. Over time, I have come to question my belief about such acceptability. I like to consider myself to have chosen to reject my former belief in favor of one that finds such jokes morally problematic and to be avoided for a host of reasons which I take it are strong and persuasive. Of course, my intuition about my epistemic free will in this case may be incorrect. Yet, even if some choice is involved, my so-called choice is likely not fully mine but is also influenced by people in my current social circles. Like everyone else, I pick up on social cues to find out what is permissible and what is not within my epistemic communities. Perhaps, I am not as epistemically free as I might think. Then again, who I associate with is something actually within my control. This, in turn, creates hope that I do have some sort of epistemic will, and epistemic will generates hope for epistemic responsibility. If I am, at the very least, able to influence my epistemic environment, especially with respect to socially significant beliefs about moral matters, I may indeed be held responsible for believing well or believing badly. Furthermore, if I can take one step beyond mere influence and actually reflect on my beliefs and engage in some sort of rational deliberation, then surely this will impose an epistemic responsibility. This sense that we can be morally reflective about our beliefs and come to reject our previous beliefs on the basis of some self-aware reflection is a relatively commonly held belief. After all, many of us actually claim to have challenged and changed previously held beliefs, and we admire people who replace their undesirable beliefs with ones that are much more widely accepted and lauded. A good example of such an individual comes from Studs Terkel (1997) who tells the story of C. P. Ellis renouncing his former beliefs concerning the Ku Klux Klan. According to Ellis, his initial beliefs were ones based in ignorance: he had nothing at all to do with

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those he was taught to hate “until I met a black person and talked with him, eyeball to eyeball, and met a Jewish person and talked to him, eyeball to eyeball. I found out they’re people just like me. They cried, they cussed, they prayed, they had desires. Just like myself. Thank God, I got to the point where I can look past labels” (Terkel 1997, 68). Such a transformation strikes those of us not in the Klan as admirable, hopeful, promising. We laud Ellis for his change of belief. Yet such praise would be misplaced were he to lack doxastic control. If his beliefs changed passively, without him having any say in or control of or influence over this shift, it would be difficult to attribute the betterment of his beliefs to him. Similarly, the blame placed on Ellis by his former associates for his change of heart would be equally misplaced if beliefs are, fundamentally, involuntaristic. But Ellis was blamed. As Ellis relates, his former associates would tell him, “You’re sellin’ us out, Ellis, get out of my door. I don’t want to talk to you.” (Terkel 1997, 71). They certainly responded in a way that implied he was in some way the author of his beliefs. They also responded in a way that suggests Ellis’ former (and their current) belief in white supremacy was highly desirable. For them, Ellis’ change of attitude was for the worse. Yet this is a blame equally undeserved if he has no doxastic control, as epistemic involuntarism suggests. What if our intuitions about doxastic responsibility are wrong? While we can legitimately ask questions about which beliefs we epistemically (and morally) ought to hold, an even more basic question concerns whether we can be held epistemically responsible at all. That is, not only is defining “undesirability” quite the muddled problem, so too is determining what sort of epistemic responsibility we have for so-called undesirable beliefs. All this shows that when it comes to discussing the undesirability of belief, two overarching and interrelated questions emerge—but each of these questions opens a number of others that are all intertwined into something of an epistemic mess. First, who gets to determine what beliefs count as desirable? This is a complex discussion and one that often focuses on a debate about knowledge that “is characterized by a … polarized tension between knowledge that is more grounded in local and regional traditions and knowledge cultures, and knowledge that rather marches to the tune of universally validated standards and prescriptions” (Weiler 2009, 8). Which community’s or communities’ beliefs define

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“undesirability?” Whose knowledge or whose epistemic authority gets to count? Who gets to decide our epistemic responsibilities, assuming we do have some? These questions become all the more pressing in a world of alternative facts and post-truth, a world in which my truth may not be your truth. A satisfactory response to these questions cannot amount to “whomever has epistemic dominance or power.” Second, what sort of control or influence over our beliefs do we actually have? Is epistemic responsibility possible at all, much less possible for undesirable beliefs? And even if epistemic responsibility, broadly conceived, is possible, it may be that “differently situated subjects have differential epistemic responsibilities (different not only in degree, but also in kind)” (Medina 2013, 17). Ellis unwittingly offers a critical insight into the social dimensions and differential responsibilities of coming to know. He says, “It disturbs me when people who do not really know what it’s all about are so very critical of individual Klansmen. The majority of ‘em are low-income whites, people who really don’t have a part in something. They have been shut out as well as the blacks. Some are not very well educated either. Just like myself ” (Terkel 1997, 65). Ellis is certainly not advocating for a doxastic determinism, but he does suggest that there may be extenuating circumstances (like poverty or lack of education) that explain why individuals hold the beliefs that they do. Furthermore, while Ellis would not put the point in quite this way, he is saying that “we need to take seriously not only the ‘oppressed’, but also attend to the emotive registers of, for example, cisgender heterosexual straight White middleclass males” (Paradies 2018, 124). Of course, “emotive registers” do not determine truth (unless post-truth is genuinely all we have), but this factor will play a role in dominant epistemic processes and in the activity of coming to hold beliefs. We ignore it at our own epistemic peril. Point is, no one deliberately sets out to hold undesirable beliefs—not Ellis, not the history instructor, not myself. Most of us are just trying to hold, if not true beliefs, at least ones that, minimally, help us account for our experiences and get us through the world. This ties back into the first question concerning whose knowledge or whose epistemic authority is in question. In Ellis’ case, the case of the poor white southerner, some people consider his change of mind to be laudatory, but others find it lamentable. Which is it? Maybe neither? Is praise- and blame-worthiness merely

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an illusion? We clearly lack the same control over our beliefs that we have over actions. Beliefs are tricker somehow. What sort of control does someone like Ellis have over his belief transformation? However admirable Ellis’ change of mind may appear, the doxastic control he appears to have is far from a given. Our implicit biases, for example, offer a clear case of beliefs that do not easily shift, even among those who wish to change their biases. Despite intentional effort, they often remain resistant to change.5 Furthermore, while many will accept, without epistemic reflection, that the shift toward more inclusive beliefs is an unquestionably positive one, what constitutes an “undesirable belief ” will still depend on who you ask. We need some principled means of determining what constitutes an undesirable belief beyond the sort of idea that “’the world’ is just whatever that vast majority of our beliefs not currently in question are currently thought to be about” (Rorty 1982, 14). Even more problematically, epistemic responsibility, if there is indeed such a thing, may not accrue to individuals equally—or at all. If social epistemology and its liberatory branches are to be believed, responsibility may lie with the community rather than the individual. In this case, a further complication comes to the fore: socially constructed ignorances.6 What happens when the social structures on which we epistemically depend actually conspire to keep us from knowing? Is each of us individually responsible when the epistemic communities of which we are a part restrict our capacity to see “the truth?”

1.3 Exculpatory Ignorance Ignorance is, as Socrates tries to teach us, part of the human condition. Oddly enough, philosophers have only recently begun to explore exactly what part of the human condition it is. Sure, ethicists since the time of  For a discussion of how implicit biases remain stable even in the face of efforts to mitigate them, see Vuletich and Payne (2019). 6  Medina’s account of epistemic responsibility explicitly maintains that “individual epistemic responsibility cannot be understood independently of shared epistemic responsibility” (2013, 52). His view, an interactionist view of epistemic agency, is one I will broadly follow, although I challenge some of the consequences of holing this view. 5

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Aristotle have worried about actions performed from ignorance or in ignorance, but epistemologists certainly didn’t much worry their heads about something so antithetical to knowledge as mere ignorance. Until now. These days we have multiple perspectives on ignorance and the epistemic role it plays in our lives. Epistemologists have, for instance, a Standard View (i.e., that ignorance is a lack or absence of knowledge), but they also have a New View (i.e., that ignorance is lack or absence of true belief ). Similarly, they talk about different types of ignorance (e.g., ignorance of facts, ignorance of subject matter, ignorance of how to perform a particular activity). There are even historical ignorances, cultural ignorances, and racial ignorances. Under the heading of racialized ignorance, we find such distinctions as white ignorance, meta-ignorance, and affected ignorance (all more or less names for how people with white skin often fail to understand the experiences of people of color). Ignorance has in many ways come to be seen not merely as a passive state of non-­ knowing but also as a process that can at times be actively constructed and promoted, such as when tobacco companies deny the carcinogenic effects of cigarettes or the sugar industry seeks to cast doubts on the role of sucrose in coronary heart disease.7 In such cases, ignorance is a social process and, thus, it is also something that implicates entire epistemic communities and epistemic practices rather than just individual knowers. It is a brave new epistemic world in which individual ignorance is derived from social ignorance. The old tried and true standard view of ignorance as the opposite of knowledge, as a mere cognitive state and not a process that affects the very possibility of our knowing, has been strongly challenged from a variety of perspectives. In the new epistemic landscape, ignorance is, as Shannon Sullivan suggests, not the opposite of knowledge but rather is constructed by knowledge. She says, “rather than oppose knowledge, ignorance is often formed by it, and vice versa” (Sullivan 2007, 154). José Medina agrees that there is an interdependent relationship between knowledge and ignorance in many epistemologies of ignorance these days. He highlights this intertwining, saying, “the epistemic agency that subjects have within a discursive practice is such that their knowledge  See Proctor (1994). Also see Kearns et al. (2016). These are examples that I will develop later.

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and ignorance are co-constituted: their epistemic lucidity and their epistemic blindness go hand in hand, mutually supporting each other” (Medina 2011, 30). Disentangling the knowledge we have from the ignorances that such knowledge can generate is well-nigh impossible according to many liberatory epistemologies. This interdependence of ignorance and knowledge—and the linking of ignorance to concerns of justice— implicates a much wider region of epistemology than if ignorance were merely a lack of knowledge or information. It also has implications for our epistemic responsibility given that ignorance can be an exculpatory reason for holding any belief, much less an undesirable one. One of the strongest challenges to older conceptions of ignorance has come from the point of view of liberatory epistemology, which emphasizes the activity of ignorance in dominant ways of knowing. What remains unclear is the sort of effect on epistemic responsibility that ignorance-­as-a-process-that-is-entangled-with-ways-of-knowing has, especially when some beliefs held in ignorance are highly undesirable or have deleterious moral consequences. What makes this problem all the more thorny for liberatory epistemologies in particular is the influence Foucault has on thinking through issues of power and resistance that are also tied up with concerns about ignorance. As Medina notes, when we take Foucault seriously (as many feminists, queer theorists, and race theorists in particular, will do), we commit ourselves to the view that “there is no such thing as epistemic innocence,” which in turn “problematizes the notion of culpable ignorance” (2011, 30). Ignorance is often, although by no means always, an exculpatory moral excuse. But if there is no such thing as “an innocent position from which ‘we’ could level charges of culpability” (Code 2007, 226), it is going to be mighty difficult to determine epistemically when beliefs held in ignorance are culpable—or even when they are undesirable. Are we always epistemically responsible for our racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic (and so on) beliefs? Even when it is precisely the discursive practices around us that make us ignorant? When ignorance was considered simply a state, the stakes were much less significant. In point of fact, being in a state of ignorance can, at times anyway, be something of a good thing insofar as it motivates knowledge. After all, when we recognize that we are ignorant of something, we are all

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the more willing to seek out answers to our questions. This is, of course, why Socrates was so terribly keen to point out not only his own ignorance but the ignorance of his fellow Athenians. Socrates believed that ignorance can be overcome just by acquiring the right information. Famously, to know the good is to do the good, so to repair our moral lives, we would simply need to acquire defensible definitions sufficient to establish knowledge on the relevant topic. Unfortunately, those days are good and gone. Current epistemologies of ignorance (at least those generated by advocates of justice) may allow a simple, passive form, but they emphasize the more interesting, more challenging, more problematic, more insidious forms of ignorance, which are much more active, much more the result of social construction. What has not changed, of course, is that ignorance remains somehow antithetical to knowledge, even if it is drawn into the sphere of knowing. It may be what our knowledges will not allow us to see. It may even be tied up with how the power structures surrounding us hide injustice from our view. Regardless, it is inseparably intertwined with knowing—but in a way that limits knowledge, that obscures facts and evidence, and that is reflected in our methods of justification. In other words, the ignorance of concern for advocates of social justice is something far more than a mere deficiency of information. If being ignorant has an element of activity in its production, it is then likely to have a negative effect on our epistemic endeavors for it will hide from us certain facts or features about the world. When we shift to thinking about ignorance as a process, especially when it involves a process that our epistemic communities actively engage in, it can become less of a motivator toward knowledge and more of a hinderance to acquiring knowledge. As a result, we need to ask what role it plays in our acquisition of knowledge and in our responsibility for holding the beliefs that we hold. In asking this question, simple forms of ignorance, forms like failing to know some relevant fact such as whether I left the lights on in my office, drop out as uninteresting. They do little to uncover sources or offer solutions to injustice. The forms of ignorance that have the most significant moral and social consequences are ones like Charles Mills’ white ignorance, José Medina’s meta-ignorance, and Michele Moody-Adams’

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affected ignorance.8 These sorts of ignorances engage us in a specific brand of the epistemology of ignorance, one that directs us to consider the role of epistemology in perpetuating injustice. With white ignorance, in particular, we are asked to confront “a particular pattern of localized and global cognitive dysfunctions (which are psychologically and socially functional), … [produces] the ironic outcome that whites will in general be unable to understand the world they themselves have made” (Mills 1997, 18). With this form of ignorance, the upshot is that white people are not only unaware of the realities faced by people of color but that this lack of awareness results, not from some lack of information, but from social activity. Our very own societies (and power structures within these societies) construct a world in which marginalization and the injustice it creates are invisible to those in the dominant epistemic position. This phenomenon is one in which some white people (perhaps a majority of white people) systematically remain ignorant not only of their own whiteness but what that whiteness means and how that whiteness affects people of color in oppressive ways. Such ignorance is widely considered, especially by people of color, to be far from passive (and far from epistemically innocent). It is not simply a matter of one person lacking knowledge of some particular fact as when Mary does not know that Antonio returned from the store. Instead, this is a social process involving a situation in which white people deliberately (but unknowingly) misunderstand and misrepresent the world around them in ways that prohibit them from seeing the world (or at least the racial aspects of it) for what it is. This kind of ignorance is communally generated and sustained, and it actively keeps some of us from acquiring knowledge or understanding. It also produces beliefs that are morally and epistemically undesirable. Morally because they produce oppression and injustice; epistemically because they produce distorted understandings of the world around us. In fact, it is precisely the distorted understandings that lead to racial insensitivities which cause unjust exclusions and marginalizations.9 Ignorant racial beliefs are false, but they are false in ways that involve moral consequences. This sort of socially constructed  See Mills (2007), Medina (2017), and Moody-Adams (1994).  See Medina (2016, 178–181).

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ignorance narrows our perspective and obscures certain truths about the world. And an important hallmark of at least some of these socially constructed ignorances is that they are actively engineered—and even deliberately planned.10 For those keen to show that socially constructed ignorance contributes to and sustains social injustice, the power of ignorance is a well-discussed topic.11 Again and again philosophers concerned with racial, sexual, or gender justice draw our attention to the fact that ignorance can be willful and culpable, even if one remains unaware of her own specific ignorance and the activity that goes into sustaining that ignorance. In some ways this is nothing new. The culpability of willful ignorance has been discussed since the time of Aristotle and is fairly well understood. For example, I might go out of my way (unknowingly or not) and choose to avoid watching or listening to certain news stories so I can plead ignorance of what new laws might recently have taken effect. This sort of ignorance does not and will not excuse me from following the law. The law has long dealt with ignorance in such a way that it is usually not exculpatory. However, not all willful ignorance is so obviously culpable. Cases of trust, for example, also require something of a willful ignorance since genuine trust requires that we not check up on the person whom we claim to trust.12 Other situations are more worrisome. An example of such worrisome ignorance is implicit bias, which is a form of ignorance of which many of us are aware of in general (i.e., we understand that implicit biases exist and affect our behavior) but of which we are highly unaware of in our own personal thinking and acting. One of the hallmarks of implicit bias is that it operates outside of conscious awareness and control; yet it remains clearly epistemically and morally problematic. As a result of implicit biases (e.g., stereotypes), we often know less than we would if we could jettison such bias. Our knowing is  Consider Proctor’s (1994) treatment of the ignorance surrounding cigarette smoking. The denial around the health consequences of smoking is also discussed by McIntyre, who argues that the roots of current day science denial can be traced to the work of the Tobacco Industry Research Committee. See McIntyre (2018, 22–27). 11  The aforementioned “white ignorance” in Mills’ work is one well known instance, but similar kinds of ignorances are discussed by Moody-Adams (1994), Smith (1983), Bailey (2007), Sullivan (2007), Pohlhaus (2012), and Medina 2017. 12  See Townley (2006). 10

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hurt by the ignorance and numbness created by bias.13 For instance, we may at times fail to judge the abilities and the work of others accurately because we are unknowingly blinded by factors related to social identity. Aside from the moral consequences, this sort of bias has a clear epistemic consequence as we become worse at knowing. The problem is, however, that the bias is implicit—it is something of which we are very often unaware, and often in an entirely unwilful manner. Furthermore, evidence suggests that even when we do become aware of it, there is no easy a priori fix to undo the effects it has on our judgements. Implicit bias operates below our introspective reflections so that even when we become consciously aware that we have such biases, they can still continue to operate and produce effects that further promote injustice in the world. Even worse? There is nothing inherently wrong with implicit bias. That is, we cannot simply say all implicit bias is epistemically problematic. Some bias may be a good thing.14 Consider, for instance, Noam Chomsky’s “universal grammar,” the idea that innate and unconscious constraints exist on what human languages can be. Assuming Chomsky is correct, such bias is actually advantageous insofar as it makes language possible in the first place. Not every bias we have is epistemically disadvantageous, and not everything of which we are ignorant is epistemically problematic. The result is that we need a means to sort out various ignorances—including which ones are epistemically undesirable—if we are to identify and seek to overcome the problematic ones. Obviously, the claim that not all biases are bad does not imply that none are bad; the claim that not all ignorance is epistemically destructive does not entail that no ignorance is epistemically destructive. There are biases—some of which we are ignorant—that surely undermine knowledge. And many of these biases are ones of which we should be aware, even in the face of social numbness which hides them from us. After all,  In a number of places Medina uses the concept of numbness to supplant and expand upon DuBois’ and Mills’ metaphor of blindness. See, in particular, Medina (2013, xi–xiii) and Medina (2017). 14  Antony (2016) argues this point quite persuasively, claiming that biases are necessary for us to do genuine and successful epistemic work. In other words, strict empiricism cannot explain the fullness of our epistemic lives and, thus, we need to consider the role played by mental structures. Antony (2002) also discusses bias—and how to make distinctions among types of biases—when she considers the bias paradox. 13

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the world in which we currently live is a world in which the marks of racism and sexism are not only evident but relatively well understood. That is, we (at least the “we” of some epistemic communities) have good reason to believe that our society is structured along lines of race and sex.15 Thus, most of us presumably should know better when it comes to racist and sexist beliefs. Still, even if there is something right about the claim that there are ignorances of which we should be aware, it is not always clear that each and every one of us has this responsibility or has it equally. A lowly foot soldier may be unaware of facts available to his superiors, who may quite deliberately shield him from knowledge of those facts. The responsibility for knowing in such instances could be shifted away from him as a result of this deliberately constructed ignorance, even if a greater responsibility nonetheless still applies to those with more power. Of course, when the beliefs in question are ones that are highly undesirable or morally problematic, as they can easily be in wartime situations, the stakes are raised significantly. The stakes can also be raised in situations that involve social beliefs related to matters such as race, sex, cultural background, and so on. These beliefs impact our lives and the lives of those around us. When beliefs have a moral stake, as they do in the case of our beliefs about race or gender, the culpability appears all the more weighty than it does when, either by my own choice or as a result of social forces, I remain ignorant of, say, the score of last night’s game. What should we know about the moral consequences of our beliefs? Ignorantly holding undesirable beliefs, especially ones that have concrete consequences for concrete individuals, may well to be some of the most significant of our epistemic actions given how important a role these beliefs play in issues of social justice and injustice. Some of the beliefs we hold in or from ignorance are highly undesirable from both an epistemic and a moral perspective.16 Determining which beliefs are undesirable is  I suspect that even with epistemic communities critical of claims of systematic racism and sexism, beliefs still hold concerning society being structured along lines of race and sex—it is just that the way this structure is understood is different. For instance, advocates of All Lives Matter would claim their opponents are the ones seeing the world along racial lines or generating the racial structure in an otherwise colorblind world. 16  Of course, there is no single, transcendent epistemic or moral perspective, so the problem of undesirability cannot be resolved simply through somewhat magical appeals to moral import of beliefs. 15

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seriously problematic if we take seriously social aspects of knowing. Thus, we return full circle to the original issue of truth and post-truth, facts and alt-facts. We cannot just say p is undesirable. We must ask the further question: undesirable for whom?

1.4 The Problem of Culpability Consider, once again, the Klansman Ellis. The epistemic and moral challenges of his case are substantial. While he undergoes what is, by all appearances, a positive shift in his beliefs, the circumstances surrounding that shift and the epistemological lessons we can draw from that shift are muddy. It is not even clear if pre-enlightened Ellis (the low-income white who doesn’t really have a part in something) might not just be an epistemologically aggrieved party. What occurs with Ellis could actually be what Miranda Fricker would call a midway case of hermeneutical injustice. Fricker (2007, 2016) speaks of situations that arise between maximal and minimal cases. In the maximal case of hermeneutical injustice, individuals are not in a position to make sense of their own experience as the interpretative resources are simply absent. Ellis does not present this sort of maximal case, but neither does he have full interpretive resources. The pre-enlightened and ignorant Ellis can make some sense of his experience as a white supremacist, but his ability to do so is limited by the constraints of his community, which is using his bigotry to sustain a certain power structure in which he only partially participates. He is white (which grants him power), but he is also poor (which disadvantages him). In comparison with his enlightened and much more knowledgeable self, he is unable to fully understand his social position while remaining within his prior community. After his transformation, he is able to articulate much more fully, at least to himself, his own social position—but maybe not to his new community for whom his past life is incomprehensible. Although his situation hardly seems to count as unjust insofar as he comes, as a poor white man, from a position of some power, his poverty speaks to his own epistemic dependence upon the more powerful politicians who use his outspokenness for their own benefit. In contrast to the maximal case, the minimal case of a hermeneutical injustice is a highly

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localized occurrence in which interpretive practices in a certain social space can perfectly capture a given range of experience—but these interpretive practices are not shared across a wider social space. This may be closer to the reality of the white supremacist like Ellis, whose own interpretive practices capture his experience but who cannot thereby translate it to society as a whole. Pre-enlightened Ellis lived in a world in which white supremacist practices could be articulated and interpreted within a certain community. Post-enlightened Ellis, however, loses this interpretive framework and has to forge a new one. He becomes caught between different social realities. However much his own self-understanding actually improves, he also loses the ability to share his experience with significant others. In his “no man’s land” social reality, Ellis may well suffer some hermeneutical injustice for he can make some sense of his own experience but may not be able to communicate it either to his former associates or to those with whom he has come to identify. This may also capture the situation for those of us suffering certain forms of implicit bias, that is, those of us who are unable to make sense of our own experience of acting in a way inconsistent with our conscious motivations. Instead, we are guilty of a sort of ignorance. This ignorance may be culpable insofar as it is a communally motivated bias, meaning that the racially or sexually dominant group has some reason for maintaining this ignorance. Yet it may also be exculpatory insofar as communally grounded power structures work to keep us individually from knowledge of our implicit biases. This is the double-bind of race-based ignorances: they assert both that such ignorance is motivated by some gain that accrues to individuals within the dominant group and that the benefiting individuals affected by this ignorance are themselves blinded or numbed by social forces that lie beyond them.17

 While Charles Mills uses the language of “blindness” to speak about socially constructed ignorance, Medina (and others) have moved away from speaking of ignorance producing blindness in order to be not only more sensitive and inclusive but to move beyond certain conceptual limitations of the metaphor. I will generally follow Medina in speaking of the “numbness” ignorance produces, but, especially when referring to Mills, the term “blindness” may be one I use. For more on this subject see the forward of Medina (2013, xi–xiii). 17

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On the one hand, whites do have something to gain by maintaining cognitive processes that keep them unaware of their social advantage. It is this seeking and maintaining of advantage that makes many of us view such ignorance as culpable, (assuming we are indeed capable of doxastic culpability or are indeed the proper object of doxastic blame). Whites, we think, could choose to know better. Ellis’ case—and the white politicians around him—suggests as much. When we are motivated to remain ignorant or to maintain a conceptual poverty in our understanding of the lives of others, we give grounds for epistemic culpability. The white politicians who used Ellis certainly appear epistemically culpable for they were aware of how white supremacy aided their own political gain. On the other hand, Ellis points out that he and other low-income whites were at a decided epistemic disadvantage, not really understanding how they were being used to further the gains of others (although presumably they were very much aware of what they themselves had to gain by segregation). Ellis is an unusual case for he comes to see how his own racist attitude blocks him from recognizing certain so-called truths—but he also comes to see how his own poverty and social powerlessness is used by others to their advantage. That is, he recognizes how he himself experienced not necessarily a conceptual poverty in failing to understand his own whiteness but instead a deliberate misguiding of his thinking by those who had something to gain. This suggests that Ellis may not have been as straightforwardly culpable for his racism as we commonly assume. In discussing his understanding of the concept of white ignorance, Mills tells us that the racialized causality I am invoking needs to be expansive enough to include both straightforward racist motivation and more impersonal social-­ structural causation, which may be operative even if the cognizer in question is not racist…. In both cases, racialized causality can give rise to what I am calling white ignorance, straightforwardly for a racist cognizer, but also indirectly for a nonracist cognizer who may form mistaken beliefs … because of the social suppression of the pertinent knowledge, though without prejudice himself. So white ignorance need not always be based on bad faith. (Mills 2007, 21).

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On first glance, pre-enlightened Ellis appears a quite paradigmatic racist cognizer for whom epistemic blame clearly attends since he has a straightforwardly racist motivation. Listening to his story, however, suggests that the situation is much less straightforward than would appear when looking from the outside in. Ellis is a Klansman, the very stereotype of the white racist; yet like the rest of us, he is shaped by impersonal social-­ structural causes over which he himself has little control. This complicates the epistemic and moral stories we can tell about racist beliefs and actions. If these stories, like all stories, must be contextualized and if truth and power arise out of these different contexts, then assigning blame for undesirable beliefs requires us to take into account not just our own communities and narratives but other communities and narratives as well. Of course, admitting this complexity need not require us to admit that racist beliefs and actions are in any way desirable. It does, however, mean that we might wish to step back and ask ourselves not only about what makes beliefs undesirable but also about what sort of epistemic responsibility we have for holding beliefs, especially undesirable ones.

1.5 Three Questions Clearly a number of serious questions remain unanswered at this point. To what extent, if any, are we responsible for our beliefs? Under what conditions might we be responsible? What constitutes an undesirable belief? Who gets to decide which beliefs are undesirable? What criteria exist for evaluating responsibility or undesirability? Does responsibility even accrue to individuals or only to communities? Before we go about judging others for holding undesirable beliefs, we should ask ourselves these questions. What I propose to do, then, is consider three very specific questions—and only after addressing these questions to consider if and how individual epistemic agents might come to be epistemically responsible (or not) for the beliefs they hold. First, how can we determine which beliefs are truly undesirable? I take it that the beliefs of white supremacists do actually count as undesirable—but they don’t think so. Nor do many whites, holding more implicitly unconscious racist beliefs, think their beliefs are undesirable. After all, if we thought that our beliefs

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were undesirable or if we simply thought our beliefs were in some way false, we would very likely abandon them.18 A great many of us do not consciously mean to be racist or sexist or homophobic or xenophobic. However, neither do we always know how best to avoid beliefs that illicitly implicate us in socially oppressive practices. How do we determine which beliefs are good ones and which are suspect? After all, we humans do disagree about these sorts of issues all the time. We argue in the most well-meaning ways about how to make our society more inclusive and equal.19 If there is anything at all evident in debates over inclusiveness, from academic literature to street demonstrations, it is that we do not agree on what the problems are or how to fix them. There has to be room for reasonable disagreement about undesirability, but there also must be some path towards defending against alternative narratives those beliefs that promise to make the world a more just place—that is, to defend justice in itself rather than justice-from-my-community’s-perspective. Completely satisfying answers probably do not exist when it comes to determining the desirability or undesirability of beliefs, but the conversation is evident in our current culture wars, whether or not we explicitly choose to address the issue. The second question concerns the nature of epistemic responsibility: do we have any epistemic responsibility? If so, how much responsibility can we or do we have for our undesirable beliefs? A great deal of attention has been given recently to the topic of epistemic responsibility, and for good reason. Intuitively, belief appears to be quite different from action in that we cannot as easily or voluntarily control our beliefs as we appear to be able to voluntarily control our many of our actions. While we can seemingly choose to raise our hands at will, we cannot similarly choose to believe the sun is shining in the middle of the night. If our beliefs are determined in a way that bypasses even indirect voluntary control, this determination casts doubt on what sort of epistemic responsibility we can have. Given the principle of “ought implies can,” the possibility of some sort of doxastic control is presumably a significant condition for holding  For discussion of how whites react when confronted with evidence of systemic racism in their own beliefs/actions and the beliefs/actions of family members see Mueller (2017). 19  We also, unfortunately, argue about which rights to revoke (e.g., voting right, abortion rights, marriage rights), which are much more dangerous discussions than ones surrounding inclusion. 18

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people accountable for their undesirable beliefs. This makes debates over epistemic involuntarism especially important for feminists and race theorists since they invariably do want to hold sexists and racists epistemically responsible for holding undesirable beliefs. Someone like Medina, for example, may argue that “differently situated subjects and groups can bear very different burdens and responsibilities” (2013, 117), but he nevertheless insists that we all have “a prima facie obligation … to cultivate openness to perplexity and to interrogate received attitudes and habits” (2013, 19). We are all epistemically obligated. How to establish this obligation, and perhaps even more importantly, the scope of this obligation is a matter of enormous debate. Yet this debate over epistemic responsibility should matter to anyone who thinks that we should be held responsible for holding beliefs that contribute to the oppression of others. The interests of justice are better served if we can hold people responsible for their epistemic processes and for believing in correct ways—but responsible belief is highly nuanced. The third question concerns the role socially constructed ignorance plays in our epistemologies. Talk of warrant and justification is all fine and good, but the advent of social epistemologies has brought to the fore the role that social forces play in what it is we believe and what it is we can be said to know. Liberatory epistemologists seek ways to upset dominant epistemologies, but especially concerning is the way ignorance is deliberately used by epistemic elites (for instance, cis-gendered white males) to maintain power and the social institutions that protect their power. Ellis, of course, offers an insight into how many openly racist people are themselves not only left out of society’s power structures but used by those in power to stay in power. Those disadvantaged along some power axes yet privileged along another are at times encouraged in holding objectionable beliefs by the very power structures that govern their lives. Again, Ellis offers some insight into how this works. We [the Klan] began to make some inroads with the city councilmen and county commissioners. They began to call us friend. Call us at night on the telephone: “C. P., glad you came to that meeting last night.” They didn’t want integration either, but they did it secretively, in order to get elected. They couldn’t stand up openly and say it, but they were glad somebody was

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sayin’ it. We visited some of the city leaders in their home and talk to ‘em privately. It wasn’t long before councilmen would call me up: “The blacks are comin’ up tonight and makin’ outrageous demands. How about some of you people showin’ up and have a little balance?” I’d get on the telephone: “The niggers is comin’ to the council meeting tonight. Persons in the city’s called me and asked us to be there.” (Terkel 1997, 67)

This is one of the more deeply problematic features of epistemic responsibility, namely, that the epistemic authorities we rely on to provide warrant for our beliefs may be actively promoting a blindness/numbness/ ignorance that deliberately produces and reinforces undesirable beliefs. This is what Ellis actually came to be aware of after he underwent an epistemic transformation: he came to understand that he was being used by people in a position of power so they could get what they wanted. One thing liberatory epistemologists all appear to accept is that none of us is free from manipulation by power structures. None of us is epistemically innocent. It is just that some of us may be more consciously aware of how we are manipulated and are thereby more obligated to resist.20 Of course, not everyone comes to this realization. Perhaps not everyone can. If the ignorance that we suffer from is constructed by those with power over us—and especially if it is an ignorance that stems from lack of intelligence or education or other epistemic resources—it may be difficult to say that this is an epistemically culpable ignorance or that the beliefs that arise out of it, however undesirable, are epistemically blameworthy. The real catch is that if racial theorists are correct about their claims that racial ignorance is socially and institutionally constructed, it may thereby be difficult to hold all whites epistemically accountable for their racial beliefs. This does not mean that every form of ignorance or, more to the point, every form of racialized and gendered ignorance will always be exculpatory, just that it could, in some cases, function to provide a legitimate epistemological excuse. One final issue of concern, then, is how to understand the dynamic between individuals and their epistemic communities. If social epistemologists really mean what they say when they assert, as does Lynn  Bevir explains that “Foucault’s hostility to the subject meant that his approach entailed a strong focus on the ways in which individuals are constructed by regimes of power” (1999, 354). 20

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Nelson, that “it is communities that construct and acquire knowledge” (1993, 123), then it would appear that communities may also turn out to be the locus of epistemic responsibility, thereby undermining individual responsibility. If individuals are indeed held epistemically responsible, there at least has to be a story told about how this responsibility is possible in the face of shifting epistemic agency to networks of knowers. Social epistemologists do recognize the problem, but rarely do they focus on highly undesirable moral beliefs and, thus, they often seem to underestimate the stakes involved. In fact, some social epistemologists are willing to argue that individuals who engage in group deliberation “seem to deserve little credit for the process and even less for its results” (Levy and Alfano 2020, 907). Surely where no credit can be given, no blame should be ascribed. Yet if this is correct, each of us who lives in a systemically sexist and racist society—societies that are sexist and racist through no fault of my own—have a built-in excuse for our beliefs. In fact, the more sexist and racist the epistemological community, the more strongly I may be justified in holding undesirable beliefs. Something seems wrong, however, when we tell people “to turn one’s attention away from regulating one’s individual epistemic states and to focusing instead on the epistemic coordination of the group” (Palermos 2022, 346). Given the history of humanity, this seems a recipe for moral disasters. Social epistemologists need individual responsibility, too. In short, it is not an easy thing to say what it is to believe responsibly, to say what obligation we have to believe responsibly, and to navigate the kinds of excuses possible for negating epistemic responsibility. To what extent are we actually responsible for our beliefs? It strikes me that we do have some doxastic control and that if we deny such control our theories of justice are thereby weakened,21 but it also seems fairly obvious that this control is not absolute. We are not free to believe just anything. Descartes may have argued in his Meditations that we have an unlimited will to believe (or at least to withhold belief ), but this hardly seems borne out in our everyday lives. As I write this sentence, the world outside my window  When I get to this topic, I will discuss the literature surrounding doxastic control, but I will focus on reasons to believe we are not doxastically determined. Part of the reason for maintaining some doxastic control is cases like Ellis, who clearly changes his beliefs, seemingly through some measure of agency. 21

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is white with snow. I can hardly believe otherwise, even if I try really, really, really hard to believe otherwise. Is it any different for the small child raised in a racist and sexist world? Can he or she avoid acquiring racists or sexist beliefs? Aren’t these beliefs taught with the same force, authority, and pervasiveness as “The sky is blue” and “2+2=4”? Are those beliefs not ones he or she should adopt because they are supported by the community? Surely most of us hold that we are not responsible for holding beliefs in the same way that we are responsible for our actions—so the question is: is believing in a racist or sexist way something that many of us can truly control? And this is a critical question because what we believe matters to how we act.22 Hence, believing responsibly matters. Beliefs can be laudable, or they can be culpable. We need to be able to say what constitutes believing well and believing badly. We need to be able to hold people responsible for believing well and for believing badly.

References Antony, Louise. 2002. Quine as Feminist: The Radical Import of Naturalized Epistemology. In A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity, ed. Louise M. Antony and Charlotte E. Witt, 2nd ed., 110–153. Boulder: Westview Press. ———. 2016. Bias: Friend of Foe?: Reflections on Saulish Skepticism. In Implicit Bias and Philosophy, Volume 1: Metaphysics and Epistemology, ed. Michael Brownstein and Jennifer Saul, 157–190. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bailey, Allison. 2007. Strategic Ignorance. In Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, ed. Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana, 77–94. Albany: SUNY Press. Bevir, Mark. 1999. Foucault, Power, and Institutions. Political Studies XLVII: 345–359. Code, Lorraine. 2007. The Power of Ignorance. In Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, ed. Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana, 213–230. Albany: SUNY Press. Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction. New York: Random House.  Of course, the moral import of our actions is highly debated and no less fraught with difficulty.

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Fricker, Miranda. 2007. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2016. Epistemic Injustice and the Preservation of Ignorance. In The Epistemic Dimensions of Ignorance, ed. Rik Peels and Martijn Blaauw, 160–177. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hedgepeth, Lee. 2022, September 28. College History Instructor Calls for “rally by the you-know-what” to Halt Cullman Pride Event. WHNT News 19. Huntsville: WHNT. Kearns, Cristin E., Laura A. Schmidt, and Stanton A. Glantz. 2016. Sugar industry and coronary heart disease research: a historical analysis of internal industry documents. JAMA Internal Medicine 176 (11): 1680–1685. Levy, Neil, and Mark Alfano. 2020. Knowledge from Vice: Deeply Social Epistemology. Mind 129 (515): 887–915. McIntyre, Lee. 2018. Post-Truth. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Medina, José. 2011. Toward a Foucaultian Epistemology of Resistance: Counter-­ Memory, Epistemic Friction, and Guerrilla Pluralism. Foucault Studies 12: 9–35. ———. 2013. The Epistemology of Resistance. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2016. Ignorance and Racial Insensitivity. In The Epistemic Dimensions of Ignorance, ed. Rik Peels and Martijn Blaauw, 178–201. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2017. Epistemic Injustice and Epistemologies of Ignorance. In The Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Race, ed. Luvell Anderson, Paul C. Taylor, and Linda Martín Alcoff, 247–260. New York: Routledge. Mills, Charles. 1997. The Racial Contract. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ———. 2007. White Ignorance. In Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, ed. Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana, 13–38. Albany: SUNY Press. Moody-Adams, Michele M. 1994. Culture, Responsibility, and Affected Ignorance. Ethics 104: 291–309. Mueller, Jennifer C. 2017. Producing Colorblindness. Social Problems 64 (2): 219–238. Nelson, Lynn Hankinson. 1993. Epistemological Communities. In Feminist Epistemologies, ed. Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter, 121–160. New York: Routledge. Palermos, S. Orestis. 2022. Responsibility in Epistemic Collaborations: Is It Me, Is It the Group or Are We All to Blame? Philosophical Issues 32: 335–350. Paradies, Yin. 2018. Whither standpoint theory in a post-truth world? Cosmopolitan Civil Societies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 10 (2): 119–129.

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Pohlhaus, Gaile, Jr. 2012. Relational Knowing and Epistemic Injustice: Toward a Theory of “Willful Hermeneutical Ignorance”. Hypatia 27 (4): 715–735. Proctor, Robert N. 1994. Cancer Wars: How Politics Shapes What We Know and Don’t Know About Cancer. New York: Basic Books. Rorty, Richard. 1982. The World Well Lost. In The Consequences of Pragmatism, 3–18. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Smith, Holly. 1983. Culpable Ignorance. The Philosophical Review XCII (4): 543–571. Sullivan, Shannon. 2007. White Ignorance and Colonial Oppression: Or, Why I Know So Little about Puerto Rico. In Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, ed. Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana, 153–172. Albany: SUNY Press. Terkel, Studs. 1997. The Studs Terkel Reader: My American Century. New York: The New Press. Townley, Cynthia. 2006. Toward a Reevaluation of Ignorance. Hypatia 21 (3): 37–55. Vuletich, Heidi A., and B. Keith Payne. 2019. Stability and Change in Implicit Bias. Psychological Science 30 (6): 854–862. Weiler, Hans N. 2009. Whose Knowledge Matters? Development and the Politics of Knowledge. In Entwicklung als Beruf, ed. T. Hanf, H.N. Weiler, and H. Dickow, 485–496. Baden-Baden: Nomos.

2 What Is Undesirable Belief?

What makes a belief undesirable? In a world skeptical of truth, the difficulty of answering this question cannot be overestimated. Beliefs that may be undesirable from one perspective are highly desirable from another perspective. In politics, this radical difference of attitudes toward dissimilar, even contradictory, beliefs (and values) is evident on a daily basis. Truth is raucously debated. With different epistemic communities pushing different narratives about undesirability, the burden of proof is surely distributed across most epistemic practices, including those fighting for justice. Given the linkage between truth and undesirability and given prevailing polyphonic approaches to truth, there is little chance that a fully satisfactory set of necessary and sufficient conditions can be given for undesirable belief. Nevertheless, epistemic practices can be better and worse, and the beliefs they endorse can be better and worse. Furthermore, we can say something about what makes an epistemic practice better than another—and we can say this independently of any assumptions about the undesirability of the beliefs within a practice. Of course, we may never actually convince our opponents using argumentative means, but ways do exist to establish principled reasons to prefer one set of beliefs over another. Thus, while the undesirability of belief in a

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socially epistemic world may be irreducibly connected with context, not all contexts are created equal. Undesirable practices do, at times anyway, lead to undesirable beliefs—and we can, at times, articulate this undesirability from more than merely “our” perspective. Articulating undesirability is, nevertheless, no simple task. Two responses concerning undesirability come easily to mind, but neither is satisfactory. The first unsatisfactory response is that undesirable beliefs are those which are false, while desirable beliefs are those which are true. In fact, epistemologists have historically equated undesirability with falsity. This makes sense. After all, truth is an important goal in epistemic endeavors.1 All of us want our beliefs to be true. We want to shun false belief. More to the point, those concerned with justice surely want to say that undesirable beliefs about race, sex, gender, national origin (and so on) are false. Still, truth is not the only value (or even the only epistemic value) that we have. Equating undesirability with mere falsity does not capture an important moral element of some forms of undesirability.2 Consider that it is probably false that there are 438,697 grains of salt in my salt shaker—that hardly seems make the belief undesirable in the way that white supremacist beliefs are undesirable. The racist beliefs of a Klansman like Ellis or the homophobic beliefs of the history instructor are not undesirable merely because they are false. Racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic beliefs have unfortunate consequences, generally for those who do not actually hold those beliefs. In other words, we find at times a real life, consequential aspect to belief that matters greatly for some classes of undesirable belief. Furthermore, quite often it is epistemic outsiders who bear the burden of these consequences. Those most harmed by racism are usually not the racists themselves—and so on for other types of harm. So, yes, falsity is a marker of undesirability, but a certain  While true belief is clearly an important epistemic goal, it strikes many epistemologists, myself included, that it is not the only goal. Other goals, including the broader concept of understanding, are implicated in many of our epistemic endeavors. The result is that often we genuinely do not care about individual truths while caring greatly about the “why” surrounding those unknowns (e.g., we don’t especially care how many grains of green sand are on the beach Papakōlea in Hawaii, but we might very well care why the sand is green). 2  This answer also does not address the fact that we can have good warrant for false belief and that falsity is, in and of itself, not quite enough to generate even epistemic undesirability. I will discuss this shortly when I consider Nottelmann’s account of undesirability. 1

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equivocation in the use of “undesirable” matters here. The undesirability of racist beliefs, of sexist beliefs, of homophobic beliefs, of xenophobic beliefs goes deeper than the undesirability of false beliefs about trivial matters. Some beliefs cause deep moral and epistemic injustice. They have devastating consequences on people’s lives. Their falseness is an important yet incomplete aspect of their undesirability. In other words, their undesirability somehow transcends their falsehood. Transcendence is, however, a rather suspect concept, all the more so if we take seriously the implications of social epistemology and the intertwining of fact and value. This is where the second response must be acknowledged, even if it is, in its most straightforward formulation, ultimately unsatisfactory at resolving all the concerns with undesirability. Rather than appealing to truth and falsity, we might instead deem undesirable beliefs to be those beliefs held by epistemic communities different from my own. An undesirable belief is, in other words, one that counteracts or otherwise disagrees with my own beliefs or the widely held beliefs of my epistemic community. This is, when baldly stated, a thoroughly subjectivistic or relativistic response that establishes nothing more than my beliefs are “true for me” or “true for my epistemic community.” The problem is, though, that across differing epistemic communities we genuinely do fail to agree about what constitutes an unjust practice. Is a LGBTQ+ march a sign of moral progress or the work of the devil? To take seriously the social dimensions of epistemology means to confront the fact that what counts as desirable for my epistemic community may not count as desirable for yours. The result is that the possibility of providing some definitive knock-down-drag-out account of undesirability appears unlikely given how unlikely is the possibility of articulating some capital-O-Objective standard for Truth-with-a-capital-T. Put much more simply, our world is sometimes said to be a post-truth one. In writing on the topic of post-truth, Lee McIntyre (2018) points out how hard it is these days to depoliticize factual questions—and this before the COVID-19 pandemic showed us just how politicized factual questions can truly become. The important insight McIntyre makes is that this politicization of factual questions happens to all of us. He warns us that we “should not assume that post-truth arises only from others, or that the

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results are someone else’s problem” (McIntyre 2018, 162).3 Our beliefs about race, sex, class, sexuality, gender, and so on are highly politicized and structured by power and by the epistemic communities of which we are all a part. If we are all subject to cognitive biases, how can we determine what the facts are, which of our beliefs are true, or which beliefs are genuinely (beyond the scope of “our own” epistemic community) undesirable?4

2.1 Truth and Undesirability Given its importance as an epistemic value, truth surely has something to do with undesirability, but truth is not enough to explain the moral aspects of undesirability that attend some of our more racist and sexist beliefs. In fact, the truth or falsity of a belief is not always simple or obvious. In paradigmatic cases—basic empirical statements about the world, for instance—the facts may seem obvious (although one thing the logical positivists did manage to demonstrate is just how complicated even the simplest of observation sentence really is). The snow I am looking at is indeed white, but not every observation is this straightforward. Empirical statements might also be vague. Is the image a duck or a rabbit? Is the woman old or young? Facts can appear obvious or ambiguous, depending on how one chooses to look—and it is not just optical illusions that have this effect. It also occurs in racialized cases. Some cases of racialized belief seem to allow for straightforward judgments of falsity. Take Kant’s assertion that being black from head to foot is clear proof that what one says is stupid (Kant 1960, 111, 113). This statement is (from within my epistemic community) simply false. However, just as not all experiential beliefs are decidedly true (or false), not all racialized beliefs are obviously false (or true)—or even racist. In the battle over Confederate monuments in the southern United States, I know people who think such monuments are obviously racist. I know people who simply and earnestly lament that “they” are taking our  McIntyre (2018).  For more on the universality of bias, see Antony (2016).

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history. I also know people who are genuinely torn by the issue. When whites speak of their history being taken, they (or at least some subset of “they”) are not being deliberately racist for the history they refer to is not a consciously racist one, even if slavery and racism are inherently intertwined with all matters related to the U.S. Civil War. Their conscious understanding of this history is instead a remembrance of the bravery and suffering of their forebearers during a time of war. Of course, it was also a war based on race, so for other people and other epistemic communities the racist past that these statues represent is obvious. Still, this obviousness is not universal. Those who fail to see the racist implications in Civil War statues may be numb and seeing only a partial picture—their view may even be epistemically culpable insofar as they overlook clear and abiding evidence of a racist past. Yet this need not entail that their beliefs are overtly racist, at least in the sense that some defenders of the monuments are focused on another aspect of the story. If narrative matters, who is to say which narrative—or which side of this argument—if either, is the epistemically correct position? Supposedly, “facts don’t lie,” so maybe we just need to be clear on our facts. “Facts,” however, are, as any philosopher can tell you, not simple. The problem of so-called facts is, at least partially, one of truth and how we determine truth. Truth is, of course, one of those deeply complex concepts that leads to intractable philosophical problems. For my purposes, I am not interested in truth per se. Others have dealt with the concept far more insightfully than I can.5 However, the undesirability of belief, especially moral beliefs, cannot be entirely divorced from an account of what makes our beliefs true. After all, true beliefs might be said to be inconvenient or difficult, but they cannot be said to be undesirable. I might find it unhappy to believe in the sort of suffering that wars produce or unhappy to believe that my car was just in an accident, but my beliefs about these matters cannot be said to be undesirable, even if the state of affairs is one I find undesirable. True beliefs are ones we should believe (and hopefully for good reasons). Thus, an undesirable belief is, at base, somehow a false belief—but for a belief with moral affect it is far  Too name just a few, see Williams (2010), Soames (1998), Horwich (1998), Blackburn (2005), Frankfurt (2010), Schmitt (1995). 5

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more than that. I might falsely believe that there are 167 jellybeans in the jar on the counter, or I might falsely believe that the criminal justice system in the United States is fair and equitable, regardless of the color of one’s skin. The latter belief is much more consequential, especially if shared by a large, epistemically influential subset of society. Yet, if we take seriously the challenges to truth that have been made, particularly by feminist philosophers who are ultimately concerned with justice, who is to say this, or any, belief is false?6 How do we go about establishing the truth or falsity of belief? The answer to this question determines much of what we can say about what makes beliefs desirable or undesirable. Many philosophers concerned with social justice underestimate just how critical a question this is. What makes this an especially critical question is that most feminists and race theorists are (with fairly good reason) skeptical of claims to Truth and Objectivity, arguing instead for, at most, small-t-truth and small-o-objectivity. A significant exception to this is Louis Antony, who claims, “I do believe in truth, and I have never understood why people concerned with justice have given it such a bad rap” (2002, 115).7 Many of those concerned with justice have indeed given truth a bad rap, choosing at times to follow something of a postmodern deconstruction of the concept.8 For instance, a philosopher like Richard Rorty, who was himself quite sympathetic to many of the aims of feminism, wants to say that truth is something like those beliefs that we are not currently challenging at this particular moment. Other philosophers like Michel Foucault (whose work has been widely used by those on the epistemic margins) would generally agree but would also take the Rortyan view one step

 For some feminist approaches to truth see Hawkesworth (1989), Hekman (1997, 2013), Benhabib (2008), Finlayson (2019). For a social science take on standpoint epistemology and truth see Paradies (2018). 7  Antony may be a fan of truth, but, unlike I make it sound, she is not a proponent of capital-T-­ truth, whatever that is. She is just more open and explicit about her commitment to truth than many feminists. 8  While no all liberatory epistemologists take this route, many have. My concern is primarily with those who have. I argue that the effects of taking this route are to put into question other philosophical aims like defending justice and liberatory practices. 6

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farther by adding a layer of power and dominance.9 The beliefs we are not currently challenging (but perhaps should be challenging) are ones built into certain power structures that deeply affect our lives. For Foucault, one sees that the core of critique is basically made of the bundle of relationships that are tied to one another, or one to the two others, power, truth and the subject. And if governmentalization is indeed this movement through which individuals are subjugated in the reality of a social practice through mechanisms of power that adhere to a truth, well, then, I will say that critique is the movement by which the subject gives himself the right to question truth on its effects of power and question power on its discourses of truth. (1997, 32)

For both Rorty and Foucault, there is no “matter of fact” to which truths point; rather, truth points not to “‘the way the world might be anyway’ … but toward possible future generations—toward the ‘better us’ to whom the contradictory of what now seems unobjectionable may have come, via appropriate means, to seem better” (Rorty 1993, 460). Rorty may have been the more optimistic, but like Foucault, he wants to say something like warrant is a sociological matter. It depends on how our peers (and power structures) respond to our beliefs.10 The same idea is echoed again in Hannah Arendt, who is described by Medina as rejecting “‘a definitive view of the world’ … [as] a vain and dangerous ambition that breeds intolerance and makes social learning processes impossible, for it leads people to ‘cling firmly to a single possible perspective’ and it fosters critical immunity to alternative experiential perspectives” (Medina 2013, 21). Within feminist epistemology—and standpoint theory specifically—the goal has often been to “de-centre ‘truth’ as monolithic and disrupt the notion that it resides within bodies that fit normative ideals, epitomised by those who are young White, male, slim, able-bodied, heterosexual and affluent” (Paradies 2018).11 While there is much to be said  The emphasis Foucault puts on power is perhaps one of the most significant reasons feminists have been drawn to his approach. 10  See, in particular, Rorty (1993, 449). 11  Not all feminists follow Foucault or adopt somewhat nihilistic attitudes toward truth, but the influence of Foucault and his intertwining of power and truth is unmistakable within much of liberatory thinking. It is this tendency—and the consequences of it—with which I am concerned. 9

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for rejecting a definitive view of the world as something that will move us past narrow and dangerous perspectives, the consequences of doing so are not always ameliorative of our epistemological positions. We want to say things like “sexism is a part of our world,” and “racism is wrong.” Yet if we make these claims from some perspective—a perspective not shared by other epistemic communities—and if this perspective is even a partial determiner of truth, then our assertion of the truth about sexism, racism, and the epistemic/moral consequences of each may only be true within our own perspective. This seems far too weak a peg on which to hang justice. Once the hold of truth is loosened, it becomes a much slipperier concept. This may, in many ways, be good for overcoming totalizing perspectives and destructive bias and other oppressive beliefs, but it is clearly bad for asserting claims of justice in adversarial situations. As McIntyre notes, “It is easy to identify a truth that someone else does not want to see. But how many of us are prepared to do this with our own beliefs? To doubt something that we want to believe, even though a little piece of us whispers that we do not have all the facts?” (2018, 162–163). Proponents of justice will naturally enough counter that they do have some facts, at least enough to warrant claims about attending to the oppressed. After all, numerous empirical studies and philosophical arguments alike attest to the existence of injustice in our world. The challenge comes, however, when we must encounter different interpretations of those facts, interpretations that may reject claims of injustice or even assert that injustices occur against epistemically dominant groups.12 The conclusions of these arguments are not ones “we” (in a particular epistemic practice) are often prepared to believe, but if Rorty and Foucault and those who follow them are right, our locatedness in the world matters to truth. If so, it may be that claims to truth are not nearly as significant now as they were in the past. After all, facts come with a point of view, which in turn makes truth negotiable.

 An example of this is the Blue Lives Matter response to Black Lives Matter.

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2.2 Whose Undesirability? Like truth, undesirability plays a role in epistemic practices in very different ways. Given how contextually situated the concept is, the undesirability of belief surely cannot be specified in any determinate manner. Still, we can begin by examining the ways the moniker of “truth” is bestowed upon (or withheld from) claims. Consider that the majority of whites actually reject outright, explicit assertions that black people are inherently inferior. Most of us are not that blatantly racist, and thus, to be a white supremacist is to occupy an epistemic practice that exists, if not on the margins, at least not fully within the mainstream. After all, most of us really do hold the beliefs of white supremacist to be false. This hesitancy of whites to come out wholeheartedly in favor of white superiority is what makes the existence of Klansman like Ellis such an embarrassment not simply for larger swaths of white society but even for the white politicians who supported Ellis—and who made sure their support remained secret.13 Of course, there are, even today, notable cases of politicians who have had success speaking such views, so perhaps the beliefs of white supremacists are not as extreme and not as widely held to be false as those of us Rorty calls “wet liberals” would hope. But those who succeed in politics with white supremacist views are still something of an exception. The majority of “us” seemingly reject hard core white supremacism, even if vestiges of it remain.14 Still, this is not enough to grant “truth” to our beliefs. The falseness of racist beliefs cannot be simply because we (whatever group “we” happens to be) think they are false. If truth and falsity are simply a matter of communal agreement, then we are doomed to rationally unwinnable culture wars.15 The problem is that  In a current play on this, a local Republican party Facebook page recently posted an image of the Republican symbol of an elephant with Ku Klux Klan imagery embedded in it. At the time of my writing this, the elected official responsible for posting the image has admitted only to making a mistake and has put out something of an apology/explanation, but is refusing to resign his elected office. See Koplowitz (2022). 14  I will discuss implicit biases in the following chapters. Here I am focused on the more extreme case only. 15  This is why Hilary Putnam, in particular, found himself at odds with Rorty’s pragmatism. See Putnam (1990). 13

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truth and objectivity are easy to assert but much, much harder to epistemically justify. Determining which group(s) get to stamp their views with the moniker of “truth” or, more to the point, “desirability,” is just part of the problem. The other part has to do with the fact that we can have good grounds for believing something that turns out to be false. Not every belief that lacks truth also lacks epistemic desirability. The history of science provides all sorts of wonderful examples of beliefs that were well justified at one time, even though we now reject them as false. We do not, for instance, hold Aristotle to be a lesser intellectual genius just because many of his beliefs about the physical world are no longer accepted. Nor do we think he had undesirable beliefs when it came to his scientific claims.16 Sure, many of his beliefs may now be considered false, but they were, at least in his day, far from undesirable. For a belief to be epistemically undesirable entails more than simply being false. It must have some other feature or features. One of the more rigorous efforts to define epistemic desirability is given by Nikolaj Nottelmann. While my own Wittgensteinian sympathies make me deeply suspicious of providing the sort of definitive conditions Nottelmann attempts, I am sympathetic to his efforts for such conditions offer an excellent starting point for thinking about what it means for a belief to be desirable. We can, as Wittgenstein would say, “draw a boundary for a special purpose” (1958, §69), and Nottelmann’s criteria help do this. According to Nottelmann, when it comes to desirability, special attention has been given to three desiderata: 1. Truth-conductivity: It is epistemically desirable that a belief is formed and (causally) sustained by a reliable process. 2. Adequate basing: It is epistemically desirable that, insofar as a belief is based on reasons, it is based on good reasons (grounds, evidence) 3. Reasonableness: It is epistemically desirable that an agent holding a belief has good rationalizing reasons (grounds, evidence) for holding that belief. (2007, 69)

 The same may not be said of his views toward women or his beliefs about slavery.

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From these three desiderata, Nottelmann derives three properties that make a belief undesirable from an epistemic perspective. 1. Lack of formation by a truth-conducive process: It is epistemically undesirable that a belief is not formed and (causally) sustained by a reliable process. 2. Inadequate basing: It is epistemically undesirable that a belief is based on reasons is not based on good basing reasons (adequate evidence, adequate grounds) 3. Unreasonableness: It is epistemically undesirable that an agent holding a belief does not have good rationalizing reasons (adequate grounds, adequate evidence) for holding that belief. (2007, 70) Each of these provides a solid reason for finding a belief epistemically undesirable. Given that we surely want beliefs formed by reliable processes and based on good reasons and having good grounds or evidence, perhaps these desiderata can demonstrate the epistemic inadequacy not just of garden variety beliefs but of many socially objectionable, offensive, oppressive beliefs. Consider the white supremacist’s belief that persons of color are inherently inferior. Such a belief surely appears to epistemically fail on all three counts. Time and time again, efforts to demonstrate the inferiority of people of color or to demonstrate the superiority of whites are shown to fail to meet these desiderata. Take the book The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray (1994). In this book, Herrnstein and Murry attempt to argue, among other things, that there is a link between race and IQ. Judging by the extant criticism, however, this link is clearly not definitively established. Far from it. It is subject to criticism for being formed by unreliable processes and for being based on inadequate (or at least heavily biased) grounds and for lacking good justifying reasons. Historically, similar efforts have suffered similar fates. So why, given such failures on all three criteria, would there be a problem declaring the beliefs of the white supremacists epistemically undesirable and dismissing them outright? The problem lies in the invisibility of our epistemic biases when we are speaking within shared epistemic practices. Put differently, if we

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ask the question “whose knowledge?” we will, in all likelihood, come up with different answers for different epistemic groups. Chances are that anyone reading this book probably does not need a lot of convincing of the undesirability of racist beliefs. However, the epistemic community of those interested in liberatory epistemologies is not the only epistemic community out there. Feminist philosophers in particular and social epistemologists more broadly have, as I have indicated, spent a great deal of effort insisting that we take seriously the question of “whose knowledge?”17 Lorraine Code (1993) directly asks this question. She takes the standard “S knows that p” formulation in epistemology and asks: who is “S”? Her claim is that it absolutely matters who S is. Yet if it absolutely matters who S is when it comes to race, sex, gender, culture, religion, and so on, it should also absolutely matter who S is when it comes to social and epistemic communities. For Code and others, because it matters who the knower is, “then it must follow that something peculiar to S’s character or nature could bear on the validity of the knowledge she or he claims” (1991, 2). Something “peculiar to S’s character” could be that S holds certain so-called undesirable beliefs, at least ones undesirable from other epistemological perspectives. The issue does not stop here as Code continues with a “variable construction” hypothesis which “requires epistemologists to pay as much attention to the nature and situation—the location—of S as they commonly pay to the content of p” (1993, 20). If we take p to be “whites are superior to blacks,” then we are being urged to consider the nature and situation of those who hold this belief—and the situation of someone like Ellis can suggest that he is very much a cog in an epistemological system that lies outside of his control. Of course, that is not the conclusion most feminists or others concerned with justice want to acknowledge. The focus is instead on the fact that contextualist sensitivities matter for those who seek liberatory epistemologies, not for those who oppose liberation. After all, focus on contextualist sensitivities is meant to open epistemological access to people who are excluded from traditional epistemologies and who thereby suffer both epistemically and morally. Yet if opening up contextual sensitivities works  This same question can be found in the moral arena in the form of MacIntyre’s Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988). 17

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one way, surely it must work in the opposite direction as well. It must allow for consideration of everyone shut out from the mainstream, even those who express exclusionary tendencies. If we have to ask questions about position and power and whose interests are served by our epistemological projects, then our doing so should also make us more aware of all of those who are marginalized (both on the political right and the left) within our epistemic communities. The concern here is that when feminists appeal to “our epistemological projects,” they assume a shared epistemic perspective and shared epistemic practices—and this is an assumption we are not going to be allowed when engaging and arguing with other epistemic communities.

2.3 Finding Fact in the Midst of Conflicting Value We live in an epistemically amorphous world—and it is not just feminists who think so. The admonition to consider whose knowledge is clearly not specific to those of us concerned with opening epistemological agency to the marginalized. It shows up even in more mainstream circles. Hilary Putnam, in Reason, Truth, and History, says that “there is no neutral conception of rationality to which to appeal” (1981, 136). He then, pace Elgin, adds, “if there is no conception of rationality one objectively ought to have, then the notion of a ‘fact’ is empty” (Putnam 1981, 136). Of course, for all her talk of facts being objective (Elgin 1996, 6), Elgin acknowledges that building a system of thought is dialectical, by which she means that “we mold specific judgments to accepted generalizations, and generalizations to specific judgments” (1996, 8). This sort of reflective equilibrium suggests that there is an interdependence or a holism to our systems of justification. Here again, we face an interdependence of fact and value. Here again, we face the emptiness of facts—until we agree on the value system that influences those facts. Here again, we face an epistemic obligation to consider whose knowledge when we ask questions about facts and about values. Fact and value and who holds which facts

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and what values necessarily play off each another.18 The values we hold influence the facts we discover—and vice versa. Facts are not simply there, to be read off the world in some value-neutral way. Yet if facts are empty or if they only appear internal to some structure or practice or manifestation of power, then the so-called facts of liberatory epistemologies may very well be undesirable falsehoods from within another epistemic point of view. “Undesirability” is as flexible in meaning as is “truth” and “fact.” The problem runs deeper than advocates of justice allow for even within mainstream accounts “there is [not] any reason to believe that a uniquely best system will emerge in the long run” (Elgin 1996, 8). In other words, we have the Quineian realization that our evidence is bound to underdetermine our theories. There is no single method we must use for accounting for the evidence. Of course, this may make it appear that there is no objectivity to be had, even if it is of necessity only a small-o objectivity. But that’s not Elgin’s conclusion (nor is it Quine’s nor is it the standpoint epistemologist’s).19 Elgin takes it that prima facie scientific claims are objective and that the value-ladeness of science, which she actually argues for, does not undermine this objectivity. In other words, objectivity (of some sort) is there to be had, even with the inextricability of values.20 This is a critical conclusion. Normative systems—which Elgin admits are guided by our interests, our purposes, and the problems we find at hand—must still be consistent with each other, coherent, and grounded in relevant facts (Elgin 1996, 10). It still must be the case that we be able to bring to bear logical and evidential consideration—not only for scientific questions but for moral and legal ones as well. The trick is precisely how we are to bring those evidential considerations to bear, especially given that our values do influence what evidence is available to us. The interdependence of evidence with our values makes this very tricky indeed. Unless we intend to reject the interdependence of fact and value, we owe our epistemic opponents in the debate over oppression,  This argument is also made by Putnam in chapter 6 of Reason, Truth, and History (1981).  For more on standpoint epistemology and objectivity see Harding (1993). 20  This is also argued for by Kuhn (1977). 18 19

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marginalization, silencing, and injustice argumentatively more than simply dismissing their beliefs as prima facie false or, perhaps worse, ignoring their reasons and reasoning. We owe them actual engagement. More technically, we cannot by fiat say that beliefs we disagree with lack formation by a truth-conducive process, that they have inadequate basing, or that they are unreasonable. Rather, we must be able to demonstrate this, at least if we are to maintain our own good epistemic practices. Of course, feminists have in many ways been doing this for years, arguing, for instance, that science needs to expand its horizons and consider more feminist biases in place of more androcentric ones. It is the mainstream practitioners of science and epistemology who are more guilty of a failure to engage. For example, a colleague of mine found himself up for promotion to professor (as an expert in epistemology) and was actually sensitive to the fact that he was being promoted without any knowledge of feminist epistemology. However, to the best of my knowledge, he has yet to educate himself about feminist epistemology in the decades since he was promoted.21 One can count as an expert without understanding issues surrounding marginalization. Surely feminist philosophers and race theorists do, as a rule, make more of an effort in these sorts of cases (likely because epistemic resistance is not allowed the luxury of dismissing outright the mainstream alternatives). Nevertheless, within liberatory thinking there is an assumption that the sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic beliefs we fight against are obviously wrong. In some ways, we have to make this assumption as it is simply impossible to argue everything all the time. It is, however, possible to argue some things some of the time, and proving the undesirability of oppressive beliefs is worth our time and effort. Taking seriously another’s beliefs involves considering the justification or warrant such beliefs have for those who hold such beliefs. To do this, we must be able to consider claims in a wider and more holistic context, much in the same way we consider (or should consider) scientific claims.  To my colleague’s credit, he does recognize his lack, but, as I will discuss shortly, the otherness of feminist epistemology often discredits it as “legitimate” within epistemological circles. The result? He need not actually take any action to correct his lack of knowledge concerning feminist epistemology. 21

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Put differently, we should consider hypotheses, claims, and beliefs—and the evidence put forward for them—from more than simply one perspective. Attempting to do this is often easier in the scientific case than in the moral or legal case for a couple of reasons. First, because science is very much built on the idea of peer review and the replication of results. Putting claims to the test is absolutely central to the process of science.22 Second, what counts as undesirability in science is typically something on which scientists will largely agree. Scientists value, for instance, accuracy, consistency, fruitfulness of theory, broadness of scope, independent testability, and even falsifiability. These values guide much of scientific discussion such that hypotheses which fail on one or more of these criteria will be non-starters for garnering scientific attention. Consider that, for the most part, scientists concur that those beliefs which fail to match the data or which fail to fit coherently within accepted epistemic systems are undesirable. After all, if a belief is explanatory of the data and fits within accepted scientific practice, it will find itself widely accepted. Such a standard by no means eliminates bias—and seriously problematic bias at that—but what it does do is show how we might just find our way through to a more objective means of establishing knowledge.23 Beliefs that explain features of our world within accepted practices are a good starting point for finding well-grounded claims to truth. The advantage of using scientific thinking as a model for how to approach the process of achieving warrant for claims of justice is that, even though it is less true now than it has ever been, science seems to remain about as close as we can still get to being a bastion of objectivity (even if we have to lower our expectations for what sort of objectivity can actually be asserted). What science has that morality and law often appear to lack is a world that we encounter in a very concrete way.24 One way to  This is somewhat true in legal arguments as well, but a key difference is that in the legal case, the burden of proof is placed entirely on the prosecution. In science the burden of proof is distributed more widely. 23  For examples of discriminatory bias in science see Tuana (2004), Longino (1987), Anderson (1995). 24  What I mean by this is science is not as much plagued by the messiness of “non-natural facts,” like morality, or by an adversarial system in which truth is subordinate to the way advocates of opposing sides represent the so-called facts. This does not imply that science is problem free or that it achieves some ideal notion of Objectivity, just that science can serve as a model for navigating a path to so-called truth. 22

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put the matter is this: sometimes we just have to deal with the fact that we ram our toes into furniture and no amount of rationalization or argumentation or theorization is going to take away that pain. Less colloquially, science must deal with a natural world that very much seems to dictate our beliefs, however underdetermined those beliefs may ultimately be, far more than our beliefs dictating the world. I can, for example, refuse to be vaccinated, but the way my values inform beliefs about vaccines is irrelevant to whether or not I contract a certain disease. Of course, values do remain significant in scientific endeavors. This is why the sense of objectivity that even science provides is less than the capital-O Objectivity that so many philosophers have historically sought. A give-­ and-­take exists between the investigative projects we propose and what the world reveals to us—but that need not be a bad thing. Feminist philosophers of science have, in particular, driven this point home: the values we use in approaching scientific investigation often dictate what we find, and if we critically examine our values, we might just end up with better knowledge in the end. What we need to do is find a balance between the evidence we have and the values that inform this evidence. When facts and values are entangled, we have to concern ourselves with how our values affect the so-called facts we discover and attempt to justify. This raises an absolutely central question concerning how we can effectively criticize any value-laden endeavor. After all, if values inform facts and if you and I have opposing values, then you and I may find that we encounter somewhat different evidence justifying our differing beliefs. This happens in all sorts of debates, but some of the clearest cases of values influencing interpretations of the evidence happen in moral debates. Consider arguments over abortion rights as a case in point. The biological fact, for example, that an embryo has a heartbeat at six or seven weeks may be evidence of the beginning of life—or it may not. Values will absolutely influence the significance granted to this empirical evidence as well as what conclusions we draw from this evidence—and not just in the moral realm but in the epistemological one as well. Of course, when it comes to efforts at criticizing any value-laden endeavor, doing so from an internal perspective will be much easier. When one shares the values of one’s moral or epistemological opponent, the parameters of criticism are much clearer. If we share the same standards of evaluation, we can work

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within a common justificatory framework to resolve disputes, and this makes the argumentative process less complicated. Sharing the same general values allows us to get on with evaluating the evidence without having to concern ourselves with the justificatory standards on which we already agree. These shared commitments, however, have a tendency to make many of our biases invisible to us—and it is this tendency that makes science appear at times more objective than it may actually be. Conversely, when we occupy different epistemic spaces or have different epistemic practices, we are (if we are at all reflective) likely to more readily see the assumptions being made on both sides of the argument; however, effective argumentation will also become much more difficult when the difference in values cut across opposing epistemological communities. When our epistemic values do not converge, we can easily argue at cross purposes because we may work with different yardsticks for evaluating arguments and evidence. Yet, any successful epistemic endeavor—at least any one that is going to engage a variety of epistemic communities—is going to have to find a way around value differences. One promising approach for effectively arguing (or at least attempting to argue) with those whom we find to hold unjust or immoral beliefs lies in Helen Longino’s contextual empiricism. While the original focus of contextual empiricism is specifically on how we validate scientific knowledge, nothing prevents it from being used to ground more objective knowledge-making within political, social, and moral contexts. In other words, if we want to argue that, say, people of color are marginalized and silenced and if we want to establish the truth of this claim not just for ourselves but across opposing epistemological communities or practices, then we should consider ways to ground our claims. Contextual empiricism is one such way. From the perspective of those who wish to support liberatory epistemologies, the chief advantage of this approach is that it demands that we acknowledge multiple epistemic communities with differing values and, thus, does not automatically subsume epistemically marginalized communities within more dominant ones. It seeks, in other words, a multiplicity of voices. This makes it a good starting point for a liberatory epistemology that can engage with a variety of epistemological perspectives. So how would contextual empiricism work to establish the

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genuine undesirability (and not just undesirability-within-my-epistemiccommunity) of certain beliefs? The concern here is obviously one of establishing some sort of objectivity. Within contextual empiricism, “a community’s practice of inquiry is objective to the extent that it facilitates transformative criticism” (Longino 2002, 103). What this implies is that objective practices require interaction with other epistemic communities. Put simply, objectivity is social. A community whose beliefs are insulated or whose beliefs cannot be challenged is a community that cannot be said to maintain an objective epistemic practice, and if their practices are not objective in this way, their so-called truths will remain internal to their system. An example of this sort of practice would be what C.S. Peirce would call the method of tenacity, a method consisting in reinforcing one’s own beliefs, however one arrives at them—often at all costs.25 This sort of person is one whom Peirce admires for his or her “decision of character,” but this is a method that Peirce argues is unconcerned with truth. This contrasts with his method of science which involves allowing one’s beliefs be constantly shaped and revised by what Peirce calls “the Real,” which we might call empirical data or natural phenomena. Of course, contextual empiricism will not appeal to “the Real,” but, as the pragmatists recognize, the constant shaping and revising of one’s beliefs, especially in light of criticism, is important to maintaining objectivity. To this end, Longino offers four criteria that are necessary for an epistemic practice to allow for transformative criticism: recognized avenues for criticism, community response, shared standards, and equality of intellectual authority. The first two criteria address epistemic practices and their standards; the second two criteria address the inclusiveness of the discussion that generates the criticism. With respect to the first two criteria, those that revolve around the practice of criticism, they entail not only the possibility of criticizing a community’s practices and the beliefs that they form as a result of those practices but also some actual response by the community showing that its beliefs change over time in response to criticism. They require engagement. With respect to the second two criteria, those that focus on inclusiveness, they require a sharing of 25

 See Peirce (1934).

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epistemic activity. That is, epistemic communities are not permitted to develop epistemic bubbles or echo chambers that fail to hear or that actively dismiss outside voices.26 With these two criteria, those who are critical of a practice must “appeal to something accepted by those who hold the position criticized” (Longino 2002, 104), and every member of the community must be considered capable of contributing to critical dialogue. In the end, the process of transformative criticism insists that our epistemic practices undergo meaningful challenge (both internally and externally) from a variety of perspectives. This is important, but less critical, when the discussion is internal to a practice. However, the meaningfulness of the challenge becomes absolutely critical when epistemic communities disagree. In the end, it may be that following through on transformative criticism will not, in actual practice, resolve debate (although that would certainly be a hoped for outcome), but such criteria can at least allow us rationally to criticize and critique beliefs across differing frameworks. In short, such criticism offers a means to ground claims to objective beliefs about undesirability.

2.4 Transformational Criticism and Undesirability So how do these four criteria assist in resolving debates and furthering support for the beliefs (hopefully desirable beliefs) of our epistemic community, assuming we are a community interested and engaged in rational defenses of our beliefs on equality and justice? Epistemically speaking, beliefs and the frameworks that surround those beliefs can be evaluated by considering, first, if they allow criticism. Even if a belief is true, it must be open to criticism. To not be open to criticism is for that belief to be dogmatically held in a way that undermines its justification. After all, if a belief is to be adequately justified, we must consider not only the evidentiary support in favor of it but also possible defeaters that speak against it. Justification requires a depth of consideration beyond simply prima facie support. To occupy an epistemic space that does not allow avenues of  I will discuss epistemic bubbles and echo chambers in the final chapter.

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criticism is to undermine one’s ability to adequately justify one’s beliefs since contrary evidence is often available. Even if that evidence is weak, we nevertheless must, in principle, be prepared to consider it. Something as simple as my believing the day is sunny can be brought into question should someone disagree and assert that it is cloudy. Given the fickleness of the weather, I would do well to consider this testimony, especially if I have not been outside in a while. Looking out the window may confirm my belief, but ceteris paribus it is epistemically best if I remain somewhat willing to entertain contrary testimony rather than dismissing it out of hand. This is all the more true in cases where the beliefs are more substantial, such as situations where justice is at stake, say, in a court of law. In legal proceedings the standard is often more than a simple preponderance of the evidence. We must instead consider reasonable doubts. When the stakes go up, so does the need to consider all sources of evidence. The result is that good epistemic practice requires that we engage with other communities of belief not only in situations where we disagree with their practice but also in marshalling epistemic support for our own practice. Of course, this requirement is understood by many liberatory epistemologists. For example, it is quite closely related to one of Medina’s guiding principles for an epistemology of resistance: namely, the principle of acknowledgement and engagement. Medina’s principle “dictates that all the cognitive forces we encounter must be acknowledged and … in some way engaged (even if in some cases only a negative mode of engagement is possible or epistemically beneficial)” (2013, 50). The evidence available from another perspective need not overturn our beliefs, but it should not be entirely ignored. This principle is fairly widely understood, even within those epistemic communities that actively dismiss evidence brought to bear from outside. Such communities still often engage that outside evidence. It is just that the engagement is sometimes one of outright dismissal. The engagement, in other words, can be deeply uncharitable and unfair—and can be criticized on those grounds—but it is engagement nonetheless.27 The upshot is that we should acknowledge those who reject  One example of this is the pundit Rush Limbaugh who would reframe and actively discredit other voices—but who nonetheless engaged with outside evidence, albeit in what would appear to be a less than epistemically genuine fashion. For more on this see Nguyen (2020, 150–153). 27

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or attack our beliefs. We are epistemically required to engage the criticism they offer and the challenge to our beliefs they propose. Closely related to the criterion that we allow criticism, is the second consideration: epistemic communities must respond to criticism by actually responding to it. It other words, we have to do something: reply, retort, rejoin—something. If we are going to be responsible epistemic agents, we are going to have to genuinely listen and react when criticism is offered to us. We do not have to necessarily change our beliefs in every circumstance, but involvement with the criticism is required. And when we genuinely engage with other cognitive forces this will, in all likelihood, cause our epistemic community’s beliefs to change over time.28 This change may be subtle, but it will be evident. After all, there are no perfectly justified belief systems, no absolutely indefeasible epistemic practices. We all have room for epistemic improvement. To deny this is to refuse to allow for genuine criticism, which violates the first criterion of transformative criticism. This is where the epistemic failure comes in for those communities that actively refuse to accept evidence brought to bear from the outside and actively refuse to adapt on the basis of criticism. When, for instance, outsiders are mocked as their evidence is dismissed, this is when not only marginalization of others takes place but also when a weakening of the epistemic practices within that epistemic community occurs. For there to be genuine criticism, there must also be some taking up of that criticism. Now, this does not mean that every single criticism should be taken up. Criticism can be rejected when found to be inadequate or unjustified. Yet if all criticism is ineffective, an epistemic practice would be impervious to criticism—and that is a problem. Third, any well-grounded criticisms of epistemic practices external to our own requires that our criticisms be ones others can accept (even if they fail to do so). This is challenging and difficult. It means that, whether or not the criticism is actually effective, the criticism must appeal to some shared values or epistemic standards if it is to have any chance of being effective. It means, in short, that genuine epistemic debates must find common ground. Of course, some epistemic communities, those caught  As will become clear, this is where those caught in echo chambers epistemically fail—they do not engage in a way that has any effect on their own epistemic practices. 28

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in echo chambers, for example, where only the voices of those within the epistemic practice are allowed to be heard, may not be willing to engage in debate. Nevertheless, those outside of these insular communities are still called upon to epistemically participate by appealing to standards that speak to the practices of these narrowly focused communities. This is an especially onerous requirement when others do not wish to engage or when they go so far as to actively discredit outsiders, but the requirement does not thereby disappear. That something is difficult does not absolve us of the effort. If we do not seek common epistemic ground, however slight, criticism will surely fail to engage a practice in a way that those participating in that practice will be able to accept. Put simply, criticism cannot take hold if it fails to find commonality. Here, Socrates had the right idea with his use of irony.29 Take the case of Euthyphro. Socrates clearly thought Euthyphro was wrong in his understanding of piety, but telling someone straight away that they are wrong is usually not a particularly effective way to attempt to teach him the error of his ways—nor does it adequately justify the position for which one is arguing. Socrates’ method sought common ground with his interlocutors, and in doing so, it also established his own position (in this case that Euthyphro did not know what piety was). It may not have always been successful at persuasion, but it had the advantage of making the arguments live options for those with whom he conversed. Those we criticize may not actually recognize our criticism as applicable within their own practices, but we need to make the effort to engage their concerns from standards they can (in principle) accept. We should, when we can, make arguments from a framework that others could accept. The issue with approaching problems of cross-cultural epistemic criticism in this way is that it may seem to set up a situation in which criticism can only be internal to a practice—but this need not be the case. We need not adopt another community’s standards. Instead, we are simply asked to consider what are the standards of evaluation within another perspective and to find a way to speak to those standards rather than ignoring them altogether. It may be, for instance, that I consider your reasoning for your position and show, using your standards, that your 29

 Assuming, of course, his inquiry was genuine.

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conclusion fails to follow, or it may be that I argue at a meta-level against your justificatory standards. It may be that I focus on those epistemic values we share in common, or it may be that I try to convince you to see the merit of my values. There are a multitude of different ways that we can seek some common epistemic ground. This criterion basically just says that criticism, to be effective, must find some common justificatory standard among competing epistemic practices. Failure to engage you on terms that you accept will rightfully lead to the criticism falling on deaf ears. Finally, the last of the criteria of transformative criticism requires the equal distribution of intellectual authority. When it comes to any epistemological framework oriented toward including marginalized and oppressed voices, this criterion is especially significant. After all, it is precisely when we fail to equally distribute intellectual authority that we find various epistemic practices and perspectives silenced. This is when epistemic marginalization becomes manifest. This is when testimonial and hermeneutical injustices occur. If we do not distribute intellectual authority equally, then practices lacking social or political power can very easily be dismissed, ignored, or erased. The result is that criticism from those avenues, avenues that are not immanent to the dominant epistemic practice, is shut out and segregated. The refusal to grant intellectual authority to epistemic outsiders shuts out those voices that lie on the margins. An epistemic agent that is not granted intellectual authority may well be subject to testimonial injustice, lacking as she might the ability to be heard by others. An epistemic practice that is not granted intellectual authority may well be subject to hermeneutical injustice, lacking as it might the ability to make social experience clear to those outside the practice. However, these sorts of exclusions are not only a matter of epistemic justice, they are a matter of good epistemic practice, period. This is why the demand for an equitable distribution of intellectual authority is one that is absolutely critical to any epistemology, liberatory or otherwise. While failing to distribute epistemic authority can easily produce epistemic injustice, it also harms epistemic practices, both for those who are excluded and for those doing the excluding. This is recognized by Medina, who argues that “the social distortions and epistemic obstacles created by conditions of oppression affect all subjects, both oppressor and the

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oppressed” (2013, 45). When an epistemic practice shuts off broader criticism, it not only harms those whose epistemic agency is undermined, it also limits its own ability to transform its biases so that they are less an impediment to knowing well. It loses the push toward a greater objectivity and to a more complete, more defensible version of truth, as imperfect as that may be. So, the harm goes both ways. A good epistemological practice, one that meets the criteria of transformative criticism, is open to a variety of voices. In other words, for epistemic criticism to be truly transformative, the criticism cannot come only from the powerful or from the epistemically advantaged. It cannot come only from the epistemic center.30 While the equal distribution of intellectual authority may be one of the most important ways of overcoming the isolation, marginalization, and silencing of certain epistemic practices, it may also be the most difficult of the criteria to navigate—and the most threatening to the aims of liberatory epistemology. If nothing else, it is the criterion that most clearly cuts both ways, working for and against liberatory aims. It can, after all, also be used by those with epistemic advantages who believe they are being unfairly disadvantaged by being asked to forsake their privilege. Such objections may be taken by those outside of the dominant epistemic community to be a perversion of the aims of seeking intellectual equality, but as with all of the criteria of transformative criticism, equal distribution of intellectual authority is open to interpretation and negotiation. In some ways, those at the epistemic center may be right when claiming they are being denied equality of intellectual authority. The equal distribution of epistemic authority (whether that distribution be literal or figural) is simply not on the agenda for many who argue for liberatory epistemologies. Not every liberatory epistemology aspires to mere equality. Take standpoint epistemology as a case in point. At the heart of standpoint epistemology lies the suggestion that those on the epistemic margins may have an advantage over those in the more dominant epistemic position.  I will return to this point, but one way of thinking about this is in terms of hermeneutical injustice. If we allow only certain epistemic communities to contribute “to the shared pool of concepts and interpretive tropes that we use to make generally shareable sense of our social experiences” (Fricker 2016, 163), we create a world that marginalizes (often due to prejudice) the voices of those left out of communal meanings. For more on this point see Fricker (2016). 30

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In other words, there is an asymmetry thesis built into standpoint theory, which is designed to show why knowers from underprivileged epistemic perspectives may, despite the disadvantages they suffer, nevertheless be better knowers. The goal here is not to argue that those outside the dominant epistemic perspectives deserve mere epistemic equality but rather to assert that they may have an epistemic superiority. After all, they see not only from their own perspective but from that of the oppressor as well. The catch here, or at least one catch, lies in the fact that epistemic marginalization does not guarantee an epistemological superiority, especially given the great liabilities placed on those within the margins. We must be careful about over idealizing what marginalized knowers who are oppressed by dominate power structures are actually capable of knowing. Settling for an equality, rather than superiority, of epistemic perspective might be a safer play, even if equality is itself a difficult concept. Regardless, what seems quite evident is that claims concerning the equality of intellectual authority cannot be taken to mean that, literally, every person’s beliefs or every epistemic practice is equal. It is just not the case that each of us are intellectually equal in every context and situation. For instance, when it comes to medicine, my beliefs are not epistemically equal to my doctor’s in an important respect: I just don’t have the medical background and depth of understanding that a licensed physician has. For example, when I see a drug advertised, mention it to my doctor, and am told that this medicine is not appropriate for me, I have little basis on which to object, although I could go for a second opinion. On the other hand, because I live constantly within my own skin, I do know certain things about my body much better than a doctor ever could. This provides me with a certain expertise—a certain intellectual authority that my doctor would be well-advised to take seriously. Patients clearly have intellectual authority in such situations, but insofar as there is an equality, it is not a literal case of equality given the unequal epistemic standing. Numerous cases like this exist: teachers and students, parents and children, experts and laypeople, among others. In the practice of medicine specifically, there is a clear epistemic benefit to distributing intellectual authority. Doctors and patients each bring something quite valuable to the table, but the kind of authority differs in the case of each participant.

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Such distribution, however, does not and should not apply to every circumstance. We should not, in other words, allow that every epistemological practice has equal standing in the process of constructing knowledge. Consider two different cases: one of science deniers, the other of colorblind logics. Science deniers, such as young earth creationists, assert that their perspective should be granted equal intellectual authority with evolutionary theory. They have even made inroads within the U.S. educational system, despite their view being inconsistent with our current best scientific theories and methods. They want to be an alternative that is placed before knowers, who then can freely choose between two incompatible—but presumably epistemically equal—alternatives. They demand an equal right to be heard. Similarly, those who appeal to colorblind logic, like those who respond to the Black Lives Matter movement with their own All Lives Matter retort, argue for an equal right to be heard. For those expressing a colorblind logic, the problem of race is one generated not by whites but by those people of color who claim race matters. The people who cling to race rather than move beyond it are, on this account, the ones who perpetuate racism. Those with a colorblind logic will use rights-based language to promote their own agenda, demanding an equal authority in social debate, presuming that people of color are somehow asking for some advantage in their claims for justice. At times, these arguments seem to win the day. There are situations in which young earth creationism is granted an equal hearing with evolutionary theory in science classes or when colorblind logics are integrated into school textbooks.31 These cases, whether science-deniers or advocates of colorblindness, are not typically ones where we (Rorty’s “wet liberal ‘we’”) find as clear a need for the equal distribution of intellectual authority, although it would be a mistake to dismiss their authority out of hand. Evolutionary theorists are not immune from epistemic responsibility to defend their view against creationist criticisms since all theories, especially scientific theories, do assume a notable burden of proof. On the other hand, to grant equal intellectual authority to creationist criticisms, which undermine our very understanding of the highly successful  The Texas school board has, for instance, even suggested eliminating reference to slavery in textbooks. They favor the term “involuntary relocation” rather than “slavery.” 31

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epistemic project that is science, does us an intellectual disservice. In the same way, defenders of racial and sexual justice should be capable of arguing the positive case for social reforms, but that need not imply that the would-be-oppressor’s view (the white supremacist or the misogynist perspective, for example) has the same sort of epistemic credibility given the rather overwhelming empirical evidence for systemic racism and sexism. Epistemic authority does need to be distributed across a variety of practices and perspectives much more widely than it is, but intellectual authority is something that must be earned (partly through engagement in the process of transformative criticism) rather than simply given.

2.5 The Challenge of Intellectual Authority Because there is a cacophony of voices claiming intellectual authority from a variety of epistemic communities, it may not always be easy to determine whose intellectual authority gets to count. What or whose standards are we to use in establishing intellectual authority? For good or for ill, the problem of evaluating competing epistemic perspectives is not a particularly new one. For several decades, feminist epistemology has been dealing with the problem of bias, which shares something in common with the problem of establishing epistemic credibility—both require sorting through different and conflicting perspectives to sort through the good, the bad, and the indifferent. In other words, both require establishing standards of evaluation in the absence of some transcendent perspective or some independent yardstick that would allow for impartial, objective judgments. Even though one of the most successful endeavors of feminist philosophy has been showing the inherent (and often androcentric) bias in all things epistemological, what feminists have been less successful at doing has been establishing criteria for actually distinguishing good biases from bad ones. Of course, feminists do implicitly (sometimes explicitly) divide bias into the categories of good biases and bad biases, but too often the evaluation of bias is assumed rather than argued. In particular, feminists often want to say things along the following lines: androcentric biases in

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philosophy and science have led our knowledge astray, but including feminist biases will help us have more reliable, stronger, more epistemically sound practices. The problem is, however, that those who make these arguments typically fall short in establishing principled reasons for the distinctions between the differing types of bias. The problem even has a name: the bias paradox.32 A generic statement of the bias paradox goes as follows: (P1) The ideal of impartiality should be rejected. (P2) If we reject the ideal of impartiality, there can be no justified procedure for normatively distinguishing among competing epistemic views. (C1) There can be no justified procedure for normatively distinguishing among competing epistemic views. (Modus Ponens, P1, P2) (P3) If there can be no justified procedure for normatively distinguishing among competing epistemic views, then all accounts are epistemically equal. (C2) All accounts are epistemically equal. (Modus Ponens, C1, P3)33

Independently of what side of an argument one is on, very few (if any) of us want to embrace the view that all knowledge claims or epistemic practices are epistemically equal. We do not, in other words, want literal equality of epistemic perspective or of intellectual authority. Too much is riding on social and political debates for any of the participants to grant this. We need some standards for epistemic evaluation, even if those standards cannot be thoroughly impartial. As a result, equality of intellectual authority, while laudable, still needs some fleshing out. How, then, can we make claims to intellectual authority work in the pursuit of justice? One avenue for this will necessarily include a justification of how including marginalized voices will better our epistemic endeavors—and this is an area where feminists and race theorists have done a great deal of work. For example, feminist philosophers of science have argued persuasively in favor of including women’s voices and perspectives as a way to make science epistemically better. This is the whole 32  This paradox is first highlighted by Antony (2002). For more on this paradox see: Campbell (1998, 2001), Rolin (2011), Heikes (2004). 33  See Heikes (2011).

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point of Longino’s transformative criticism after all.34 Even though the idea of transformative criticism focuses on the sciences, the criteria involved have in many ways been used widely to argue for more inclusiveness for women (regardless of the color of their skin) and for people of color (regardless of their sex and gender). Additionally, feminists have argued rather successfully that social situatedness matters and that those on the epistemic margins see more clearly the biases of mainstream practices.35 This is one way to establish an intellectual authority that is inherently built on an inequality of epistemic position but to do so by flipping the script. The epistemically disadvantaged become potentially better, stronger, clearer epistemic voices hence conferring intellectual authority in spite of epistemic hardship. In another form, the effort to privilege those who clearly lack epistemic standing is manifest in Du Bois’ “double consciousness.” Over a century ago Du Bois writes: After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-­consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. (1997, 38)

 Other good examples of arguments in favor of the inclusion of women’s marginalized voices— and the benefit these voices bring to the activity of science—can be found in Longino (2002). For a discussion of the deeper threat that alternative epistemologies can have on mainstream epistemologies see Collins (1996). As Collins concludes, “an alternative epistemology challenges all certified knowledge and opens up the question of whether what has been taken to be true can stand the test of alternative ways of validating truth” (1996, 241). This hints at the problem inherent in undermining traditional, dominant epistemologies—we have to replace them with something rather than simple undermine them. 35  For an example of this sort of argument see Harding (1993). For discussion of the liabilities (and advantages) of this view see Medina (2013, 40–48). 34

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While this passage has been interpreted in a number of different ways, Mills takes it to demonstrate something very similar to what standpoint epistemologists would say about the epistemic advantages that are to be had when one occupies space within the margins, only in this case the epistemically privileged are not men but whites. Says Mills, on the positive epistemic side, the route to black knowledge is the self-­ conscious recognition of white ignorance…. The attainment of “second sight” requires an understanding of what it is about whites and the white situation that motivates them to view blacks erroneously. One learns to see through identifying white blindness and avoiding the pitfalls of putting these spectacles for one’s own vision. (1997, 19)

Where whites are struck by a problematic ignorance that affects their epistemic (and moral) vision, blacks (and other people of color) are able to see more clearly precisely because they can see what whites do not allow themselves to see. The underlying message is that women’s voices and black voices and the voices of other marginalized groups (e.g., Latinx or LGBTQ+ groups) would strengthen our epistemic practices if those voice were to be allowed and to be heard. Intellectual authority comes in a variety of forms. This is very much at the heart of transformative criticism. However—and this is a point that is often lost—for transformative criticism to work effectively, it must also work the opposite direction and allow for criticism of those views that actually struggle for justice and equality. In other words, we cannot simply assume that the marginalized have a superior intellectual authority as a result of their marginalization, especially since the marginalized do suffer a great many epistemic injustices that hamper their ability to function as equal participants in the epistemic life of communities. There must be room to criticize voices from outside the dominant framework. In many instances, this is far from a problem because those involved in transformative projects are usually not only subject to criticism but also open to it. In fact, openness to criticism is precisely why there is, for example, not only first and second wave feminism but third wave feminism, maybe fourth wave, and presumably a yet to come fifth wave. Feminists are typically receptive to criticism in ways their critics often appear not to be. Feminists have consistently responded to criticism in

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ways that have changed and expanded feminism—often for the better. They allow a variety of voices to be included in this discussion, even if the inclusion is not always easy or smooth. More recent feminists often criticize earlier feminists for a lack of concern with intersectionality, and feminists have responded by being more open to concerns of intersectionality. The criticism has indeed been transformational, even if intersectionality has its own critics. Nevertheless, the criticisms that feminists typically respond to are, for the most part, internal, coming from within other feminist or race-based projects. The transformations of feminism toward a broader, more intersectional understanding of their own projects have been motivated from within. What feminists, and more recently race theorists, are less accustomed to is adapting to criticism that lies outside of their own practices. Part of the reason for this is that those outside these fields often ignore or even actively dismiss them as offering nothing constructive to epistemological debates.36 Part of the reason is that outside criticism can fail to meet the standards of transformative criticism, especially by not engaging with feminist or race theory in constructive ways.37 To take an example from popular culture, consider, for example, the moniker “feminazi,” which has been attached to feminists by their critics. This is a pejorative term that seeks to mock and dismiss feminist aims without any genuine or transformative engagement with feminist ideas. Less mockingly, but just as marginalizing, is the academic community’s treatment of feminist concerns as peripheral to mainstream efforts. As Phyllis Rooney (2011) notes, within epistemology “proper” there is an implicit (perhaps sometimes explicit) assumption that feminist epistemology is not genuine epistemology. Feminist work is considered “other,” and the insights feminist epistemology offers are ignored within the larger field. Ignorance and erasure of feminist concerns for inclusivity demonstrates a culpable lack of engagement. That is, those who are critical of liberatory projects s­ imply refuse to engage these projects in any meaningful way—and that makes  This may be less true in ethics or political theory, but even there, the discussion can ignore issues of exclusions based on sex/gender or race as if justice and injustice along these axes are not worth full attention. 37  Consider, for instance, Pinnick et al. (2003) and Anderson (2006). Also see Rooney (2011). 36

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it all the more difficult for those engaged in such projects to respond to their critics. Even though marginalization of feminist projects is evident throughout a variety of academic disciplines, it is in the broader rhetoric of feminist and race theory where the rhetoric gets particularly ugly. Debates about access to abortion rights or about injustices within the criminal justice system, for example, often devolve into shouting matches and sometimes even violence. Little transformative criticism happens in these cases, which in turn undermines our epistemological efforts to find some so-called truth on these issues. At the heart of the problem is a lack of respect for the other’s epistemic practices. For instance, when white supremacists attack race theory, they fail to do so in ways that demonstrate a commitment to shared standards or equality of intellectual authority. Yet, many times neither are race theorists willing to transformatively engage the white supremacist. When someone is shouting you down, denying your intellectual authority, or otherwise seeking to silence you, it is not at all easy to grant intellectual authority. It is not at all easy to find common epistemic ground for argument when your own epistemic authority is denied. It is not at all easy to alter beliefs in response to those who wish to eradicate your own epistemic practices. Nevertheless, it remains important that we have some means for establishing claims about oppression and justice as warranted—and perhaps even true. Justice is not simply a matter of one group’s narrative. It remains important that we can show our beliefs to be the epistemically (and morally) desirable ones to hold. How, then, do we transformatively engage alternative views enough to epistemically justify the undesirability of what the we who believe we hold the moral high ground also believe to be undesirable?

2.6 Undesirable Belief and Exculpatory Reasons The crux of the problem is establishing the undesirability of belief. After all, if we can demonstrate undesirability, we thereby demonstrate grounds for not holding that belief. None of us really wants to hold undesirable

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belief.38 Even those who hold what “we” consider undesirable beliefs do not themselves think of their beliefs as undesirable but rather as getting at some (perhaps unfortunate) truth. Unhappily, because our epistemology has made a social shift and our understanding of truth has become contextual, the task of establishing undesirability is rather difficult. Undesirability is not a universal notion. The challenge, then, is to find some means of establishing undesirability within standards that speak to both sides of a debate—a debate that perhaps neither side is interested in engaging in if the views are far enough apart or if one side of the debate dismisses outright the epistemic authority of the other. When we can find a way to actively engage with other epistemic practices, the argument against holding some particular undesirable belief becomes much, much easier to make. This, in turn, increases the possibility of engaging in genuinely transformative criticism. At times, though, it seems as if engagement is impossible, especially with epistemic communities intent on not engaging with others or even intent on actively discrediting others. The deep nature of disagreement means that we may have a great deal of difficulty proving genuinely undesirability or undesirability beyond simply what the narratives of my community may ascribe. The difficulty of establishing the non-relativistic undesirability of belief in a post-truth world cannot be overestimated. It may be that finding room for transformative criticism is the best we can do in terms of negotiating among various epistemic practices which beliefs are epistemically undesirable. Of course, achieving actually transformative criticism is hardly a given. Others have to be willing to play the game in order for this to happen. Still, when transformative criticism happens, when we successfully navigate among various communities in a back-and-forth, we may very well find ourselves capable of convincing others who fail to share our epistemic practices. If we actually pull this off, this method will have the virtue of distributing epistemic authority across a variety of communities and creating some version of what Medina would describe  One commentor on an earlier discussion of this paper pointed out that in the medical field, in particular, people sometimes will tell their doctors, “Don’t tell me. I can’t take any more bad news.” In such a case, perhaps people do want to believe falsely (although not undesirably), but I suspect that rather than wanting to believe falsely, what they really want is for the truth to be different than it is. 38

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as a polyphonic contextualism (2013, 21). Unfortunately, this method of coming to agreement also has a notably large liability insofar as many communities will simply reject criticisms of their epistemic practices and charges of the undesirability of their beliefs. Yet the we-who-reside-­ outside-of-that-epistemic-community may very well desire to hold people responsible for their undesirable beliefs, even when they fail to recognize or even acknowledge that undesirability. That is, even when the relevant beliefs are well-justified within their own epistemic practices, those of us in other communities may still level charges of undesirability and hold others epistemically accountable for holding those beliefs. We want epistemic blame. The central difficulty here is that if, within an epistemic practice, a belief is held to be desirable, we can hardly be blameworthy for holding that belief. Consider, again, Nottelmann’s generic notion of undesirability: lack of truth-conductivity, lack of adequate basing, and lack of reasonableness. We can hold beliefs that fail to be true (on some version of truth), that lack evidence, or that we fail to have good reasons for holding—and even so, we might not be blameworthy for holding the belief, however undesirable.39 That is, even when a belief is undesirable, we may incur no epistemic blame for holding it. Says Nottelmann, An agent is epistemically blameworthy for holding the belief that p if, and only if 1. She believes that p. 2. Her holding of the belief that p is epistemically undesirable. 3. She enjoys a mode of doxastic control M belonging to the set M* over her holding of the belief that p and it is either the case that

(a) The epistemic undesirability of her holding the belief that p is caused by an exercise of M and she has no appropriate excuse for that exercise. Or (b) The epistemic undesirability of her holding of the belief that p is caused by an omission of an exercise of M and she has no appropriate excuse for that omission. (2007, 82)

 For the moment, I assume that a belief can be blameworthy. This is an assumption I will challenge and respond to in the next chapter. 39

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This amounts to is saying something like, Jeanie actually holds a belief that, say, whites are intellectually superior to blacks, that her holding this belief lacks truth-conductivity, adequate basing, and reasonableness,40 and that she has not only some control over holding this belief but also no appropriate excuse for holding that belief—but if her epistemic community endorses that belief, she might just have an appropriate excuse.41 Despite the awkwardness of this conclusion, something seems right in saying that epistemic blameworthiness can be overridden if one has an appropriate excuse for exercising or failing to exercise some control over the undesirable occurrence. And something seems right in saying that a belief being widely held in my community offers good reason for me to believe it. The question, then, is whether communal assent might provide a legitimate exculpatory reason for undesirable (from the perspective of those outside my community) beliefs. Of course, this is just a narrower version of the question of what constitutes an appropriate excuse—but if one has a legitimate excuse, of whatever sort, surely that person’s undesirable belief will be less culpable than other cases where such an excuse is lacking. Furthermore, since truth is less than absolute, the first condition on desirability (i.e., truth-conduciveness) will likely be responsive to what sorts of excuses we have for holding the beliefs that we do. After all, would my community’s holding a belief to be true not provide me with a solidly appropriate excuse for holding it, regardless of how undesirable it might be to others? What it is for an excuse to be appropriate is far from obvious; yet if some excuses are indeed exculpatory, understanding when an excuse is appropriate ultimately will matter if not to the undesirability of belief, then to our epistemic responsibility for holding that belief. Coping with the idea of what makes an epistemic excuse appropriate is not a new topic for epistemologists. One of the most obvious candidates  This refers back to Nottelmann’s specification of the conditions for epistemic undesirability (2007, 69). 41  The penultimate consideration here, doxastic control, is a dicey one that I will deal with in some depth when I discuss the nature epistemic responsibility in the next chapter. Prima facie, it is not always clear that we actually do have the kind of doxastic control that allows for the sort of epistemic responsibility. For the moment, I will simply assume the requisite doxastic control and focus instead on the idea of an appropriate excuse and whether having such an excuse undermines our blameworthiness for undesirable beliefs. 40

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for appropriate excuse for undesirable belief, especially the sorts of undesirable beliefs related to race or to sex/gender, is cultural limitations. Our culture is, after all, the source of a great many of our beliefs—but this cultural inheritance is something we do not get to make up ourselves. As Neil Levy and Mark Alfano argue, “the formation and maintenance of cumulative cultural knowledge does not rely on dispositions in virtue of which [individual] agents deserve credit” (2020, 905). We are, in other words, dependent upon our cumulative culture in formulating knowledge. Yet surely our cultural backgrounds affect our ability to know certain actions (and, by extension, certain beliefs) are wrong. In some sense, I cannot know more than the epistemic practices and knowledge of my community will permit. Cultural background is such a strong determiner of knowledge that even if it fails ultimately to offer exculpatory excuses, it has often been used as an excuse. The story goes, for example, that ancient peoples could not have known that slavery was wrong because they had no alternative views available to them. Consider Michael Slote’s argument: Just as ignorance of the alternative terms used by other languages can make matters of linguistic convention seem to be inevitable facts of nature, so too can ignorance of alternatives to a given social arrangement instil [sic] the belief that the arrangement is natural and inevitable and thus beyond the possibility of radical moral criticism. So if the ancients were unable to see what virtue required in regard to slavery, that was not due to personal limitations (alone) but requires some explanation by social and historical forces, by cultural limitations … (1982, 72).

On this account, individual citizens of the ancient world had an appropriate excuse for slavery. Their cultures simply failed to acknowledge other possibilities for ordering their society—and because the cumulative culture which surrounded them accepted slavery as a norm, those who believed slavery was permissible were simply believing in accordance with their culture. They were, in short, ignorant of alternative social

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arrangements.42 As a result, their beliefs, which are undesirable to us, could not have been epistemically undesirable to them. That such ignorance is a genuinely appropriate excuse is problematic for those who wish to assert the wrongness of slavery, as does Michelle Moody-Adams (1994). While she considers slaveholders of the 1850s as well as the ancients, she goes further than mere slavery and addresses authors who seek, much more controversially, to excuse Hitler Jugend or male chauvinists of previous generations. From at least some epistemic perspectives which allow for cultural epistemic dependence, people within each of these groups have some diminished responsibility for their actions based on a kind of widespread cultural ignorance. That is, their beliefs may have been undesirable, but people in these cultures supposedly could not have known of this undesirability due to the popularity and seemingly universal acceptance of such beliefs within their social milieu. In all these examples, the argument is the same: culture made me believe it. Now, on a cursory glance (and especially if we consider beliefs with far less moral import), it is somewhat reasonable that our beliefs should appear more desirable when they are the result of cultural acceptance. That is, if truth is genuinely open to negotiation, then widespread acceptance can affect how desirable a belief may be—and even if truth has a more solid ground than the true-for-me crowd might allow, widespread acceptance will still affect how desirable a belief may appear. As a result, the responsibility of the Hitler Jugend, the 1850s slaveholder, or the male chauvinist can, some will argue, be diminished, despite the fact that we look back on their beliefs and find them undesirable from our perspective.43 It may also be reasonable that we have diminished responsibility both for beliefs and for actions if they are widely, perhaps almost universally, accepted within our culture. After all, much of what we individually  Much more on ignorance and the role in plays in epistemological exculpation in Chap. 4.  One might rightfully protest this in the situations of adult 1850s slaveholders and male chauvinists (after all, we think adults should know better), but Hitler Jugend have the added excuse of being children and, thus, less epistemically responsible in general. Of course, the argument can be made that the slaveholder and the chauvinist developed their views while children and, thus, during a time when they are clearly epistemically dependent upon the knowledge of their cumulative culture. 42 43

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believe (and desire and do) is clearly shaped by the culture of which each of us is a part.44 The concern, though, is whether such beliefs are undesirable in spite of their widespread acceptance. If our culture widely accepts the belief, say, that slavery is permissible, are we thereby epistemically excused for holding that belief even if that belief turns out to be false? One of the more controversial cases Moody-Adams cites is from Susan Wolf, who explicitly offers an excuse for the falsely believing slaveowners of the 1850s, Nazis of the 1930s, and “many male chauvinists of our father’s generation” (1987, 56–57). According to Wolf, These are people, we imagine, who falsely believe that the ways in which they are acting are morally acceptable, and so, we may assume, their behavior is expressive of or at least in accordance with those agent’s deep selves. But their false beliefs in the moral permissibility of their actions and the false values from which these beliefs derived may have been inevitable, given the social circumstances in which they developed. If we think that the agents could not help but be mistaken about their values, we do not blame them for the actions those values inspired. (1987, 57)

This is, for my money, a rather surprising and eye-opening defense of the excusability not only of belief but also of some deeply immoral actions. Setting aside the responsibility such agents might have had for their actions, Wolf ’s choice of examples indicates an incredibly strong position on how greatly cultural influence can diminish epistemic responsibility. She suggests that the beliefs of 1850s slaveholders, 1930s Nazis, and mid-­ twentieth century male chauvinists may have been inevitable. Yet in none of these particular social situations does it seem these beliefs were inevitable. Despite talk of cumulative cultural inheritances, cultures are never monolithic, and in each of these three specific examples powerful social forces stood in resistance to them. Put differently, given the social circumstances of each of these times, Wolf ’s language is strong indeed, for each time period has clear examples of those who did not hold these beliefs inevitable.  Whether or not we are actually responsible for such culturally influenced beliefs will be a subject for later discussion, specifically in Chap. 4. 44

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The abolitionist movement, for instance, was well established by the 1850s. In fact, it was fairly well established by the late eighteenth century. No slaveholder living within a decade of the U.S. Civil War could have been entirely ignorant (at least not without some active and culpable effort) of the debates over slavey. In Germany, Dietrich Bonhoeffer offered a clear alternative to Hitler’s way of thinking and believing—nor was he the only dissident at the time. Finally, women’s suffrage occurred early in the twentieth century, and although feminism proper came much later, the world still had Mary Wollstonecraft and Simon de Beauvoir, Rosie the riveter, and early voices speaking towards women’s equality. Male chauvinistic beliefs hardly seemed culturally inevitable, although they were less challenged than slavery in the 1850s or Nazism in the 1930s. Each of these cases offer beliefs that are strongly, culturally inculcated, but the evidence suggests that none of them were inevitable. Deeply concerning, however, is the suggestion that these particular examples show epistemic blamelessness. If exculpatory reasons exist in these cases, a great many of us could be epistemically blameless for a great many of our beliefs—provided they are culturally entrenched. That means, for instance, that if critical race theory is correct and racism is systemic, then individual racists believe falsely but inevitably. After all, even within the assumptions of those fighting against racism, racism is held to be baked into the system. This means that our own racist biases will be (at least on Wolf ’s view) inevitable given the social circumstances in which they develop. Perhaps, then, we can epistemically excuse even the passively unaware, garden variety racist for holding undesirable (from our perspective) beliefs. The problem, though, is that a belief ’s being culturally entrenched not only fails to make it inevitable, it also fails to remove the epistemic requirements we have to consider whether our beliefs are warranted. Take 1850s slaveholder as an example. Could this person be epistemically blameless for a belief that slavery is morally permissible? By 1804 every state north of Maryland in the United States had abolished slavery, and by 1807 the U.S. prohibited importing slaves. In 1833 William Lloyd Garrison founded the American Anti-Slavery Society in Philadelphia. By 1841 Frederick Douglass, a former slave, was speaking to abolitionist groups. In 1852 Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe was

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published. Finally, by the late 1850s, the bloodshed between pro and anti-­slavery forces was actively occurring in the Bleeding Kansas conflict. The controversy over slavery was, in other words, well entrenched, and the movement against it was clearly evident. Of course, one consideration that could be added is the fact that some slaveholders in the south may not have been the most worldly or informed of citizens, which might leave them unaware of what was occurring elsewhere in the debate over slavery. After all, there was likely less debate in their own communities. Then again, being slaveholders, they would have also been some of the more economically well-off citizens of the south. They would have lived, as one of my acquaintances once put it, in “the big house.” They would have thereby would have possessed more access to education, newspapers, and other epistemic resources. They would have less excuse for not knowing of opposition to slavery. Then again, these slaveholders would have also been raised to possess a sense of epistemic entitlement and arrogance. As Alexis de Tocqueville observes in the 1830s, slaveholders’ first habit is that of “ruling without resistance” (1990, 394). No one was able to tell them they were believing wrongly—and believing wrongly from a very young age. In a different way, Medina notes this as an “epistemic arrogance,” an arrogance which accompanies having an undisputed cognitive authority (2013, 31). Nevertheless, by the 1850s anyone socially so well positioned as to own slaves surely must have been aware of, if not the moral arguments against slavery, at least the political pressures to eliminate the practice.45 To be unaware of the arguments and the sentiments against slavery at that time would have required an active ignorance or an active shutting out of other epistemic voices—and that is never an epistemically blameless position.46 An 1850s slaveholder surely would have had some epistemic obligation to form beliefs about or engage in transformative criticism concerning slavery. That sort of slaveholder would be epistemically required to respond to the mounting evidence that the practice was, at  The idea of what a white southerner should know is an open-question, one I will return to later in the argument. Contrary to what I have argued more generally here, I do believe that there is a sliding scale of epistemic responsibility and that it is difficult to say that culture never excuses undesirable belief, especially in the case of those who are epistemically less privileged. 46  More on ignorance in the Chap. 4. 45

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minimum, politically under pressure, if not morally questionable. Of course, the pro-slavery cultural pressure in the U.S. South would have been strong indeed, but that does not offer an epistemic excuse for holding a belief that is increasingly lacking in adequate evidence or grounds within a larger epistemic community of which one is a part. Where there are widespread arguments against a belief, holding it without appropriate epistemic warrant crosses an important line toward epistemic undesirability. The same would apply to Nazism of the 1930s or male chauvinism of the mid-twentieth century. The cultural influences and pressures were not inevitable enough to amount to a widespread epistemic excuse or widespread blamelessness in holding undesirable beliefs. But what of the ancient Greek citizen and his or her beliefs about slavery? Because there is more cultural uniformity and unanimity in ancient Greece, the claim to the cultural inevitability of the belief seems much stronger, which in turn makes this a more difficult case. Still, Moody-­ Adams pushes back against the position that Greek beliefs on slavery are inevitable. She argues that whatever the initial appearance, it is difficult (perhaps impossible) to make a rationally compelling case for what she calls the inability thesis.47 While she starts with the acknowledgement that the practice of Greek slavery had deep cultural acceptance and few, if any, serious critics, she nevertheless concludes that “the belief that slavey was justified was insufficiently examined by those who held it … [and that] there is no convincing evidence that the blame for this should be traced to anything other than affected ignorance” [i.e., choosing not to know what one can and should know] (Moody-Adams 1994, 296). In other words, the inability thesis fails. Even the Greeks, says Moody-Adams, should have known slavery is wrong. Now, assuming the inability thesis does indeed fail, then it also follows, by extension, that beliefs which may appear to have an appropriate epistemic excuse negating their undesirability could no longer be considered to have such an excuse. Put differently, if the ancient Greeks should have known better, so too should the 1850s slaveholder, the Hitler Jugend, the mid-twentieth century ­misogynist—and, in our own day, the unaware racist. With the rejection of the inability thesis, many, many epistemic excuses fall by the wayside, and many, many of our undesirable beliefs lack appropriate excuse.  See Moody-Adams (1994, 295).

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2.7 Taking Social Acceptability Seriously Unfortunately, the inability thesis may not be as simple to defeat as Moody-Adams suggests, especially if a social epistemology is the default position.48 After all, if individual knowing is derivative of communal knowing, and if the community genuinely does universally endorse some belief, individuals may have a quite diminished epistemic ability when it comes to rejecting that belief. The belief in question could very well be undesirable (although how this undesirability would be determined would depend upon epistemic negotiation among epistemic communities), but since each of us must take our epistemic cues from the communities around us, individual knowers may obtain an appropriate excuse for holding that belief. This is a conclusion which Moody-Adams outright rejects, although it is far from clear that she can satisfactorily establish individuals have the sort of epistemic responsibility she asserts. The crux of the difficulty is, first, what to make of Moody-Adams’ claim concerning affected ignorance (the idea that we ought to know better) and, second, what to make for her implicit individualism.49 While there are several reasons why we might adopt a position of affected ignorance, the one discussed by Moody-Adams that is most relevant for Greek slavery is “the tendency to avoid acknowledging our human fallibility: as finite and fallible beings, even our most deeply held convictions may be wrong” (1994, 301). Often times, we simply give ourselves too much epistemic credit. Instead, Moody-Adams wants us to be more skeptical of our own epistemic abilities and the widely held cultural beliefs that we form on their basis. We ought to acknowledge that we can be wrong, which is something we often fail to do. She also urges us to stop speaking of culture as if it is something deterministic and monolithic. Talk of culture is, Moody-Adams reminds us, only a useful abstraction, suggesting that, contrary to Levy and Alfano, we do indeed bear individual responsibility for cumulative culture. She maintains that  As I will discuss, Moody-Adams defends a certain epistemic individualism which rejects key precepts of much of social epistemology. 49  Moody-Adams does not specify whether the epistemological agent she refers to is the individual or the community, but she seems to imply that we are individually responsible for knowing better—even if our communities believe differently. 48

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“culture—independent of agents who perpetuate culture—cannot be an ‘agent’ of anything…. Culture is created, and even transmitted, by people” (Moody-­Adams 1994, 304). This is a far cry from more recent social epistemological claims that individuals “deserve little credit for the process and even less for its results” (Levy and Alfano 2020, 907) or that we should turn our “attention away from regulating one’s individual epistemic states and to focusing instead on the epistemic coordination of the group” (Palermos 2022, 346). As if to illustrate her point, Bonhoeffer, for example, was able to see past so-called Nazi culture. Rather than accept it as a given, he fought back and sought to change that culture. In this sense, each of us is not simply a product of our culture but a contributor to it as well. So, we can, for Moody-Adams, bear individual responsibility. After all, we belong to multiple epistemic and moral communities, and as a result, she warns us against viewing culture as something monolithic. Cultures are not monolithic in the way talk of “Nazi culture” (or any other culture) suggests. There are multiple subcultures within any culture and overlapping cultural influences surround each of us, regardless of how monolithic the culture might appear. This means that we should be able to subject culture, or at least the people who perpetuate culture, to rational scrutiny and criticism. It also means that culture cannot explain every single aspect of human behavior. As Moody-Adams points out, marriage can take place in a house of worship or at the end of a couple of bungee cords. Cultural practices do not define every aspect of a person. The conclusion that she draws is that the Greeks were a bit hubristic about their cultural beliefs and that they each were responsible for contributing to an unjust social practice. They turned a blind eye when they should not have. And that bolsters the claim that their beliefs about slavery were truly undesirable. Two aspects of Moody-Adams’ argument strike me as implicitly defending not just a version of epistemic atomism but also a version of moral objectivism (and probably a more objectivist account of truth), which I suspect many will be hesitant to grant her, regardless of their

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position on the inability thesis.50 In other words, her epistemic individualism and objectivist moral stance will be non-starters for many liberatory epistemologists. With respect to moral objectivism, Moody-Adams’ first tendency toward it is her claim that “only a misguided cultural relativism could support the view that moral criticism of another culture is never justified” (1994, 308). Now, she obviously leaves the door open for a non-misguided cultural relativism, but she clearly wants to cut off the possibility of never being able to criticize a moral practice from outside of that practice. In short, she wants an argument that gets at the possibility of a culturally transcendent wrongness of slavery. While her desire is to assert the wrongness of slavery, period, it is, unfortunately, hard to epistemically justify this claim if we also allow (á la much of current social epistemology) that social forces both affect our beliefs and determine which of those beliefs get to count as knowledge.51 We cannot have it both ways. That is, we cannot reject individualism and hold people absolutely accountable for failing to recognize some objectivist version of truth. Her assertion that the Greeks were suffering from affected ignorance may be correct, but it is no small feat to establish that the Greeks epistemically should have known slavery was wrong any more than they should have known human flight was possible.52 Culturally, there really were not many, if any, dissenters to the practice of slavery, so there were no clear alternative belief systems that individual Greek citizens could appeal to in justifying an anti-slavery sentiment. Perhaps unfortunately, the possibility of seeing alternatives is central to critically examining one’s epistemic practices. It simply is not clear what  I myself am sympathetic to her implicit moral objectivism as it can avoid a number of problems with determining undesirability and establishing an epistemic responsibility to believe better than we do. However, her assumption needs a more explicit defense, especially in light of the shift away from atomistic individualism in epistemology. I will discuss epistemic individualism more in the final chapter. 51  The situation is much worse for those who expressly follow Foucault in denying epistemic innocence. 52  Even though we today might see these beliefs as dramatically different given the human suffering involved in the practice of slavery, history suggests that not all cultures—even our own—are sensitive to suffering as a moral failure. Case in point, those who view the LGBTQ+ community as a tool of the devil can acknowledge the suffering of, say, transgendered youth without granting that suffering a moral significance. Consider the forthcoming quote from Rorty (1986, 14). 50

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it might be like to challenge beliefs that are so entrenched that no alternative appears possible. As Rorty points out, When we ask ourselves how our ancestors, or the inhabitants of an exotic culture, or our past selves could have been so blind to the cruelties they (or we) practised, the right answer is that they (or we) were using a language which was built around this practice, a language different from the one in which we are now condemning it. (1986, 14)

Greek social structures are not our social structures. We can criticize them from our perspective, but we stand outside the system in which those beliefs would have their truth and their justification. We stand outside the system in which these practices make epistemic and moral sense. We could just as well ask whether the Greeks should have been epistemically responsible for failing to see non-Euclidian alternatives to geometry. It took centuries (lots of them) for the language and the social practices to allow for alternatives to become visible. Unless there exists some underlying or transcendent truth of the matter, it is difficult to look back and proclaim those practices wrong in some metaphysical sense. Moody-­ Adams’ argument hints at such an underlying truth, but establishing such a truth is no small task. Yet even if there is some deeper notion of truth to be had (and my sympathies, if not my arguments, run parallel to Moody-Adams on this point), there also remains a question concerning the ability of the Greeks to challenge their dominant practices. To challenge each of our deeply entrenched beliefs seems not only impractical but psychologically impossible—unless, that is, one wishes to engage in a fairly radical skepticism. To make the claim that individual Greeks were responsible for failing to see past a ubiquitous cultural practice requires that we consider more fully the nature of responsibility for belief. What are we actually responsible for knowing or not knowing? Most problematically, many epistemologists are skeptical that we have any sort of voluntary control over our beliefs, so what we should believe is not only an open question but a question that may beg questions of doxastic control.53 Whether or not slavery  More on this in the next chapter.

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is, in the final analysis, transcendently wrong, we still must ask how (and whether) we can come to know this. We must ask, in other words, what are we truly responsible for knowing and how does that responsibility impact the desirability or undesirability of our beliefs. The second hint of Moody-Adams’ moral objectivism lies in her adoption of a rather Kantian approach to moral responsibility. She says, “to deny that an unimpaired person has engaged in wrongdoing … is to deny the humanity of the person in question” (Moody-Adams 1994, 306). She repeats this claim, adding that “to view those who accept another culture as fundamentally ‘other,’ as this misguided relativism typically does, is ultimately to view them as less than fully human” (1994, 308–309). We are individually morally responsible to such an extent that to excuse us from our moral obligation on cultural grounds undermines our very humanity. However powerful the social forces around us, we not only ought to know better, we ought to be held accountable for our actions done in a state of affected ignorance. To do otherwise is to lessen the moral worth of those we excuse. Of course, the real target of Moody-­ Adams’ attack is not necessarily the ancient Greeks or others from the past whom we might excuse. Her target is those of us today who do the excuse-making. She argues that the tendency to excuse our forebearers for wrongdoing shows how hard it is for us “to accept that … [our] cultural predecessors could have perpetuated a practice embodying culpable moral ignorance” (1994, 302). The problem lies with us insofar as we fail to recognize the banality of wrongdoing, the connection of wrongdoing with affected ignorance, and the serious effort required for us “to adopt an appropriately critical stance toward potentially problematic cultural assumptions” (Moody-Adams 1994, 303). While we should certainly wish very much to adopt an appropriately critical stance to problematic cultural assumptions, it still seems that, in particular, a poor Greek farmer of the fourth or fifth century BCE might just have a legitimate epistemic case to make for failing to believe in the moral wrongness of slavery. In other words, even if some of his epistemically more advantaged counterparts might be guilty (e.g., Aristotle maybe ought to have known), the average citizen’s ignorance could still fail to be affected ignorance and instead be genuine, non-culpable ignorance. We need to examine the role ignorance plays in belief and whether that

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ignorance is always epistemically culpable—and surely it is not always culpable. The Greeks do have genuine epistemic excuses for not understanding the aerodynamics of flight or the principles of an internal combustion engine. Of course, these are not undesirable beliefs with high moral stakes. Perhaps there are higher standards that can be expected in the case of certain kinds of undesirable beliefs. After all, the level of scrutiny a belief is subject to depends on how consequential the belief is. Beliefs about slavery (or race and sex in our own day) have significant moral import as they lead to unjust social practices. Thus, they may require us to submit them to a higher degree of scrutiny. Still, before we can know if the Greeks, or anyone else for that matter, held undesirable beliefs with respect to slavery, we must consider not simply the potentially exculpatory role ignorance plays in our epistemological practices but also the very possibility of responsibility for our beliefs, undesirable or otherwise. In other words, to ask whether the Greeks were exculpatorily ignorant with respect to knowing the immorality of slavery, we must first ask whether they (or any of us) are epistemically responsible in the first place. After all, beliefs are not like actions. If we lack epistemic control, then we may just lack epistemic responsibility; and if we lack epistemic responsibility, then the question of affected versus exculpatory ignorance is a moot one. Perhaps attaching the moniker of “desirable” or “undesirable” to beliefs is possible but pointless since beliefs are not something for which we can be responsible. Perhaps beliefs simply are.

References Anderson, Elizabeth. 1995. Feminist Epistemology: An Interpretation and a Defense. Hypatia 10 (3): 50–84. ———. 2006. How Not to Criticize Feminist Epistemology: A Review of Scrutinizing Feminist Epistemology. http://www-­personal.umich.edu/eandersn/hownotreview.html. Antony, Louise. 2002. Quine as Feminist: The Radical Import of Naturalized Epistemology. In A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity, ed. Louise M. Antony and Charlotte E. Witt, 2nd ed., 110–153. Boulder: Westview Press.

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———. 2016. Bias: Friend of Foe?: Reflections on Saulish Skepticism. In Implicit Bias and Philosophy, Volume 1: Metaphysics and Epistemology, ed. Michael Brownstein and Jennifer Saul, 157–190. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Benhabib, Seyla. 2008. Feminism and the Question of Postmodernism. In The New Social Theory Reader, ed. Steven Seidman and Jeffrey C. Alexander, 2nd ed., 156–165. New York: Routledge. Blackburn, Simon. 2005. Truth: A Guide. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Campbell, Richmond. 1998. Illusions of Paradox: A Feminist Epistemology Naturalized. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. ———. 2001. The Bias Paradox in Feminist Epistemology. In Engendering Rationalities, ed. Nancy Tuana and Sandra Morgen, 195–217. Albany: SUNY Press. Code, Lorraine. 1991. What Can She Know? Feminist Theory and the Construction of Knowledge. Cornell: Cornell University Press. ———. 1993. Taking Subjectivity into Account. In Feminist Epistemologies, ed. Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter, 15–48. New York: Routledge. Collins, Patricia Hill. 1996. The Social Construction of Black Feminist Thought. In Women, Knowledge, and Reality, ed. Ann Garry and Marilyn Pearsall, 222–248. New York: Routledge. de Tocqueville, Alexis. 1990. Democracy in America. Vol. 1. New York: Vintage Books. Du Bois, W.E.B. 1997. In The Souls of Black Folk, ed. David W. Blight and Robert Gooding-Williams. Boston: Bedford Books. Elgin, Catherine. 1996. The Relativity of Fact and the Objectivity of Value. The Harvard Review of Philosophy 6 (1): 4–15. Finlayson, Lorna. 2019. What to Do with Post-Truth. Nordic Wittgenstein Review 8: 63–79. Foucault, Michel. 1997. In The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvere Lotringer and Lysa Hochroth. New York: Semiotext(e). Frankfurt, Harry G. 2010. On Truth. New York: Random House. Fricker, Miranda. 2016. Epistemic Injustice and the Preservation of Ignorance. In The Epistemic Dimensions of Ignorance, ed. Rik Peels and Martijn Blaauw, 160–177. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harding, Sandra. 1993. Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology: What Is “Strong Objectivity”? In Feminist Epistemologies, ed. Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter, 49–82. New York: Routledge.

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Hawkesworth, Mary E. 1989. Knowers, Knowing, Known: Feminist Theory and Claims of Truth. Signs 14 (3): 533–557. Heikes, Deborah K. 2004. The Bias Paradox: Why It’s Not Just for Feminists Anymore. Synthese 138 (3): 315–335. ———. 2011. The Bias Paradox. In Just the Arguments: 100 of the Most Important Arguments in Western Philosophy, ed. Michael Bruce and Steven Barbone, 154–155. New York: Wiley-Blackwell. Hekman, Susan. 1997. Truth and Method: Feminist Standpoint Theory Revisited. Signs 22 (2): 341–365. Hekman, Susan J. 2013. The Future of Differences: Truth and Method in Feminist Theory. New York: Wiley. Herrnstein, Richard, and Charles Murray. 1994. The Bell Curve. New York: Free Press. Horwich, Paul. 1998. Truth. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1960. Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime. Trans. John T. Goldthwait. Berkeley: University of California Press. Koplowitz, Howard. 2022. Lawrence County Republican Party Apologizes for GOP logo with Ku Klux Klan imagery. AL.com. August 16. Kuhn, Thomas S. 1977. Objectivity, Value Judgment, and Theory Choice. In The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change, 320–339. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Levy, Neil, and Mark Alfano. 2020. Knowledge from Vice: Deeply Social Epistemology. Mind 129 (515): 887–915. Longino, Helen. 1987. Can There Be a Feminist Science. Hypatia 2 (3): 51–64. ———. 2002. Essential Tensions—Phase 2. In A Mind of One’s Own, ed. Louise M. Antony and Charlotte E. Witt, 93–109. Cambridge, MA: Westview Press. MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1988. Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. McIntyre, Lee. 2018. Post-Truth. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Medina, José. 2013. The Epistemology of Resistance. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mills, Charles. 1997. The Racial Contract. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Moody-Adams, Michele M. 1994. Culture, Responsibility, and Affected Ignorance. Ethics 104: 291–309. Nguyen, Thi C. 2020. Echo Chambers and Epistemic Bubbles. Episteme 17 (2): 141–161.

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Nottelmann, Nikolaj. 2007. Blameworthy Belief: A Study in Epistemic Deontologism. Dordrecht: Springer. Palermos, S. Orestis. 2022. Responsibility in Epistemic Collaborations: Is It Me, Is It the Group or Are We All to Blame? Philosophical Issues 32: 335–350. Paradies, Yin. 2018. Whither standpoint theory in a post-truth world? Cosmopolitan Civil Societies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 10 (2): 119–129. Peirce, Charles S. 1934. Fixation of Belief. In Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Volume V: Pragmatism and Pragmaticism, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, 358–387. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pinnick, Cassandra, Noretta Koertge, and Robert F. Almeder, eds. 2003. Scrutinizing Feminist Epistemology: An Examination of Gender in Science. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Putnam, Hilary. 1981. Reason, Truth, and History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1990. Realism with a Human Face. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rolin, Kristina. 2011. Contextualism in Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science. In Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science: Power in Knowledge, ed. Heidi E. Grasswick, 25–44. Dordrecht: Springer. Rooney, Phyllis. 2011. The Marginalization of Feminist Epistemology and What That Reveals About Epistemology “Proper”. In Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science, ed. Heidi Grasswick, 3–24. Dordrecht: Springer. Rorty, Richard. 1986. The Contingency of Community. London Review of Books 8 (13): 10–14. ———. 1993. Putnam and the Relativist Menace. The Journal of Philosophy 90 (9): 443–461. Schmitt, Frederick F. 1995. Truth: A Primer. Boulder: Westview Press. Slote, Michael. 1982. Is Virtue Possible? Analysis 42 (2): 70–76. Soames, Scott. 1998. Understanding Truth. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tuana, Nancy. 2004. Coming to Understand: Orgasm and the Epistemologies of Ignorance. Hypatia 19 (1): 194–232. Williams, Bernard. 2010. Truth and Truthfulness. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1958. Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. New York: The Macmillan Company. Wolf, Susan. 1987. Sanity and the Metaphysics of Responsibility. In Responsibility, Character and the Emotions, ed. Ferdinand Schoeman, 46–62. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

3 Can There Be Epistemic Responsibility?

Any talk of epistemic responsibility begs significant questions concerning how responsible we are for our beliefs simpliciter. When it comes to responsibility, beliefs are not like actions. As a rule, we do not choose to believe in the same way that we choose to act. Beliefs are much less dependent upon will, so much so that some epistemologists argue for a doxastic involuntarism, which might just make all talk of the undesirability of our beliefs moot. Being responsible requires being the proper object of some normative appraisal, but being the proper object of such an appraisal presumably implies we can, at least in principle, meet the standard(s) for that appraisal. Whether undesirable or not, for beliefs to be laudable or blameworthy—or for doxastic obligations of any sort— surely, we must have some ability to influence our beliefs.1 To claim otherwise—that is, to claim that we are epistemically responsible without any control—is to go against widely held intuition, not to mention the “ought implies can” principle argued for by Kant. However, some  Not everyone agrees with this claim, at least in the moral realm. Frankfurt (1969), for instance, denies that a person is morally responsible for what he has done only if he could have done otherwise. I will discuss this briefly, but I do hold to the “ought implies can” thesis. 1

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epistemologists actually deny the “can” when it comes to beliefs, arguing that we are not able to believe other than we do.2 In other words, some are involuntarists, who suggest that whatever the shared standard of belief, we can do little to meet (or little to fail to meet) that standard. This has the appearance of entailing that perhaps we are not responsible for any of our beliefs regardless of how benign or objectionable they may be. After all, if involuntarism is correct and we indeed lack the ability to voluntarily control our beliefs (either directly or indirectly), how is it we can have any sort of obligation when it comes to believing? Here the proverbial rubber meets the road when it comes to undesirable beliefs such as racist and sexist ones. If we ought to believe better, then it must be possible for us to believe better. Yet it is clear that this may not always be the case. For instance, we all have unconscious mental associations, many of which we are simply unaware of having. We have, in other words, implicit biases and beliefs which operate below the level of introspection and conscious awareness.3 The empirical evidence often suggests the intractability of these biases, even when they are brought to our attention.4 However, there is also evidence that these biases can be manipulated under certain circumstances, so maybe the epistemological situation is not as dire as it might seem on first glance.5 The problem is, though, that such biases are, as indicated by empirical research, often quite unintentional. We do not choose to be implicitly biased. We just are. In fact, what the science of implicit cognition suggests is that “actors do not always have conscious, intentional control over the processes of social perception, impression formation, and judgment that motivate their act” (Greenwald et al. 2022, 946). We similarly fail much of the time to have conscious control over the processes of forming beliefs informed by our biases. That is, few, if any, of us choose our implicit biases or the beliefs that result from our having such biases. Rather, we inherit them from the epistemic communities of which we are a part.  See, especially, Alston (1989).  Biases may not be actual beliefs, but they clearly influence beliefs in important ways. For an overview of the psychology of implicit bias, see Johnson (2020). 4  These biases are often measured by the Implicit Association Test. For an overview of this test see Petty et al. (2009). 5  For a summary, see Johnson (2020, 28–30). 2 3

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Furthermore, implicit biases are notoriously resistant to efforts on the part of epistemic agents to consciously change them.6 Even when we become aware of our implicit biases, it is not always within our power to change them. Combine these psychological features of implicit bias with epistemic involuntarism and it may appear that biased beliefs are precisely the ones we are doomed to hold. This is bad news indeed when we consider the moral consequences of such beliefs, beliefs that we may not be epistemically blameworthy for holding. Given that epistemic involuntarism is correct, we could perhaps be morally responsible for our actions but not epistemically responsible for the beliefs underlying our actions. That hardly seems a satisfying state of affairs given that beliefs inform actions and that some actions are surely not simply harmful but deeply unjust. Of course, many philosophers are hesitant to deny any and all epistemic responsibility, and no liberatory epistemologist is willingly going to let us off scot-free for believing undesirably. Still, it is far from obvious how we can establish an epistemic responsibility for belief given the overwhelming evidence that beliefs are not as freely chosen as actions. Standing in the noon day summer desert sun will cause me to involuntarily believe it is hot. Would it not be the same with racist and sexist beliefs for those of us who are raised in systemically sexist and racist societies? Simply put, given that I live in a thoroughly racist or sexist society, would my racist or sexist beliefs not simply be involuntarily there like my belief in the desert heat? Would I not, then, have an appropriate—and exculpatory—excuse for my belief? Could the same not be the same for other undesirable beliefs? For those of us who want to claim undesirable beliefs are indeed blameworthy, epistemic involuntarism is dangerous. Regardless of how determined our beliefs about current weather conditions may be, many of us would like to think that the racist and sexist can believe better than they do. We would like to think that we are epistemically responsible for purging ourselves of such beliefs when we have them, even if such beliefs are implicit and beyond our obvious control.7  See Greenwald et al. (2022). Also see Vuletich and Payne (2019).  Holroyd argues, for example, that “individuals are, at least sometimes, liable to blame for the extent to which they are influenced in behavior and judgment by implicit biases” (2012, 274). 6 7

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Undesirable beliefs of this sort are, after all, beliefs with far more moral import than those about the weather. The stakes are much higher. Unlike our beliefs about weather conditions, which we cannot change, we would like to think that we can become more open-minded and accepting of those different from ourselves, and we would like to think that people are epistemically blameworthy when they believe badly about race and sex among other things. Surely our beliefs about race and sex are, unlike beliefs about basic sensory states of affairs, more malleable beliefs, with more flexible evidence and with a variety of influences available to change them. The difficulty is that the empirical evidence does not always bear out this sort of epistemic voluntarism. What seems obvious is that many of us have beliefs, some of them undesirable, that we ourselves never choose to have. This creates something of a dilemma with respect to epistemic responsibility: on the one hand, we do judge people for having undesirable beliefs; on the other hand, these beliefs (like many other of one’s beliefs) may lie outside of the agent’s conscious choice and perhaps even control. If belief simply happens to me, can I be accountable for my undesirable believing?

3.1 Epistemic Voluntarism? Belief as Habits of Action When it comes to considerations of epistemic responsibility and the control over beliefs that such responsibility presupposes, perhaps the only consensus is that beliefs are less responsive to will than are actions.8 Although there may be a great many actions we can take to put ourselves in different evidentiary relationships or otherwise to influence the process of coming to hold a belief, beliefs themselves are not particularly susceptible to willing. Put differently, belief is not fully voluntary, if it is voluntary at all. Of course, one of the most notable exceptions to the idea that we do not choose our beliefs comes from Descartes, although his brand of voluntarism lies in withholding judgment rather than in having basic  While this assumes that we do have some control over our actions, it acknowledges that, even if doxastic involuntarism is false, we surely have less control over our beliefs. 8

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beliefs. After all, even Descartes, in his Meditations, allows that sensory beliefs are resistant to will. In fact, he asserts that he may be stuck with a tendency to “happily slide back into my own opinions” (Descartes 1984, 15)—namely his belief “that the corporeal things of which images are formed in my thought … are known with … distinctness” (Descartes 1984, 20)—but he also insists that he can at least choose to withhold assent from his beliefs. That is, while he cannot change his sensory impressions, he can supposedly control whether he believes what they tell him. Fast forward a few hundred years, and this rather unusual but highly influential attitude of Descartes’ is precisely what Peirce claims is just plain wrong.9 Instead, says Peirce, “we must begin with all the prejudices which we actually have when we enter upon the study of philosophy. These prejudices are not to be dispelled by a maxim, for they are things which it does not occur to us can be questioned” (1934, CP5.265). Contrary to what Descartes preaches, Peirce acknowledges what most of us today also assert: we must start from the body of beliefs we already have and that we rarely think to question. Rather than choose our epistemic starting point, it is given to us. The bulk of our beliefs are, in other words, like the Greeks’ cultural prejudice with respect to the permissibility of slavery. It simply did not occur to the Greeks to question their widely and strongly held beliefs.10 Same for us and the prejudices we have today. We start with a body of beliefs that strike us as beyond doubt, and for us even to be able to question them, we must have (as the pragmatists would tell us) a living reason for doubt. Of course, when it comes to our beliefs about race and sex/gender, we surely do have that living reason for doubt. We do not have a homogenous community or a unified set of cultural beliefs when it comes to those beliefs at least some of “us” find potentially undesirable. However, this does not entail that all of “us” recognize these living reasons for doubt nor does it entail that we can willingly alter our beliefs, even when we do recognize legitimate reasons for doubting. Racist and sexist beliefs are notoriously difficult to recognize and to dislodge. Given the systemic  Wittgenstein also finds Cartesian doubt a non-starter. Consider what Wittgenstein says in On Certainty: “The reasonable man does not have certain doubts” (1969, §220). 10  We can, though, ask as Moody-Adams (1994) does whether they should have morally questioned them. 9

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nature of these beliefs, it is quite difficult for us not to believe them—just as we find it rather difficult to believe at will any particular background belief. At times we might (à la William James) be able to will ourselves to believe if the circumstances warrant it, but this requires our options to be live, forced, and momentous.11 Not every belief, and certainly not all our undesirable beliefs, will be ones that meet these criteria, and even if they do, we may have trouble simply choosing to believe without some activity that nudges us toward a more desirable belief. In other words, if racism and sexism are as entrenched as race theorists and feminists want us to believe, our racist and sexist beliefs may be precisely those for which we have the least amount of responsibility since they permeate our epistemic practices. Still, highlighting the link between belief and action is a rather promising way to think about our how we become responsible for beliefs that many times seem merely to happen to us rather than being of our choosing. What often distinguishes the classical pragmatists, like Peirce and James, is that they tend to buy into some version of the view that beliefs are habits of action and that there is a close connection between what we believe and what we do. They may not assert that we can change our beliefs by changing our habits, but this is at least consistent with much pragmatism—and this connection of belief to habit offers a hint of an epistemic voluntarism that is not quite as radical as Descartes’ version. Insofar as we can put ourselves in positions favorable to certain beliefs, we have hope of influencing them, even if the influence remains indirect. More recently, some virtue epistemologists hold that even if we cannot directly will ourselves to believe, we can still voluntarily put ourselves in position to develop the right character traits to be epistemically responsible.12 Linda Zagzebski, for instance, argues that “a virtue is a deep and enduring acquired excellence consisting of an admirable motive disposition and reliable success in reaching the end of the motive because of the behavior to which the motive leads” [italics added] (2019, 32). Two components emerge in this definition: a motivational component (an emotional disposition that leads to either cognitive or overt behavior) and a  See James (1979).  See Montmarquet (1992).

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success component (a requirement that one regularly reach the end of the virtue, i.e., truth or understanding). The motivational component is especially important here as motivations are something over which we have some influence. It is a short distance from this general definition of a virtue to the idea that intellectual virtues are acquired excellences leading to some epistemic end (such as truth or understanding)—so perhaps our epistemic feet can be held to the fire for believing desirably. The question is whether this is enough to generate epistemic responsibility for beliefs, especially undesirable ones, in such a way that we actually garner epistemic praise or blame for holding them. The difficulty with taking the approach that epistemic practices or habits—activities over which we do have some control—can influence belief is that not all beliefs would seem to admit of such influence. I can develop all the acquired virtues I want, but I am still going to believe the sun is shining when it is a sunny day.13 As a result, not everyone holds that we have control over our beliefs, and, thus, not everyone will find them subject to talk of epistemic responsibility in the first place. Hume rather famously denies that beliefs are something over which we have much control. He defines belief as “a lively idea related to or associated with a present impression” (Hume 1975, 96), and follows this up by further adding that “belief consists merely in a certain feeling or sentiment, in something, that depends not on the will, but must arise from certain determinate causes and principles, of which we are not masters” (Hume 1975, 624). Assuming our lively ideas arise from determinate causes of which we are not masters, epistemic responsibility is seemingly off the table. This is also hinted at by Hume when he discusses causality and suggests that it is a habit that is not “impelled by any reasoning or process of the understanding” or, again, when Hume argues that reason is merely a slave of the passions (1977, 28).14 Similarly, William Alston argues against basic voluntary control by pointing out that when we have decisive evidence, we typically cannot help but believe propositions that align with  Implicit belief will be a concern shortly, but the imperviousness of some of these beliefs to conscious manipulation may also suggest they lie outside the individual epistemic agent’s control. For more on how social factors may make implicit biases stable despite efforts to dislodge them, see Vuletich and Payne (2019). 14  Also see Hume (1975, 415). 13

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that evidence.15 Habits of action be damned, my belief that the lights are on in my office hardly seems within my control because, well, the visual evidence I have in front of me is of their being on. Short of radical doubt, the evidence for the sun shining or the lights being on is rather decisive. Yet many epistemologists do not want to follow Hume or Alston down this involuntaristic road. Richard Feldman, in particular, counters Alston’s argument, for at least some beliefs, by maintaining that we can, in many instances, control the evidence and in the process of doing so thereby control our beliefs (2001, 83). Feldman allows that his belief in the lights being on in his office tracks the actual state of the lights almost perfectly. When the lights are on, he almost always believes the lights are on. When the lights are off, he almost always believes the lights are off. But, in such a case he reminds us that while he cannot directly control his belief, he can actually control the evidence by acting in such a way as to determine whether the lights are on or off. All he has to do is flip a switch to produce the desired belief about the lights being on or off. To hammer the point home, Feldman’s notes that when the chair of his department says she will give a raise only those people who in the next 30 seconds believe the lights are on in their office, he’ll make sure he has those lights on post haste so as to acquire the right belief. In such cases, features of the world that are under our direct control have influence over our beliefs. Unfortunately, not all beliefs, especially our most morally undesirable ones, are this compliant. If they were, undesirable beliefs would surely be capable of being more effectively influenced, especially in cases when we consciously seek to change them.

3.2 The Intractability of Undesirability Many of us with implicit biases and undesirable beliefs formed on their basis often seek actively to change them—yet we remain biased. Many of us with undesirable beliefs may keenly and vigorously wish to jettison  See Alston (1989, 91ff, and 115-42). This view is also something Descartes (1984) hints at in the first Meditation when he admits how difficult it is to maintain his hyperbolic doubt. He, like a prisoner having a pleasant dream, wants to believe his senses. 15

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them; nevertheless, we find ourselves unable to control these beliefs with the ease with which we control our beliefs about lighting. Undesirable beliefs with respect to race, gender, class, sexual orientation, national background—these beliefs would very much appear to be of the type that are much less under our direct (or perhaps even our indirect) control. These are beliefs that resist our efforts to change them. Despite this, though, we often find ourselves lauding or blaming people for holding certain types of beliefs. For example, we condemn the white supremacist while admiring the civil rights activist, assuming, it seems, that they can indeed choose to do better or worse in their believing. After all, if beliefs were to lie outside of our control, if we were to have no more ability to influence belief than we are to influence the orbit of the Earth, then our blame and our praise would be misplaced. Our unreflective intuition, then, seems to be that there is some doxastic control. Our reflective intuitions, however, might not be so clear. How do we sort out these opposing tensions? Clearly, we are not always so sure what to do with implicitly racist or sexist beliefs when it comes to epistemic praise or blame, partly because many of us are not even aware we hold such beliefs. Is epistemic blame in order for beliefs I am not even aware than I have? Is it in order for beliefs I consciously have, even when I expressly do not want to have them. Each of us may have implicitly biased beliefs about, say, people of color or about women, but few of us ever explicitly, consciously seek to acquire these beliefs—and especially not in the same ways as we might seek to acquire beliefs that the lights in the room are indeed on. Such beliefs just do not seem to admit of that sort of responsiveness to evidence. In fact, many of us try quite hard to disavow ourselves of racist beliefs in the same way that Feldman tries to disavow his belief that the lights are off. Yet very few people are able to change their racists or sexist beliefs (especially when attached to implicitly held biases) by “flipping a switch.” These sorts of beliefs are much more entrenched and resistant to change. Even when we deliberately seek to eliminate these beliefs, we often find they remain beneath the surface, contrary to our desires or conscious intentions. These appear to be precisely the sorts of beliefs over which we do not always exhibit a great deal of control, making them precisely the sort of belief for which epistemic responsibility is a live and pressing question. Given how many socially

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and morally significant beliefs are stubbornly resistant to change, far more must go into belief and into doxastic control than simply putting ourselves in a different evidentiary relationship to sensory evidence. A major problem with holding people responsible for their undesirable beliefs is precisely that these beliefs often just occur without, it would seem, any input on our part. This could be because we were taught to hold these beliefs before we could ever have determined the truth for ourselves, it could be the result of the evidence we simply happened (often accidentally) to discover, or it could be a matter of seemingly overwhelming social forces (e.g., everyone else believes it). All sorts of my beliefs are ones that I acquire in this way and cannot readily change, even if I wanted to do so. For instance, Grass is green. A cardinal is sitting on the pagoda just outside my window. Joe Biden is President of the United States. Murder is wrong. Many African-Americans suffer legal injustices.

These, and many more, are beliefs that I hold (at least while confronted with the evidence immediately available to me) without my being able to alter them at will. None of these beliefs are ones I can readily change, if I can change them at all. Grass may turn brown, the cardinal may fly away, or we may get a new president, but as long as the rain comes in summer, bird is sitting on the pagoda, and Biden is sitting in the White House, I cannot very easily choose to believe otherwise. Surely it is possible that someone could convince me of the moral permissibility of murder or the fairness of our legal system—after all, these beliefs are less directly tied to straightforward sensory evidence. Still, I cannot envision changing my beliefs about these matters given my current relationship to the evidence. It strikes me that I do indeed lack voluntary doxastic control over these beliefs as well. This same lack of control is, however, also true for those who hold opposing beliefs. The person who believes our legal system is equitable and fair may also lack clear voluntary doxastic control. That person may be looking through an epistemic lens that presents different evidence, evidence which may be tied to mechanisms of power that are

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not simple to overcome. It remains an open question what this seeming lack of control means with respect to the types of evidence I should seek out, the types of warrant I should acquire, or the doxastic obligation that attaches to my believing.

3.3 Salvaging Epistemic Responsibility While epistemologists who worry about responsibility are rarely concerned with beliefs like our racist or sexist ones, many of them still seek ways to avoid the nasty conclusions and the exculpatory excuses that come from epistemic involuntarism. Rik Peels (2017) identifies five possible reactions to the problem that arises from our apparent lack of doxastic control: (1) we do, contrary to appearances, actually have direct doxastic control, (2) we have indirect doxastic control, (3) we have compatibilist doxastic control, (4) we have no doxastic control—but doxastic obligation does not require us to have doxastic control—and (5) we have doxastic influence. The first of these positions—that we do have direct doxastic control—seems to be, if true at all, the exception rather than the rule, especially for undesirable beliefs of the sort that lead to marginalization, silencing, or oppression. Believing at will is something that does not come easily to us humans, and changing beliefs about the moral import of so-called undesirable beliefs seems rare indeed. Even Descartes, who insists that he can withhold judgments from belief at will, still admits that his hyperbolic doubt is “an arduous undertaking” (1984, 15). It is not something natural or easy to do with even the most pedestrian of beliefs. Less pedestrian, more morally troublesome beliefs are not any easier for us to directly control or even influence. Whatever conscious desire we might have to eliminate our racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic beliefs, most of us find doing so just as arduous an undertaking. It requires not merely intentional effort but also a focused and concerted one as well, one that unfortunately often results in imperfect success. The sorts of undesirable beliefs that lead to unjust action or outright oppression are typically not ones that admit of direct doxastic control. More promising is the second idea, the one that suggests that we have indirect doxastic control, that is, the idea that we have some foresight on

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how our voluntary actions or omissions will result in some belief. In Feldman’s example of flipping the light switch in his office to generate the desired belief about whether the lights are on, indirect doxastic control is rather obvious. This example illustrates how there is a class of beliefs that admits of control through doing something to shift our evidentiary relations. Without question, putting oneself in a position to elicit some desirable belief is possible for a number of beliefs. Still, these cases are limited. While any epistemic agent should be required to put herself in the best position possible with respect to available evidence, human beings generally fail to have absolute control over this evidence. Sometimes the evidence is what it is, and there is nothing I can do to alter it. Even in the case of believing the lights are on, my control over my belief is dependent upon things like the power in my office staying on. This suggests that the indirect voluntary control over my beliefs generally, and my undesirable beliefs more particularly, may be rather limited. The question, of course, is whether undesirable beliefs such as my racist or sexist ones are a class of belief that admits of “flipping a switch” to elicit a desirable one instead. The answers here may be both “yes” and “no.” Research suggests that our undesirable beliefs may be subject to influence such as when I choose to seek out counter-stereotypical exemplars. This can “change my mind,” so to speak.16 However other research suggests that interventions can often be unfruitful or lack long-term effect.17 In the end, undesirable beliefs are ones that many of us would rather rid ourselves of having— but many times our desire is to little avail. I may very much wish to believe in such a way that I eliminate my biased beliefs, including my implicitly biased ones, but it is quite unclear that I have the sort of indirect control over these beliefs that I have over the lights in my office being on or off.18 If we had the kind of immediate indirect control that comes with flipping a light switch, then surely beliefs that lead to oppressive practices would be far less entrenched than they are. We would just  See FitzGerald et al. (2019).  See FitzGerald et al. (2019). Also see Payne and Hannay (2021), Vuletich and Payne (2019). 18  We do seem to have some indirect control over implicit biases, which I will discuss. For more on this see Holroyd (2012, 286–291). 16 17

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metaphorically “flip the switch” with our undesirable beliefs and, consequently, with our behavior. More to the point, we would not simply come to believe that some people lack equality but would do something to alter this fact. After all, most of us do not want to knowingly live in an unjust world. Of course, we could have indirect doxastic control but this control be much less immediate. Jules Holroyd (2012) argues that we have the ability to intentionally albeit indirectly influence our biases through long-­ range control and through explicit beliefs and values. To support this claim, she appeals to empirical research that shows not only that there is evidence that some things under our voluntary control can affect biases but also that we can intend to change our behavior and can develop motivations or strong commitments to avoiding prejudicial behavior.19 The evidence Holroyd presents suggests that implicit biases are indeed malleable. Yet that is not the only evidence out there. Other research indicates that any positive improvements in prejudicial thinking gained through intervention can be quite short-lived—as in a matter of days or even hours.20 In other words, we may be able to change our biases, but those changes generally do not stick. One hypothesis Vuletich and Payne (2019) have considered is that the stability of implicit bias does not reside in the individual but in society. They conclude that “far from being a rigid attitude, implicit bias is highly transient at the individual level but stable for social contexts,” suggesting that “the source of stable implicit bias—and the opportunity for change—is to be found in the places and people around us” (Vuletich and Payne 2019, 860). This opens up a whole other level of consideration because it implies that the responsibility for at least some of our undesirable beliefs may lie with the community rather than the individual, which means some circumstances might exist in which some individuals could garner exculpatory reasons for holding an undesirable belief.21 However, the immediate question is the voluntarism of beliefs and whether we have indirect voluntary control over undesirable beliefs. While the idea has some merit, especially in cases  See Holroyd (2012, 286–291).  See Lai et al. (2016). Also see Vuletich and Payne (2019), Payne and Hannay (2021). 21  I will discuss this possibility in the following two chapters. 19 20

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where we choose to put ourselves in a different relationship to the evidence we have for and against beliefs that may be undesirable, the intractable nature of some forms of undesirable belief suggest that responsibility cannot be assigned in this way for all undesirable beliefs. There has to be more to the story of how we salvage responsibility for undesirable beliefs. The third option, doxastic compatibilism, holds that “the absence of intentional doxastic control is compatible with having a doxastic obligation and with being responsible for what one believes” (Peels 2017, 72). In other words, even though we have no intentional control over our beliefs, we are still responsible for them. This view comes in a variety of forms, but what they typically have in common is that to be responsible for our beliefs we need not form an intention to believe. What confers the responsibility is that we can form such an intention if we so choose. Steup (2017) argues this using the example of Carl who finds his brand-­ new BMW is not where he last parked it. After working through all the possibilities of what happened to his car, Carl decides (contrary to Alston’s claim that our beliefs are not voluntary) to believe it was stolen, not that the car was towed or that he misremembered where he parked it.22 Carl may not be aware of this decision, but the point is that he could be made aware of it. Now, the possibility that we can make a doxastic decision in the face of different, conflicting evidence appears a somewhat promising account for dealing with beliefs that are undesirable enough to produce oppression and injustice. After all, when we consider beliefs about topics like women’s rights or racial justice, epistemically responsible people are faced with conflicting evidence (even if the evidence opposing what I choose to believe is ultimately rejected). For instance, I might consider my belief that confederate monuments should be removed from widespread public display. The evidence I have for this could be that my African-American friends tell me those monuments celebrate a war in favor of slavery and that this is offensive to them. The evidence I may have against my belief is conversations with my white friends and family who tell me that these statues are a tribute to those forebearers who fought—and often died—in war. To take the statues down is disrespectful of their history. Like Carl  See Steup (2017, 2681).

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deciding to believe his car was stolen, I seemingly can decide to believe the monuments should be taken down (or left up, or, in a compromise, moved to a less public space). We do this sort of thing all the time when we make lists of pros and cons and weigh them against one another. However, not every case of undesirable belief may be susceptible to compatibilist choosing because many, many people who truly wish to change racist or sexist beliefs have a hard time doing so. Part of the problem is that such beliefs are often ingrained in us from an early age and are widely supported in our epistemic communities. Such beliefs are not easily done away with, even with the best of intentions. A friend of mine who was raised in a highly racist environment and who describes himself as “a recovering racist,” expresses a quite intentional desire to hold non-­racist beliefs—but he also recognizes that his biases have a residue, despite his best intentions. He is unwilling to put the past-tense “recovered” to his “racist” moniker, which highlights how intentional he is about his efforts for he remains critical of his own progress.23 For many of us who struggle with our deeply ingrained undesirable beliefs, we do not decide to have or to not have those beliefs. We lack the intention of forming them and struggle with intentions to not form them. The undesirable beliefs remain, even when we make an intentional effort to ameliorate them. In these cases, involuntarism (and perhaps a little defeatism) rears its head. The fourth option for overcoming a seeming lack of doxastic control is to assert that, yes, we have doxastic obligations but, no, we don’t have control.24 Frankly, this tactic confuses me as I am sympathetic, first, to the idea that we have some control over our undesirable beliefs and, second, to the “ought to imply can” condition for responsibility.25 We should not be able to make epistemic (or moral) demands on those who simply cannot meet those demands. In fact, the unreasonableness of this sort of demand is one reason that feminist philosophers have been critical of  Ironically, this friend of mine is perhaps the most thoughtfully open-minded, least racist people I know. In discussing this example with another of my colleagues, he, too, suggested that he is consciously aware of having to continually overcome racist attitudes developed in childhood. He, too, claims to be a “recovering racist,” as are many of us. 24  For a more in-depth discussion of this option see Peels (2017, 81–87). 25  For those who also accept the “ought implies can” condition for responsibility see Van Inwagen (1975), Ginet (1996), Widerker (1995). For those who reject the “ought implies can” condition see Frankfurt (1971), Wolf (1980), Fischer and Ravizza (1999). 23

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holding unachievable moral ideals: if we cannot meet those ideals, they at best offer no useful moral guide and at worst set up unachievable and impractical standards.26 However, not every philosopher feels this way. Feldman, for instance, maintains that while “the right way to carry out one’s role as a believer is to form beliefs that are supported by one’s current evidence,” it is nevertheless “consistent with it being the case that one ought to believe a particular proposition that one is unable to believe it, perhaps because it is psychologically too troubling or for other reasons unrelated to the merits of one’s evidence” (2001, 88). When presented with evidence of the mass shooting of school children, I simply may not be able to believe it, at least not in the way I believe that there was a traffic accident during rush hour. The overwhelmingness leads me to mutter, “I don’t believe it.” And there may well be times when I truly do not believe it because I cannot psychologically accept it—but that does not change the truth of the belief and the fact that we ought, as responsible epistemic agents, to believe it.27 Similarly, Hilary Kornblith argues that we can be held to high epistemic standards despite not being able to actually meet those standards. He considers situations where we want to appraise the knowing of either particular epistemic agents or of epistemic communities. He says, If the inferences made by the subject are licensed by the rules, then the belief is justified; if they are not, the belief is unjustified. Here we take a God’s-eye view and hold our subject up to the highest standard of good reasoning. [italics added] Setting our standards this high is often precisely what we wish to do. It is often useful and interesting to see the extent to which a subject’s patterns of reasoning differ from the ideal. (Kornblith 1983, 33)

Underlying this is a sense that there is some ideal reasoning and some sort of theory of ideal evidence gathering, but Kornblith acknowledges that  For an example of this view see Held (1995, 153–154). Also, consider Medina’s claim that “abstractions and generalities … divert our attention away from concrete realities” (2013, 11). Along with idealizations, they fail to “provide an adequate standpoint for the diagnosis of social problems and injustices (Medina 2013, 11). He argues instead that ideals should be conceived as imagined solutions for particular problems. 27  For Feldman, “epistemic oughts don’t imply voluntarism about beliefs” (2001, 88). 26

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this is an ideal that we may never be capable of reaching. The standards may be beyond our reach, in part, because we may be “creatures with wholly unreliable innate endowments, and, consequently, with massively false systems of justified belief ” (Kornblith 1983, 48). Quite reasonably, he allows that having a justified belief is “simply doing the best one can in light of the innate endowment one starts from” (Kornblith 1983, 46). Yet he also maintains that, even when we do the best that we can do, beliefs are not freely chosen (Kornblith 1983, 34). Surely cases exist that are appropriate for what Kornblith intends us to take away from this. In other words, there are situations that provide exculpatory excuses in a quite reasonable way. Consider, for instance, those who are intellectually less well off. Here Kornblith’s argument fits nicely with our basic intuitions and even our legal practices for we do change our understanding of epistemic expectations and obligations in such cases. Doing the best with what abilities and evidence one has is all we usually ask of people epistemologically speaking. When we have done the absolute best we can do, when we have believed as well as we possibly can, we may relax our insistence on meeting some ideal standard—but then do we not also relax our understanding of responsibility? In other words, when we deny doxastic control, we usually lower our tendency to assign epistemic praise or blame. The problem with maintaining responsibility while insisting on a lack of doxastic control is that by removing choice and by setting standards that may be unachievable, Kornblith opens the door to those who would seek excuses for holding undesirable beliefs. After all, if I do not choose to hold some particular undesirable belief and if I cannot do any better than I do in formulating that belief, then I hardly appear responsible for failing to meet some unachievable ideal standard. This combination of assumptions promises to provide grounds for potentially exculpatory excuses for holding undesirable beliefs. Recall that for Nottelmann epistemic blameworthiness came when (among other things) the epistemic undesirability has no appropriate excuse for exercising or for omitting to exercise doxastic control. If Kornblith is right, appropriate epistemic excuses may very well exist in the case of beliefs with widespread communal acceptance, even if those beliefs may be morally flawed. According to Kornblith, when we are to appraise “the beliefs of particular agents, or of particular communities,” we sometimes wish to know “whether a subject was

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reasoning ‘as best he could,’ where this does not simply mean ‘in accord with rules of ideal reasoning’; we want to know whether the extent to which the subject departed from the ideal was his own fault” [italics added] (1983, 33). The departure from the ideal will not necessarily be one’s own fault if one’s beliefs are not in any way chosen and if one’s innate endowments do not allow one to move beyond the epistemic limitations of the epistemic community. For example, say one lives in a thoroughly racist and sexist environment in which other epistemic possibilities are not evident. Or instead, imagine that one’s own epistemic limitations are themselves significant. One can hardly be blameworthy when the mistake arises from the narrowness of an epistemic community we reside in through no fault of our own. One can hardly be blameworthy for being born with seemingly insurmountable epistemic limitations. Of course, none of us have perfect epistemic communities; none of us have perfect epistemic abilities; none of us have all and only true beliefs. These are simply unrealistic standards for granting epistemic responsibility. This is probably why Kornblith eschews talk of reliability and truth being connected to justification. The goal may be to “get it right,” but we are not creatures who can be expected to obtain this goal perfectly, whether individually or in epistemic communities. Consider the ancient Greek slaveholder whose entire community accepts slavery—and one could add that invariably accepts the lesser status of women. Add to this that not all Greek slaveholders were economically or intellectually well off. Some genuinely ideal standard that speaks to the immorality of slavery or the equal status of women could very well exist yet remain unattainable, which then provides an appropriate epistemic excuse for not attaining the standard. If we cannot do any better than we do, our mistakes will not be our fault. In such cases, a legitimate, exculpatory excuse is built into our epistemic endeavors. Of course, that we may not wish to allow the racist or sexist an epistemic excuse does not entail such excuses are illegitimate, but it should make us question whether we should so easily allow that we have no doxastic control.28  I realize I’ve not yet discussed Peels fifth option for overcoming doxastic involuntarism. That will come shortly. 28

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3.4 Doxastic Intentions and Epistemic Responsibility Should we thereby assign epistemic responsibility for what lies beyond our grasp? As it turns out, even in the case of undesirable beliefs we often do not blame people. Consider the case of implicit biases. Fricker, who is not one to make excuses for undesirable beliefs, nevertheless maintains that we naturally feel that any kind of prejudice that works against another group is something epistemically (and ethically) blameworthy; yet … the whole point about “implicit” biases, including those biases we would consider prejudices, is that their influence in our judgements is so hard to detect that correcting them would seem to require supererogatory, even superhuman, levels of perceptiveness, corrective know-how, or plain time and effort. We are rightly reluctant to proclaim that we are always blameworthy for this kind of epistemic error, for that would surely be an unfair demand in cases where we are structurally in no position to tell that we are guilty of it (a form of non-culpable ignorance), and/or where it would take heroic efforts to reliably correct it (a mere failure to perform the supererogatory). (2016, 33)

A fine line exists between the biases we are responsible for and those that we are not,29 but there are surely cases where we do cut people some epistemic slack for holding prejudicial beliefs. Not every case is simple, however. As the debate around the culpability of the ancient Greeks with respect to slavery suggests, we (or at least some subset of “we”) do not hold everyone to precisely the same standards, even if we should. Cultural ignorance could offer an exculpatory excuse on the view that denies epistemic control but that nevertheless asserts responsibility. There are those who will excuse Greek slavery or who will make exceptions for, say, the founding fathers of the United States whose equality of all men really meant only some men—and no women. They may simply be victims of their cultural circumstance. Such cases are often controversial and  Holroyd (2012) offers a good discussion of this line and what the empirical evidence suggests with respect to when we are and are not responsible (and blameworthy) for our implicit biases. 29

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­ roblematic, but when an epistemic excuse is in order, what we attempt p to do is acknowledge that those with undesirable beliefs may simply be doing their best in the environment they have.30 Of course, the best we can do may turn out for the better. For someone like the Klansman Ellis, who obviously had a clear capacity for self-awareness and reflection, we can allow that, for him, doing his epistemic best led to desirable beliefs, whether or not he had control over them. However, we cannot, on a view that denies doxastic control, grant Ellis credit for having made an active choice in developing his newly found beliefs (although epistemic choice is still a very open question at the moment). Ellis’ case appears simpler because his transformation was toward more socially acceptable views, but what of remaining white supremacists, who also “do their best,” but continue to hold racist beliefs? Are we to hold in every case that one who lacks doxastic intentions is still epistemically responsible? Pamela Hieronymi (2008) certainly thinks so. Her tactic is to assert that beliefs are the sort of things for which we are responsible precisely because they fail to be voluntary. On her account, “that for which one is most fundamentally responsible could not be voluntary” (Hieronymi 2008, 371). The reason beliefs cannot be voluntary is because voluntariness requires intention, and beliefs are not intentional in the requisite manner. She maintains, An activity is voluntary just in case one engages in the activity by forming and executing an intention to do so, where one forms an intention to engage in the activity in settling the question of whether to engage in it, where that question could be settled by any set of considerations that one takes both to count in favor of the activity and to be sufficiently strong”. (Hieronymi 2008, 366)

As is evident in the case of Carl and his missing BMW, belief does not fit this definition. Carl does not form an intention, although Steup argues  For the record, I am not so sure about what the Greeks could or should have known, but for my money, the founding fathers of the United States had every opportunity to recognize the wrongness of slavery as indicated by the debates surrounding the practice and some of their own seeming discomfort with it (e.g., Jefferson condemning the slave trade in an early version of the Declaration of Independence and his freeing a few of his slaves upon his death). 30

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that he could form such an intention. Hieronymi takes a different tact.31 She claims that neither believing nor resenting, caring, fearing, being graceful, being angry are formed intentionally. These so-called commitment-­constituted attitudes “embody one’s take on an object … [and] could not be voluntary—they are not the sort of thing one can form or revise or maintain for any reason one takes to show it worth doing” (Hieronymi 2008, 371). Despite the involuntariness of belief on Hieronymi’s view, she still maintains that we are answerable for our beliefs insofar as we can be asked for our reasons for holding them. If we can be shown that our answers to the question of why we believe are inadequate, we will (if we are rational) abandon the relevant beliefs (Hieronymi 2008, 359). In other words, beliefs may not be voluntary but they are also not entirely passive. Rather, beliefs “embody our take on the world, on what is or is not true or important or worthwhile in it, we control them by thinking about the world, about what is or is not true or important or worthwhile in it” (Hieronymi 2008, 370). Beliefs (like facts) are tied up both with what we value and what we hold to be true. Unfortunately for those of us concerned with liberatory projects, here the idea of alt-facts or post-truth once more rears its troublesome head. If beliefs embody our take on the world, we must again consider that our take on the world is subject to the influence of social forces, communities, and power structures in ways that will greatly impact not only what we find true but what we find worthwhile. These social forces, communities, and power structures may not be uniform and homogenous, but they serve as influences upon our beliefs that require us to acknowledge that truth is not always straightforwardly obvious. Furthermore, if racism and sexism are as systemic as we are told, they work across a variety of communities, making it seem that what we find worthwhile may not be what we hope. The result is that the beliefs we adopt will involve a take  And not for Feldman either. He concurs, saying, “What is involved in genuine and paradigmatic decision making is the formation of an intention,” but “epistemic deliberation does not result in effective intentions to believe” (Feldman 2001, 85). Such intentions are essential to voluntary control, as Hieronymi and Feldman emphasize, but epistemic deliberation doesn’t result in intentions to believe. Steup disagrees, arguing the contrary point that “examples of belief acquisition after deliberation show [that] our propositional attitudes are under direct control of our will after all” (2017, 2693). I will discuss Steup’s counter shortly. 31

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on the world that is influenced by racist and sexist structural elements— but in a way we cannot form, revise, or maintain. Now, Hieronymi is somewhat sensitive, if not to the epistemic import of the difficulty of beliefs embodying our take on the world, at least to the moral import of her insistence on the involuntary nature of belief. She argues that this way of thinking is continuous with our ways of thinking about moral responsibility since to morally assess someone on account of some action or attitude … is not just to make a statement about the action or attitude; it is to make a statement about the quality of will or mind or moral personality of the which [sic] action or attitude is a product or part…. To morally assess someone on account of some state of affairs … one needs to think that the state of affairs in some way reveals something of the person, of the quality of her will. (Hieronymi 2008, 362).

Being answerable for the reasons for one’s beliefs follows the pattern of being answerable for one’s moral personality or will. Ellis, for instance, demonstrates a pattern of being answerable not only for the reasons for his beliefs but also for his own moral choices, which lead him to work with others in his community toward the goal of inclusiveness. The white supremacists he leaves behind in his epistemological awakening fail to demonstrate such answerableness. The result is that, as with moral responsibility, “to be epistemically responsible for a thing would be to be open to epistemic assessment or judgment on account of that thing, to be epistemically praise- or blameworthy for it, to be open to certain reactions from others on account of it, and perhaps to be open to certain sanctions from one’s epistemic community” (Hieronymi 2008, 363). The only differences between the epistemic and the moral for Hieronymi are the standards applied and the reactions warranted. Responsibility amounts not to intentional control but answerability—and we can be responsible to that for which we are answerable because answers reveal our moral and epistemic selves. The problem with claiming our beliefs are involuntary in this way is, however, that when we are asked the reasons for our beliefs, as Hieronymi describes, we can, and often do, become reflective about our beliefs in the

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way, say, Carl could be reflective about his belief that his BMW was stolen. We can, when asked reasons for our beliefs, decide that the reasons we have are sufficient or insufficient, perhaps not in a fully voluntary fashion but at least in ways that allow us to have some intentional formulation of beliefs. Becoming consciously reflective about our beliefs may in fact be somewhat parallel to deciding to flip the light switch to alter one’s belief about the light being on in his office. When Carl is asked, for example, why he believes his car has been stolen, he will have to be answerable to reasons about why he has not concluded the car was towed or that he misremembered where he parked it—and this may put him in a different evidentiary relationship, one that involves him forming and executing an intention with respect to his belief about his car. While epistemic agents may not always be able to alter their beliefs by examining the reasons and forming intentions to believe, we do appear to have some influence over our assessment of reasons, causing the makeup of belief to be at times partially voluntary. For instance, say I am thinking of taking another job. One thing I might do is make a list of pros and cons with respect to each job under consideration. This list of reasons may function like “flipping the switch” and provide an immediate and involuntary insight into what I should do. Surely this is consistent with Hieronymi’s sense of being answerable—after all, I may very well be able to give my reasons—but it nevertheless suggests that belief is not always unintentional as I actively formed an intention to come to a decision (belief about what I should do) and I consciously understood the process that led to my belief. Of course, sometimes the belief-making process is less decisive, and here the intentionality of the belief-forming process may be even clearer. That is, many times in the process of deciding, I will have to actually make a conscious, intentional decision about which set of reasons I will accept. This is most clear when I am seriously undecided and genuinely do have to make a decision about which set of reasons hold more weight. Whatever belief I decide upon may be somewhat unsatisfactory, but I must decide. Even if the decision-making process remains sublimated, the conscious process of making a list will influence my belief about, say, which job to take. That is, there is something I can do about my beliefs even if I lack direct control over them. Thus, the view that we have doxastic responsibility without doxastic control has limited explanatory potential insofar

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as we have, if not some doxastic control, at least some doxastic influence. Beliefs are not entirely distinct from the activities we engage in when forming them. Even Hieronymi admits this when she suggests that when we are asked why we believe and when our answers prove to be inadequate, we will abandon the relevant belief. This suggests that even if beliefs are not voluntary, they do not lie outside of our influence. We can engage in activities, for example, of seeking out evidence and examining our reasons, and these activities will influence our beliefs, sometimes in predictable ways. Whatever this influence is over which we have control is going to lie at the heart of epistemic responsibility and blameworthiness.

3.5 Doxastic Influence and Responsibility The final option for overcoming involuntarism with respect to belief is to assert the possibility of doxastic influence. The idea is that while we do lack control over our beliefs, we nevertheless have the ability to affect our beliefs because certain behaviors influence what we believe—and we can control behavior. We are, in other words, not entirely epistemically helpless. While this view is consistent with features of some of the other options for maintaining epistemic responsibility, it concentrates on those aspects of the belief-making process over which we do have control. That is, focusing on doxastic influence can be compatible with other responses to involuntarism, but it emphasizes the behavioral aspect of belief formation. It also avoids Hieronymi’s counterintuitive claim: that for which we are “most fundamentally responsible could not be voluntary” (2008, 371). The doxastic influence approach allows that beliefs themselves are not voluntary but focuses on what is voluntary in coming to have beliefs, namely the influences on our beliefs, which are in turn clearly something for which we are responsible. Peels, who specifically argues for the claim that we can influence our beliefs, identifies three belief-influencing factors that are indeed under our control: (1) doxastic mechanisms, (2) cognitive situatedness, and (3) intellectual virtues and vices (Peels 2017, 91). By “doxastic mechanism,” Peels means mental faculties that produce belief, disbelief, and

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suspension of judgments—and he believes we indirectly control these faculties, for instance, when we use introspection or visual perception. “Cognitive situatedness” refers to putting ourselves in position to acquire evidence, as when we go see if we left the lights on in the next room. Finally, “intellectual virtues and vices” concern our cognitive dispositions. These are, of course, well discussed within virtue epistemology. Epistemic virtues are those attitudes and dispositions that help us acquire and disseminate knowledge. They include: open-mindedness, intellectual courage, carefulness, precision, diligence, and thoroughness.32 Epistemic vices, on the other hand, are an impediment to knowledge. Vices can be traits such as epistemic conceit or conformity or intellectual laziness. These are dispositions that we are able to acquire through the practicing of actions that reflect these traits. When it comes to beliefs, we certainly appear to have the ability to influence them through utilizing mental faculties, by altering our cognitive situatedness, and by affecting our cognitive dispositions. When it comes specifically to mental faculties and cognitive situatedness, these ways of influencing belief are very much consistent with some of the other means of salvaging doxastic voluntarism. For example, the use of doxastic mechanism (e.g., mental faculties that produce belief, disbelief, and suspension of judgments) is largely consistent with deciding that one’s car has been stolen. Surely situations do exist in which we can become reflective about our beliefs and make decisions about the sufficiency (or lack thereof ) of the evidence. Similarly, changing one’s cognitive situatedness is precisely the sort of situation that occurs when one flips the light switch in order to generate the belief the lights are on. Not every circumstance allows for this easy a repositioning with respect to the evidence, but some circumstances do. Becoming reflective or altering one’s situation are everyday sorts of activities that we perform that have every appearance of influencing our beliefs—and doing so reliably. The processes of using visual perception or introspection may have a greater or lesser effect, but they do alter our beliefs in fairly predictable ways, ways that serve us well in the acquisition of belief. Same goes for our cognitive situatedness. For example, I once had a disagreement with 32

 This assumes a responsibilist conception of intellectual virtue.

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someone about whether there was a restaurant at a particular intersection. To resolve the disagreement, I went to the intersection and looked. Turns out, what I thought was not there had been there all along. All I needed to do to see it was to attentively look. In other words, I changed my cognitive situatedness—and used my visual perception—to alter one of my beliefs. Unfortunately, this particular belief is not all that similar to other sorts of beliefs, like those about race and sex. Undesirable beliefs of these sorts do not always shift as easily as our beliefs about cars, lights, and the location of restaurants. They are often much more resistant to such dramatic and decisive change. Yet, the last option, intellectual virtues and vices, may allow us to influence these beliefs.33 Here is where epistemic responsibility for our undesirable beliefs can be highlighted in a slightly different way. Consider the idea of epistemic virtue. While it may be that we may lack direct or even indirect control over the vast majority of our beliefs, we nevertheless are able to control behaviors that influence the beliefs that we have.34 This falls in line with James Montmarquet’s claim that “our doxastic responsibility is incomplete, but not, in the main, indirect; and it is grounded not in the responsibility for actions affecting our beliefs, but in a more basic responsibility we bear for the exercise of certain kinds of traits of intellectual character” (1992, 331). The point is that epistemic responsibility need not require direct control over our beliefs, as long as we have sufficient influence over the process by which we form beliefs. We can choose to be intellectually charitable, careful, and thorough, for instance. We can choose to be intellectually open-minded or generous or even fair. These character traits are acquired habits and dispositions. We can do something, perform some actions that produce good epistemic characters. This, in turn, puts us in a position to acquire beliefs that are appropriately responsive to all the evidence—and, of course, being responsive to all the evidence demands that we include considerations from a variety of perspectives, not just our own.  To be fair, this idea is indirectly touched upon in Hieronymi, who does refer to personality traits without mentioning specific virtues or vices. 34  At least if we are going to be responsibilists about our epistemic virtues. Responsibilists, as opposed to reliabilists, hold that intellectual virtues are not so much cognitive faculties as they are character traits. 33

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This is standard fare for liberatory epistemology more broadly. While not a virtue epistemologist himself, Medina tells us, “it is epistemically beneficial to consider things from multiple angles, to use a kaleidoscopic approach to the events, and to compare and contrast as many perspectives as possible (2013, 69). Developing intellectual virtues means we will be thorough in our examination of the evidence, much like we are asked to be when engaging in transformative criticism. The result, then, of making choices that promote intellectual virtue would include our taking into account the perspectives and voices of those who are excluded and harmed by undesirable beliefs. For instance, this is something it appears the Alabama history instructor could have engaged in before calling upon the Ku Klux Klan to break up a pride gathering. That is, she could have very well asked what it is like for those on the other side of the issue. Had she done this, she could have at least been a more sensitive epistemic agent even if her fundamental beliefs did not change. Developing our intellectual virtues, which is something over which we do have some control, allows us to become better, more sensitive knowers. When we consider how many of our undesirable beliefs are implicitly or unconsciously held and how many of these beliefs resist the influence of introspective awareness, the nature of our influence over and responsibility for our beliefs is especially significant. The vast majority of us surely fail to have direct control of our implicit biases and over the beliefs informed by those biases. The unconsciousness of the mental associations and underlying beliefs is part of what gives them their implicit nature. Yet this need not doom us to having no influence whatsoever over undesirable biases or the beliefs that these biases inform. Holroyd (2012) brings a number of examples of such influence in arguing that we are indeed responsible for our implicit biases. As she points out, empirical research has demonstrated: (1) that exposure to members of stigmatized groups or to counter-stereotypical exemplars led individuals to exhibit less bias,35 (2) that automatic racial prejudice is subject to social influence,36 and (3) that individuals who are committed to responding without prejudice or

35 36

 See Blair (2002).  See Lowery et al. (2001).

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who have the goal to treat people non-prejudicially exhibit less bias.37 Who we are exposed to, what social influences we subject ourselves to, and what goals we set for our beliefs and behaviors may not always be entirely under our control, especially when we are children and particularly subject to the influence of others, but they are factors over which we tend to have considerable influence by the time we become adults.38 If, as the evidence suggests, altering these influences alters our underlying beliefs, then we do have an obligation to put ourselves in the best epistemic position we possibly can with respect to the influences over our beliefs, especially our undesirable ones, so that we act in the best we can within the limits of the innate endowments we have. While beliefs may themselves remain involuntary, that does not entail that everything related to belief formation must remain involuntary. What we can do is affect the process of coming to have beliefs. We can influence them by taking care in what evidence we are exposed to and with how we are guided by evidence, by seeking out diverse epistemic communities, and by developing character traits, habits or dispositions that guide us in being, among other things, more epistemically open-­ minded and intellectually honest. Beliefs are not always something we can alter or change as simply as flipping a switch, but empirical research suggests that they are not fully involuntary. Instead, beliefs are something we can affect based on how we position ourselves in the world. Our epistemic habits, whether they be good ones or bad ones, will have an impact on the beliefs we hold. Of course, the types of habits we are encouraged to adopt will depend, in part, on which habits are endorsed by our epistemic communities, so even these lie somewhat beyond purely individual control. Still, if beliefs are responsive to habits of action and we are indeed capable of developing our habits, there is room, in principle, for each of us to assume some responsibility for the beliefs we hold.

 See Devine et al. (2002). Also see Moskowitz and Li (2011).  In the final chapter, I will consider circumstances when we get caught up in narrow epistemic communities through no clear fault of our own. 37 38

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Focusing on habits of action ties epistemic adequacy and inadequacy to one’s conduct. It addresses the concern of what sort of care we give to epistemic matters. Even if interactions, practices, or conduct cannot directly produce or undermine some specific belief, they still influence our beliefs, and these influences are ones that we can be responsible for or answerable to for they concern the ways we choose to position ourselves epistemically. In other words, our habits of action put us in a position to influence our beliefs in ways that make us more likely to adopt desirable or undesirable beliefs. This opens the possibility of assuming a level of responsibility for our beliefs, but for liberatory epistemologists it also has the advantage of opening up the possibility of dealing subversively with undesirable beliefs and innate biases.39 That is, if it is possible for us to influence belief, then it is possible to influence belief in the ways we want it influenced. Since we can, for instance, control to a large extent whom we associate with and since contact with members of stigmatized groups lead people to exhibit less bias, a clear means opens up for manipulating not simply how we comport ourselves with respect to the evidence but also how others with whom we interact are presented with evidentiary considerations. Of course, this works both ways, and those who want epistemic perspectives narrowed can also influence beliefs. It may not always be a simple matter for us to control the influences over our beliefs, especially when there are power structures constraining our access to these influences. Yet if transformational criticism has any force at all, we should be able to find reasons for expanding our epistemic communities since presumably we are all epistemically better off if we learn to adopt a wider field of vision and a broader conception of evidence. Sometimes, however, we fail to do this, if not from epistemic laziness, at least from an overestimation of our epistemic abilities.

 It is also to adopt some valuable lessons from both the American pragmatists and the later Wittgenstein. Pragmatists like Dewey focus on dynamic social learning and on interaction with diverse elements of our society while Wittgenstein emphasized the role of social practices, practices that have been coopted for subversive, epistemically resistant purposes. See Seigfried (2010), Rorty (1990), Medina (2004, 2013), Tanesini (1994, 2004), Scheman and O’Connor (2002). 39

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3.6 Epistemic Humility/Epistemic Hubris When it comes to considering the care we take in our epistemic endeavors, one of the difficulties is that we are often epistemically over-­confident, not realizing that we need to seek out more information. An example of this sort of circumstance comes to mind from my own past. I grew up with a grandmother and a close friend both of whom were decidedly deaf. As a result, I have always been relatively comfortable around those who do not have the best of hearing. When I first went to college, however, I remember quite clearly encountering for the first time a person in a wheelchair. Unlike the case of deafness that simply surrounded me as a child, I previously had known of people in wheelchairs but never really thought much about it. I was unaware of my experiential and epistemic limitations, that is, until my circumstances changed. It never dawned on me that I knew no one who used a wheelchair, just as it never dawned on me that my grandmother was deaf. In the latter case, my epistemic situation was—unbeknownst to me—epistemically advantageous; in the former case, epistemically disadvantageous. Yet in both situations I was unaware of my epistemic positioning. It can be a challenge to know when to be epistemically conservative, trusting one’s epistemic capacities, and when to doubt what it is we believe we know.40 The epistemically virtuous person must, on pain of opening the door to a fairly radical skepticism, walk a fine line between trust in and skepticism concerning his or her epistemic abilities. As a rule, we tend to be epistemically conservative, and with good reason—most of our beliefs, most of the time, tend to be just fine. Besides, we simply cannot doubt everything, at least not all at once, meaning we have to have some method of determining appropriate conditions for a genuine, living doubt, especially when the belief subject to doubt is one accepted within one’s own epistemic community or is one that is well-justified and well-established. The difficulty of this  This problem is one that gets more difficult to deal with when it involves epistemic echo chambers that deliberately and actively discredit outside sources. When this happens, my own epistemic awareness can be seriously affected. The consequences of echo chambers on individual responsibility will be discussed in the final chapter. 40

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task, especially when it comes to undesirable beliefs, may be easier to discern in an historical example: the circumstances surrounding some of Kant’s racist beliefs. Take the case of what at the time and in the cultural milieu probably seemed for many to be a quite reasonable instance of a well-informed race theory: Kant’s conception of race. Kant wrote the book on reason, literally. He certainly did not have the final word, but what he said has been unquestionably influential. When it comes to reason, Kant understood it a whole lot better than most. He is very much what we would call a “subject-matter expert.” A hallmark of Kant’s work on reason is that it is always concerned not simply with appearances but with what underlies those appearances, with that which makes appearances possible. What then emerges from this concern with the underlying structure of rationality is the idea that there is a metaphysical necessity that grounds empirical laws of nature. In other words, nature is purposive. When it comes to his critical work, the purposiveness of nature has been well understood for quite some time now, but what is lost on those who do not know Kant’s work on race is how he uses this very idea of purposiveness to dehumanize people of color. To put the matter bluntly: nature does nothing without a purpose, nature gave different races different skin color (which is a permanent, persistent quality across generations), so nature must be signaling some significant difference among races, with some (i.e., whites) being superior to others.41 Much has been said on Kant’s racial theory, but the question at hand is whether Kant was failing to do his epistemic best, whether he was failing to take action where he should have, whether he was being epistemically hubristic, when he formulated his theory on race. To consider Kant’s obligation in this instance, first consider what he supposedly knew about reason and about metaphysics. He clearly knew quite a bit being, as he was, a renowned expert on the subject. Prima facie he had good reason to trust his epistemic capacities on the subject of reason and its relation to a purposive unity. So, what does Kant tell us about purposive unity and its relation to race? Purposive unity is something Kant thinks we must 41

 See Mills (2005, 2014). Also see Heikes (2016, 77–98).

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assume because it is what assures us that the laws of nature will conform to both experience and our moral nature. Guyer explains this point by noting that, for Kant, “we can only give content to the idea of a purpose for nature that we are led to by our reflection on the purposiveness of organisms by thinking of human moral development as the ultimate end of nature” (2001, xxvii). What this actually means is that purposiveness is centrally connected to the worth of persons. The way this happens is, first, that when we make an orderly whole out of experience, everything is understood to occur for a reason—not just in the critical work but in the anthropological as well. The result is, then, that race becomes more than some accidental differentiation among humans. It must have within it some purposive cause or causes. In his writing on race, Kant goes so far to say that “it is easily without doubt certain that nothing purposive would ever be found by means of purely empirical groping about without a guiding principle that might direct one’s search: for to observe just means to engage experience methodically” (2013b, 174). In other words, observation, at least when it is done correctly, guides us to purposiveness. Elsewhere, in his “little essay” on human race entitled “On the Different Human Races,” he maintains that “we also wish to specify natural causes in those cases where we cannot become aware of any purposes” (Kant 2000, 14), and this in turn leads us beyond the merely empirical to the metaphysical.42 In essence, Kant wants us to be aware that his repeated appeals to final causes apply to human beings as much as anything else. Even organized beings are to “be conceived only as a system of final causes” (Kant 2013b, 189). The ground of race is not natural but metaphysical, which in turn means that the evaluations Kant makes of the different races—when Kant says, for instance, the difference between whites and blacks is so fundamental that it “appears to be as great in regard to mental capacities as in colour’ and that being ‘quite black from head to foot’ is ‘clear proof ’ that what one says is stupid”

 In another work on race, Kant (2013b) describes this essay and what he tries to accomplish in it. He says, ‘I have tried in a little essay on the human races to demonstrate a similar warrant, indeed, a need, to proceed from a teleological principle where theory forsakes us’ (2013b, 173). He has even more to say on the matter in Kant (2013a). 42

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(Kant 1960, 111, 113)—when Kant says that, he does not think he is making an empirical observation but a necessary one.43 So, what does this have to do with being guided by the evidence and how it leads to doxastic responsibility? Well, fact is that hate him or love him—think that he’s a racist or not—Kant was during his lifetime a well-­ established authority on the topics with which he was concerned. He not only believed his views on the rational capacity of various races to be correct, he had detailed, developed arguments that supported his view. He very likely never believed that there was in fact evidence at his disposal that he had not considered. This much is made evident by his response to one of his critics, Georg Forster. Kant describes this criticism thusly: To be sure this renowned man [i.e., Forster] finds it hazardous from the very beginning to settle in advance on a principle on the basis of which the investigator of nature … might even be led in the inquiry into … and observation of nature, especially the sort of principle that directed observations to a natural history by that means advance --in distinction from the mere description in nature—in a manner this distinction itself illicit. (Kant 2013b, 174)

Put simply, Forster said that we cannot prejudge issues about race (i.e., that whole mess about purposive causes); rather, we have to examine the empirical facts. According to Forster, Kant’s view is simply not empirical enough—and it is not supported by the empirical data. Forster was in a position to make this criticism because he had, unlike Kant, traveled the world and interacted with people of different races. The way Kant replies to Forster is, however, very telling. He says, more or less, Forster has it backwards; we simply cannot investigate nature if we don’t have some theory to guide us.44 In other words, Kant insists, quite strongly, that his method of first seeking regulatory principles in anthropology was the right one—and given the evidence he had of his own intellectual prowess and the success of his architectonic system, he had some justification for  For a more detailed argument see Heikes (2019, 45–52).  More specifically, Kant says, “It is easily without doubt certain that nothing purposive would ever be found by means of purely empirical groping about without a guiding principle that might direct one’s search: for to observe just means to engage experience methodically” (2013b, 174). For more on this debate see Gray (2012). 43 44

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this belief.45 We today may think he should have been intellectually more willing to consider additional evidence, but whatever intellectual hubris we all share, we cannot successfully live our lives second guessing every belief we have that appears justified. This is a case where it appears we wish to hold someone accountable for believing in a way that from that person’s own perspective seems justified.46 Kant was (we think) wrong about his view of race, but his view had some well-developed, if flawed, justification. In other circumstances, we can find intellectual hubris where the believing is not so justified and where a bit more intellectual honesty and open-mindedness would produce better beliefs. One example of this comes from the trial of a conspiracy theorist, Alex Jones, who denies that a particularly horrific shooting of schoolchildren ever happened. This man has been sued by the families of some of the victims. During one of his trials, Jones is on the stand testifying and the judge called him [Jones] out for his lies…. At one point she [Judge Maya Guerra Gamble] told Jones: “It seems absurd to instruct you again that you must tell the truth while you testify, yet here I am. You must tell the truth while you testify. This is not your show.” When Jones said he “believed” he was telling the truth, Gamble shot back: “You believe everything you say is true, but it isn’t. Your beliefs do not make something true. That is what we’re doing here. Just because you claim to think something is true does not make it true. (Huppke 2022)47  For a good discussion of the conflict among disciplinary approaches like that between the philosopher Kant and the naturalist Forster see Zammito (2012). 46  Without doubt, seeming justified and actually being justified is all the difference in the world. 47  Rather significant here is the role power plays in this exchange. As Foucault says, 45

Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its regime of truth, its “general politics” of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true. (1980, 131) The situation of a judge in a court of law telling a witness what counts as “truth” is as clear an illustration of Foucault’s point as can be had. The themes of power, narrative, truth/post-truth have a role in this exchange; however, to address this aspect of the example here would take me too far afield. Suffice to say, the issue of “whose truth?” is one that matters to determining the desirability or undesirability of belief.

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One of the most important differences between Jones’ circumstances and those of Kant is that Kant can claim not mere belief but a much more thoroughly justified belief. Where Jones lacks evidence and justification (and even sincerity),48 Kant can provide a painstakingly developed, systematic philosophical theory to lend credence to his claims. It is much easier to point to Jones’ beliefs and accuse him of epistemic (and moral) irresponsibility. His epistemic flaws are rather glaring, all the more so because huge swaths of Jones’ larger epistemic community (beyond that of his own making) are telling him he believes wrongly. That is good grounds for a wee bit of epistemic humility. Conversely, while Kant’s intellectual prowess leads to intellectual hubris on his part, he is not simply spouting out beliefs with little to no support. What should make us think that Kant had a greater obligation to question his beliefs than he exhibits in his exchange with Forster? The larger question is: what should we question or what should we know? The great difficulty in providing an answer is that doxastic responsibility may amount to more than failing to take action that one should have taken. Montmarquet, for one, addresses this point directly—and in a way that ties into the Kant-Forster debate. Despite the fact that he suggests that “doxastic responsibility is ultimately a matter of failing to take actions which, from an epistemic and sometimes a moral standpoint as well, one should have taken” (Montmarquet 1992, 332–333),49 Montmarquet ultimately rejects this suggestion. The problem for Montmarquet is that it ignores important kinds of cases, cases like Hitler, where the claim is that he should have not been satisfied with his first order beliefs but should have taken the further action of examining them. In other words, this difficulty allows Hitler—or Kant—too easily off the hook. Consider Montmarquet’s hypothetical dialogue between Hitler and his critic: Hitler. I was sufficiently sure of my beliefs that I did not believe that further checks were necessary.  He did lose his case in court.  Montmarquet (1992) ultimately thinks this way of putting the point is insufficient to get at our epistemic responsibility, but it does head us in what I think is the right direction. 48 49

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Critic. You were culpable for failing to check those beliefs and since, in failing to check those beliefs, you thereby failed to check the higher order belief (that further checks were unnecessary) you are culpable for the latter belief, too. Hitler. You beg the question. For the question was whether my first level failure to check was culpable. I claim that it was not, because it was justified by my second level belief that further checks were unnecessary. If you are to prove me wrong, you cannot begin by assuming that my first level omission was culpable. (Montmarquet 1992, 333).

Montmarquet’s hypothetical dialogue reflects much the same nature and tone as the dialogue Kant had with Forster: Kant: I was sufficiently sure that the observation of nature can only be advanced on the basis of presupposing a principle of purposive causes. Forster: But you were culpable for failing to check your beliefs about purposive causes. Kant: You beg the question. My first level failure to check my beliefs was offset by my second level belief that no further checks were necessary.

The moral for Montmarquet is that if Hitler is culpable, his failure lies in him having no right to be certain in the first place, not that he should have considered further checks on his belief. The same can be said of Kant. He does not need further checks on his belief; instead, his culpability lies in being certain of something of which he should not have been certain. Of course, the contemporary shift to social epistemology makes the claim that Kant should not have been certain a much, much more difficult claim to make. After all, Kant’s epistemic community was supportive of his beliefs and his justifications—yet that the critic Forster existed is a problem for Kant’s confidence that he needed no further checks on his beliefs. Forster is a challenge to Kant’s epistemic character and, thus, his epistemic innocence.

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Epistemic character is of great important for virtue epistemologists, and, like any good virtue epistemologist, Montmarquet seeks to put the blame on Hitler’s (and by extension Kant’s) epistemic character. We should ask, though, about the nature of this epistemic character that is to blame. In what way do Hitler and Kant fail to have good epistemic character? What is good epistemic character? How are we responsible for acquiring and maintaining good epistemic character? If epistemic character lies at the heart of epistemic responsibility, some notion of what this is and how we are to obtain it is in order. Fundamentally, epistemic character has to do with the way one orients oneself toward the epistemic good of believing what is true and not believing what is not true.50 Of course, we cannot execute this orientation in quite the same way epistemically as we can morally given the less voluntary nature of belief, but we do bear responsibility for at least some of our individual traits of good epistemic character such as: Intellectual honesty Intellectual fairness Intellectual courage Intellectual generosity Open-mindedness Impartiality Intellectual carefulness Intellectual thoroughness

It is with several of these traits that Kant, in particular, could have been more epistemically virtuous. It is Forster who provides the specific challenge to Kant’s epistemic character. It is Forster who directly tasks Kant with better accounting for the evidence available to him about people of different races. It is Forster who has sufficient intellectual authority to be  Epistemologists do not agree that seeking truth and avoiding falsehood is the only epistemic good, but it is an important one. I very much believe that there are other epistemic goods, like acquiring understanding, but since truth is perhaps the most widely accepted good, I will focus on it. Even so, truth has its limitations since not all truths are really that important to attain. For example, it is of little consequence if I obtain a true belief about how many leaves are on the trees on my property. Not every truth matters to my epistemic character. 50

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taken seriously. However, when Forster levels his criticism, Kant responds in a rather close-minded, intellectually ungenerous fashion. He takes Forster’s approach to be backwards without sufficiently considering the evidence in favor of Forster’s position. In other words, Kant more or less just assumes his approach is correct. Kant’s epistemic failure here lies in his dismissing his critic out of hand and failing to sufficiently reconsider his beliefs in light of well-grounded criticism—but it is possible that the failure lies even deeper than that, resulting further from refusing to act in an epistemically responsible manner. When writing “On the Different Human Races,” consider that Kant overlooked Forster’s quite knowledgeable first-hand account of the people of the South Pacific—and this despite the fact that Forster was well known in Germany. Instead, as Sally Hatch Grey tells us, Kant chose to reference “a travel narrative written by British Philip Carteret, who … spent less time exploring the South Pacific than did Cook [with whom Forster sailed] and covered much less territory” (2012, 402). Given Forster’s fame, it is possible that Kant read but deliberately ignored Forster’s account. Yet even if his omission was accidental, this does not absolve him of epistemological vice. After all, Forster was well-known and regarded, so Kant should have known and taken it into account. Because we, as good epistemological agents, are expected to seek out evidence both for and against our beliefs, Kant’s ignorance of an available travelogue that spoke against his view demonstrates culpability. To make matters worse, Kant doubled-down on his omission/ignorance. Assume Kant was initially quite genuinely unaware of Forster’s account, when Forster directly criticized him, Kant’s attention should have been refocused. He can be held responsible for not considering the breadth of evidence Forster was relying on to make the criticism. At some point, the omissions are no longer excusable but constitute an epistemic error. Put simply, Kant had an intellectual duty to consider the evidence available to him—and he did not do that.

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3.7 Epistemic Communities and the Possibility of Voluntarism Because we can act in ways that make us better and worse knowers, we do have epistemic responsibilities and obligations. Beliefs themselves may remain stubbornly “there,” but because we can act in ways that influence our beliefs, we carry some responsibility for them or at least for how we choose to act in the formulation and maintenance of them. Provided we act in epistemically virtuous ways, we can be praised when our beliefs are desirable; provided our epistemic virtue is lacking, we can be blamed when our beliefs are undesirable. Of course, it is easy to point to the sort of epistemic duty we have in the face of undesirable beliefs when one has great intellectual aptitude, such as Kant, or even when someone has great power, like Hitler.51 The duty to seek more evidence surely increases with the level of one’s ability to acquire and assess that evidence. What, then, of those of us who are much more pedestrian in intellectual ability or political power, those of us more products of our epistemic community than shapers of our epistemic community?52 Most of us acquire most of our beliefs from the epistemic communities of which we are a part, and we often have little reason to challenge those beliefs. Just this week I had a conversation with a master beer brewer who asked me how many ounces are in a gallon. I said sixty-four. He asked if I was sure, to which I very cautiously said, “yes.” He informed me that I was wrong. A half-gallon has sixty-four ounces; a gallon one hundred and twenty-eight. Digging into my muddled remembrance of measures, that sounded right, but mostly, I took his word for it as he is, after all, an expert who uses these measurements daily. Measurements are one thing. What if this expert were telling me something more objectionable, more undesirable? Something that was nevertheless quite consistent with my inherited background beliefs, much like my sometimes vague recollection of  Hitler has fewer intellectual endowments than someone like Kant, but he as a result of his power, he has access to significant epistemic resources and (hopefully) knowledgeable advisors around him. 52  This does not mean Kant and Hitler were not also products of their intellectual community. They were. It is just that they happen to also be more intellectual fashion setters than most of us have the ability or opportunity to be. 51

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­ easurements was consistent with what the master brewer was telling m me. Would I still take his (or her) word for it? In all likelihood, that depends on who I am, what my background beliefs are, where I fit in my epistemic community. What does this mean for undesirable beliefs? Well, what if the person whose knowledge is in question is a poor, white, rural southerner in the United States with little education and little power? Living myself on the fringe of the rural south, this is a person I encounter with some frequency. I have met people who have no transportation and who think that a good day is one in which they can find work; I have met people who clearly could not read a map, although they can tell you exactly how to get someplace locally; I have met people who are convinced that they are treated poorly because they are white. These sorts of people are the one’s Ellis tells us are left out of mainstream society’s power structures. At least some of these disenfranchised people are raised in environments where racist beliefs not only go unchallenged but are actively promoted. They see affirmative action programs, for instance, and think they are being left behind because they are white. The world they see is one where there are programs to help people of color or women or immigrants—but not them. Given the evidence available to them, given their epistemic communities, given their innate abilities, are they responsible for their beliefs? Unfortunately, the answer is not as clear cut as we often want to make it. Assuming we do have some influence over our beliefs, we do have some prima facie epistemic responsibility. Still, questions remain. Just as not everyone has the same moral responsibilities, not everyone has the same epistemic responsibilities. Medina, an otherwise strong proponent of epistemic responsibility, argues that “differently situated subjects and groups can bear very different burdens and responsibilities” (2013, 117). For him, the primary demarcation for greater and lesser epistemic responsibilities revolves around epistemic privilege, with the epistemically disadvantaged sharing a lesser epistemic burden. On the face of it, this makes perfectly good sense. To whom much is epistemically given, much is required. Of course, all sorts of questions can be asked about what it means to be epistemically advantaged or disadvantaged and why or how there might be differential responsibilities attached to one’s epistemic

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position.53 The answers will tend to revolve around social positioning and the power attached to various positions. In other words, what it means to do the best one can in light of one’s innate endowment will depend on where we fit within a social structure, one that is greatly influenced by power. Power structures operate on all of us. Power shapes our beliefs. If this is the case, as many liberatory epistemologists do argue, then subjects are not at all autonomous but hold beliefs in reference to power and social forces. As a result, because individual epistemic agents are immersed in various epistemic communities, a related concern is how to disentangle individual responsibility from communal responsibility.54 Even if one does not wish to go as far as Foucault on this issue, social epistemologists note how epistemic agency does not stand independent of the contributions of social influence.55 The result is that we must ask: When is a belief my belief? When am I individually responsible for holding or maintaining a belief? Social epistemology cannot easily answer such questions, but the concerns raised by them are understood. In fact, Stephen Hetherington directly raises precisely these sorts of concerns when he asks: How much of the person—his reflecting, his sensing his surroundings, etc.—must be involved in having the belief if he is to be epistemically responsible for having it? How little role must anyone else play in his having the belief, if he is to be epistemically responsible for it? To what extent does epistemic responsibility require the person to identify consciously with his having the belief? (2002, 399)

What Herrington wants to know is, given the ways in which social influences play a role in our belief formation, how voluntary—and how consciously voluntary—must our beliefs be? We each acquire many, many of our beliefs from our epistemic communities without any awareness that we are doing so. In these cases, do we acquire individual responsibility? Consider the case of beliefs tinted with bias. Some of these are explicit— we know we have them and we actively seek to uphold them. Whether  For a thorough discussion of this see Medina (2013).  This is a topic I address more fully in the final chapter. 55  See Reider (2016). 53 54

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the biases involved are undesirable or not, we often may find such explicit biases to be ones we are far more responsible for than implicit ones precisely because conscious beliefs are much more “one’s own” than implicit beliefs. Perhaps an example here will be useful. I am biased against Chevrolet automobiles after having a bad experience with one particular model about thirty years ago. I admit that my judgment is a hasty generalization, but I nonetheless continue willfully in my belief. I refuse to own Chevrolets. In this case, I consciously identify with and actively uphold having this belief, and thus, the responsibility for it would appear to be very much my own. Contrarily, implicitly held beliefs are typically ones with which I do not consciously identify. The stereotypes I buy into, for example, may be ones that I never consciously formed even if I now consciously do not wish to hold them. In this sort of case, others have played a large role in my having the beliefs that I have. The role may be so large that I cannot easily dissuade myself of the belief. Our forms of life, as Wittgenstein might say, are simply there, and these forms of life loom large in my holding the beliefs that I do. In a very strong sense, I am not responsible for the forms of life that surround me. This makes epistemic responsibility much more problematic. Still, the forms of life or epistemic practices that surround us need not be immutable givens. They are not activities over which we have no influence. Surely, as Moody-Adams maintains, we each contribute to these practices. Each of us is capable of making some effort, however small, to subvert or otherwise alter them. In the case of implicit beliefs, specifically stereotyping, we may not be doomed to hold the beliefs that we hold, even if those stereotypes are built into our social structure. For instance, evidence exists that making a conscious decision to form a goal of being nonprejudicial actually impacts implicit biases and serves to reduce prejudicial action. When considering the role egalitarian goals have on our stereotype inhibition, Moskowitz and Li found that “proactive control [of stereotypical thinking] produces a negative event (no stereotype activation) that is easy to contemplate because it can be seen. It does not result in nothing happening, but something measurable in the form of stereotype inhibition and other forms of goal shielding” (2011, 115). Put differently, if we consciously try to not-stereotype, the stereotyping that

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occurs outside our conscious awareness can be minimized.56 Here, at least, it is the case that conscious reflection can impact even socially inherited, implicitly held undesirable beliefs, which in turn confers some individual responsibility, assuming one is aware of having a communally inherited undesirable belief.57 Unfortunately, research also suggests that our implicit biases and underlying beliefs are far more stable than they should be given that interventions, such as having a second-order goal of not-stereotyping, have been shown to be effective in the short term but not necessarily in the long term. Vuletich and Payne have considered the encouraging evidence that “procedures intended to change implicit bias found evidence that scores were malleable when measured on immediate tests” (2019, 854), but they have also gone a step further. They proceeded to ask how well the changes persisted after a delay. What they found was a large-scale experimental study (Lai et al., 2016) that discovered “all nine interventions [for minimizing implicit bias] were effective on the immediate test, yet none of the interventions produced a lasting effect after 1 to 2 days” [italics added] (Vuletich and Payne 2019, 854–55). Vuletich and Payne suggest that this is because implicit bias, while unstable in individuals, is quite stable in social contexts.58 If this hypothesis is correct, it further complicates how we are to disentangle individual epistemic responsibility from communal responsibility. If being epistemically responsible for believing that p means accepting it oneself and having good reasons for p, well, in the cases of implicit beliefs, we often fail to meet the criteria of “accepting it oneself.” In fact, Fricker suggests that implicit attitudes, or the ones for which I might actually disown their content, “seriously compromises our conception of ourselves as cognitively authentic, or even epistemically responsible” (2016, 37). Although Fricker treats epistemic culpability along the lines of moral culpability,59 Hetherington’s concern is that we cannot answer these questions by appealing to a parallel with moral responsibility. Epistemic responsibility is something different. Part  See Moskowitz and Li (2011, 114).  The case of ignorance, especially actively constructed and maintained ignorance, will be discussed at length in the next chapter. 58  See Vuletich and Payne (2019, 860). 59  See Fricker (2016, 35). Her concern is specifically with implicit bias. 56 57

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of the reason for this is that, unlike in the moral case, how we respond to evidence is not something within our direct voluntary control. Even if we can affect how we comport ourselves with respect to the evidence, we cannot alter our belief at will, especially when we are up against communally supported attitudes. While there is a sense in which I have an epistemic obligation to put myself in the best possible position when it comes to acquiring evidence, the concern is that stable social environments that support undesirable beliefs will affect what it is I believe—even when I individually commit myself to avoiding those undesirable beliefs.60 Whatever obligation I have to resist, subvert, or otherwise alter my community’s stable practices, I alone will not undermine systemically supported beliefs. Furthermore, it may only be with extraordinary (perhaps epistemically supererogatory?) effort that I escape sharing those beliefs. Epistemic responsibility, even for virtuous knowers, may remain far more difficult than we could have ever imagined.

3.8 Joint Epistemic Responsibility While the topic of individual agency becomes muddied in a socially epistemic world, the difficulties only get deeper if we expand our focus beyond the individual knower and ask about community agency.61 The further level of concern that arises is this: can there be jointly held, communal epistemic responsibility? Seumas Miller (2015) has argued that there can indeed be joint epistemic responsibility because there can be joint epistemic action. What constitutes a “joint epistemic action” on Miller’s view is an action that is directed toward an epistemic end (e.g., truth, knowledge, or understanding) and that involves individuals working interdependently toward that end. He offers examples of a team of detectives seeking the identity of the Yorkshire Ripper or a team of scientists seeking a cure for cancer (Miller 2015, 283). These are clearly positive cases where the epistemic advantages of collective social action shine  See Feldman (2001).  While I address part of the issues related to joint epistemic action here, I will revisit this topic in the final chapter as well. 60 61

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through as the detectives or scientists consciously work together to strive toward a specific epistemic goal. In such cases, joint epistemic responsibility is surely praiseworthy as when the killer’s identity becomes known or when new and effective treatments that lead to better outcomes for cancer patients are discovered. Yet where the possibility of praise exists, so too does the opportunity for blame. Miller acknowledges that we, as a community, can be held morally responsible for joint epistemic actions, which would mean that it is possible to hold entire communities morally responsible for undesirable actions. What about joint epistemic responsibility for joint epistemic beliefs, especially when those beliefs should be avoided? The most obvious application of joint epistemic action leading to joint epistemic responsibility lies in testimonial and hermeneutical injustice, with testimonial injustice being especially obvious. As Kristi Dotson puts it, “we all need an audience willing and capable of hearing us” (2011, 238). An important part of our epistemic lives is sharing knowledge. We must be willing to engage (transformatively or not) with others in the community to build and share our knowledge. In fact, the willingness to share knowledge back and forth is critical to producing not only epistemic good but social goods as well. Zagzebski echoes the importance of being heard by arguing that Sharing knowledge is an extremely important aspect of any community, and we want people who are intellectually generous, intellectually fair, intellectually tolerant, intellectually honest, and who are careful with the truth in their communications with others. Some epistemic goods are not divisible—not exhaustively divided among individuals but are goods that are possessed by the community itself. Epistemic justice and epistemic welfare are closely parallel to justice and welfare in the moral sense, and it is important that epistemologists investigate the social and structural conditions that produce these goods. (Zagzebski 2019, 34)

Joint epistemic action solidifies our status as intellectually equal agents— and when that occurs, we then have joint epistemic responsibility to make sure that we attend to the social structure and condition that produce epistemic welfare and epistemic justice. The problem is, joint epistemic

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action is not always one conducive to being heard. Sometimes it serves to muffle certain voices. Consider Miller’s example of a crime being reported.62 The victim reports the crime to a police officer. This reporting requires “a cooperative action governed by conventions, the convention that the speaker A tells the truth and the hearer trust the speaker to tell the truth” (Miller 2015, 287). While Miller is not concerned with testimonial injustice, reporting crimes is one area where such injustice can and does happen with some frequency.63 In cases of testimonial injustice, the convention between speaker and hearer breaks down—but it does not do so accidentally or as a result of only one individual’s action. In fact, testimonial injustices in crime reporting are often predicated on certain hermeneutical injustices that make epistemic cooperation difficult. What this means is that the convention surrounding crime reporting fails in systemic ways that we can identify as being associated with oppressive practices. For example, Heather Zaykowski reports that while “minority victimizations are less likely to be reported for both racial and nonracial hate crimes …, the magnitude of this effect was greater for racial hate crimes” (2010, 391). The obvious question, and one Zaykowski asks, is why this is. She suggests that “future research should continue to evaluate the factors that contribute to the victim, their family, and the community’s willingness to report hate crime to the police (Zaykowski 2010, 391). Of course, she does seek an answer to this question and finds that there are intersectional differences across social groups and that reporting behavior appears to be a function of multiple structural inequalities.64 It is difficult to imagine that these intersectional differences would occur in the absence of differences in how the testimonial injustices experience by each group play a role in their trust in the system.

 This is just one layer of what Miller claims are a series of layered structures of joint epistemic action involved in solving a crime, but it is the one most immediately relevant to epistemic injustice and is, thus, the only one I will consider here. 63  Consider the Gabby Petito case in the U.S., where the police were called to the scene of a domestic violence situation and sided with Petito’s boyfriend, who shortly thereafter killed Petito. See Whitehurst (2022). 64  See Zaykowski et al. (2019). 62

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For example, at the intersection of gender-based and race-based inequalities are women of color who experience intimate partner violence or sexual violence. These women are discouraged from calling the police, in part, due to a perceived lack of concern on the part of the police.65 This makes sense. For any group, if the members of that group believe that the police will not take their reporting of the crime seriously—that is, if cooperative testimonial exchanges break down and one’s testimony is unjustly dismissed—why should they report it? Surely many epistemically disadvantaged groups have good reasons to believe they will not be heard by the police. The sort of joint epistemic action that creates epistemic injustice by silencing marginalized groups is given the name “epistemic violence” by Gayatri Spivak (1998). The idea is that with such joint action the knowledge of marginalized or oppressed groups is eliminated. They are not allowed to speak or to be heard (which is precisely the idea behind testimonial injustice). Linguistic communication requires what Jennifer Hornsby calls “reciprocity” (1995, 134), which is when people not only understand another speaker’s words but understand those words as they are meant to be taken. When this does not occur, we often have an epistemic violence in which there is “a refusal, intentional or unintentional, of an audience to communicatively reciprocate a linguistic exchange owing to pernicious ignorance [i.e., an ignorance that harms another person]” (Dotson 2011, 238). Silencing of those who are marginalized is surely at work in the underreporting hate crimes related to race. Here is where Miller’s argument about joint epistemic responsibility has some teeth in holding groups responsible. If collective moral praise can accrue to groups who solve crimes or who find successful treatments for cancer, collective moral blame should attach to epistemic failures, as when testimonial exchanges between those with power and those who are socially marginalized break down. A lack of reciprocity leading to epistemic violence suggests some legitimate epistemic blame is in order. Of course, on Miller’s account, responsibility assumes we are discussing actions with moral significance, but this assumption is unproblematic in cases of racial or sexual inequality. After all, these cases have obvious 65

 See Decker et al. (2019).

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moral implications that far transcend the epistemic ones. The call to treat people fairly or justly wears its moral content on its sleeve. Violations of the demand to be treated fairly or justly strike just about everyone as wrong.66 We are talking about rights after all. So how do we acquire joint responsibility for our moral treatment of others? Well, we can be, what Miller calls, “naturally responsible,” meaning one has reasons for an action (or inaction), forms an intention to perform (or to not perform) that action, then acts (or not) on that intention.67 We can also have “institutional responsibility,” meaning we occupy institutional roles that assign responsibility to us or that give us the authority (and the expectation that we will assert this authority) to tell others what they ought to do or what actions they should perform. In this taxonomy, the easy case is when the collective responsibility we jointly have may stem from each of us individually and intentionally contributing to some collective end. This would explain why we would both collectively and individually praise, for example, the people who marched across the Edmund Pettis Bridge on Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama. Each person intentionally contributed to a joint action working toward a collective end that had moral content. This is also why we who are not white supremacists will collectively and individually judge those who are—we see them as intentionally contributing to a collective end that also has moral content. The harder cases, though, lie in the so-called institutional responsibility category because here the responsible agent may not have formed an intention beyond fulfilling his or her institutional role. The police officer to whom the hate crime is reported may write up his report and may intend to use his best, most impartial judgment in doing so, but implicit bias built into his own thinking or the policies and procedures of the institution may undermine his ability to accept the testimony of the accuser.68 At this intersection of conscious intention and implicit bias or belief is where a variety of forms of ignorance come into play and become deeply problematic—and all  Of course, the tremendously contentious part of the debate is what constitutes fairness or justness in our dealings with others. Everyone wants to be treated fairly, but what that involves is something different aspects of society disagree about vehemently. 67  See Miller (2015, 288). 68  This is illustrated in the Gabby Petito case where the mistakes of the Utah police to fail to notice the abuse she suffered are quite noticeably described as “unintentional.” See Whitehurst (2022). 66

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the more so because the institutional role played by the individual masks the ignorance in ways that make it difficult for the individual to come to know. The hardest cases are those that involve acting in or from ignorance. This is where something like white ignorance or meta-ignorance specifically lies, and it is here where many of the epistemic and moral concerns lie. The whole point of calling white ignorance “white ignorance” is not merely to indicate that the phenomenon is one of not knowing; it is also to signify that there is group involvement with active color blindness. This sort of ignorance involves a dynamic “refusal to perceive systemic discrimination, … amnesia about the past and its legacy in the present, and the hostility to black testimony on continuing white privilege …” (Mills 2007, 35). White ignorance, in other words, is a collective social action with the goal of maintaining a white delusion of racial superiority. Yet it is not the sort of collective action that Miller’s detectives or scientists engage in. Those actors are actually aware of working together toward some epistemic goal. They know what it is they are doing (i.e., searching for a killer or trying to cure cancer). On the contrary, ignorant agents are typically unaware of both the goal and the collective nature of their actions. Nevertheless, Miller’s notion of a collective end as one that “more than one agent has, and which is such that, if it is realized, it is realized by all, or most of the actions of the agents involved” (2015, 284) is met. Even in cases of actively constructed ignorance, the collective actions of white ignorance bring into existence a state of affairs in which each agent has as an individual end (e.g., retaining white privilege), even if this end is only implicitly held by the agents involved. As a result, white ignorance counts as a joint epistemic action—one that produces epistemic injustice and for which we would like to assess some responsibility, not just to communities but also to individual agents. Despite an action counting as a joint epistemic action, resources still exist for ascribing responsibility to individual agents within the community. To bring this point home, Miller discusses scientists whose research is not intended to be used to create weapons of mass destruction but whose research is subsequently used for this purpose. This is similar to cases when, as a result of socially and actively generated ignorance, no individual intends to contribute to systemic racism but does so anyway.

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These scientists (or these white folk) might not be entirely ignorant of the consequences of their research (or social structure), but it is certainly imaginable that when they started down the path they are on they had no idea it would have destructive consequences. That is, they fail to have any intent to produce such consequences. In Miller’s example, because the scientists lack intent, he allows that they may have diminished responsibility. Nevertheless, this does not entail no responsibility whatsoever. (Same goes for those who fall victim to white ignorance). As Miller argues, “each agent might have partial and minimum moral responsibility jointly with others if each only makes a very small and incremental contribution as a member of a very large set of agents performing their actions over a long period of time” (Miller 2015, 292). Yet, they are— each one of them—responsible. While Miller offers the specific example of incremental responsibility of climate change to suggest the ways in which individuals bear some responsibility within larger group responsibility, another example that also works well concerns racial injustice and other forms of oppression of disadvantaged populations. Sticking with white ignorance, each white person in the United States benefits from current social structures, and even though many white people don’t intend for their actions to perpetuate oppressive social structures and practices, they do. A particular example comes to mind. As I have mentioned, I live in a rural area in the southern United States, an area widely known for its past racial injustices. While shopping for carpeting one day, I was speaking to the owner of the store and for some reason which I can no longer recall she started talking about a particular man who lived, quite a while ago, in the same area and who, she reports, was very abusive towards blacks in the area. She spoke with disapproval of this man’s actions, but I suspect she never did anything to challenge him—nor did I challenge her or suggest that we today could do a lot more to make our community more just for black community members. Neither of us intended to perpetuate a social injustice, but neither of us actually did anything that might have made the world a more just place.69 We each simply lamented the actions of this man and  This is the phenomenon of which Martin Luther King, Jr. speaks in his Letter from Birmingham Jail: white moderates who say nothing. See King (1994). 69

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continued with our day.70 This is a situation in which the contribution each of us made to the perpetuation of a much larger social injustice may have been very small and incremental, but in our inactions we each would appear to assume part of the joint moral responsibility for the oppression of our neighbors. The something that either of us was or is capable of doing may also be very small and incremental, but that does not negate that we have an obligation to perform even micro actions that contribute to justice. Part of the problem with overcoming socially engrained injustices, though, is that it just seems too big for any individual to do anything about. One person cannot alter the history of slavery and its repercussions. One person cannot undermine the overwhelming androcentrism of much of human culture. One person cannot seem to take any meaningful action in the face of such massive problems. Yet joint moral responsibility for collective action need not always be an unfair expectation insofar as there are actions we can take. We are not entirely helpless even if we cannot solve all the problems. There is a famous song sung at Passover, Dayenu. It’s repetitive, but with a purpose. The song starts by saying that if God had brought us out of Egypt, it would have been enough. It then goes on to say if God had executed justice upon the Egyptians, it would have been enough. If God had split the sea for us, enough. If He had led us through on dry land, enough. If he had provided for our needs in the wilderness for 40 years, enough. And so on until the Israelites are given land and their temple. At every step, it would have been enough. Of course, anyone who has read the Bible knows it would not have been enough as the Israelites (as pretty much any group of humans) were quite good at complaining. But the moral of the song is that we should celebrate each step in our liberation. We cannot expect it to come all at once. Somewhere along the line in this discussion of belief is a shift from that which is involuntary to that which is voluntary, a shift from what we cannot do to what we can. Rather than emphasizing belief, this discussion  And ever since I had this conversation, I have wondered what I should have done or said in this circumstance—without, in my mind, any satisfactory resolution. I’m pretty sure my actions fell short without quite being able to determine a better alternative given the particulars of the situation. 70

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has shifted to action—and we can do something about our actions, even in a social world. Thus, perhaps belief—or at least the influences surrounding belief—is something for which we do assume responsibility. That there is collective epistemic action and that individuals contribute to collective epistemic action surely offers insight into how we can be not only jointly but individually responsible for the process of coming to hold beliefs. Still, the sources of our beliefs are sometimes hidden from us. At times, there are even powerful forces at work to obscure these sources— and at times, it may appear that there is absolutely nothing we can do to change our epistemic situation. For instance, a child who listens to the adults around her and believes in Santa Claus may be led astray through no epistemic fault of her own. Of course, an adult with the same belief would be entirely blameworthy, but there are other beliefs which adults hold that, while more subtle, are believed because social forces wash over us. If we can be ignorant through no fault of our own, then we may very well have exculpatory reasons for holding an undesirable belief; and if we have exculpatory reasons, we may not be epistemically responsible for holding at least some undesirable beliefs. Before the issue of epistemic responsibly can be resolved, the issue of socially constructed ignorance— precisely the kind of ignorance that feminists and race theorists assert is rampant in the world—must be addressed. After all, if this sort of ignorance is a group handicap that hides from the individual knower the sources of and evidence for belief, then it may still be a difficult proposition to assign responsibility to individual epistemic agents.

References Alston, William P. 1989. Epistemic Justification. Essays in the Theory of Knowledge. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Blair, Irene V. 2002. The Malleability of Automatic Stereotypes and Prejudice. Personality and Social Psychology Review 3: 242–261. Decker, Michele R., Charvonne N. Holliday, Zaynab Hameeduddin, Roma Shah, Janice Miller, Joyce Dantzler, and Leigh Goodmark. 2019. “You Do Not Think of Me as a Human Being:” Race and Gender Inequities Intersect

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to Discourage Police Reporting of Violence against Women. Journal of Urban Health 96: 772–783. Descartes, René. 1984. Meditations on First Philosophy. In The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Volume 2. Trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Devine, Patricia G., E. Ashby Plant, David M. Amodio, Eddie Harmon-Jones, and Stephanie L. Vance. 2002. The Regulation of Explicit and Implicit Race Bias: The Role of Motivations to Respond Without Prejudice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 82: 835–48. Dotson, Kristi. 2011. Tracking Epistemic Violence, Tracking Practices of Silencing. Hypatia 26 (2): 236–257. Feldman, Richard. 2001. Voluntary Belief and Epistemic Evaluation. In Knowledge, Truth, and Duty, ed. Matthias Steup, 77–92. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fischer, John Martin, and Mark Ravizza. 1999. Responsibility and Control: An Essay on Moral Responsibility. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. FitzGerald, Chloë, Angela Martin, Delphine Berner, and Samia Hurst. 2019. Interventions Designed to Reduce Implicit Prejudices and Implicit Stereotypes in Real World Contexts: A Systematic Review. BMC Psychology 7 (29): 1–12. Foucault, Michel. 1980. Power/Knowledge. New York: Pantheon. Frankfurt, Harry G. 1969. Alternate possibilities and moral responsibility. Journal of Philosophy 66 (23): 829–839. ———. 1971. Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person. Journal of Philosophy 68: 5–20. Fricker, Miranda. 2016. Fault and No-fault Responsibility for Implicit Prejudice—A Space for Epistemic Agent-regret. In The Epistemic Life of Groups: Essays in Epistemology of Collectives, ed. Miranda Fricker and Michael S. Brady, 33–50. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ginet, Carl. 1996. In Defense of the Principle of Alternative Possibilities: Why I Don’t Find Frankfurt’s Argument Convincing. Philosophical Perspectives 10: 403–417. Gray, Sally Hatch. 2012. Kant’s Race Theory, Forster’s Counter, and the Metaphysics of Color. The Eighteenth Century 53 (4): 393–412. Greenwald, Anthony G., Nilanjana Dasgupta, John F. Dovidio, Jerry Kang, Corinne A. Moss-Racusin, and Bethany A. Teachman. 2022. Implicit-Bias Remedies: Treating Discriminatory Bias as a Public-Health Problem. Psychological Science in the Public Interest 23 (1): 7–40.

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Guyer, Paul. 2001. Editor’s introduction. In Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, edited and translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews, xiii–lii. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heikes, Deborah K. 2016. Rationality, Representation, and Race. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2019. Toward a Liberatory Epistemology. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Held, Virginia. 1995. Feminist Moral Inquiry and the Feminist Future. In Justice and Care: Essential Readings in Justice and Care Essential Readings in Feminist Ethics, ed. Virginia Held, 153–178. New York: Routledge. Hetherington, Stephen. 2002. Epistemic Responsibility: A Dilemma. The Monist 85 (3): 398–414. Hieronymi, Pamela. 2008. Responsibility for Believing. Synthese 161 (3): 357–373. Holroyd, Jules. 2012. Responsibility for Implicit Bias. Journal of Social Philosophy 43 (3): 274–306. Hornsby, Jennifer. 1995. Disempowered Speech. Philosophical Topics 23 (2): 127–147. Hume, David. 1975. A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, 2nd ed., revised by P.H. Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 1977. Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. Huppke, Rex. 2022. Alex Jones finally faces consequences. Hateful lies have to come with a cost. USA Today, August 4. James, William. 1979. The Will to Believe. In The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, vol. 6, 13–33. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Johnson, Gabrielle M. 2020. The Psychology of Bias: From Data to Theory. In An Introduction to Implicit Bias: Knowledge, Justice, and the Social Mind, ed. Erin Beeghly and Alex Madva, 20–40. New York: Routledge. Kant, Immanuel. 1960. Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime. Trans. John T. Goldthwait. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2000. Of the Different Human Races. In The Idea of Race, ed. Robert Bernasconi and Tommy Lee Lott, 8–22. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. ———. 2013a. Of the Different Human Races. In Kant and the Concept of Race, trans. and ed. Jon M. Mikklesen, 41–54. Albany: SUNY Press. ———. 2013b. On the Use of Teleological Principles in Philosophy. In Kant and the Concept of Race, trans. and ed. Jon M. Mikklesen, 169–194. Albany: SUNY Press.

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King, Martin L. 1994. Letter from the Birmingham Jail. San Francisco: Harper. Kornblith, Hilary. 1983. Justified Belief and Epistemically Responsible Action. The Philosophical Review 92 (1): 33–48. Lai, Calvin K., Allison L. Skinner, Erin Cooley, Sohad Murrar, Markus Brauer, Thierry Devos, Jimmy Calanchini, et al. 2016. Reducing implicit racial preferences: II. Intervention effectiveness across time. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 145 (8): 1001–1016. Lowery, Brian S., Curtis D. Hardin, and Stacey Sinclair. 2001. Social Influence Effects on Automatic Racial Prejudice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 81: 842–855. Medina, José. 2004. The Meanings of Silence: Wittgensteinian Contextualism and Polyphony. Inquiry 47 (6): 562–579. ———. 2013. The Epistemology of Resistance. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Miller, Seumas. 2015. Joint Epistemic Action and Collective Moral Responsibility. Social Epistemology 29 (3): 280–302. ———. 2005. Kant’s Untermenschen. In Race and Racism in Modern Philosophy, ed. A. Valls, 169–193. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. 2007. White Ignorance. In Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, ed. Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana, 13–38. Albany: SUNY Press. ———. 2014. Kant and race, redux. Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 35 (1/2): 125–157. Montmarquet, James. 1992. Epistemic Virtue and Doxastic Responsibility. American Philosophical Quarterly 29 (4): 331–341. Moody-Adams, Michele M. 1994. Culture, Responsibility, and Affected Ignorance. Ethics 104: 291–309. Moskowitz, Gordon B., and Peizhong Li. 2011. Egalitarian Goals Trigger Stereotype Inhibition: A Proactive Form of Stereotype Control. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 47: 103–116. Payne, B. Keith, and Jason W. Hannay. 2021. Implicit Bias Reflects Systemic Racism. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 25 (11): 927–936. Peels, Rik. 2017. Responsible Belief: A Theory in Ethics and Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Peirce, Charles S. 1934. Some Consequences of Four Incapacities. In Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Volume V: Pragmatism and Pragmaticism, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, 264–317. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Petty, Richard E., Russell H. Fazio, and Pablo Briñol, eds. 2009. Attitudes: Insights from the New Implicit Measures. New York: Psychology Press.

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Reider, Patrick J., ed. 2016. Social Epistemology and Epistemic Agency: Decentralizing Epistemic Agency. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. Rorty, Richard. 1990. Feminism and Pragmatism. The Tanner Lectures on Human Values. University of Michigan. Scheman, Naomi, and Peg O’Connor, eds. 2002. Feminist Interpretations of Ludwig Wittgenstein. University Park: Penn State Press. Seigfried, Charlene Haddock, ed. 2010. Feminist Interpretations of John Dewey. University Park: Penn State Press. Spivak, Gayatri. 1998. Can the Subaltern Speak? In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Steup, Matthias. 2017. Believing Intentionally. Synthese 194 (8): 2673–2694. Tanesini, Alessandra. 1994. Whose Language? In Knowing the Difference: Feminist Perspectives in Epistemology, ed. Kathleen Lennon and Margaret Whitford, 203–216. New York: Routledge. ———. 2004. Wittgenstein: A Feminist Interpretation. New York: Polity. Van Inwagen, Peter. 1975. The Incompatibility of Free Will and Determinism. Philosophical Studies 27: 185–199. Vuletich, Heidi A., and B. Keith Payne. 2019. Stability and Change in Implicit Bias. Psychological Science 30 (6): 854–862. Whitehurst, Lindsay. 2022. Probe Finds “Unintentional Mistakes” in Petito Police Stop”. Associated Press, January 13. Widerker, David. 1995. Libertarianism and Frankfurt’s Attack on the Principle of Alternative Possibilities. Philosophical Review 104: 247–261. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1969. On Certainty. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright. New York: J & J Harper. Wolf, Susan. 1980. Asymmetrical Freedom. Journal of Philosophy 77: 157–166. Zagzebski, Linda. 2019. Intellectual Virtues: Admirable Traits of Character. In The Routledge Handbook of Virtue Epistemology, ed. Heather Battaly, 26–36. New York: Routledge. Zammito, John H. 2012. The Forster-Kant Controversy: The Provocations of Interdisciplinarity. In Klopffechtereien - Missverständnisse – Widersprüche? ed. Rainer Godel and Gideon Stiening, 225–243. Leiden: Brill. Zaykowski, Heather. 2010. Racial Disparities in Hate Crime Reporting. Violence and Victims 25 (3): 378–394. Zaykowski, Heather, Erin Cournoyer Allain, and Lena M. Campagna. 2019. Examining the Paradox of Crime Reporting: Are Disadvantaged Victims More Likely to Report to the Police? Law & Society Review 53 (4): 1305–1340.

4 What About the Exculpatory Effects of Ignorance?

Given that we are able to act in ways that influence both our beliefs and our communities’ epistemic practices, the possibility for epistemic responsibility does exist. The degree of influence we have will, of course, depend upon the nature of the beliefs and upon how ingrained they are in our thinking or in the structure of our society. As long as there is some influence, however, there can be some responsibility. Nevertheless, not every belief is the proper object of praise or blame. Some beliefs, like the belief that the lights are on in my office, simply are—and unproblematically so. These types of beliefs carry no moral import. Other beliefs, like the belief that girls are no good at math and science, appear to be more within our control and appear to have more normative significance. Still, such beliefs may not only be less voluntary than we like to think, they may, due to social conditions, also come with an appropriate excuse that undermines epistemic responsibility. Occasions do exist when we have exculpatory reasons. One of these exculpatory reasons is simply not knowing any better—that is, being ignorant. We may, like the Greeks, simply be unaware of other alternative conceptions or be otherwise blamelessly ignorant of our lack of understanding. While it may be

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difficult to accept that exculpatory ignorance might exist in the case of undesirable beliefs, the possibility cannot be ruled out in some sort of a priori fashion. Ignorance has in recent years become a rather difficult topic of discussion. Is it something that is simply a lack of knowledge or a lack of true belief? Is it is passively or actively held? Is it a state or a process? Is it a socially reinforced epistemic practice? Might it be culturally induced? Is it a legitimate epistemic excuse for holding undesirable beliefs? Much has been said on the topic of ignorance.1 Whatever the complexities of the topic, surely some ignorance is exculpatory. At times, I truly do not know any better. Then again, not all ignorance is epistemically exculpatory. At times, I should know better. Drawing the line between the exculpatory and blameworthy forms of epistemic ignorance is a task fraught with difficulty, all the more so when the beliefs in question are morally undesirable. After all, morally implicated beliefs (e.g., racist and sexist ones) can, and often do, contribute to injustice, both epistemically and morally. Even so, if ignorance can be exculpatory in some cases, then why not in undesirable ones? And why not when those undesirable beliefs result specifically from group-based, socially constructed cognitive numbnesses that are structurally built into our epistemic practices? What about the cognitive handicap of white ignorance, for example? Is this an occasion when we do not know but ought to know? While the exculpatory effect of ignorance is perhaps not terribly widespread when it comes to undesirable belief, it is not out of the question that there could be cases where ignorance absolves one of epistemic responsibility for believing undesirably. It all depends on the form of ignorance and the context in which it appears. As a result, however much “we” want to assign epistemic responsibility and epistemic blame, at least some undesirable beliefs can fail to incur epistemic blame—or can at least incur a lesser epistemic blame.2

 For an overview of ignorance see Peels and Blaauw (2016).  Moral blame is a different story entirely, but it is not a story I will focus on here.

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4.1 Varieties of Ignorance and Exculpation All sorts of ignorances exist—some simply amounting to a basic lack of good information, some of our own making, and some manufactured by social and cultural forces.3 In one of the many taxonomies of ignorance, Nadja El Kassar identifies three different overarching conceptions of ignorance: first, “ignorance as a lack of knowledge/true belief,” second, “ignorance as actively upheld false outlooks,” and third, “ignorance as substantive epistemic practice” (2018, 300–301). Within these overarching conceptions, it is also the case that ignorance can be accidental, it can be willful, and it can be cultural. Depending upon the circumstances surrounding the ignorance, each type could provide excuse or could be blameworthy. As with knowledge generally, “whose ignorance” and the conditions surrounding that ignorance matter to our epistemic culpability. The simplest type of ignorance to deal with is that of simply not-­ knowing. We can, at times, be responsible for our not-knowing, but in many instances such ignorance arises through no fault of our own (or anyone else’s). Given that none of us is capable of knowing everything, this sort of ignorance is practically guaranteed. What makes this basic form of ignorance less complex is that it is usually the easiest to resolve. We overcome simple not-knowing by making inquiries, doing research, asking others, or engaging in similar sorts of behavior. In fact, it is this type of ignorance that motivates many knowledge inquiries. If I do not know something, my ignorance may push me to seek answers. Some of these inquiries are deep and challenging, some are quite fleeting. Asking a scientific question about something of which we are ignorant might lead to years of inquiry, but questions and answers can be much simpler than that. For example, in conversation I often find factual matters come up for which no one happens to have an immediate answer: what was the score of last night’s game, how many slaves did Thomas Jefferson free upon his death, what do the colors of Mardi Gras symbolize? What follows is often a quick internet search to resolve our immediate ignorance, what Michael Lynch calls “knowing by Google” (2016, 6). When  For a taxonomy of ignorances, see Nottelmann (2016).

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we fail to know something like the score of last night’s game, our ignorance is easily corrected, provided we are willing to take correction. Even if our ignorance in such cases stands uncorrected, it remains far from culpable, either epistemically or morally. It is just one of the many, many things we do not happen to know, and this is okay because nothing especially important is at stake with a great many of our beliefs about mundane affairs—unless, of course, I have placed a bet on the outcome of last night’s game. As a general rule, it simply does not matter if I am ignorant of how many grains of sand are on the beach or whether my dog is currently treeing a squirrel. Resolving my ignorance concerning these matters will likely do little to change my life or to affect those in my community in any adverse way. As a result, the level of scrutiny for these types of claims need not be particularly high. The aforementioned cases of lacking knowledge or true belief are relatively passive and often uninteresting, especially when considered in contrast to undesirable beliefs that are the source of genuine oppression, marginalization, and silencing of disadvantaged groups within our society. Since the issue at stake here is the manner in which ignorance makes us responsible—or not—for beliefs that produce unjust practices, the relatively basic ways of not-knowing are not all that enlightening. Situations do exist where a basic lack of information can be the source of hurtful or even morally questionable behavior, but many of these situations will fall short of being especially difficult or intractable. This is because just plain not-knowing is a form of ignorance that can often be resolved simply by pointing out what it is we don’t know. For example, if I am ignorant of the quickest way to get to New York City, my ignorance can be resolved by asking someone more knowledgeable or by consulting the nearest GPS. Similarly, albeit much more problematically, if I am just plain ignorant that the use of some linguistic expression is offensive and if you pointing this out to me is enough to enlighten me and change my belief and, perhaps more significantly, change my behavior, then my culpability (and I may very well be culpable) will be less than if mere awareness were not enough to convince me of my wrongdoing. In such situations, the behavior is not entrenched. I am unaware but willing to be educated.

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A situation like this happened a few years ago with NBA player Steven Adams. 4 Adams, who is from New Zealand, called some African-­ American players “quick little monkeys.” Now, this is a statement that any North American (and anyone who has lived in North America for any length of time) should know is racially charged and offensive. Adams, however, seemingly did not know this, and the cultural differences between New Zealand and the United States were cited in explaining his behavior.5 The claim he and others made was that he did not have the knowledge or the intent to be racially motivated in his remarks.6 Furthermore, he was deeply apologetic and remorseful when informed of the meaning of his words. Because he was willing to recognize his error and improve his behavior, his ignorance struck many as less problematic than other similar instances, even if it generated negative consequences and elicited some blame. After all, when we show that we want to know better, we can be more easily forgiven for not-knowing. Genuine openness to learning surely makes ignorance less culpable. By contrast, I remember talking to a fellow student in graduate school and mentioning the work of Paul Tillich. My colleague had not heard of Tillich, but rather than accept this new information, he got rather irate and defensive, much to my surprise. Instead of seeking out new knowledge, this man doubled-down on his ignorance and insisted (fairly vehemently) that if he did not know Tillich’s work, then it was not worth  For another example—and a much deeper analysis—see Medina (2013, 135–45). I will discuss Medina’s example shortly, but I will not go into the depth he goes in dealing with when our communal knowledge (or lack thereof ) provides an appropriate excuse. 5  See Boren (2016). Of course, at the time he made this statement, Adams had been in the United States a number of years. This probably makes Adams more culpable for, as Medina points out in a similar kind of example, “the exculpating effect of the collective ignorance one has inherited gets dissipated quickly, and the longer one is exposed to communities in which there are opportunities to learn and repair that ignorance, the weaker one’s exculpatory appeal to a collective body of ignorance is” (2013, 140). The nature and culpability of Adams’s ignorance can certainly be debated, and in the end, he likely bears some blame. Still, because none of us can know everything about every culture, there are contexts in which cultural differences make us ignorant in non-culpable ways. What lessens (or magnifies) culpability in these cases is the subsequent willingness (or not) to learn and to change one’s behavior. 6  One could always argue that his ignorance was affected and that he should have known. Yet even if culpability accrues in this case, surely some genuine cases of innocent and exculpatory ignorance can occur, especially when one newly crosses cultural boundaries. We cannot be expected to know everything about other social groups. 4

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knowing. What he accomplished, at least in my estimation, was to take his ignorance from a case of simply not knowing to one of actively upholding a lack of true belief—and in a very willful manner. He was, unlike Adams, not open to overcoming his ignorance—and this is epistemically far more problematic than the initial ignorance itself. When we learn from our mistakes, when we willingly take correction and move beyond our previous ignorance, we may not entirely avoid epistemic culpability, but we incur a lesser degree of blame than when the beliefs and behavior are ones we refuse to change or, even worse, ones we actively defend. At other times, though, we perhaps don’t know but truly should. In other words, there are times when ignorance is, as Moody-Adams describes it, affected. This precise situation is described by Medina (2013) in a rather vivid case of so-called ignorance. After a fraternity party on the campus of Vanderbilt University, a student dropped a pig’s head in front of the Jewish community center “as a joke.” This student (and the university) claimed that he did not know the significance of this action. In other words, he pleaded ignorance. Now, Medina leaves open the issue of whether this explanation is legitimate (i.e., was the student actually ignorant?) and gives the student the benefit of the doubt. However, he does not thereby take this instance of ignorance to be exculpatory. Even if the student was genuinely ignorant of the meaning of his actions, he should not have been. As Medina argues, there is a “minimal social knowledge of others required for responsible agency” (2013, 139), and this student failed to meet that standard.7 Still, the failure here was much larger than one individual student and one missing bit of information. This case illustrates a whole series of failures that range from the individual student to the educational system to the broader communal sources of knowledge. They all failed him for he ought to have known better than to discard a pig’s head on anyone’s doorstep, much less on the doorstep of a Jewish group on campus. That he supposedly did not know any of this implicates not just him but also his epistemic communities for they allowed a greater and more damning ignorance than a simple case of not-­ knowing. The reason the lack of information is so critical in this and  This differs from the Adams case insofar as here there is no possibility of the sort of culture gap that occurs when one is raised in a different cultural environment. 7

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similar sorts of cases is that epistemic responsibility is, as Medina notes, a precondition for other social responsibilities we have. In order to act appropriately, one must know appropriately. This is the very lesson Socrates sought to teach: we cannot do good if we fail to know what good is.8 Similarly, we cannot act more justly, more inclusively if we remain ignorant of injustice, exclusion, marginalization, and silencing. We must understand the social conditions and situations that produce these. The very real problem with affected ignorance is that it concerns matters where we ought to know but don’t—and this leads to injustice, not for us but for those about whom we are ignorant. One of the most important consequences of this sort of ignorance is that we are not the ones who pay the price for it. That is, it was not the “pig head dropper” who was truly harmed; it was the Jewish community and those sympathetic to that community. Such a shifting of harm is highlighted by Fricker, who speaks of epistemic injustice in cases bearing a great deal of resemblance to those involving socially constructed ignorance. She tells us, Being a member of a social group that does not contribute on an equal footing with other groups to that shared interpretive resource (a position of hermeneutical marginalization) puts one at an unfairly increased risk of having social experiences that one needs, perhaps urgently, to understand and/or communicate to certain powerful social others—to a teacher, an employer, a police office, a jury—but which cannot be made mutual sense of in the shared terms available (Fricker 2016, 163).

When social others, especially social others who hold power over us, ought to know but do not, the experience of marginalized others can remain foreign and inaccessible. In such cases, a systemic lack of voice is imposed through ignorance upon those in the epistemic margins. This, in turn, produces injustice that affects marginalized others as knowers. The upshot is that those who are more epistemically powerful engage in an ignorance that prevents hearing what the epistemically marginalized might wish and even need for them to hear. It creates an active ignorance  Socrates was a bit more optimistic about the connection between knowing the good and actually doing the good, but akrasia aside, responsible knowing is a precondition for responsible acting. 8

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that keeps those in the epistemic mainstream from recognizing or otherwise knowing what those in other epistemic communities are trying to communicate. What all this suggests is that the more interesting types of ignorance for those concerned with justice are not simple forms of not-knowing but rather the much more complex varieties of “ignorance as actively upheld false outlooks” or even “ignorance as substantive social practice.” Deep epistemic difficulties tend to come from forms of ignorance that are of the socially constructed and often systemic, the sort of ignorance that involves impersonal social-structural causation. These are the forms of ignorance that produce many of the undesirable beliefs surrounding race and gender for they are the forms of ignorance that produce not just the explicitly racist and sexist beliefs we find in our epistemological practices but also many of the implicit biases we find. Furthermore, these are the forms of ignorance that many times involve group-based cognitive handicaps that are deeply intractable, that create blindnesses or numbnesses, and that obscure the reality of oppression and injustice.9 As something that can be built into existing power structures in society—power structures that control our lives in significant ways—these are also the forms of ignorance that appear to lie furthest from our control or influence and, thus, from our responsibility. After all, if it is the case that we are all subject to power on a variety of axes, if it is the case that this power masks from us certain facts about the world, if it is the case that the epistemic communities to which we belong can actively produce ignorance as a matter of course—if all these things are indeed evident in our lives, then individual epistemic agents may well be epistemically innocent in holding undesirable beliefs even when the epistemic communities that surround those persons are far from innocent. Insofar as “the truth” (whatever that turns out to be) is being kept from us by epistemic authorities and the epistemic communities to which we are bound, then it should not be quite so surprising that we may not be able to hear what those outside of our epistemic communities are saying.  For further discussion concerning the group-based cognitive handicap that is white ignorance, see Mills (2007, 15). Consider also Mills’ claim that “part of what it means to be constructed as “white” … is a cognitive model that precludes self-transparency and genuine understanding of social realities” [italics added] (1997, 18). 9

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We can ask, however, to what extent do we (at the community or at the individual level) have an epistemic responsibility to hear? To put the matter slightly different, when is ignorance truly affected, truly the sort about which I ought to know better? Can ignorance, especially ignorance that is socially and communally constructed, be a legitimate excuse for my not knowing? Given the highly contextual nature of these questions, no one-­ size-­fits-all answers can be offered. Instead, the answers will depend on the type of ignorance involved and the context in which that ignorance appears. It may be, on the one hand, that I am simply unreflective about the lives of other people but that I am (as Adams appears to have been) willing to learn when my ignorance is pointed out to me. Even if affected (and thereby blameworthy), this sort of ignorance is not profoundly affected. It is not the type of ignorance that causes the intractable and deeply destructive problems of racism and sexism that surround us. Ignorance that we are willing to learn from is epistemically productive for it pushes us toward greater knowledge. On the other hand, it might be that my not-knowing is one I do not wish to correct, where the affectedness lies much deeper. I may not care enough to consider the reality of the epistemically marginalized, even when my ignorance is brought to my attention. I may simply decide (as did my graduate school colleague) that if I don’t know anything about the experience of others, then that experience is simply not worth knowing. It may even be that I am unwilling to seek shared epistemological ground or to grant epistemic authority to those outside my own epistemic community (thereby committing a testimonial injustice in the process). In such cases, I become actively ignorant in the matter, putting my head in the sand, so to speak, and refusing to consider evidence of exclusion and marginalization and injustice. This is a far more problematic ignorance as the epistemic agent in these cases doubles-down on his ignorance, refusing to learn. Yet not all ignorance is active in this way. Occasions exist when I am blissfully ignorant not through my own willfulness but because my epistemic community actively obscures knowledge. In other words, substantive epistemic practices, practices of which we may be only vaguely aware, can keep us from knowing. Here individual epistemic responsibility is rather blurry. Is epistemic blame appropriate when perhaps I could, in principle, know better but am being kept from knowing by social forces seemingly beyond my control?

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4.2 Immersion and Responsibility Within Socially Constructed Ignorance While ignorance exhibits many forms and possibilities, perhaps the most challenging form of ignorance is the one in which individual agents’ lack of awareness stems from social mechanisms that actively block their understanding. With this sort of ignorance structural forces conspire to keep individual knowers deliberately in the dark. Of course, it may be that individual knowers also want to be kept in the dark because they have something to gain from remaining ignorant. They may have a need to not-know because knowing would, for example, cause them to have to re-think fundamental feature of their lives. For example, Allison Bailey explains that “white ignorance is the axis around which white Americans construct our political identity” [italics added] (2007, 80). Why? Because whites (as a group) have a great deal to gain from this ignorance. One of the biggest gains is that this sort of ignorance allows whites to maintain their image of themselves as “good people.” This suggests that white ignorance may be very much affected. After all, having something directly to gain from maintaining one’s ignorance can indicate a certain blameworthiness since a need to not-know suggests a willful ignorance. Confronting racial and sexual inequality or other forms of outright oppression can challenge our self-image and make us uncomfortable, but refusing to accept the challenges of being made uncomfortable threatens our epistemic “innocence” insofar as it leads us to go out of our way to not-know. In such cases, we collectively choose not to look at that which we would rather not see. This more problematic sort of ignorance is precisely what is empirically identified and discussed by sociologist Jennifer Mueller (2017). When her white students confront evidence that perhaps the world is systemically, racially stacked in their favor, when shown that perhaps the world is not as colorblind as they have been led to believe, Mueller’s students actively engage in what she calls “white epistemic maneuvers” (2017, 225). These maneuvers allow the students to retain their racial ignorance in a variety of ways. They may simply evade the evidence, they may neutralize the evidence so they can continue believing in a

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colorblind world, they may accept morally laden assumptions that whites are passively ignorant, and they may simply throw up their hands in the absence of a solution to race-based problems.10 The first of these tactics, evasion, is one that Mueller explicitly links to an epistemology of racial ignorance, especially that found in the work of Mills.11 Evasion on the part of white students to facts suggesting systemic racism illustrates the type of selective management of memory that Mills’ work highlights. For Mills, the “white delusion of racial superiority insulates itself against refutation” (2007, 19), in part, by evading any and all defeaters of this belief.12 That is, whites fail to see evidence of racism, which, in turn, allows them to maintain their view of either a colorblind world or, more problematically, their own racial superiority. The second tactic, willful colorblindness, occurs when whites outright deny racial privilege, creatively reproducing colorblind ideologies in the face of evidence that suggests otherwise. With willful colorblindness, whites attribute their success to something like hard work or class differences rather than systematic privileging through institutional social structures, such as being able to take advantage of bank loans which are available more readily to whites. The next tactic, tautologically reasoning ignorance, relates the moral dimensions of white ignorance. Mueller cites the example of Chelsea, who comes to see racist tendencies in her family but who concludes that her family’s racism is “an unconscious act, because these are not people who would willingly cause harm to others” (Mueller 2017, 230). In other words, she assumes a priori something about the moral nature of her family members—and herself—and takes this assumption as the basis for deductively reasoning a “soothing, parallel logic of sincere, passive white ignorance” (Mueller 2017, 230). Finally, the tactic of mystified solutions allows that, yes, racism and the injustices surrounding the practice of racism do exist—but it is far from clear what can be done to resolve the problems. This reaction seems akin to an empty form of “white guilt” in which many whites see their complicity in racism but do nothing about  See Mueller (2017, 225).  See Mueller (2017, 227). 12  Of course, not all whites evade all defeaters. As Mills allows, white ignorance can be overcome (2007, 23). 10 11

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it because the problem simply seems too big to resolve. Obviously, one can be horrified by one’s complicity in racism and attempt to do something to ameliorate the situation, but when solutions seem out of reach, the reaction can be one of befuddlement. The four strategies Mueller identifies in her students’ confrontation of facts suggests a systemic racism of the sort that concerns philosophers of race. That is, the empirical evidence she sees in her students is a direct manifestation of the theoretical aspects of race-based ignorance that tend to concern philosophers. In the case of Mueller’s students, they individually construct ways to continue to be ignorant not merely of their own privilege but also of the ways that privilege is codified within social structures. They exhibit selective memory, outright denial, and assumptions of their own moral goodness. At times, they even acknowledge structural racism—yet without the requirement that they actually do anything about it. Such concrete examples of ignorance are instances that reflect Moody-Adams’ aforementioned affected ignorance (1994) or Mills’ white ignorance (2007) or even Medina’s meta-ignorance (2016). In other words, Mueller’s students demonstrate how white people often look past what they ought to know or that to which they should be epistemically sensitive. These students, for all intents and purposes, appear to be precisely those on whom an epistemic culpability falls. They ought to know better. After all, Mueller’s assignment is designed to bring white students face-to-face with evidence of systemic racism—yet many of her students seemingly choose not to see or to be sensitive to that evidence. In other words, despite the fact that these students’ ignorances do sometimes give way to insight or even to knowledge, many of the students still actively manufacture ways to overlook structural racism and to maintain their image of themselves as “good people.” Given the parameters of the assignment and the evidence uncovered in completing the assignment, these students, argues Mueller, still manage to perpetuate a race-based ignorance. As insightful as Mueller’s work is on the particular white epistemic maneuvers her students manifested when asked to confront evidence of systemic racism, another layer of Mills’ work does not get highlighted in her discussion. Beyond the fact of white ignorance, something that Mills emphasizes is how this phenomenon, along with other racialized patterns

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of ignorance, is actively constructed within society, even if it is not always willful.13 White people, for Mills, are not necessarily conscious of their own “misunderstanding, misrepresentation, evasion, and self-deception on matters related to race,” even if these are “among the most prevalent mental phenomena of the past few hundred years” (Mills 1997, 19). The moral is that individual whites cannot see systemic racism because there are communal epistemic structures in place that prohibit their ability to recognize the evidence of such. Given this, Mueller’s students (or at least some of them) are simply reflecting the broader social structures or the larger social environment in which they reside. Then again, this is part of the tension Mueller identifies: the students’ responses to evidence of structural racism cannot, strictly speaking, be operating below the level of conscious awareness because the assignment deliberately asks them to confront the evidence of systemic racism. However, given the structural dimensions of racism (the very dimensions Mueller is attempting to highlight for her students), it is that much harder for individual agents to identify and recognize for the ignorance is socially supported. Put differently, the students’ judgments will not always remain implicit because the assignment they are completing requires them to confront directly evidence of systemic racism—but these very same judgments are equally part of epistemic communities that support and exploit an actively constructed ignorance. Each of Mueller’s students who dismiss the raced-based privileging they are being asked to examine has explicit reasons for dismissing the evidence of inequality. Muller cites several examples, including the following: Josh indicated he chose not to ask family members “if they thought race had played a role in their success,” despite it being an explicit guideline. He attributed evasion to his “very non-confrontational” nature. (2017, 226) Felicia retreated to colorblindness … when contemplating the influence of racial privilege on her family’s success: “The transfer of wealth is more  See Mills (2007). Medina also agrees with Mills. Medina comments, “How do individuals develop and maintain forms of irresponsible ignorance? Not alone, but with a lot of social support and collective effort” (Medina 2013, 145). 13

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than just giving your kids money and assets. I believe it’s living in decent neighborhoods with good schools and having the opportunity to attend college. I don’t feel that the color of my skin or of my ancestors necessarily made it easier on them than other immigrant families….” (2017, 227) Carmen promptly defended the legitimacy of her family’s wealth, declaring, “ownership of these slaves was not a key.” (2017, 227) Chelsea … wrote the project had “brought an eerie light to the matter of ‘who is racist,’ because now the racists have faces and names, and they are my kin.” So fraught, it appeared Chelsea could only accept this racially conscious conclusion under one condition: “For me to consider my family racially prejudiced, I must accept racism as an unconscious act, because these are not people who would willingly cause harm to others” (2017, 230)

Each of the students makes some explicit claim that permits them to sidestep, evade, or dismiss evidence of systematic racial advantage that they and their families enjoy because they are white. These moves suggest that the students are being willfully ignorant and, hence, acting in an epistemically blameworthy fashion. Nevertheless, as Mills emphasizes, their reasons are socially supported. Their misunderstanding, misrepresentation, evasion, and self-deception result from a cognitive handicap that is not of their own making. This makes it much more difficult for them to actually see the tensions in their reasoning. If Mills is right, these white students see the evidence through a glass darkly. The heart of the problem, which is reflected not only in Mills’ acknowledgement of the deeply social nature of white ignorance but also in current research, is this: racial ignorance lies fundamentally in our social environment, not the individual knower.14 This tension between individual and systemic responsibility gets worse with another bit of philosophical insight offered by Medina, who extends Mills’ thinking on racial ignorance. Medina takes Mills’ white ignorance and transforms it to the broader category of meta-ignorance, a form of  For the empirical research see Vuletich and Payne (2019). Also, consider Mills’ claim that with Quine’s naturalized epistemology, “the cognitive agent needed to be located in her specificity” (2007, 14). Mills argues, “the aim is to understand how certain social structures tend to promote these crucially flawed processes, how to personally extricate oneself from them …, and to do one’s part in undermining them in the broader cognitive sphere” (2007, 23). 14

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ignorance which generates insidious forms of racial oppression that “often are in a recalcitrant state of self-denial that disarms any critical intervention and neutralizes any attempt to wake them up from their racist slumbers” (2017, 250).15 Mueller’s examinations concerning how her students go out of their way to see past evidence of racist practices illustrates how particular forms of racist slumber actually work. Of course, labeling these mechanisms as “slumber” suggests an intellectual laziness which is in some ways illusory for considerable effort goes into maintaining this ignorance—but the effort is not that of a single epistemic agent as Mueller’s examples perhaps suggest. It is a structural, societal effort. This is precisely why white ignorance and meta-ignorance are so resistant to transformations toward knowledge. Whites are not meant to gain knowledge that societial power structures do not want them to see, which is, once again, reflective of Foucault’s insights into power. As he points out, “individuals are subjugated in the reality of a social practice through mechanisms of power that adhere to a truth” (Foucault 1997, 32). The “truth” in this case is white supremacy, and through a socially endorsed activity of which many of us are unaware, the almost invisible (at least to whites) undercurrent it supports keeps individual epistemic agents from recognizing their own ignorance. In short, the slumbers of many undesirable beliefs (e.g., racist and sexist ones) are active albeit through little effort on the part of any single agent. Without the social practice surrounding white epistemic maneuvers, Mueller’s students could not pull off their evasions.

4.3 Deliberate Ignorance and Responsibility Whatever the liabilities and responsibilities that arises from willful ignorance, the systemic nature of some forms of ignorance may suggest that only the epistemically heroic can find their way to enlightenment. After all, if differential white privilege does not officially exist (at least  While Moody-Adams emphasizes what might be called a willful ignorance, Mills and Medina turn their attention to more of a cognitivist approach that focuses on how broader social practices affect our epistemic practices concerning race. For a deeper discussion of the differences between a willful view of ignorance versus a cognitivist view of ignorance see Martín (2021). 15

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according to our larger epistemic communities), then there may well be nothing of which individual epistemic agents are willfully ignorant. Given the practices of my epistemic community, perhaps I simply cannot know any better. The tale might be different for the communities themselves. Within certain social epistemologies it is the community to whom agency attaches, and when these communities construct their accounts of racial and sexual “equality,” they presumably assume epistemic responsibility. Of course, these are precisely the situations in which affected ignorance, white ignorance, and meta-ignorance appear. The story with these forms of ignorance is that actively and jointly upheld falsehoods and substantive epistemic practices obscure the social reality of some groups, not in an individual or in an isolated manner, but through communally grounded effort. Because some epistemic communities hide the reality of marginalization and silencing, individuals within these communities perhaps cannot be expected to know. In other words, if my epistemic community endorses and promotes a certain form of ignorance, I may not be the active agent. The ignorance may not be my own. Instead, a communal agency may leave me the passive recipient of socially ignorant attitudes, which opens the possibility of epistemic exculpation for at least some beliefs, perhaps even some undesirable beliefs. When our epistemic transgressions are so communally entrenched that we are either unaware of them or are so socially supported that we cannot help but maintain them, rightly placing blame on individual epistemic agents is more challenging. Even when the evidence suggests we need to work on influencing our beliefs for the better, our cultural milieu may make the evidence difficult to see or to integrate with my other beliefs. Put differently, my epistemic failures may have little to do with my own active, affected ignorance and much more to do with the way power structures intertwine with justificatory practices to keep hidden evidentiary considerations that might produce a change of beliefs. Some ignorance is, after all, manufactured within society in such a way that it becomes structurally integrated into our ways of knowing. For example, a few decades ago we knew we were supposed to be eating a low-fat diet, at least if we wanted to avoid coronary heart disease. This is what scientific research was telling us. As a result, low fat diets became very popular. Turns out, however, science may not have been telling us the so-called

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truth. Much of the scientific research on the role of fat and cholesterol on coronary heart disease was funded and guided by the Sugar Research Foundation in an effort to mask the role sugar plays in coronary heart disease.16 The books were being cooked, so to speak, with science itself being a tool of the sugar industry to obfuscate facts about sugar’s role in coronary heart disease. The same thing occurred earlier with smoking and the Tobacco Industry Research Committee, which was “created to cast doubt on scientific consensus that smoking cigarettes causes cancer, to convince the media that there were two sides to the story about the risks of tobacco and that each side should be considered with equal weight” (Rabin-Havat 2016, 16). With scientific studies being touted, the average citizen could hardly be epistemically blamed for not knowing any better. We were, at least as long as that narrative was the one being promoted, simply believing what the science told us. After all, science is supposed to provide us fact-based and objective research results, right? And most of us are epistemically justified in believing what the experts tell us since there no way that each of us can personally check every study and every so-called fact being touted by scientists. However, the sugar and tobacco studies are clear cases of certain epistemic-powers-that-be deliberately, actively creating an ignorance for which many of us could individually not be culpable. Epistemic agency is, in such cases, decentered, but this has effects that cannot be overlooked when it comes to assigning epistemic culpability. What many feminists and race theorists have tried to convince us of is the interconnectedness of our epistemic endeavors and the fact that individual knowers are not truly individual.17 Consider what Elizabeth Potter tells us about knowledge: Whatever else we may wish to say about knowledge, we must recognize that it is a social affair. This in turn will allow us to see what cannot be seen by individualist epistemologies: the communal nature of knowledge production and the ways in which the politics of gender, class, and other axes of oppression are negotiated in the production of knowledge. (Potter 1993, 165) 16 17

 See Kearns et al. (2016).  A notable exception to this general push away from individualism is Antony (1995).

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This sentiment is echoed later in Medina’s exhortation to “understand the positionality and relationality of social agents in networks of power relations” (2011, 10). Although Medina highlights our need to do this as a matter of setting up an emancipatory project, he, like others, inadvertently highlights that mainstream perspectives (like science) are no less inscribed with power relations which keep subjugated knowledges invisible. Individuals in the mainstream are, like those on the margins, not meant to see how power dominates them. Yet if we are not meant to see behind the smoke and mirrors deliberately created by the epistemic-­ powers-­that-be, how are we thereby responsible when we fail to do so? As the obfuscations of the sugar and tobacco industries suggest, epistemic blame can be difficult to assign to individual knowers. In the case of scientific beliefs, for instance, the lay public has good epistemic reason to believe what the experts are saying. After all, the scientists doing the studies have access to much better evidence than the rest of us. Should we take to challenging and doubting all experts? If we do, we must face the consequences of doing so, which involve opening ourselves up to alternative facts and theories vying for our attention. This can, in turn, make our epistemological situation much worse. Yet if we trust the experts, we must also recognize that epistemic authority figures and societal power structures can and do conspire to advocate for sets of beliefs that sometimes obfuscate and distract us from what we might otherwise see. The larger epistemic communities of which we are a part may very well hold beliefs such as those touted by the tobacco and sugar industries to be not only true but well justified, supported by well-researched scientific belief. These communities may, then, actively promote these beliefs as true and well-justified, despite the fact that they are ultimately neither true nor well-justified. The situation is no different when it comes to undesirable beliefs, at least if we are to accept the story of those who tell us that there are race-­ based and gender-based active ignorances. The activity in these cases is a communal one. In other words, the ignorance created in relation to racist and sexist belief is created. As with the sugar and tobacco industries’ obsfucations, racial and gender ignorance does not just occur by happenstance. When that occurs, our responsibility for our beliefs, even the

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epistemically undesirable ones, will be lessened. The result is that ignorance becomes more removed from the individual epistemic agent and far more grounded in communally held and social ways of knowing. When ignorance is active and persistent and structurally built into our epistemic practices, the issues surrounding it are much more epistemically challenging, more difficult to overcome, and have much deeper implications for blameworthiness and responsibility. The result is that the individual agent’s ignorance may, at least in some instances, remain a passive one. Under such circumstances, how am I to know any different? This question is clearly important in cases where our health is at stake, but it is surely no less pressing in situations where morality and justice come into play. Undesirable beliefs lead to epistemic and moral injustices. Thus, they demand our attention. The difficulty is, however, that powerful structures are understood to conspire to hide certain facts and evidence. If socially constructed ignorance can be exculpatory in the case of beliefs about what constitutes a healthy lifestyle, an obvious question emerges: might beliefs about race or gender be like our beliefs about sugar and tobacco? Might our racialized and gendered beliefs be of the sort where the cultural elements around one—and where the epistemic authorities within that culture—are driving the ignorance in ways that offer a legitimate epistemic excuse? After all, my implicit beliefs and biases, which are often the ones that matter for my prejudicial behavior (at least if I’m not a died-in-the-wool racist or sexist), are ones that I am not even conscious of having much less forming. These are not beliefs any of us typically choose to have. Of course, perhaps like the scientist actually doing the obfuscating research (i.e., as someone who ought to know better), I, as an educated person, ought to know better as a result of my education and life experience. After all, my epistemic communities are sensitive to how ignorance and bias is constructed and maintained, so I should not be able to claim that I simply do not know. But not everyone is as well educated. Not everyone has the same abilities or the financial wherewithal to expand their epistemic lives beyond the everyday situations in which they find themselves. Not everyone resides in epistemic communities that are sensitive to various forms of ignorance. In fact, many people live everyday lives in which power is embedded in very

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mundane ways. What about, say, the poor or undereducated/narrowly educated person who lives in a restrictive epistemic community and who is exposed since childhood to racist or sexist beliefs? Can some of us be exculpated for our ignorance because we are epistemologically duped?

4.4 Anti-individualism and Epistemic Heroism An affirmative answer to this question is one that advocates of justice wish to resist. The stakes are just too high to give up on epistemic responsibility. To do so is to give the racist and the sexist and others with undesirable beliefs an epistemic pass. Thus, we should not easily dismiss epistemic responsibility, either for communities or for individuals. Fortunately, for many of the undesirable beliefs we hold, we have some minimal sort of influence (e.g., over the epistemic communities in which we participate) even when we lack outright control. Because we can put ourselves in different evidentiary relationships, the invisibility of subjugated knowledges and of our own implicit beliefs about those in marginalized groups are properly the subject of consciousness-raising, which in turn can make us aware of our ignorance and alter our behavior. Furthermore, given our access to media and the internet, it is rather difficult to avoid entirely encounters with other epistemic communities which many times provide challenges to our own practices of knowing.18 In other words, we live in a society in which there are indeed a number of avenues for encountering different voices and different evidential considerations, so in a very important sense we ought to know better. Nevertheless, not every community is open to transformative criticism. Some communities, in fact, actually reject it. The individual agents within these communities, then, may be especially vulnerable to ignorant closed-mindedness. To make matters worse, underlying many arguments concerning epistemic responsibility is a theorical commitment to undermining epistemic individualism which means that those most concerned with justice often  One significant issue here is that some of the most epistemically isolated communities have large numbers of members who also lack internet access. 18

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promote the decentering of agency.19 The motive in doing this is a noble one: to open up epistemic agency to a broader swath of knowers by acknowledging that particularity and situatedness matter. For instance, Elizabeth Anderson suggests that feminist epistemology is “the branch of social epistemology that investigates the influence of socially constructed conceptions and norms of gender and gender-specific interests and experiences on the production of knowledge” (1995, 54).20 Similarly, Code notes that “one of the most promising events in preparing the way for feminist disruptions of these stark assumptions [of individualist epistemology] has been the emergence of social epistemology” (2014, 151). And in another work, Code notes that “socially grounded and enacted capacities [such as] responsible knowing found no easy uptake in Anglo-­ American philosophy, prior to the development of social epistemology” (2017, 96). Continuing this trend, Patricia Hill Collins makes note of how feminist theorizing needs to attend to how “social phenomena such as race, class, and gender … mutually construct one another” (1998, 205). Finally, Medina asks a particularly telling question: “When is partaking in a body of social ignorance a form of irresponsibility? … And is the failure in responsibility an ethical failure of the individual or a political failure of the society?” (2013, 133). Indeed, there is a tension between individual and communal responsibility within liberatory social epistemologies as a result of decentering agency and of calling to attention the specific location of knowers. If we have to take into account the subjectivity of knowers, then we have to take this subjectivity seriously even when we may not wish to recognize it, such as when the failures of society influence the epistemic endeavors of individuals. Our epistemological endeavors, whether they be ones of knowledge or of ignorance, cannot be adequately understood without grasping the role of community in both epistemic successes and failures.

 For anthologies that develop this theme in feminist epistemology see Alcoff and Potter (1993) and Antony and Witt (2002). For a counter-perspective see Antony (1995). Antony offers an especially good summary of the general critique of individualist epistemologies that feminists have offered. 20  For more general approaches to social epistemology and the role of the agent, see Grasswick and Owen (2002), Goldman (2011), Palermos and Pritchard. (2013). 19

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This makes it far more difficult to place blame (or praise) on any specific epistemic agent since knowledge is taken to be a social construct rather than the product of any particular individual. Liberatory epistemologies more broadly tend to follow feminist epistemologies in emphasizing the social dimension of knowledge. They insist that we take into account the situation and the circumstances of knowers, and that these factors will play a central role in our epistemic practices. This move comes at a cost, however. If knowledge is the result of a social process, the blame for undesirable beliefs will not clearly lie at the feet of individual epistemic agents. Consider Code’s argument that “isolated and empirical” claims to knowledge are barely achievable, if at all—and all because we must take into account the subjective conditions of knowing: once one seriously entertains the hypothesis that knowledge is a construct produced by cognitive agents within social practices and acknowledges the variability of agents and practices across social groups, the possible scope even of “definitive” justificatory strategies for S-knows-that-p claims reveals itself to be very narrow indeed…. I am suggesting that necessary and sufficient conditions in the “received” sense—by which I mean conditions that hold for any knower, regardless of her or his identity, interests, and circumstances (i.e., her or his subjectivity)—could conceivably be discovered only for a narrow range of artificially isolated and purified empirical knowledge claims, which might be paradigmatic by fiat but are unlikely to be so “in fact.” (1993, 15)

Once we accept that the practices of social groups are integral to knowledge and once we accept that individual knowers (the S in S-knowsthat-p epistemologies) are necessarily bound up with their epistemic communities, it becomes much more difficult to assert that particular epistemic agents are responsible for their beliefs—all the more so when we are also told that our epistemic communities deliberately construct ignorance to reflect and defend systems of dominance and power. Take, again, the concept of white ignorance and what Mills quite specifically says about it. He explicitly argues that white ignorance is a group-­ based cognitive handicap (2007, 15), adding that “the social dimension of epistemology is obviously most salient … [when considering

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perception], since individuals do not in general make up these [perceptual] categories themselves but inherit them from their cultural milieu” (Mills 2007, 24). Individuals inherit the concepts they use to make sense of the world around them.21 In these particular passages Mills leaves out the asymmetry of power that accompanies our cumulative culture, but power is lurking just under the surface of these remarks, which are just a slightly milder version of Foucault’s claim about truth being determined by power structures that lie beyond the individual.22 When it comes to understanding truth, after all, Foucault finds it necessarily intertwined with power: Truth is a thing of this world: It is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its own regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth: that is, the type of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true. (1980, 131)

Mills “perception” and Foucault’s “truth” are both inextricable from the culture or society that frames them. Much the same can be said for certain forms of socially constructed ignorance: it is a thing of this world that can be produced by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. This is especially true of implicit bias, which none of us knowingly acquires. They are beliefs we pick up from our surrounding communities and culture. As Vuletich and Payne point out, “aggregate levels of implicit bias reflect structural inequalities in the environment, consistent with the bias-of-crowds model” (2019, 855). We arrive at these beliefs without any introspection or reflection (in fact, implicit biases are notoriously resistant to introspection and reflection) and are ignorant of even being biased. In what ways can we then be said to be responsible for them?

21  More mainstream social epistemologists (Levy and Alfano 2020) also make this precise claim. I will discuss their approach to cultural inheritance in the next chapter. 22  Foucault is a double-edged sword for those fighting for racial and gender justice. On the one hand, Foucault allows for what Medina calls guerilla pluralism (2011, 31), which enables possibilities for resisting power. On the other hand, Foucault insists that none of us can escape the power structures that operate on us, including the powerful. Although Medina defends the possibility of resisting, he also points out that “there is no such thing as epistemic ignorance,” and that “this problematizes the notion of culpable ignorance” (2011, 30).

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If epistemic responsibility is to be tied up with social location and cultural ignorance, it becomes rather important to understand the nature of these relationships. The idea that we can be culturally ignorant insofar as we, as a culture, do not (perhaps cannot) know is one that some have found tempting, as Moody-Adams (1994) points out. Yet she very much wants to dissuade us from allowing ignorance as an appropriate moral (and presumably epistemic) excuse for undesirable belief. This idea that we are culturally unable to know certain actions are wrong—for example, that the Greeks could not have been expected to know slavery is morally wrong—the idea that we can be culturally ignorant of the wrongness, is, for her, a non-starter. Even in the face of widespread cultural acceptance, she maintains that our individual responsibility to know the moral truth remains undiminished. In fact, she goes as far as to say that when we allow cultural background to function as an appropriate excuse for undesirable moral action, we believe wrongly. The way we come to “believe wrongly” is that when we engage in arguments which allow cultural blindness as an appropriate excuse—an excuse that exculpates one from morally wrong action and, presumably, morally undesirable belief—we overlook our own engagement in choosing not to know what we can and should know. We fail to do something we are absolutely obligated to do: ponder whether the practices we participate in are indeed wrong. The argument against this sort of affected ignorance focuses on what we are morally obligated to know, even if no one around us shares in this moral knowledge.23 Moody-Adams considers Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem and the notion that ordinary citizens can do evil—one could add, even if no one were to recognize the evil in their actions. Clearly, times exist when our communities overlook what we, collectively, really ought to know. This seems to be precisely what occurs in Nazi Germany. The problem, says Arendt, was not Eichmann per se but that “so many were like him” (Arendt 1963, 253). Evil can become routine; it can be something of which we, collectively, become ignorant. How does this happen? Perhaps because we choose not to be informed. So many could be like  Issues of what counts as moral knowledge or undesirable belief are relevant here, but because these were already addressed in an earlier chapter I will simply assume we can establish some moral knowledge. 23

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Eichmann because they made a choice to not know—and since choice is involved in this sort of not-knowing, moral responsibility may not be escapable. Still, some of us continue to offer moral and epistemic exculpation. The fact that we (or clearly some morally and epistemically dominant subset of “we”) tend to offer excuses (e.g., they could not have known any better) for such failings can function as a sign of our common human tendency to overlook our own fallibility. It can also indicate a tendency to overlook our own active not-knowing. If we can do that, it is much easier to explain why we would overlook (and perhaps more actively overlook) more socially determined forms of ignorance. What can happen, then, is that we (whomever “we” happens to be) look at others in their cultural milieu and, rather than accept the wrongness of their actions or the willfulness of their ignorance, instead extend to them an excuse for their not-knowing. Such an excuse is perhaps not because others are epistemically innocent in their beliefs but because, deep down, we suspect that we share their hubris—and we do not care to think about our own posterity judging us. Moody-Adams asks us to take seriously the possibility that “we”—and our cultural forebearers—could be perfectly capable of perpetuating practices that embody culpable moral ignorance.24 Yet does this entail that our ignorance is thereby a culpable epistemological ignorance? If the Greeks had believed in the moral impermissibility of slavery, they surely would have structured their society in ways that depended less on the practice—but did they have an obligation to believe differently than they did? The answer may be troubling. Given epistemological tendencies to decenter agency and to move toward social construction of knowledge, epistemic oughts become weaker. Just as Mills does in the racial context, so too do other epistemologists argue in a non-racial context that “some of our most significant epistemic achievements rest on dispositions that cannot be understood within an individualistic framework” (Levy and Alfano 2020, 888). We inescapably depend on a cumulative cultural knowledge. The cumulative cultural knowledge in the Greek’s circumstance (unlike Nazi Germany) is one that appeared to offer little in the way of alternative views on slavery. Perhaps the Greeks should have been willing to challenge their dominant beliefs, and perhaps 24

 See Moody-Adams (1994, 302).

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we should be willing to take them to task for not challenging their beliefs—yet to ask people to challenge dominantly held beliefs within their epistemic communities, beliefs that lack some living reason for doubt, may be asking for epistemic heroism that lies beyond the ability of most of us. If we (all of us) take seriously our need to inquire about our dominant beliefs, we can also take seriously our need to ask ourselves about our culpability in perpetuating practices embodying epistemic ignorance. To be sure, there are times when our ignorance is truly affected, times when we genuinely ought to know better, as in the case of Eichmann. Even in less dramatic cases we can often find culpable ignorance. When our ignorance is directly pointed out to us, but we do nothing to ameliorate the situation—or, worse, dig in our heels and defend ourselves—this is precisely the sort of case where affected ignorance comes into play. My colleague who had not heard of Tillich would have been wise to accept that just maybe he did not know everything rather than insisting that work he was unfamiliar with was thereby unimportant. Similarly, when Forster calls out Kant’s racist beliefs, Kant would have been wise to consider the evidence Forster brought to the table instead of simply insisting Forster approached the question of race from the wrong perspective. In fact, Kant had a clear epistemic obligation to be responsive to this evidence rather than dismissing it out of hand. These are times when we surely do become responsible for beliefs generated out of ignorance, even when (perhaps especially because) they involve a more active, deliberate ignorance on our own part. After all, the activity of being ignorant is one factor that raises the level of culpability. As Susan Haack points out, “it is precisely when a person’s unjustified believing stems, not from cognitive inadequacy, but from self-deception or negligent incontinence—from a lack of intellectual integrity on his part—that we hold him responsible for his belief ” (2001, 30). In cases where our beliefs are intellectually lazy or disingenuous or self-deluding—when our ignorance is most clearly affected—we do assign blame, and rightly so. The difficult cases come when our beliefs do not necessarily stem from intellectual laziness or disingenuousness or negligence, when instead we simply happen to live in a world for which no other possibilities appear

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to us. This may be the result of historical accident or cultural numbness, but there are occasions when alternative beliefs seem to be missing. When it comes to slavery, we today obviously no longer live in world devoid of competing beliefs, but we may remain hesitant to judge the Greeks’ beliefs and behavior because we recognize our own fallibility in them. We (or some culturally dominant subset of “we”) see in them and our attitudes toward them the future generations who judge us for our ignorant beliefs—and rather than blame ourselves for holding beliefs in cultural ignorance, we decide to cut the Greeks some epistemic slack, so to speak. More to the point, we choose to allow them a culturally exculpatory excuse. When all is said and done, Moody-Adams rejects this choice and argues instead that “only a misguided cultural relativism could support the view that moral criticism of another culture is never justified” (1994, 308). She insists that not only do we have genuine doxastic control but also that there are moral standards that allow for cross-cultural criticism. Socially influenced or constructed ignorance is no excuse for acting or for believing badly. Now, to deny the possibility of cross-cultural criticism is surely a misguided idea. However, that cross-cultural criticism is sometimes warranted does not entail that it is always warranted. It is an open-­ question to what extent other cultures and other epistemic communities can be criticized from our vantage point—but Moody-Adams implicitly, and problematically, assumes that there is an underlying moral truth that can ground our cross-cultural criticism of the Greeks. In other words, she argues as if there is a moral truth to be had about slavery such that any culture will, in principle, have access to that truth and can be criticized for not discovering that truth. Albeit a laudable and tempting conclusion, recent trends in understanding truth, knowledge, and power (as with recent trends in understanding and undesirability) make this a difficult conclusion to defend, relying as it does on an implicit appeal to a moral and an epistemic objectivism—even, perhaps, an individualism that has been dislodged by deeper understanding of social relationships. For many of us today, the idea of truth is not so simple for society exerts power on us of which we may not even be aware. Power relations are often invisibly built into the system by being “rooted in a system of social

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networks” (Foucault 1982, 793).25 This can affect whether ignorance may be considered an appropriate epistemic excuse. If the social communities of which we are a part are imbued with power in such a way that its ubiquitousness becomes invisible, we will have difficulty seeing it. As a result, to obligate us to see some non-societally inscribed “truth” may well be making a supererogatory epistemological request. The push toward an anti-individualism in epistemology works against the claim that we ought to—or even can—believe differently than our epistemic communities. It also greatly undermines many possible avenues for cross-cultural criticism since it tends to fully contextualize the concept of truth. The upshot is that shifting epistemological ground and the push to consider “whose knowledge” has led to individual subjects being considered much less autonomous, able to act only within particular contexts and within particular conceptions of truth. Better than anyone, Foucault highlights the connection of truth and power and the ways these lie outside of our individual control. On his conception, “multiple relations of power traverse, characterize, and constitute the social body; they are indissociable from a discourse of truth, and they can neither be established nor function unless a true discourse is produced, accumulated, put into circulation, and set to work” (Foucault 2003, 24). In other words, the relationship between truth and power is such that power relies upon a discourse of truth—a discourse it creates. Foucault goes on to emphasize the highly compulsory nature of truth within systems of power, saying, In order to characterize not just the mechanism of the relationship between power, right, and truth itself but its intensity and constancy, let us say that we are obliged to produce the truth by the power that demands truth and needs it in order to function: we are forced to tell the truth, we are constrained, we are condemned to admit the truth or to discover it. Power constantly asks questions and questions us; it constantly investigates and records; it institutionalizes the search for the truth, professionalizes it, and rewards it…. After all, we are judged, condemned, forced to perform tasks, and destined to live and die in certain ways by discourses that are true, and which bring with them specific power-effects. So: rules of right, mecha Rorty would also reject the idea of some cross-cultural truth, but without the emphasis on power.

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nisms of power, truth-effects. Or: rules of power, and the power of true discourses. (Foucault 2003, 24–25)26

What counts as true belief—and for that matter what counts as justified true belief—cannot be divorced from the epistemic communities in which we are immersed and the power that operates within those communities. The case of the conspiracy theorist whom the judge chastises for not telling the truth is precisely what Foucault has in mind here. This individual is explicitly being forced to accept a version of “the truth” that he protests against.27 If this can happen to one of us, it can happen to any of us. This means that the question of what we can and should know— and what we cannot and should not be ignorant about—cannot be divorced from questions of power. If we are, as individuals, shaped by power within our communities to this extent—and if what constitutes truth is imbued with power—then it is asking for epistemic heroism to overcome communal influences, at least when those influences are universally (or almost universally) accepted. The result is that socially constructed ignorances may well exist and persist through little fault of one’s own, especially if we take seriously epistemic fragmentation, decentering, and the shift to post-truth.

4.5 Holding Out for Epistemic Heroes Whatever its limitations, the recognition of power and the way it shapes our lives is, quite understandably, something that advocates of social justice want to use to their benefit. Taking Foucault as a starting point, Medina, for instance, reiterates what many others have said when he asserts that “fixity is a property that human truths cannot have” (2011, 25). The intent is surely not to undermine truth for its own sake but rather to open up epistemology to those who have heretofore been excluded. For Medina, in particular, the avenue should be one of  Consider the example from Chap. 3 of the judge’s direct admonition of Alex Jones for not telling the “right sort of truth”—that it was the role of the court, not Jones, to determine the truth. 27  His protests may or may not be genuine, but if they are genuine, he is being decidedly coerced into accepting a version of the truth to which he objects. 26

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“guerrilla pluralism,” which is designed to overcome “ossified valuations and rigid beliefs” in favor of more inclusive and more liberatory notions (2011, 25). Not a bad goal. If more people shared this goal, the world would be a kinder and more just place. However, the effort to undermine the ossified and rigid dominant conceptions of truth cuts both ways. Undermining truth also leaves open means for obfuscating truth in ways that many on both sides of cultural debates now take quite seriously. It other words, obfuscation of dominant modes of truth-making is no longer just for the subversive purposes of liberatory epistemology but is also used by defenders of opposing epistemic practices as well. For example, in his book on post-truth, McIntyre quotes a popular and influential pro-­ Trump blogger. In an interview with the New Yorker, this man says: “Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that Walter Cronkite lied about everything. Before Twitter, how would you have known? Look, I read postmodernist theory in college. If everything is a narrative, then we need alternatives to the dominate narrative” (quoted in McIntyre 2018, 150). If everything is just narrative, then, yes, you can have a narrative that says some specific mass shooting did occur and that it was deeply, morally wrong—but you can also have a counter-narrative that says the shooting never actually happened, never actually caused great pain and suffering. If all is narrative, then, yes, you can have a narrative showing another culture is morally and epistemically wrong—but you can also have a counter-narrative which shows that culture morally and epistemically right. One narrative says the Greeks were wrong in their beliefs concerning slavery; another narrative says their beliefs may be mistaken but they were genuinely ignorant and could not have known of their error. Are they blameworthy or do they have some epistemically exculpable reasons? Which is it? Determining the correct narrative can be a significant point of contention. Because social forces do a great deal of work in our belief forming processes and because competing social forces and competing power structures have to be navigated when forming beliefs, assigning epistemic blame is far from a simple endeavor. After all, none of us is an epistemic island. None of us is epistemically cut off from the beliefs and the standards for belief that come from our communities. None of us is immune to the power structures that operate on our epistemic lives. None of us escapes the ignorances created within our epistemic communities. In

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fact, all of us are epistemically dependent. Some of us are epistemically quite vulnerable. If we want to maintain membership in our communities, we need to tow the epistemic line. To fail to believe according to the standards and practices set forth by our communities means expulsion— as it did for the Alabama history instructor who was placed on leave for expressing homophobic and racist beliefs. In very ordinary ways we rely on others to formulate, justify, and maintain many, many of our beliefs. In fact, the overwhelming majority of our beliefs are inherited in one way or another. Almost everything I know about science, for example, is determined by standards and practices that are not my own and that I may very well fail to understand in the absence of expert explanations. My physicist friend tells me there is water on the moon—and I accept his testimony, not because I understand the evidence behind his claim but because he is an expert and in a much better position to understand such matters.28 In essence, my own ignorance is overcome through a social division of labor. While this social division of labor allows us to come to know so much more knowledge than we could obtain individually, it can, at times, lead us astray, especially when our epistemic communities are ones that produce systemic racist or sexist distortions. If others in my social community, especially others who have epistemic power and authority, are promoting and authorizing undesirable beliefs, I may very well find myself unreflectively adopting these beliefs as a matter of course.29 For example, my community may abide by standards of equality and fairness that are systematically biased against certain groups of people, but since my teachers, friends and family, community leaders all reinforce the message of fairness, I may continue to believe our social systems are equitable and fair. In listening to others and placing my epistemic faith in them, I can be led to believe falsehoods—but with justification. After all, reliable sources such as teachers or community leaders or subject matter  Of course, when we accept (or fail to accept) the testimony of others—and how testimonial exchanges lead to injustice—is a major concern within liberatory epistemology. Rather than being concerned with the injustice that occurs when we should accept others testimony but fail to do so, I am concerned with when we do accept others testimony, even when it leads us to adopt undesirable beliefs. 29  The normative questions of whether I should adopt these beliefs or whether I am obligated to reflect on my beliefs are questions I will ask and attempt to answer. For now, however, my concern is purely descriptive. 28

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experts do give us good reason for believing a great many things. All things being equal, children should listen to their teachers and adults should listen to subject matter experts—the situations where all things are not equal will be ones that we can only discover in context. Of course, contextualism is something many liberatory epistemologists promote not to undermine epistemic responsibility but to open it up. Contextualism allows us to be sensitive to a wide variety of contexts that have been silenced.30 It allows a finer grained approach to epistemic culpability, which is meant to cut off the possibility of exculpatory ignorance. The success of such efforts, though, is not always clear. Asking contextualizing and decentralizing questions such as “whose knowledge,” “whose ignorance,” “whose power,” or “whose testimony” (among other sorts of questions) has the effect of muddying the task of assigning epistemic blame for beliefs—especially beliefs involving socially constructed ignorance. In extreme cases, a belief might be almost impossible for me to hold—or impossible for me to not hold—given the epistemic communities to which I belong. It may not have been impossible for an ancient Greek citizen to see beyond communally held beliefs about slavery, but for the average citizen, doing so may very well have been epistemically supererogatory. That is, it is possible we could take an epistemic exemplar such as Aristotle and assign to him some epistemic (and moral) blame to for his views on slavery, especially given his clearly conscious reflection on the topic. The epistemological abilities he brought to his arguments, and his role as an epistemic trendsetter make him a very powerful expert. Yet he is far from a representative knower in the Greek world. Aristotle may suggest that the Greeks could have known better—and maybe they would have had he or someone like him argued against slavery—but for most individual citizens, perhaps the should is too much to ask given the cultural force behind the beliefs. Contra Descartes, most of us are simply incapable of genuinely considering our rational or our epistemic capacities to be so systematically mistaken that we challenge them. We must, as Peirce entreats us, start with the beliefs we have. In fact, Peirce notes that in the sciences, when agreement is reached, “the question of certainty becomes an idle one, because there is no one left who doubts it (Peirce  See Medina (2013), especially his concept of polyphonic contextualism.

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1934, 5.265). In other words, there are times when questioning widely held beliefs requires genuinely superhuman epistemic effort. Examples of such superhuman effort or, more appropriately, such epistemically heroic believing do exist. For example, the former Ku Klux Klansman Ellis. He may not have lived in ancient Greece, but he was raised in an environment in which racist beliefs were widely- and well-­ supported communally and thus very easy to believe. He also lived in a world where the power structures operating on him strongly encouraged him to believe along white supremacist lines. In fact, what power he had was a direct result of holding those beliefs. To believe otherwise is no simple matter for someone in Ellis’ epistemic position. Yet Ellis had a choice that few in ancient Greece would have had. The fundamental difference between Ellis’ situation and that of the average Greek is a clear epistemological uprising and vocalization of alternative perspectives in the southern United States. While white supremacy was the dominant view in Ellis’ most immediate and influential epistemic community, it was clearly not the only epistemic community available to him in a desegregationist south. From where are Ellis and his compatriots to take their epistemic cues? The answer is not as obvious as it might first appear for, as Ellis points out, the “majority of ‘em [Klansmen] are low-income whites, people who really don’t have a part in something…. Some are not very well educated either” (Terkel 1997, 65). In this situation, these were people who would have experienced great social pressure to maintain their white supremacist beliefs, would have been very much epistemically dependent on others around them, and would have very much taken epistemic clues from those in power (as if any of us is immune to the influence of power)—and the people in power wanted to maintain segregation and white supremacy, even if they had to do so secretly. Those on the margins of any society may well be expected to pick up on the beliefs of authority figures, even if, epistemically speaking, they ought not do so. That Ellis was able to resist the powerful forces encouraging racist beliefs is testament to his epistemic and moral courage. Not many of us have enough courage to break free of powerful culturally induced ignorances. Even those who seek racial and gender justice point out time and time again how people who hold racist and sexist beliefs will often do so as a result of a cultural milieu that promotes a

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certain degree of ignorance.31 In other words, whites are not even aware of their own ignorance with respect to race—and the system is designed specifically to preclude this awareness. Ellis’ Klan beliefs are, given his circumstances, to be expected, but his transformation proves him to be something of an epistemic exception, a hero who actually overcomes the societal ignorance around him and becomes enlightened. Should we expect this much from everyone? Can we legitimately claim that we ought to epistemically know better when in similar circumstances? After all, the social power structures surrounding Ellis were strongly at work to keep his ignorance functioning beneath the surface—only he was observant enough and self-reflective enough to come to shift his thinking. Of course, a different story entirely can be told with the politicians who supported Ellis’ white suprematism for their own gain. They themselves would have also suffered from a partly socially inculcated ignorance, but their situation with respect to epistemic power is quite different. They were consciously aware of what they had to gain by continuing the status quo. Then again, that may make their ignorance all the more affected because they might not want to see what could very well undermine their positions of power. As Medina suggests, the privileged subjects who are less inclined and worse equipped to resist inherited habits of social perception, those who find their experiences and perspectives most obvious and unproblematic, are precisely the ones who should bear a heightened responsibility and should make special efforts to resist and undo the exclusions and marginalizations of the social imagination. (2013, 22)

Given their relatively advantaged epistemic position and given their own power to influence their community through laws and governmental policies, the politicians who goaded Ellis into publicly speaking out in favor of segregation take on far more epistemic responsibility than he was able to muster. They may have suffered from white ignorance as well, but they knew what they were doing in using white supremacy as a means of  “White ignorance,” for instance, functions specifically to preclude “self-transparency and genuine understanding of social realities [of people of color]” (Mills 1997, 18). It is an implicit agreement to misrepresent the world. 31

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furthering their own goals. They were far more actively involved in their own ignorance—and active ignorance garners more epistemic blame than the passive variety. Thus, we might very well praise Ellis for his epistemic heroism and blame the local politicians for their epistemic narrowness, but those are two extremes of the spectrum. What about others who are less heroic or less implicated in actively promoting their own interests?

4.6 When Should We Know? When are we responsible for not knowing, especially when we occupy epistemic situations that do not allow our errors to be pointed out to us? Does it make a difference if the errors are not our own? Are we responsible when cultural or social structures blur our vision, numb our sensitivities, and affect our epistemic practices or other forms of reasoning? More to the point, when is the ancient Greek or the 1850s slaveholder responsible for not knowing the evils of slavery? When are we today responsible for failing to recognize our implicit biases and the structural inequities that result from these biases? When does the cultural milieu offer an appropriate epistemic excuse? These are some seriously challenging questions with answers that will depend on context, all the more so since the ignorance involved in different scenarios can vary greatly. Given their cultural milieu, the Greeks could be argued to have merely lacked true belief rather than having engaged in an ignorance resulting from some substantive epistemic practice. This sort of epistemic “innocence” is much less obvious in the case of the 1850s slaveholder. By the 1850s, beliefs about the moral permissibility of slavery could hardly help but, at minimum, be actively maintained falsehood as the culture surrounding those beliefs had shifted notably—and surely some instances of beliefs concerning slavery actually involved a substantive practice of generating ignorance. Local communities in the South may have widely accepted the belief, but there were other communities with which those more local communities would have had contact, at least enough contact to allow for the possibility of transformative critical debate. For us today, the epistemic situation is even more dire as “we,” with all our racial and gender biases, have even

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less communally held epistemic unanimity and even more potential contact with other epistemic communities. We may not accept slavery, but we have our own beliefs about race and gender that are equally the result of ignorances that stem from substantive epistemic practices. Whether or not we want to give the Greeks a so-called pass, it is much, much harder to excuse the 1850s slaveholder, especially if that person is epistemically well off. It is all the more difficult to excuse our systemically racist and sexist implicit biases today since we, as a society, are aware of them and do have, at minimum, some long-range control and ability to mitigate them, albeit imperfectly, through indirect means.32 In each of these cases we may have a different intuitive response about the nature of responsibility. For instance, the Greeks may, on some versions of the story, be expected to know less than the 1850s slaveholder, who in turn might be expected to know less than we do today. The reason is that Greek ignorance appears less active, even if it is ultimately culpable—and the more active the ignorance, the more culpable it is.33 Presumably, the more knowledge we have, the more active is our ignorance when it occurs. Even if we blame the Greeks, we can find their ignorance more epistemically forgivable than later slaveholders who live in a different cultural milieu. Regardless, any intuitive differences, whether they survive reflective consideration or not, will suggest that the problem of an active i­gnorance is made even more complex by the fact that our epistemic obligations do differ depending upon what we can be expected to know—and what we are expected to know is a social expectation. In spite of our epistemic advantages with respect to the preponderance of epistemic communities and the possibilities available to us, our biases appear no less intractable than those of our forebearers. Yet they also prove to be somewhat intractable for reasons that are not entirely of our own, individual making.34 Our social environments are still local and they still support systemic ignorance. The cultural component of belief still haunts us.  See Holroyd (2012).  I am far from convinced that the Greeks (at least the everyday ones) were epistemically culpable for their beliefs about slavery. 34  There are disagreements about whether we are responsible for our implicit biases, and I will address these. Those who maintain we are not necessarily responsible for our implicit biases include Fricker (2016, 33) and Saul (2013, 55). For an argument against Saul, see Holroyd (2012). 32 33

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The problem of determining what it is we are supposed to know is that there are no necessary and sufficient conditions that can capture what it is we ought to know. Context really does make all the difference. As good epistemic agents or otherwise responsible knowers, we are expected to confront the evidence available to us, but what evidence is available—or even what counts as evidence—depends upon our social situatedness. Of course, all of us at times go out of our way to avoid confronting unpleasant facts or immerse ourselves in epistemic communities that share our underlying beliefs. We can, in other words, be epistemically lazy or even willfully ignorant. Many of us do this in rather benign ways when we, for example, refuse to read about or listen to bad news because it is too upsetting. We become cognitively closed-minded. This can be epistemically blameworthy, but not in every instance. It is impossible to be an ideal epistemic agent all the time. It is impossible for us to be mentally open about absolutely everything. In fact, times exist when open-mindedness can be a liability—and more than one epistemologist has pointed this out. Taking a somewhat extreme stance, Levy and Alfano argue that individual epistemic vices, such as closed-mindedness, can, in a deeply social epistemology, work out for the best. They argue, It takes hard work to consider a range of hypotheses and to be open-­ minded. It takes hard work to think for oneself. We fail at these attempts at epistemic virtue routinely. If we’re right, these failures may be happy: if we succeeded very much more often, we would do less well epistemically…. [It] is, perhaps, only by great effort that we achieve a cognitive sweet spot, where we follow the crowd and are closed-minded just enough. (Levy and Alfano 2020, 909)

There is a sense in which we are epistemically better off having epistemic vices—and biases—for our cumulative culture offers us the opportunity for group knowledge that we could never achieve on our own. Similarly, Antony’s work on bias suggests that not only are some biases hardwired into we human beings but that there are times, as with recognizing speech patterns, when open-mindedness “would have been fatal in the ancestral environment, and still constitutes extreme disability today” (2006, 62). She also mentions how in Kuhnian approaches to science, “commitment

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to a paradigm entails an unwillingness to call certain basic principles into question” (Antony 2006, 64)—but this is part of what makes it possible for us to do science in the first place. There are perfectly good epistemic reasons for excluding other possibilities and sorts of evidence that is irrelevant given our (necessary) presuppositions.35 Then again, there are occasions when each of us may be closed-minded or shut out evidence as a psychological coping mechanism. For instance, with a story of a mass shooting, I may deliberately choose to “tune out” many of the details even if I remain aware of the broad strokes of the news story. The particulars may simply be too difficult to hear. All things being equal, I do not always (or even typically) incur any epistemic blame for my deliberate ignorance in these kinds of cases. Remaining ignorant of the particulars is rather a way of coping with the empirical evidence in a meaningful way or of coping with a tragedy about which I can do very little.36 Similarly, a quality such as trust may very well require one to remain willfully ignorant at times.37 These are merely a few instances when ignorance is not all that bad. Because we cannot know everything, it is quite reasonable for us to remain ignorant of a great deal. None of the epistemic close-mindedness or (even deliberate) not-knowing in these sorts of cases is inherently problematic and, thus, not inherently epistemically blameworthy.38 Still, while occasions exist where deliberate not-knowing can be blameless, not every context of not-knowing is straightforward. Yes, we must recognize that none of us is epistemically omniscient or perfect, but the fact that we will, in low stakes situations, provide ourselves and others  “Necessary” here is more of a practical than a logical necessity. In other words, we must have some presuppositions to make sense of anything, but what those presuppositions are is open to challenge and negotiation. This challenging of presuppositions is what feminists and race theorists do in order to open dialogue and discussion for excluded, marginalized, and otherwise silenced voices. 36  Insofar as there might be something I could do to alleviate someone’s suffering, perhaps I would be responsible for my ignorance about how to act, but, then again, there are so many mass shootings that I clearly cannot have some responsibility in every one of these situations. I simply lack the resources to act in every case. 37  In cases of genuine trust, I will, in fact, remain happily ignorant of what you are doing, believing that you will do what you say and otherwise honor your commitments. I am not expected to know in this sort of situation. See Townley (2006). 38  The close-mindedness of these cases may not be inherently blameworthy, but this does not entail that it cannot be blameworthy, especially when it produces undesirable biases, such as when scientists fail to recognize gender bias in their work. 35

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with some epistemic leeway does not mean that we should always remain satisfied with our epistemic situation. We can always do a little better even when doomed to the fallibility of our limited epistemic (and psychological) resources. Even if we cannot manage to do our absolute best at every single moment, we still have an epistemic obligation to acquire and maintain intellectual integrity, especially when epistemic and moral justice is at stake. In situations where there is a greater consequence for our failures—situations such as allowing our own implicit biases to go unchecked or in failing to make the effort to believe in a more egalitarian fashion—refusing to know takes on a different meaning. Unlike situations in which we may turn off bad news, shutting down awareness of biases and undesirable beliefs in my own thinking has consequences for those who are epistemically marginalized and oppressed. That must be taken seriously. When harms occur, the nature of epistemic responsibility cannot be easily dismissed. Still, the issue is complicated by the complicity of epistemic communities in individually held beliefs. Intuitively, the communities and the practices of which we are a part cannot be entirely independent of the actions and influence of individuals, but individuals rarely have direct (or even indirect) control over communal practices. Fricker and Medina both address this interaction of individuals with their communities. For Fricker, “one hermeneutical rebellion inspires another” (2007, 167). If enough of us are willing to challenge epistemic practices, these practices can change, although they may not do so easily. Each of us individually has the capacity to influence our epistemic communities, and while this influence may be rather small, small is not nothing. Following up on this thought, Medina recognizes the difficulty of individuals affecting their communities and speaks of “chained actions” that “echo or resonate with one another, actions that overlap and share a conceptual space or joint significance, actions that can be aligned and have a (more or less) clear trajectory” (2013, 225). What Medina recognizes is that if others do not take up the actions of specific individuals, then those actions will have little effect on the community. Even so, it remains possible for each of us to do something, however small. Given that we can do something, a corresponding “ought” emerges, even more so when the epistemic (and moral) consequences for those in some

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communities are rather significant.39 Intellectual integrity requires us to be willing to engage in transformative criticism, which in turn demands that we (regardless of the epistemic community of which we be a part) be willing to consider what those outside of our epistemic community are trying to tell us.40 How easy this is to do depends on the epistemic community of which we are a part.41 Some communities will actively discredit outsiders, which makes it terribly difficult for individuals to have any real effect when attempting to bring in evidence that comes from outside of the community. That is, some epistemic practices have built into their structure that individuals can have very little effect, especially when those individuals want to push epistemic boundaries. Nevertheless, all of us can incur an epistemic responsibility, even if what that responsibility is remains contextually different and dependent upon what actions are possible for us within our epistemic communities. For those of us who are ignorant, even socially ignorant, if we allow our errors to be pointed out to us or if we genuinely engage with criticism,42 passive ignorance can be lessened and perhaps transformed into knowledge. Listening to other epistemic communities will surely allow us to better understand the assumptions and implicit biases of our own epistemic community. Becoming aware of our ignorance by accepting the testimonial input from marginalized epistemic communities can allow us to modify our beliefs and behaviors in ways that better achieve justice, although it may also push us outside the bounds of our own epistemic communities and into the realm of others. In this way, our epistemic responsibilities may demand heroic action. It is not easy to challenge or to leave established epistemic relationships. Remaining ignorant in the face of criticism or contrary evidence may produce a special kind of  The relationship between individual epistemic agents and their communities is far from straightforward. What can be done by an individual in interaction with a larger epistemic community is not always clear. This issue will be developed more fully in the concluding chapter. 40  For more on the responsibilities of those in marginalized epistemic communities see Medina (2013, 109–118). 41  In the following chapter, I will discuss epistemic echo chambers in which outside voices are deliberately and actively silenced. 42  There is no necessity to our ultimately accepting this criticism, especially if it is one that is misplaced. We can have good reasons for dismissing criticisms. It is just that epistemic practices should not be set up in a way that they never accept criticism. 39

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culpability, but not every ignorance may be clear to us or easily responded to, even when it is pointed out. At times our concepts may blind us to the ways we should approach the evidence. Our concepts, in other words, guide our perceptions and direct our attention toward certain features of reality and away from others. Some features of the world become imperceptible to us, but because the perceptibility or imperceptibility is guided by the epistemic concepts we have, context will also determine what evidence is available to us.

4.7 Whose Ignorance? Whose Responsibility? Ignorance is deeply embedded in social structures. Society manages its epistemic practices in ways that assure such ignorance is supported and reinforced. This is a powerful force in the construction of our beliefs, especially since none of us maintain beliefs without social support. Even a cursory glance at the world around us suggests that philosophers are right to point out the insidiousness and the active construction of racial ignorance.43 The same cursory glance, however, suggests that the ignorance is indeed a group-based cognitive liability—and it is a liability that does not show any signs of going away any time soon. In the United States, for example, there is a quite vigorous movement by state legislatures to ban the teaching of critical race theory and similar “divisive” topics.44 As I write this, no fewer than fourteen states have restrictions on how schools address the teaching (or prohibitions on teaching) of issues related to race and gender—and many more states are considering such legislation. An especially concerted effort is being directed toward policies that prohibit discussion of slavery or of gender.45 Of course, what the aim of such legislation is or how “well meaning” it is taken to be will  A strong summary of relevant statistical facts supporting white dominance is provided by Martín (2021). 44  It is rather beside the point that critical race theory is not taught outside of universities. Those who seek to ban its teaching are making a much broader statement about what constitutes an acceptable “truth” that can be taught to children. 45  In Texas, the state education board has suggested that slavery be referred to as “involuntary relocation.” And Florida has its “don’t say gay” law, which governs discussions teachers can have on sexual orientation. 43

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depend upon who you talk to—perhaps it is about limiting divisiveness, perhaps it is about not making students feel uncomfortable, perhaps it is about silencing certain voices, perhaps it is even about maintaining heterosexual, white racial superiority—but what is also evident is that the various sides of these racialized and gendered debates appear to talk across each other as much as they do to each other. Neither side is especially skilled at engaging in a transformative discussion, and the default stance is that ignorance, most especially on the part of the epistemically advantaged, frames much of the discussion. Law makers’ actions in such cases appeal to a desire by dominant groups to remain ignorant about racial or sexual oppression. Of course, we should not be especially surprised that there would be pushback to calling out white ignorance and making facts about racialized oppression more widely known. Many people sincerely do not want to know, so the voices that win out are those who reject being made to feel uncomfortable, those who do not wish to confront the evidence of oppression that is being actively hidden. The voices that often seem to shout the loudest are those with the power to legally codify remaining ignorant. This social aspect of ignorance is almost always evident in writings of those concerned with this form of ignorance because it is the systemic, communally-promoted aspects of this ignorance that do the most damage. For example, when Medina speaks of racial insensitivity, he focuses on three features that highlight not just individual responsibility but the social aspects of ignorance. He maintains (1) that racial insensitivity involves epistemic labor and that in its most insidious form this insensitivity protects itself through cognitive and affective mechanism that make people socially numbed to racial injustices; (2) that racial insensitivity becomes insidious and recalcitrant when it operates at two levels: at the object level and at a meta-level; and (3) that racial insensitivity is a numbness directed both outward—to the social world, to others— and inwards—to oneself, thus involving blind spots that result both in social ignorance and in self-ignorance. (Medina 2016, 181)

The language of “numbness” is intended to capture not simply a lack of sensitivity but also the fact that it is a phenomenon in which we—both

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communally and individually—actively engage. We may in many instances innocently inherit our ignorance but when we get a glimpse of how we are ignorant, we can—and often do—engage in mechanisms that allow us to preserve it. That is, we become invested in not knowing. We become affectedly ignorant, choosing not to know what we can and should know. Still, what Medina and other liberatory epistemologists often fail to emphasize is that the contextualizing question, “whose ignorance,” cannot be dismissed, at least not if we also maintain the role of community and its power in the conceptual systems that drive our perception. The world is a very big place, and as a result, all of us are ignorant of the practices of at least some other epistemic communities—what drives them, what motivates them, what standards they adopt, what justifies their beliefs, what counts as evidence within their practices. The most notable tensions occur when differing epistemic communities come in contact with each other. This is when ignorance typically becomes more visible and more problematic. When there is interaction and friction among epistemic practices, we gain the opportunity to interact with other communities— we gain the opportunity to find out what motivates them, what standards they adopt, what evidential considerations matter to them, and so on. We also gain the possibility of transformative criticism for both communities. When communities interact, we can no longer legitimately maintain a merely passive ignorance. With epistemic resistance comes the inability to remain simply ignorant. In other words, ignorance that arises from epistemic tension is a much more active endeavor—yet insofar as the activity is a communal one, the responsibility for the ignorance may not fall on the individual members of the community. This conclusion may be less than satisfactory, but it is a conclusion that is at least plausible given how feminists and race theorists talk about gender-based and race-based ignorance as practices that transcend individual efforts. The possibility of exculpation may not be the rule, but it is difficult to cut off this possibility under certain epistemic conditions. How can we (as individuals or as communities) not be responsible for our own gender and racial ignorance and the undesirable beliefs that arise out of this ignorance? Setting aside issues of gender and race for just a moment, consider what is clearly a class of beliefs over which there is

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considerable difference of opinion concerning desirability: vaccination. Those who are current on vaccinations may have a difficult time understanding those who refuse to be vaccinated (and vice versa). It seems unfathomable to some that others would knowingly risk serious illness and even death when there are (supposedly) safe and simple vaccines that will prevent many unwelcome consequences. However, people clearly have reasons about which they feel quite strongly as many have sacrificed their jobs and their health (or even their children’s health) by knowingly and deliberately choosing not to get vaccinated (or choosing to not get their children vaccinated). While these reasons for and against vaccinations can be inquired about and examined in an intellectually honest way, many of us never actually do this. Some reasons for refusing vaccination are surely good ones (like an allergy or other contra-indicatory medical condition), but of course, not all reasons are good ones. For instance, some argue that getting certain vaccinations will cause autism or infertility,46 will change your DNA, or will subject you to the “mark of the beast.” While it is difficult to see how current evidence supports these beliefs, some epistemic communities vocally support them. But since these communities are often not interested in engaging in transformative criticism or in placing themselves within different evidentiary relationships, at least some of these beliefs, even if ultimately correct, remain epistemically lacking and thereby epistemically blameworthy. Nevertheless, not every anti-vaxxing community is epistemically blameworthy. Imposed ignorances and hermeneutical injustices can make distrust quite rational once a community’s reasons are clearly articulated. African-Americans in particular have quite good reasons for distrusting medical institutions, reasons that come from something as shocking as the Tuskegee study to something as straightforward as day-­ to-­day discrimination in the health care industry. An African-American who distrusts vaccines may have strong epistemic reasons for such distrust, reasons that are not only supported within her epistemic community but are also ones that those in other epistemic communities need to take seriously.47 The distrust African-Americans have can come  For a discussion of the myths surrounding vaccines and autism see Davidson (2017).  For a brief overview of vaccine hesitancy among African-Americans, see Monk (2021).

46 47

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specifically from actively manufactured and imposed ignorances that make their skepticism warranted. The men who participated in the Tuskegee study were ignorant of the fact that they had syphilis through absolutely no fault of their own. The researchers in the study went out of their way to make sure that these men did not know their true medical situation, even after a cure was discovered. This study is one in which ignorance was shockingly, deliberately constructed and foisted on others supposedly for some good—but surely not for the good of the people in the study whose well-being was consciously diminished. This was a case of using manufactured ignorance to treat a group of rational human agents as a means to an end. Understanding this history makes AfricanAmerican suspicion of the medical community much more justified for ignorance (both of the active and passive variety) has been used against them. This sort of weaponized ignorance has, of course, a prima facie moral culpability, and philosophers who write about racialized forms of ignorance invariably condemn these forms for their moral failings. It also has a prima facie epistemic culpability, which is also invariably condemned. Still, not every ignorance is manufactured in such a deliberate way. Subtle forms of socially constructed ignorances create all sorts of questions about epistemic responsibility, both for groups and for individuals. The convergence of social epistemology with socially constructed ignorance and a world of post-truth, makes it quite possible that ignorance could be both active and exculpatory, at least for particular epistemic agents. Fricker makes note of this very early on in her work on epistemic injustice pointing out that “power can … operate purely structurally, so that there is no particular agent exercising it” (2007, 10), although she also notes that “power is always dependent upon practical coordination with other social agents” (2007, 11). The result is that power effects social control, to which individuals are subject. It is perfectly conceivable that there will be circumstances (e.g., the ancient Greeks or the child of a member of the Ku Klux Klan) where individuals are constrained by power in ways that make it difficult (even practically impossible) for them to see past the constructed ignorance that surrounds them. However, to ask the question concerning when (as opposed to if) ignorance is a mitigating factor in one’s epistemic or moral blameworthiness is a

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tremendously thorny issue that depends upon contextual elements that tend to be continually shifting. To claim that for at least some epistemic agents and for at least some (undesirable) beliefs that epistemic culpability may be absent is to challenge the widely received view that our undesirable beliefs are epistemically culpable. Granted that we are even capable of exerting some control over our beliefs and granted that we indeed ought not hold certain undesirable beliefs, it nevertheless remains an open question how much epistemic responsibility individuals (or even communities) have over their actual beliefs. Add power to the mix—the desire to hold power, gain power, shift power—and the whole enterprise becomes messy rather quickly. Of course, all of this assumes basic epistemic responsibility, which is not as straightforward an assumption as it might seem on first glance. We may be able to control at least some of the circumstances surrounding our epistemic situations, but we are also subject to a bit of determinism when it comes to our beliefs. To return one last time to the Ku Klux Klansman Ellis, his awareness about himself and the world around him allowed him to come to recognize something about his social position: he and the other white supremacists with whom he associated were shut out of society in a way similar to the blacks around them. While they were privileged along one axis of power (viz., being white), they were disadvantaged along educational and economic axes. And this gave Ellis a certain epistemic advantage once he came to see it. He recognized clearly how he and others like him had been used by powerful members of his community. Yet Ellis is not typical. He clearly had a certain exemplary moral fortitude that allowed his epistemological awakening to take hold. It led him to renounce his former ignorance and to act in ways that made the world a more just place. Setting aside the moral dimension of Ellis’ conversion (although fully disentangling the practical and the theoretical may well be impossible), what of his change of belief? In his telling of his story, even he suggests that he never fully chose to believe one way or the other. His beliefs sort of happened to him as a result, first, of associating with white supremacists and, later, of associating with blacks and Jews. He never indicates that he made some conscious choice to jettison his undesirable beliefs. However, he does exhibit the courage of his epistemic convictions insofar as he is willing to sacrifice his social place in the world

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in order to embrace his newfound beliefs. Can we, or should we, hold each of us to the high epistemic standards that seem to be met in this case? The answer is: it depends. When it comes to epistemic responsibility, no single set of conditions will resolve the nature of that responsibility. In a world imbued with social situatedness and power structures that undermine our epistemic innocence, not all of us will have the same epistemic duties. Some of us are better positioned epistemically. We may be subject to forces of active ignorance-making, but we should nevertheless be able to struggle against it. The obfuscators of truth,48 like the tobacco and sugar industries, are not equally powerful in every epistemic community. Some of us have more epistemic ability, more epistemic power, and consequently more epistemic obligation to resist deliberate efforts to confound and confuse. Others have less ability, power, and responsibility. While none of us is entirely free from epistemic responsibility, not everyone has the same epistemic responsibility. Scientists who promote ­ignorance hold a greater culpability than those of us who merely bow to their more powerful epistemic position. Teachers who promote hate hold a greater culpability than the students who are subject to their teaching. We are beholden to our epistemic communities and the intellectual leaders of those communities, but we also have obligations to resist when we are in a position to do so.49 The ignorance that is foisted upon us will only take us so far in terms of epistemic exculpation, especially when we are in contact with other epistemic communities that provide us with alternative narratives. Epistemic responsibility demands engagement with the world around us, and it requires us to challenge our own ignorance. Epistemic marginalization—on any axis—will limit our ability to counter actively constructed ignorance, so the responsibility to challenge ignorance will not fall on everyone equally. Yet the responsibility does fall on most of us most of the time. We not only have a moral obligation to fight injustice, we have an epistemic obligation to do so. It is just that some of us bear this responsibility to a greater degree.

 In matters of health, there may not be Truths, but there are small-t truths concerning what is better and worse for humans. 49  This idea is developed in great detail in Medina (2013). 48

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References Alcoff, Linda, and Elizabeth Potter, eds. 1993. Feminist Epistemologies. New York: Routledge. Anderson, Elizabeth. 1995. Feminist Epistemology: An Interpretation and a Defense. Hypatia 10 (3): 50–84. Antony, Louise. 1995. Sisters, Please, I’d Rather Do It Myself: A Defense of Individualism in Feminist Epistemology. Philosophical Topics 23 (2): 59–94. ———. 2006. The Socialization of Epistemology. In The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis, ed. Robert E. Goodin and Charles Tilly, 58–77. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Antony, Louise M., and Charlotte Witt, eds. 2002. A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity. 2nd ed. Boulder: Westview Press. Arendt, Hannah. 1963. Eichmann in Jerusalem. New York: Viking. Bailey, Allison. 2007. Strategic Ignorance. In Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, ed. Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana, 77–94. Albany: SUNY Press. Boren, Cindy. 2016. New Zealanders Explain why NBA Player Called Steph Curry, Warriors “Little Monkeys.” Washington Post, May 18. Code, Lorraine. 1993. Taking Subjectivity into Account. In Feminist Epistemologies, ed. Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter, 15–48. New  York: Routledge. ———. 2014. Ignorance, Injustice, and the Politics of Knowledge: Feminist Epistemology Now. Australian Feminist Studies 29 (80): 148–160. ———. 2017. Epistemic Responsibility. In The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice, ed. Ian James Kidd, Jose Medina, and Gaile Pohlhaus Jr., 89–99. New York: Routledge. Collins, Patricia Hill. 1998. Fighting Words. Minneapolis: Minneapolis University Press. Davidson, Michael. 2017. Vaccination as a Cause of Autism—Myths and Controversies. Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience 19 (4): 403–407. El Kassar, Nadja. 2018. What Ignorance Really is. Examining the Foundations of Epistemology of Ignorance. Social Epistemology 32 (5): 300–310. Foucault, Michel. 1980. Power/Knowledge. New York: Pantheon. ———. 1982. The Subject and Power. Critical Inquiry 8 (4): 777–795. ———. 1997. In The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvere Lotringer and Lysa Hochroth. New York: Semiotext(e). ———. 2003. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-76. Translated by David Macey. New York: Macmillan.

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Fricker, Miranda. 2007. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2016. Epistemic Injustice and the Preservation of Ignorance. In The Epistemic Dimensions of Ignorance, ed. Rik Peels and Martijn Blaauw, 160–177. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goldman, Alvin. 2011. A Guide to Social Epistemology. In Social Epistemology: Essential Readings, ed. Alvin Goldman and Dennis Whitcomb, 11–37. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Grasswick, Heidi E., and Mark Owen Webb. 2002. Feminist Epistemology as Social Epistemology. Social Epistemology 16 (3): 185–196. Haack, Susan. 2001. “The Ethics of Belief ” Reconsidered. In Knowledge, Truth, and Duty, ed. Matthias Steup, 21–33. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Holroyd, Jules. 2012. Responsibility for Implicit Bias. Journal of Social Philosophy 43 (3): 274–306. Kearns, Cristin E., Laura A.  Schmidt, and Stanton A.  Glantz. 2016. Sugar industry and coronary heart disease research: a historical analysis of internal industry documents. JAMA Internal Medicine 176 (11): 1680–1685. Levy, Neil, and Mark Alfano. 2020. Knowledge from Vice: Deeply Social Epistemology. Mind 129 (515): 887–915. Lynch, Michael Patrick. 2016. The Internet of Us. New York: Liveright Publishing. Martín, Annette. 2021. What is White Ignorance? The Philosophical Quarterly 71 (4): 864–885. McIntyre, Lee. 2018. Post-Truth. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Medina, José. 2011. Toward a Foucaultian Epistemology of Resistance: Counter-­ Memory, Epistemic Friction, and Guerrilla Pluralism. Foucault Studies 12: 9–35. ———. 2013. The Epistemology of Resistance. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2016. Ignorance and Racial Insensitivity. In The Epistemic Dimensions of Ignorance, ed. Rik Peels and Martijn Blaauw, 178–201. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2017. Epistemic Injustice and Epistemologies of Ignorance. In The Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Race, ed. Luvell Anderson, Paul C. Taylor, and Linda Martín Alcoff, 247–260. New York: Routledge. Mills, Charles. 1997. The Racial Contract. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ———. 2007. White Ignorance. In Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, ed. Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana, 13–38. Albany: SUNY Press. Monk, David L. 2021. Public Confidence and Vaccine Hesitancy Among African Americans. International Journal of Medical Sociology and Anthropology 11 (3): 1–3.

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Moody-Adams, Michele M. 1994. Culture, Responsibility, and Affected Ignorance. Ethics 104: 291–309. Mueller, Jennifer C. 2017. Producing Colorblindness. Social Problems 64 (2): 219–238. Nottelmann, Nikolaj. 2016. The Varieties of Ignorance. In The Epistemic Dimensions of Ignorance, ed. Rik Peels and Martijn Blaauw, 33–56. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Palermos, Orestis, and Duncan Pritchard. 2013. Extended Knowledge and Social Epistemology. Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 2 (8): 105–120. Peels, Rik, and Martijn Blaauw, eds. 2016. The Epistemic Dimensions of Ignorance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Peirce, Charles S. 1934. Some Consequences of Four Incapacities. In Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Volume V: Pragmatism and Pragmaticism, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, 264–317. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Potter, Elizabeth. 1993. Gender and Epistemic Negotiation. In Feminist Epistemologies, ed. Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter, 161–186. New York: Routledge. Rabin-Havat, Ari. 2016. Lies, Incorporated: The World of Post-Truth Politics. New York: Anchor Books. Saul, Jennifer. 2013. Implicit Bias, Stereotype Threat, and Women in Philosophy. In Women in Philosophy: What Needs to Change, ed. Katrina Hutchison and Fiona Jenkins, 39–60. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Terkel, Studs. 1997. The Studs Terkel Reader: My American Century. New York: The New Press. Townley, Cynthia. 2006. Toward a Revaluation of Ignorance. Hypatia 21 (3): 37–55. Vuletich, Heidi A., and B. Keith Payne. 2019. Stability and Change in Implicit Bias. Psychological Science 30 (6): 854–862.

5 It’s Not My Fault

While each of us may be said to bear some responsibility for our beliefs, including our undesirable ones, the fact remains that exculpatory reasons beyond ignorance do exist—all the more so when we take communities, not individuals, to be operating as primary epistemic agents. After all is said and done, it still remains possible to ask about the extent of individual responsibility for holding the beliefs that we do. It is far from clear that all undesirable beliefs held by individuals are entirely culpable for the nature of our epistemic communities and our situatedness within them may provide legitimately exculpatory reasons. As I have argued, the difference between responsibility and exculpation depends on a number of factors. It depends on how we determine what constitutes an undesirable belief; it depends upon how voluntary beliefs are; it depends upon the role ignorance plays in offering genuine epistemic excuses—it also depends on whether epistemic agents are fundamentally individual or communal. If (on top of all the other concerns surrounding responsibility) the locus of epistemic responsibility attaches to epistemic communities, then individual praise or blame becomes much harder to pin on

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specific people. After all, if knowledge is derivative, so too, it seems, will be epistemic responsibility. Thus, assuming we can actually agree that some beliefs are genuinely undesirable (which is a rather significant assumption) and assuming that we can actually establish that particular epistemic agents do shoulder some responsibility for their beliefs (a responsibility that is not always mitigated by a social ignorance), the pressing question becomes when and to what extent I actually bear that responsibility for my undesirable beliefs. Once again, it matters greatly how we answer that pesky question, whose knowledge? For those most eager to ask this question, the goal is invariably to undermine traditional epistemic individualism and the answer typically involves some consideration of the social circumstances surrounding the knower. Ultimately, asking and answering the “whose knowledge” question results in a recognition that knowledge is something deeply social and that “it is communities that construct and acquire knowledge” (Nelson 1993, 123). Such a shift has the effect of fundamentally altering the nature of epistemic responsibility. Overturning epistemic individualism and atomism produces individual agents who are dependent on their epistemic communities. When individual knowing is no longer primary—when individuals necessarily derive knowledge from their epistemic collaborations, communities, or cumulative cultures— then individual responsibility is lessened. This diminishing of epistemic responsibility is recognized by social epistemologists in a variety of ways. Jennifer Lackey shifts focus toward groups as being “subject to normative evaluation” (2021, 12). Orestis Palermos goes as far to assert that “no amount of individual epistemic responsibility can make up the entirety of the epistemic responsibility associated with epistemic collaborations” (2022b, 336). And Levy and Alfano maintain that “the formation and maintenance of cumulative cultural knowledge does not rely on dispositions in virtue of which [individual] agents deserve credit” (2020, 905). Of course, the intent of social epistemologists’ move toward communal epistemic agency and responsibility is not to absolve individuals of the obligation to responsibly know— surely no epistemologist wants to excuse individuals holding what amount to not just epistemically but also morally undesirable beliefs. The intent is rather to move beyond the limits of an epistemology bound by

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assumptions of atomic individualism, assumptions that not only allow us to avoid but positively require us to overlook the situatedness of knowers and of knowledge. What social epistemologists, in turn, recognize and emphasize is that even if we add up the contributions and the responsibility of every member of an epistemic collective or community, this will not make up the entirety of the normative component or the entirety of the responsibility assigned to the beliefs. Because our epistemic ground has shifted in such a way that communities, not individuals, are often taken to be the primary agents of epistemology, epistemic success and failure must accordingly go beyond that for which we can be individually held responsible. Giving knowledge an irreducible social aspect entails that we become obligated to ask how the social dimensions of knowing affect the epistemic responsibility of individual agents. The difficulty is that when groups epistemically fail (as they clearly often do when holding undesirable beliefs), individual members of the group are seemingly permitted to escape being wholly responsible, even if they retain some, limited responsibility. Put simply: if the answer to “whose knowledge” is my epistemic community’s, then I have a potentially exculpatory avenue to avoid being fully epistemically responsible for those undesirable beliefs for which the community is more fundamentally responsible. In the end, my holding of some particular undesirable belief may very well not be my fault.

5.1 Epistemic Individualism Be Damned When considering individual responsibility for any undesirable belief within a social framework, one of the traditional questions that must be asked concerns the nature of epistemic agency. “Whose knowledge” may be our collective knowledge (even though there are clearly a variety of “we’s” that we may happen to be). Yet, as epistemologists have expanded agency beyond traditional individualistic models, they have also muddied the waters concerning the locus of responsibility for belief.1 On  For a summary of this expansion see Levy and Alfano (2020, 889–891). For a criticism of expanding agency to communities, see Calvert-Minor (2011). 1

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certain accounts, what we know as individuals is derivative of the epistemic standards held by our community such that “certain groups can sometimes be epistemic agents” (Tollefsen 2004, 60). On an even stronger account of epistemic anti-individualism, Nelson removes the “sometimes” and maintains that what we know on the basis of … experience has been made possible and is compatible with the standards and knowledge of one or more communities of which we are members: standards and knowledge that enable us to organize our experiences into coherent accounts, underwrite the specific contributions that we make as individuals, and determine what we and our communities will recognize as knowledge. It is that priority that makes it appropriate to extend the notion of epistemological community beyond science communities … and to recognize a multiplicity of communities as primary knowers [italics added]. (1993, 150)

On this view, our individual knowing is entirely derivative, which is a theme emphasized again by Levy and Alfano who argue both that “some of our most significant epistemic achievements rest on dispositions that cannot be understood within an individualistic framework” [italics added] (2020, 888) and that “the formation and maintenance of cumulative cultural knowledge does not rely on dispositions in virtue of which agents deserve credit” (2020, 905). While such a shift in epistemological thinking focuses attention away from the individual and the problems of epistemic individualism, it also leaves open questions about how the individual relates to the community and questions about where epistemic responsibility ultimately lies. The dynamic between the individual knower and the epistemic community of which she is a part lies at the heart of the shifting burdens of epistemic responsibility. After all, at some point most of us do wish to assign epistemic credit and blame to individual agents for their holding of certain beliefs as there are some beliefs that seem especially praiseworthy and others that seem to be beyond the pale. How we do that while rejecting epistemic individualism and accepting a pluralism of epistemic communities is quite the trick. If individual responsibility is going to be a derivative feature of collective responsibility, then how this dynamic

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plays out is going to have a lot to do with how epistemic agency is distributed. The choices for distributing agency would appear to be: the standard, atomistically situated individual, the whole community, or something intermediate.2 Since individual epistemic agency is clearly the least attractive option for most liberatory epistemologists, it makes more sense to focus on the remaining options and to ask two further questions: what does it mean for epistemic communities to be responsible epistemic agents, and how does the dynamic between communities and individuals work. Can we find room for individual responsibility within a communally focused epistemology? Some social epistemologists are more open to individual responsibility than others. In one version of collective agency, Deborah Tollefsen argues that communities, as agents, may arrive at beliefs not shared by any of its individual members—but this does not negate that individuals can believe differently from their communities. One of her examples concerns members of an admissions committee, none of whom individually believe a candidate should be admitted, but who collectively (by aggregating premises rather than a conclusion) can decide to admit. In this way, Tollefsen allows that there are occasions when collective agency is indeed primary without, however, completely eliminating individual attitudes and beliefs. Her account recognizes the stresses and tensions between individual agency and collective or group agency. In fact, she argues that “whatever reasons an individual might have to accept a decision that goes against their personal opinion on the matter is parasitic on the group’s reasons” [italics added] (Tollefsen 2004, 61). Despite her insistence that individual beliefs are parasitic, she nevertheless highlights potential conflicts between the individual’s belief and that of the group— and she acknowledges that the individual’s belief may diverge from the group. On this account, we can very well have personal beliefs that may not reflect that of our epistemic community, and, presumably, we can still be responsible for those beliefs—or at least for the individual epistemic states surrounding those beliefs. If so, we may still deserve credit or blame  Really, this should say “epistemic communities,” plural. None of us belongs to just one epistemic community. However, addressing this subtlety would at this point further complicate what is already a fairly complicated issue. 2

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for our beliefs, independently of the beliefs of the collective. The result, for Tollefsen at least, is that collective rationality may influence individual rationality, yet the individual can still retain her own reasons and own epistemic point of view.3 That is, group beliefs do not necessarily determine the believing of individual epistemic agents. Whatever questions are left open concerning the epistemological dynamic between that knower and her epistemic community, individual responsibility is still on the table.4 Tollefsen’s view is, however, a somewhat weak account of communal knowledge, and not all social epistemologists follow her in taking such a weak approach. One of the most influential accounts within feminist epistemology is that of Lynn Nelson, who argues that “the appropriate loci of philosophical analysis of science are communities, with community standards, theories, and practises the appropriate loci of explanations and evaluations of scientific practice” [italics added] (1995, 407). Of course, Nelson does not restrict her epistemic communitarianism to science, but like many philosophers, she views science as a model of precisely the sort of communally generated knowledge that happens throughout our epistemological endeavors. The idea is that without the community, we as individuals are incapable of knowledge because the conditions of knowledge are inextricably intertwined with social epistemic practices. Put differently, ideal Cartesian knowers, if there were any, would never actually be capable of having any knowledge at all because the standards for knowing are not ones we can establish in the absence of other knowers who together form an epistemic community. This is a truly important refocusing of our epistemic lives—one perhaps as revolutionary as Descartes’ own inward turn—for it shifts epistemic agency to groups. Individual knowledge is dependent and recedes into the background of our epistemic lives while the foreground is focused on the epistemic

 This is the sort of thing Levy and Alfano would likely dub “weak anti-individualist” insofar as Tollefsen maintains (or at least suggests) that underlying the collective agency are states and processes that “continue to be those of individuals” (Levy and Alfano 2020, 890). 4  This is not a point that I will address here, but Calvert-Minor (2011) argues that we need to abandon talk of epistemic agency in favor of talk of epistemic practices. It is practices, not agency, that lie at the heart of epistemology for Calvert-Minor. 3

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communities that structure standards of evidence and thereby our ways of knowing. In another particularly strong version of epistemic anti-individualism, Levy and Alfano go even further and argue that “some of our most significant epistemic achievements rest on dispositions that cannot be understood within an individualistic framework” [italics added] (2020, 888). The sort of epistemic achievement they have in mind? Collective cultural knowledge. This is a much more robust case in which epistemic responsibility is more fully shifted away from the individual and towards the community. After all, our cultural knowledge transcends any individual epistemic agent, and Levy and Alfano are explicit about putting the onus on the community. According to them, “the formation and maintenance of cumulative cultural knowledge does not rely on dispositions in virtue of which [individual] agents deserve credit” (Levy and Alfano 2020, 905). Here the knowledge of our epistemic communities exceeds our individual grasp, which, of course, follows in the footsteps of Nelson’s view that communities are epistemically primary and that individual knowers are dependent upon collectively held standards. This increasing movement toward accepting a cumulative cultural knowledge decidedly and explicitly weakens individual responsibility. More to the point, even though something seems deeply right about the claim that I myself do not deserve credit for cumulative cultural knowledge, this claim has a flip side: I also do not deserve blame. This, then, is a real dilemma for any liberatory epistemology that seeks both epistemic primacy in communities and individual responsibility: assert community agency and undermine individual responsibility or emphasize individual responsibility and risk falling back into an epistemic atomism. Because most liberatory epistemologists want to emphasize the communal aspects of epistemology, the threat to individual responsibility is very real—but how best to navigate this tension needs to be better addressed. Of course, not everyone sympathetic to liberatory social epistemologies is unaware of the problem or is sympathetic to more radical moves

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toward communally oriented epistemologies.5 As Chris Calvert-Minor has argued specifically with respect to Nelson’s view, “her epistemology makes it difficult to reconcile how individuals can transform their ­community’s own epistemic standards” (2011, 348).6 This recognizes a critical issue. For any individual to make a dent in collective cultural knowledge, there must be some uptake by others in the community, what Medina might call “chained agency.”7 After all, if we wish to maintain individual epistemic obligations, then individuals must have a means of resisting their epistemic communities when those communities engage in oppressive practices. Yet this cannot happen in isolation. If I am the only one resisting, my efforts will be for naught—and the reasons for this are clear. Insofar as my knowledge depends upon the epistemic standards of my community, I am in a position of substantial weakness when it comes to challenging by community’s beliefs or the standards which justify those beliefs. Consider, for instance, Tollefsen’s example of the admission committee’s decision-making process. If everyone else is adamant about admitting the student and I alone oppose the decision, my belief in the inadequacy of the candidate may be considered, but it will not win the day. The very possibility of my solo resistance is undermined by the presumption of communal primacy—ultimately, the formation of my beliefs will be subject to communally held standards and practices. In cases where the social pressure is strongest, the very possibility of my being responsible for my undesirable beliefs will be substantially weakened. For instance, what made the Klansman Ellis’ transformation so powerful was that others recognized it, supported it, lauded it. Conversely, a similarly positioned Greek opposing slavery in the ancient world would not have found the social support Ellis enjoyed. The need for meaningful tension between the individual and the community also leads other liberatory epistemologists, such as Heidi  While I will briefly focus on Calvert-Minor’s and Grasswick’s responses to Nelson, other responses which are also critical of Nelson include Tanesini (1999) and Webb (1995). Since my intent is primarily to follow through on the consequences of the shift to social epistemology for individual (versus communal) responsibility, I will not dwell on these criticisms even though I clearly think they have merit. 6  To be clear Calvert-Minor (2011) thoroughly rejects the focus on agency. 7  For more on this see Medina (2013, 234–249). 5

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Grasswick, to argue that treating communities as primary epistemic agents is problematic. Her reason? It either reproduces problems at the communal level that were previously found at the individual level or it simply is not clear what it means to assign epistemic agency to communities.8 Grasswick counters the holistic conception Nelson offers by suggesting instead that we recognize individuals-in-communities because this will better allow us to better “foster an analysis of social relations and their power dynamics” (Grasswick 2004, 112).9 This recognizes anti-­ individualism, but it does so in a weaker way than those who wish to attach agency to epistemic communities. This may well be a move that could grasp the horns of the dilemma and traverse the line between individual and group responsibility—but it does suggest more epistemic individualism than is typical within liberatory epistemology. In fact, what it does is substantially weaken the claim to social-theoretical holism that lies at the heart of much thinking about the systemic nature of oppression.10 That is, it takes less seriously that communities are the primary bearers of epistemic responsibility at the cost of losing sight of significance of how pervasively social and collective are the oppressive aspects of epistemological practices. Taking seriously the systemic nature of oppression means taking seriously the social dimensions of knowing. This has led many other epistemologists to grasp the other horn of the dilemma. The heart of the issue is, ultimately, what to make of the relationship between individual knowers and the communities that construct the standards according to which these knowers operate. This is a complex relationship, but whatever the difficulties with anti-individualistic shifting epistemic agency, some social epistemologists have knowingly doubled-­down and pushed forward with promoting communities as epistemic agents. They have sought to better clarify what it means for groups to be responsible by more clearly specifying what it actually means  See Grasswick (2004, 86).  Grasswick is, I believe, onto something important, and in a different context I would develop this line of thinking because it may very well be able to navigate the tensions of assigning epistemic responsibility. However, resolving those tensions is not my main task since I simply to not have the space to satisfactorily resolve this deep a difficulty. Instead, I will follow through on the consequences on epistemic responsibility of maintaining a strongly social constructivist epistemology. 10  For an argument to this point with respect, specifically, to Nelson’s view, see Calvert-Minor (2011, 354–355). 8 9

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to assign agency, not to individuals but to communities. Emerging from recent trends has been a particularly strong epistemic anti-individualism that focuses on either how groups aggregate epistemic attitudes of members or how collaborations generate knowledge that cannot be attributed to any individual within the group. One such view is that of Palermos, who goes beyond the individual-in-community approach and instead claims that collaborative knowledge actually emerges from the mutual interactions of members of an epistemic group. For Palermos, “appropriately interacting individuals can give rise to distributed cognitive systems that manifest collective properties” [i.e., the resulting beliefs’ positive epistemic standing] (2022a, 1483). In short, groups (or epistemic collaborations) generate knowledge. Similarly Levy and Alfano (2020) acknowledge that epistemic competencies are shared between individuals and groups, arguing that epistemology is pervasively social and, at times, irreducibly collective. While neither of these views entirely absolves individuals of epistemic responsibilities, the pervasive socialness within these epistemic perspectives does create a significant tension when it comes to assigning responsibility, especially when the beliefs in questions are ones with an undesirable moral component. Take Palermos’ idea that group beliefs can manifest the property of positive epistemic standing.11 What “positive epistemic standing” amounts to is a topic in and of itself, but Alvin Plantinga describes it (or at least “positive epistemic status”) thusly: a belief B has positive epistemic status for S if and only if that belief is produced in S by his epistemic faculties’ [sic] working properly; and B has more positive epistemic status than B* for S iff B has positive epistemic status for S and either B* does not or else S is more strongly inclined to believe B than B*. (Plantinga 1988, 46–47)

Unpacking all this is a rather large (and for my purposes somewhat unnecessary) task—except to note that on Palermos account S can be an epistemic group with epistemic faculties that can work or not work  Palermos does not specify if this standing is knowledge or justified belief or understanding or other sort of epistemic value, but this does not make much difference in this context. 11

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properly. The problem is, we still have to determine what “proper working” amounts to in an epistemically pluralistic world. If it were a simple matter (which it is not) to show that epistemic faculties worked improperly when arriving at undesirable beliefs, then it would also be a simple matter to assign epistemic blame to a group. However, undesirable beliefs could very well obtain positive epistemic status within an epistemic community or collaboration that is systemically racist or sexist or otherwise oppressive. After all, if we are going to be social epistemologists (of whatever stripe), our evidentiary standards are constructed within the practices of our epistemic communities. Regardless of whether knowers are taken to be individuals or groups, epistemic faculties can, within a systemically oppressive system, work properly to confer on an undesirable belief a greater epistemic status than an alternative (hopefully more desirable) belief.12 Surely the “proper working” of our faculties requires reliability, but here we find, once again, the issue of which epistemic communities get to argue for which conceptions of reliability. Power rears its head once again. Different beliefs and belief-forming processes become deserving of the moniker “reliable.” So, if we allow that groups can “epistemically … [self-organize and self-regulate] so as to form a belief-forming process that can reliably and responsibly generate true beliefs” (Palermos 2022a, 1494), we also have to consider, once again, that there is no transcendent notion of “reliability” and “responsibility” to which we can appeal. The “we” that defines what it is for epistemic system to “work properly” will make a difference.13 The new twist with the shift in epistemic agency toward communities is that once we consider, as do epistemic anti-­individualists, that our epistemic activities may be partially dependent upon properties of our broader environment, then that broader environment—the cumulative culture that surrounds us—may very well alter our epistemic practices in ways for which individuals actually do avoid responsibility. Despite the obvious difficulty with this view, the idea that there is a cumulative culture for which we are individually not responsible is quite  The problem is, as Chap. 2 highlights, that a great bit of undesirability lies in the eyes of the beholder. 13  This is an instance of how epistemic problems are reproduced at the communal level. 12

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plausible. After all, in all but the most unusual of situations, we simply inherit the cultures in which we find ourselves, which is where Levy and Alfano start their argument for the social aspect of our knowing. They maintain that “knowledge production has always been a collective enterprise for homo sapiens because we are dependent upon cumulative culture …: culture that is not merely transmitted but which then becomes a platform for the next round of innovation” (Levy and Alfano 2020, 891–2). Yet what Levy and Alfano fail to highlight is that our cumulative cultural knowledge is not morally or epistemically innocent. The culture that they specifically consider is, perhaps rather expectedly, a somewhat morally neutral one that emphasizes skills necessary to surviving in a challenging environment (namely, the Artic), but what they overlook is that some cultures involve systematically oppressive beliefs, especially concerning matters related to sex, gender, and race. When the culture in question entails undesirable beliefs that produce not only epistemic but moral lapses, the emphasis on cumulative culture as something for which individual agents deserve no credit has a much more sinister side.14 Given human history, it is not all that difficult to see how a cumulative culture actually built on collective racist and sexist practices actually could be transmitted and actually could serve as a platform for innovation. The practices of colonialism, for instance, which are very much still with us, are ones that illustrate how cumulative culture produces knowledge that may not depend on dispositions for which we individually deserve credit or blame. In fact, that we fail to individually be responsible for our racist culture is something baked into the very heart of a concept like white ignorance—but what is also baked in is a sense in which those of us who are caught within such a culture are permitted certain comfortable falsehoods. These sorts of institutional processes over which we individually have no direct control but that nevertheless affect our epistemic lives reflect the sorts of situations which Levy and Alfano describe thusly: Group deliberation harnesses the power of argument, but the individuals who engage in it seem to deserve little credit for the process and even less  Here lie echoes of Moody-Adams’ concern with slaveholders, Nazis, and other groups with morally undesirable beliefs. 14

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for its results. If there is epistemic credit for, and if there is epistemic agency deployed in the generation of knowledge, it is irreducibly social. It is at the level of the group as a whole that these processes are truth-conducive. At the individual level, they may entrench us in comfortable falsehoods [italics added]. (2020, 907)15

What is lost in this general statement of irreducibly social epistemic agency is that highly undesirable beliefs are often precisely the sort of comfortable falsehoods that we culturally endorse and live with. Socially and culturally generated ignorance is what, for example, allows whites to avoid facing the reality of the systemic oppression of people of color. Yet because the ignorance is located within a group setting, epistemic primacy—and, hence, epistemic responsibility—is shifted to the community. Individual responsibility is undermined if not dissolved. In order to regain individual responsibility, there must be room in our social dynamics for us to call into question the comfortable falsehoods evident in our epistemic communities.

5.2 Epistemic Dependence and Individual Responsibility Assuming that groups truly do have epistemic agency and assuming this agency takes primacy over the individuals within the groups, what then becomes threatened is a means to require individuals to do epistemically better than their communities. After all, if my epistemic community sets the standards for knowing, who am I to counteract these standards? It is a recipe for epistemic disasters if we endorse individuals negating the epistemic limits set by widely-held practices, which in turn suggests that

 This is very much a more general statement of a point Mills makes about race in The Racial Contract. In this work Mills not only describes an epistemology of ignorance that relies upon “a particular pattern of localized and global cognitive dysfunctions” (1997, 18), he also adds that “to a significant extent, … white signatories will live in an invented delusional world, a racial fantasyland, a ‘consensual hallucination’” (Mills 1997, 18). 15

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our epistemic responsibilities are indeed primarily group-based.16 Other philosophers, however, are not so sure.17 In fact, Grasswick’s insistence on having feminists focus not on epistemic communities but on “the dynamic relations between individual knowers and their communities” (2004, 86), stems precisely from a worry about making sense of knowledge-seeking practices in a way that prescribes how we can know better.18 As she points out, “we need an understanding of epistemic agency as something that can be exercised more or less well” (Grasswick 2004, 89).19 Yet it is precisely this sort of understanding that, at an individual level, is a deep problem for social epistemologists who continue to emphasize and promote group agency. Nevertheless, the arguments made for communal obligation within social philosophy make it difficult to ignore that some communal practices and standards do lie very much outside our reach as individuals, that our cultural commitments do lie beyond our individual grasp, and that communities of knowers are capable of knowledge that escapes us as individuals. So, if at least some epistemic agency does fall jointly on the shoulders of communities of knowers and on the individuals making up those communities, where exactly does this dynamic leave individual agency? This question is specifically raised, but not necessarily resolved, by Palermos (2022b). He asks, “if, in epistemic collaborations, epistemic responsibility is an emergent collective property, does this mean that individual members are exempt from attributions of responsibility” (Palermos 2022b, 346)? Even before answering this question, he assumes there must be room to attribute individual responsibility within epistemic collaborations—but he also admits that no set answer can always be provided. Given the complexity of our epistemic endeavors, surely this last bit about there being no easy, single answer to the question has to be  In addition to Mills, see Medina (2013), who is somewhat ambivalent on where epistemic responsibility lies but who definitely puts the onus upon epistemic communities. Also see Fricker (2009, 2012). Finally, see Anderson (2012). 17  For a summary of the literature, see Palermos (2022b, 337). 18  Following through on the details of how this dynamic relationship would work goes beyond what I can accomplish here. 19  This is something that is also a goal of transformational criticism insofar as we need to find ways for cross-communal epistemic criticism. 16

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correct. Epistemic activity depends greatly on context, which does not lend itself to simple answers. Even so, the stakes involved in asking and attempting to answer this question are much higher than Palermos seems to allow for he does not consider what to do with beliefs that might be especially unsavory. In fact, he states that “membership to an epistemic collaboration amounts to an invitation to turn one’s attention away from regulating one’s individual epistemic states and to focusing instead on the epistemic coordination of the group” [italics added] (Palermos 2022b 346). An epistemic dynamic that invites us to turn our attention away from our own individual epistemic states is one that has built into it a host of potentially exculpatory reasons for holding an undesirable belief. After all, when I am not simply permitted but asked to actively turn my attention away from my own epistemic states, would I not also be shifting epistemic responsibility toward that to which I am turning my attention, namely, my epistemic community? Granted, we all must do this to some extent, especially when we, for instance, accept the testimony of those held to be experts within our epistemic practices, but epistemic collaborations should not allow for a strong shift of epistemic responsibility away from the individual. If we are going to assign epistemic responsibility to individual knowers, we still need room for us to exercise our epistemic agency better (and worse) and to hold that we individually ought to know better. Finding ground for such accountability, however, becomes even more difficult for someone like Palermos, who suggests that engaging in collaborative projects requires agreement on certain standards, values, assumptions, attitudes toward certain kinds of evidence and other propositions, rejection of which would hinder collaboration. This is where joint commitments toward certain propositions come into play: They solidify the collaboration by precluding participants from doxastically diverging—i.e., from abandoning beliefs, whose acceptance is essential for sustaining their coordinated epistemic performance [italics added]. (2022b, 344–5)

This is quite different from the weak anti-individualism of Tollefsen, who acknowledges that individual beliefs can diverge from those of the larger

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community. Here that divergence is expressly disallowed. Of course, Palermos has in mind scientific collaborations, which may seem less problematic than the coordinated epistemic performances of committed male-chauvinists or bald-faced white supremacists, but even scientific commitments have been shown to have highly gendered and racialized aspects that work against those outside of the dominant groups. The coordinated epistemic performances of scientists are far from innocent— so much so that feminists have argued for, if not doxastic divergence, at least doxastic subversion. In other words, we should seek to disrupt doxastic convergence when undesirable beliefs are the ones solidified by collaboration. Yet not only is Palermos willing to argue for doxastic conformity, he goes as far as to say that many of these commitments … are propositions for which no (or at least no direct) epistemic justification and/or evidence exists. In fact, the absence of any direct epistemic credentials is [sic] support of such propositions, which would allow members of epistemic collaborations to embrace them on the basis of purely epistemic grounds, is the very reason participants need to agree—i.e., jointly commit—that they will let them stand as the view of their group. (2022b, 344)

A very troubling turn of events is this. Such a “need to agree” appears to allow beliefs in the absence of epistemic justification or evidence provided our epistemic community embraces them.20 To see how dangerous such a view can be consider what the “need to agree” might mean for slaveholders of the 1850s or even the politicians who privately encouraged the Ku Klux Klan to push back against efforts at integration in the United States South. Such individuals are (as all of us are) very much a part of epistemic collaborations, ones in which the practices depend upon agreement, perhaps even agreement that could very well lack direct epistemic justification. They are also subject to power  Although I am rather critical of this approach given the moral ramifications of the epistemic commitments here, Palermos’ view has some fairly strong epistemic history behind it. In On Certainty, Wittgenstein adopts a very similar position when he tells us, “the difficulty is to realize the groundlessness of our believing” (1969, §166). Of course, while beliefs may ultimately lack epistemic grounds, they do for Wittgenstein fall back on ungrounded ways of acting (Wittgenstein 1969, §110). 20

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structures that further serve to lessen individual responsibility insofar as individual agents become pressured to believe in ways they may not even be aware. When we take epistemic dependence, combine it with social power, and throw in a bit of socially constructed ignorance, the invitation to turn away from regulating our epistemic states or the expectation that we will converge upon (perhaps unjustified) beliefs embraced by our epistemic community may well lead to beliefs with deleterious moral consequences. If we epistemically commit to this concatenation of claims, normative assessments of individual beliefs become tenuous indeed for it seems as if there could be no way that a single agent could actually know any better. As if the push towards epistemic submissiveness does not create enough potential epistemic exculpation, Levy and Alfano make the tenuousness of epistemic responsibility even more troublesome by further suggesting that there are situations in which we are epistemically better off by being closed-minded and following the crowd. They maintain that, while deferring to the larger epistemic community may be an epistemic vice, it is an epistemic vice that may nevertheless lead to knowledge. As they point out, it takes hard work to consider a range of hypotheses and to be open-­ minded. It takes hard work to think for oneself. We fail at these attempts at epistemic virtue routinely. If we’re right, these failures may be happy: if we succeeded very much more often, we would do less well epistemically…. [It] is, perhaps, only by great effort that we achieve a cognitive sweet spot, where we follow the crowd and are close-minded just enough. (Levy and Alfano 2020, 909).

To be fair, the idea is not that we should promote or glorify closed-­ mindedness (we are, say Levy and Alfano, good enough at this already); rather, the idea is that we should, instead of relying on our own epistemic resources (which is difficult for us to continually do), sometimes allow ourselves to indulge in going with the “wisdom of the crowd.” Of course, this makes perfect sense if, as Levy and Alfano hold, that some of our most significant epistemic achievements are irreducibly collective. Yet it also opens us up to epistemic vulnerability. Given that we depend for our epistemic lives on the community, the admonition to “follow the crowd”

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makes it far more difficult to justify bucking the trend. Instead, this furthers our dependence upon our epistemic communities, which may themselves have suspect practices that are inherently difficult for members of the group to recognize. It is not just social epistemologists who put us in this position. Philosophers as diverse as Martin Heidegger and Alasdair MacIntyre note, albeit in different ways, there is an inherited nature to the world and to the communities into which we are born, which make us dependent upon the communities around us. Very much like Levy and Alfano’s epistemic position, MacIntyre, for example, argues that moral virtue “always requires for its application the acceptance for some prior account of certain features of social and moral life in terms of which it has to be defined and explained” (1984, 186). He goes on to point out that practices have a history and that “the standards are not themselves immune from criticism, but nonetheless we cannot be initiated into a practice without accepting the authority of the best standards realized thus far” (MacIntyre 1984,190). If we have no choice but to accept the best standards realized thus far and if those standards shut out external criticism, then at least some of us are in a dire epistemic position, especially when our communities are seeking to deliberately maintain ignorance and to actively shut out evidence and voices external to the community. Of course, all is not lost. Epistemic dependence, even this dramatic an epistemic dependence, does not necessarily entail that we have no means of critically examining epistemic communities, even our own. That there are multiple epistemic communities of which we are a part and that we are generally situated within more than one of these communities, should allow us, if we are intellectually honest, to engage with criticisms of our own communities, especially if we adopt a stance of transformational criticism. The 1850s slaveholder or racist politician do not exist in isolation (then again, who does?). They may be epistemically dependent on their communities—but their communities are not homogeneous.21 The fact that our epistemic communities overlap and interact might give us hope that we can, and indeed should, do our epistemic best. After all, epistemic conflict allows us to see that there are competing epistemic  Again, a point for which Moody-Adams argues strongly.

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practices. Furthermore, that there are other epistemic communities surrounding us means that we can, in principle, alter our position in the world. We may even be responsible for altering our position in the world for while we may not be able to ignore a certain epistemic “giveness” to where we are, many of us can still find room to shift to other communities or to engage in transformative criticism. If we can do this, we may find ourselves invited, once again, to consider regulating, not only our own individual epistemic states but also to seek to influence the epistemic states of the communities on which we depend. The problem is, however, that, assuming the primacy of epistemic communities, we become epistemically dependent and susceptible to the influence of our communities. As a result, the sort of epistemic transformation required may, in some cases, require an epistemic heroism. That is, the epistemic giveness of one’s community may deliberately isolate and restrict the kinds of evidence and sources of evidence that we are allowed to consider. For those of us who are brought up in epistemic communities that are isolated from other perspectives or that as a matter of principle actively dismiss and discredit other voices, the possibilities for regulating our epistemic states in transformative ways may be extremely limited.

5.3 Epistemic Bubbles, Echo Chambers, and Becoming a Cognitive Newborn If knowledge is genuinely communal, then we have to take seriously that the sources and standards of knowledge come from complex social networks, which in turn makes us epistemically vulnerable at an individual level. Each of us is dependent upon the epistemic communities to which we belong. Much of this vulnerability and dependence, however, is overlooked due to the fact that many epistemologists fail to adequately address the ways in which we are fully situated within epistemic communities. In other words, even social epistemologists miss the depth of our social networks, focusing instead on how knowledge is transmitted from one

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person to one person.22 To not recognize the broader complexity of epistemic networks results in “contemporary approaches [that] are illequipped to address the extent to which we suffer from epistemic vulnerability” (Sullivan et al. 2020, 732). In other words, when we interact with other epistemic agents, we rarely do so on a one-to-one basis. More typically, we interact with larger bits of our epistemic networks rather than one single person. These networks with which we interact are not all created equally. Some epistemic networks (or communities or practices) put us in better epistemic situations, for example, by demanding that we be ­attentive to our own epistemic states or by providing us with more diverse and better evidence. Some epistemic networks limit our epistemic options, for example, by undermining our epistemic attentiveness or by narrowing our perspective. When considering how good or beneficial a person’s epistemic situation is, we must consider not simply how receptive a community is to transformative criticism (although that is a significant indicator of the quality of our epistemic situation), we must also consider “the number of sources they have, how independent these sources are from each other, how diverse the viewpoints of these sources, and how reliable the sources are” (Sullivan et al. 2020, 737). The more, the better, and the less interdependent our sources are, presumably the better our epistemic position is. Yet some epistemic systems ignore or disregard or even discredit other sources. These systems exploit epistemic vulnerability by supporting or even encouraging epistemic mistakes. Such mistakes may, at times, occur through no fault of our own—all the more so if we are truly expected to follow the wisdom of the crowd or to accept our unquestioningly communities’ (sometimes unjustified) joint epistemic commitments. It all depends on our epistemic networks and our position with respect to those networks—and our networks and relative power positions within them can be quite epistemically compromising. Unfortunately, some epistemic communities are less accommodative of what we consider good epistemic practices and standards. Some communities shut out other voices and outside sources of evidence, sometimes through omission and sometimes through active discrediting. Thi Nguyen discusses two separate structures of exclusion: epistemic bubbles  See Sullivan et al. (2020).

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and echo chambers.23 The metaphorical appeal of bubbles and echo chambers is that these images highlight situations in which we become epistemically isolated from evidence or trapped in a social structure that only listens to itself. Both bubbles and echo chambers capture less-than-­ ideal epistemic situations, partly because they fail to participate in or even refuse to engage in transformative criticism. The situatedness and isolation they create comes in different forms depending on how active are the exclusions in which they engage. This, in turn, makes us more or less epistemically vulnerable and more or less epistemically responsible. In the more benign case, an epistemic bubble is “a social epistemic structure in which other relevant voices have been left out” whereas, in the more sinister case, an echo chamber is “a social epistemic structure from which other relevant voices have been actively excluded and discredited” [italics added] (Nguyen 2020, 141). The primary difference is that while epistemic bubbles tend to form through some form of epistemic laziness (whether culpable or not), an echo chamber systematically and actively isolates members from outside epistemic sources. Epistemic bubbles, which tend to passively not hear other voices, tend to be less problematic because they are open to “being burst.” Less metaphorically, the exclusions of bubbles are more accidental than deliberate so when heretofore unrecognized evidence is brought to bear, those caught in bubbles may still be open to considering that evidence and reevaluating the narrowness of their beliefs.24 The same cannot be said for echo chambers, which actively shut out alternative epistemic sources. For this reason, Nguyen argues echo chambers, in particular, are a decided threat to our epistemic lives.25 Unlike echo chambers, bubbles are, in many instances, formed somewhat innocently through our ordinary epistemic practices. After all, none of us, individually or collectively, is able to have at our disposal all the time all the evidence. Sometimes we miss something. It is not that we mean to miss something or that we actively go out of our way to discredit outside information. It just happens in the ordinary course of our  As Nguyen notes, whether some epistemic situations constitute an epistemic bubble or and echo chamber can be a matter of degree. The scale is sliding rather than dichotomous. Furthermore, both bubbles and echo chambers can be utilized within a single epistemic community (2020, 142). 24  They also may not reconsider their beliefs. I will consider such a situation shortly. 25  See Nguyen (2020, 142). 23

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epistemic lives. Yes, epistemic bubbles have a dearth of outside voices— but those in these bubbles are usually willing to listen when other voices arrive within earshot. As Nguyen maintains, “epistemic bubbles are rather ramshackle—they go up easily, but they are easy to take down” (2020, 153). This gives them an advantage over echo chambers, whose hallmark is, by contrast, the active discrediting of outside voices. That is, with echo chambers epistemic inputs are limited, not through mere overlooking of evidence but through deliberate effort. Because the epistemic liability within a bubble is neither intentional nor predicated on preemptively discrediting other epistemic sources, they have less structural integrity and less resilience than the more deliberate echo chamber. Consequently, echo chambers turn out to be much more dangerous and much more likely to support marginalizing and oppressive practices, especially the practice of active ignorance. Furthermore, because echo chambers actively restrict epistemic access and trust away from broader outside sources and towards only members of the group, echo chambers can have the deleterious consequence of allowing some individuals within the group to have “runaway credence” (Nguyen 2020, 150). Contrary evidence and outside experts are simply not allowed within a functioning echo chamber—and this epistemically weakens many of its individual members. The distinction between a more benign epistemic bubble and a more sinister echo chamber harkens back to the distinction between passive and active ignorance. Passive ignorance is, as a rule, something much easier to correct and less epistemically blameworthy than actively constructed ignorance. When we go out of our way to maintain our ignorance or to drown out other epistemic voices, we raise our level of culpability. The same can be said of epistemic communities that exclude and disregard evidence that others bring to the table. In such cases, the culpability may not reach the level of the individual knower who is dependent upon group practices. Given that the standards of evidence and of justification are generated at a social level, the individual’s inability to recognize certain evidence may be the fault not of one person but of the larger epistemic network. This would seem to be the situation in at least some cases of well-meaning and well-intentioned whites who are neverthelss able to “tune out” the voices of people of color. Their numbness does not necessarily arise because they have individually made some

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decision to shut out “epistemic others” but may well be because the dominant epistemic community has distributed epistemic agency in such a way that non-white voices are diminished. Are such knowers epistemically lazy? Perhaps. The answer will depend, in part, on whether this “tuning out” is the result of a bubble or an echo chamber. If a bubble, then the agent’s epistemic network may be deficient insofar as it does not look past its own perspective. This sort of laziness is something a single individual might be able to overcome though epistemic diligence. If an echo chamber, however, the agent’s network will be built on actively excluding outside evidence and outside voices, so even intellectual diligence may not be enough for a single individual to transcend that community’s exclusionary practices. Because epistemic bubbles are not actively maintained, they are thereby typically much easier to escape and typically incur much less culpability. Even if we are as epistemically faithful as we can be, there is no guarantee that however reliable and diverse are our sources of information that they will offer us complete coverage of when it comes to collecting relevant information about or evidence for our beliefs, which is how we find ourselves in epistemic bubbles in the first place. Part of our epistemic responsibility should presumably be to broaden our sources of information—but this is easier said than done. Each of us has a limited ability for uptake, and we all understand that there is much more information out there than we could possible take in. We are forced to rely on a social division of labor to spare us from having to cope with all the evidence, which is something each of us could never manage anyway. What this means, however, is that “bad coverage,” as Nguyen calls it, becomes “an epistemic flaw of epistemic systems and networks, not individuals” [italics added] (2020, 143). Even the most epistemically diligent of us can find ourselves in an epistemic bubble, and, thus, it appears we individually escape at least some epistemic culpability when we find ourselves caught up in one that unknowingly generates undesirable beliefs. This is, in fact, precisely the sort of filtering of information that occurs with Medina’s example of the “pig head dropper,” assuming (as Medina does) the student’s profession of ignorance is genuine. On this specific interpretation, the failure is one of the student’s epistemic communities, those who failed to teach him what amounts to basic etiquette and awareness of other

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communities’ practices. They permitted him to epistemically exist within a bubble that clouded his understanding of his action. Of course, this is where bubbles can easily burst—after the fact surely someone within the university community must have explained to the “pig head dropper” the significance of his actions in such a way that he could not go forward in ignorance. Genuinely innocent ignorance should be easily overcome once outside evidence is brought to bear. But what if other epistemic communities of which the student was a part countered the university community’s message and instead sustained and promoted his ignorance? If, as Nguyen says, the epistemic flaw is built into the system, competing epistemic communities may offer different practices and different evidence that must be sorted through. When the communities that are more central to or more powerful in my life are actually echo chambers, I might find myself with some exculpation for my belief. The potential exculpation becomes stronger when we consider not simply the possibility of bad coverage but also the fact that the processes by which we acquire information within our epistemic networks can be modified by others without our knowing. Nguyen specifically mentions censorship, media control, and even algorithmic filtering of online experience—but the methods of epistemic modification and distortion could also be more broadly dispersed social practices operating through a power that does not attach to particular agents. None of us is free of epistemic distortions, but that there are such forces operating within epistemic communities also puts more of the onus on the social networks that generate them. Unlike merely bad coverage, the idea of the manipulation of epistemic sources creates a much more of an ominous threat, especially when it comes to the production and maintenance of beliefs resulting in silencing, marginalization, and oppression. When beliefs arise from a simple lack of information—a lack that can be overcome with the introduction of new evidence—changing them is a relatively straightforward process. When beliefs arise from the active manipulation of information within epistemic networks, the threat is much more profound, and we begin to be dragged into the realm of perhaps powerful echo chambers that are constructed in ways that preclude encountering or even recognizing other evidence. Of course, if we believe Foucault, power is inescapable, so it will operate even within the most benign of epistemic bubbles

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(i.e., it need not work actively to narrow our epistemological perspective), but in much the same way it actively creates and sustains ignorance, power can give rise to much more troublesome echo chambers.26 These are much more difficult to escape, which means that the epistemic responsibilities of those caught within them may be diminished. That is, insofar as socially generated ignorance can function as an exculpatory reason for a person’s undesirable belief, so too can echo chambers absolve the individual of personal epistemic responsibility. While bubbles disperse epistemic responsibility, their more passive nature means their internal mechanisms can allow for individuals to be critical of the community’s epistemic practices and to engage in efforts at transformative criticism. This is not the case with an echo chamber. An epistemic community that goes out of its way to dismiss outside voices and sources of evidence will not simply shut out external inputs it will also override the internal voices of community members who dissent from the party line. The epistemic practices within echo chambers actively shut out contrary evidence. Consequently, people who find themselves trapped in an echo chamber (especially if they are caught through no specific epistemic fault of their own) are not permitted the epistemic resources necessary to challenge the community, resources such as bringing in heretofore unconsidered outside evidence. By contrast, such resources are, in principle, permitted within epistemic bubbles for such epistemic networks simply fail to have a broad enough outlook (i.e., they do not actively seek to narrow their point of view). Put differently, nothing in an epistemic bubble inherently demands that individuals turn away from regulating their own epistemic states; echo chambers insist upon it. One of the key differences between bubbles and echo chambers, then, comes in the form of how much agency one is allowed by the power structures that guide epistemic practices. In some communities, we may be encouraged to challenge the status quo—or at least not be overly  In fact, Nguyen argues not only that “echo chambers are excellent tools to maintain, reinforce, and expand power through epistemic control” but that they are “set up intentionally, or at least maintained, for this functionality (2020, 149). To this extent, Nguyen maintains this account is “compatible with, but independent from, Fricker’s [testimonial injustice] and Mill’s [active ignorance] accounts” (2020, 149). Although their reach extends further, “echo chambers can and surely are used to maintain social oppression through enhancing credibility gaps and supporting practices of active ignorance” (Nguyen 2020, 149). 26

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prohibited from doing so. Obviously not everything can be open to critique all at once, but well-functioning epistemic communities, even those with bad coverage, will allow its members room to bring in additional sources of evidence for consideration. Echo chambers decidedly prohibit the consideration of outside evidence. Consequently, if we reject epistemic individualism and insist that individual epistemic agency is derivative of communal agency, then those within a social framework marked by the active dismissal and discounting of outside voices will lack many of the resources necessary to see and to respond beyond the boundaries of their group. The result, and one that Nguyen readily admits, is that our criticism of others caught within epistemic echo chambers may be misguided and misplaced. Nguyen goes as far as to point out that accusing individuals of “problematic acquiescence to authority … [relies on] an unreasonable expectation for radical epistemic autonomy” [italics added] (2020, 142). When we make judgments concerning others’ epistemic responsibility, we cannot forget our epistemic interdependence. None of us stands epistemically alone. None of us is capable of entirely rejecting and counteracting the epistemic practices within which we are situated. Of this Nguyen is quite sensitive, arguing that, “in some circumstances, echo chamber members do not have full epistemic responsibility for their beliefs” (2020, 143). This is worth repeating: echo chamber members do not have full epistemic responsibility for their beliefs. Our vulnerability to our epistemic community diminishes responsibility. Those individuals who are members of epistemic communities that most strongly create ignorance and most strongly encourage silencing—that is, those who are members of communities that are most likely to generate practices that silence and oppress outsiders—may be the least responsible for their beliefs. This hardly seems the conclusion that most of us outside of the echo chamber would like to accept. Whether we can avoid this conclusion depends on the answer to two questions: to what extent can we escape epistemic bubbles or echo chambers, and to what extent are epistemic agents responsible for getting caught in these bubbles or echo chambers? If the answer to the first question is “we cannot escape,” then the best we can hope for is to avoid getting caught in these epistemic webs in the first place. Problem is, not

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getting caught is far easier said than done. In fact, it will require a fairly decent amount of epistemic luck for if I am born into or otherwise inculcated into the wrong epistemic community, it seems all hope will be lost. Now, bubbles do appear easier to extract ourselves from as there is nothing deliberate about the exclusion of evidence and the outside voices that get lost. For example, my graduate school colleague who was ignorant of the work of Tillich clearly inhabited a philosophical epistemic community in which Tillich’s work was simply not part of the cannon. This happens to all of us. With a little curiosity, though, we can overcome this oversight and burst such bubbles when confronted with new evidence. With bubbles, in particular, the situation may not be quite as dire as a we-can-never-escape possibility suggests, but that there is this possibility much more clearly with echo chambers (those epistemic traps where external evidence is hidden, dismissed, or otherwise diminished) makes the answer to the second question especially pertinent: how responsible are we for our epistemic situatedness within bubbles or echo chambers? When it comes to epistemic bubbles, the answers seem more promising. Epistemic practices within them should involve more epistemic freedom, at least in principle, because these form rather accidentally. The bad epistemic coverage or the lack of other voices is not willfully created, generated, or maintained. It just happens in the course of living our lives. The reason bubbles are called “bubbles” is that they are supposed to burst when agents are exposed to the information they have been missing. When the lights go on in my office, I suddenly believe the lights are on; when my student tells me my use of language has a racist or sexist or ableist tone, I suddenly believe I should examine my expression. In such cases, the omission of information is not deliberate, much like when we are passively ignorant of information that, once brought to our attention, will change our minds. Of course, the omission may not be entirely innocent since we are epistemically obligated to seek out information that may escape us, but the point is that with a bubble, new information is often welcomed. However, it is not especially clear where the individual’s obligation to seek out new information falls when the epistemological structures in play provide us room to turn our attention away from regulating our own epistemic states in favor of accepting the wisdom of the crowd. If individual agency is dependent upon group agency and if the

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group fails to gather all the relevant data, to what extent would individuals be obligation to pick up the epistemic slack, so to speak? Are ancient Greek citizens, for example, truly responsible for their epistemic bubble? Their cumulative cultural knowledge was limited (as is every culture’s knowledge), but realistically, could the average Greek (or the average liberal democrat today) be expected to see beyond his or her cultural inheritance? Surely there are circumstance where epistemic bubbles are easily escaped, but not every bubble bursts easily. If the bubbles are deep and far reaching and if they involve relatively homogeneous groups of knowers, it could be quite difficult indeed to escape from them, even if the omissions fail to be actively constructed. Insofar as some of these bubbles are ones I inherit from my community, then I could hardly be responsible for getting caught in at least some of them—and the ones that I may very well be least responsible for getting caught in are those which involved systemically and deeply held beliefs, beliefs like those about sex/gender or race. At least these bubbles, if they are bubbles, have proved rather difficult for individuals to escape. On the other hand, when a bubble is stubborn, perhaps that should be taken as a sign that what is at hand is not an epistemic bubble at all but rather an echo chamber where the epistemic distortion is dynamic. These are harder to escape. To avoid the unhappy conclusion that individuals within echo chambers have diminished epistemic responsibility, Nguyen maintains that if one has lots of diverse epistemic sources around her and still chooses to enter an epistemological echo chamber, that agent assumes some epistemic blame. The situation may well be something like Aristotle’s notion of acting in ignorance when one is drunk: one may act involuntarily while in the state, but one is not innocent of being in that state. Similarly, we can take on epistemic responsibility for beliefs filtered through an echo chamber if we made the choice to enter the chamber in the first place. The problem with Nguyen’s solution is that it is too simple. Not all of us are fortunate enough to be inculcated into epistemic communities with sound practices. To be swayed into participation within an epistemic network that excludes sources of evidence would indeed speak ill of one’s epistemic character (unless, of course, we are socially invited not to attend to our epistemic states in favor of

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community’s), yet most of us are not raised in a perfect epistemic world. Indeed, many of us are immersed in echo chambers from a young age. Nguyen gives the example of a child who is homeschooled and who does not come into contact with alternative epistemic sources until a teenager. By then, the child is inculcated into the epistemic world of her parents— and, of course, has little epistemic reason not to trust her parents. In such cases, outside voices and evidence have no chance to enter the already established echo chamber. The question, then, is: does a misled epistemic agent have a genuine, accessible escape route out of the echo chamber? Here is where Nguyen’s account fairly radically diverges from other socially oriented epistemic accounts, especially those found within feminist epistemology. In fact, he offers, ironically enough, an almost full-on return to epistemic individualism. Nguyen’s radical thesis? A complete cognitive reboot. In other words, our teenager who has been raised in an echo chamber needs, first, to recognize (as does Descartes in the opening lines of the Meditations) that something is epistemically awry with her situation and, second, to “begin afresh socially” (Nguyen 2020, 157). To ask someone caught in an epistemic echo chamber to recognize that something is awry seems a big ask, but that is far from the most problematic aspect of Nguyen’s thesis. To escape the echo chamber, this person is expected to go back and re-evaluate all testimonial sources without utilizing any previous beliefs about how to rank those credentialing sources. Says Nguyen, “our rebooter must take on the social epistemic posture that we might expect of a cognitive newborn” (2020, 157). Yet cognitive newborns, like newborns in general, cannot thrive without social support. Evaluating or re-evaluating all testimonial sources cannot be done on one’s own (assuming this big of a task can be done at all). Without some social practices to rely on it is hardly clear how one could ever make sense of competing testimonial sources. Even Descartes needed a foundation for his epistemic fulcrum. Even Descartes had clarity and distinctness to guide his meditations. Because cognitive newborns are asked to begin afresh socially, they are asked to start over cognitively without any means of finding a foundation on which to stand. All epistemic standards vanish. For those of us who live in a non-individualistic epistemic world, the very origin of our conception of knowledge involves the notion of

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community.27 The position of a cognitive newborn is not available to anyone with a cognitive past. If the only way to exit an echo chamber (or a strongly engrained epistemic bubble) is to epistemically start over from scratch, the level of epistemic responsibility one assumes within these epistemic communities seems highly unclear. Even if I am ultimately responsible for finding myself within the echo chamber in the first place, the difficulty of escape—and the fact that escape may be predicated on reevaluating my entire cognitive life—will diminish the responsibility for having beliefs at all. After all, the epistemological standards supported by my community will only allow me certain evidence and certain authority figures. Without this communal support, I have nothing with which to begin my epistemological life. This is simply part of what it means to make the community’s epistemic practices primary. Certainly, the community may take on a significant epistemic blame for their narrow and exclusionary approach to evidence, but each of us is required to believe within the epistemic standards endorsed by social practices.

5.4 It May Really Not Be My Fault So, what is the consequence for epistemic responsibility for undesirable beliefs? Well, if we take seriously the anti-individualistic push toward focusing on the communal aspects of epistemology, and if we take seriously the socially constructed nature of epistemic practices surrounding knowing and ignorance, then the picture is not as clear and bright as many of us might hope. For most of us, most of the time, we can affect our behavior in ways that make us more or less epistemically virtuous. We can shift our epistemic communities so that we become better knowers. We can, in other words, put ourselves in positions to know well. Yet epistemically there is much that lies outside of our control. Beliefs are often foisted on us by powerful sources of which we are unaware, and resisting  This is a point Peirce brings home in a different way when he says, “the very origin of the conception of reality shows that this conception essentially involves the notion of COMMUNITY” (1934b, 5.311). 27

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and counteracting these forces is not an easy or simple task—assuming it is a task that we can accomplish at all. Furthermore, if we maintain that whatever it is we mean by “truth” is not a Truth-with-a-capital-T that transcends our epistemic communities’ understandings of it but is instead a function of communal practices, then what counts as a desirable or undesirable belief will be a matter up for negotiation among various epistemic perspectives. To be responsible for an undesirable belief, then, requires some (negotiated?) standard that determines my belief to be undesirable in the first place, but it also requires that I have some control over my beliefs, which my epistemic community may or may not allow. For those of us within epistemic communities that demand individual accountability for one’s epistemic states, responsibility is easier to assign. For those caught up in epistemically troubled communities, by contrast, there may be more pressure to defer to the crowd and to accept knowledge generated through socially constructed ignorance. Consequently, one-size-fits-all solutions to epistemic responsibility will escape us even in cases of particularly unsavory sorts of beliefs because epistemic situatedness matters greatly. At times, undesirable belief may be, quite literally, not my fault.

References Anderson, Elizabeth. 2012. Epistemic Justice as a Virtue of Social Institutions. Social Epistemology 26 (2): 163–173. Calvert-Minor, Chris. 2011. “Epistemological Communities” and the Problem of Epistemic Agency. Social Epistemology 25 (4): 341–360. Fricker, Miranda. 2009. Can There Be Institutional Virtues? In Oxford Readings in Epistemology (Special Issue: Social Epistemology), ed. Tamar Gendler and John Hawthorne, 235–252. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2012. Group Testimony: The Making of a Good Collective Informant. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 84 (2): 249–276. Grasswick, Heidi E. 2004. Individuals-in-Communities: The Search for a Feminist Model of Epistemic Subjects. Hypatia 19 (3): 85–120. Lackey, Jennifer. 2021. The Epistemology of Groups. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Levy, Neil, and Mark Alfano. 2020. Knowledge from Vice: Deeply Social Epistemology. Mind 129 (515): 887–915. MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1984. After Virtue. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press. Medina, José. 2013. The Epistemology of Resistance. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mills, Charles. 1997. The Racial Contract. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Nelson, Lynn Hankinson. 1993. Epistemological Communities. In Feminist Epistemologies, ed. Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter, 121–160. New York: Routledge. ———. 1995. A Feminist Naturalized Philosophy of Science. Synthese 104 (3): 399–421. Nguyen, Thi C. 2020. Echo Chambers and Epistemic Bubbles. Episteme 17 (2): 141–161. Palermos, S. Orestis. 2022a. Epistemic Collaborations: Distributed Cognition and Virtue Reliablism. Erkenntnis 87: 1481–1500. ———. 2022b. Responsibility in Epistemic Collaborations: Is It Me, Is It the Group or Are We All to Blame? Philosophical Issues 32: 335–350. Plantinga, Alvin. 1988. Positive Epistemic Status and Proper Function. Philosophical Perspectives 2: 1–50. Sullivan, Emily, Max Sondag, Ignaz Rutter, Wouter Meulemans, Scott Cunningham, Bettina Speckmann, and Mark Alfano. 2020. Vulnerability in Social Epistemic Networks. International Journal of Philosophical Studies 28 (5): 731–753. Tanesini, Alessandra. 1999. An Introduction to Feminist Epistemologies. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Tollefsen, Deborah. 2004. Collective Epistemic Agency. Southwestern Philosophical Review 20 (1): 55–66. Webb, Mark Owen. 1995. Feminist Epistemology and the Extent of the Social. Hypatia 10 (3): 85–98. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1969. On Certainty. Trans. G.E.M.  Anscombe and G.H. von Wright. New York: J & J Harper.

Author Index1

A

C

Adams, Steven, 147, 147n5, 148, 148n7, 151 Alfano, Mark, 30, 71, 77, 78, 165n21, 167, 179, 194, 196, 198n3, 199, 202, 204, 209, 210 Alston, William, 93, 94, 100 Anderson, Elizabeth, 66n37, 163 Antony, Louise, 21n14, 40, 40n7, 63n32, 159n17, 163n19, 179, 180 Arendt, Hannah, 41, 166

Code, Lorraine, 17, 46, 163, 164 Collins, Patricia Hill, 64n34, 163

B

Bailey, Allison, 20n11, 152

D

Du Bois, W. E. B., 21n13, 64 E

Elgin, Catherine, 7, 8, 47, 48 Ellis, C. P., 12–15, 23–26, 28, 29, 30n21, 36, 43, 46, 106, 108, 126, 175–177, 188, 200

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

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225

226 

Author Index

F

Feldman, Richard, 94, 95, 98, 102, 102n27, 107n31 Forster, Georg, 119, 120n45, 121–124, 168 Foucault, Michel, 5, 6, 17, 29n20, 40–42, 41n9, 41n11, 79n51, 120n47, 127, 157, 165, 165n22, 170, 171, 216 Fricker, Miranda, 23, 59n30, 105, 129, 149, 178n34, 181, 187, 217n26 G

Grasswick, Heidi, 200–201, 200n5, 201n9, 206 H

Heidegger, Martin, 3, 5, 210 Hetherington, Stephen, 127, 129 Hieronymi, Pamela, 106–110, 107n31, 112n33 Holroyd, Jules, 89n7, 99, 105n29, 113 Hume, David, 93, 94 J

James, William, 3, 92 K

Kant, Immanuel, 38, 87, 117–125, 118n42, 119n44, 120n45, 125n51, 125n52, 168

King, Martin Luther, 136n69 Kornblith, Hilary, 102–104 Kuhn, Thomas, 48n20 L

Levy, Neil, 30, 71, 77, 78, 165n21, 167, 179, 194, 196, 198n3, 199, 202, 204, 209, 210 Longino, Helen, 52–54, 64, 64n34 M

MacIntyre, Alasdair, 46n17, 210 Medina, José, 14, 15n6, 16–18, 20n11, 21n13, 24n17, 28, 41, 55, 58, 68, 75, 102n26, 113, 126, 147n4, 147n5, 148, 149, 154, 155n13, 156, 157n15, 160, 163, 165n22, 171, 176, 181, 184, 185, 189n49, 200, 215 Mills, Charles, 18, 19, 20n11, 21n13, 24n17, 25, 65, 135, 150n9, 153–156, 153n12, 155n13, 156n14, 157n15, 164, 165, 167, 176n31, 205n15, 206n16, 217n26 Montmarquet, James, 112, 121–123, 121n49 Moody-Adams, Michele, 18, 20n11, 72, 73, 76–81, 77n48, 77n49, 91n10, 128, 148, 154, 157n15,

  Author Index 

166, 167, 169, 204n14, 210n21 Mueller, Jennifer, 152–155, 157

R

N

S

Nelson, Lynn Hankinson, 30, 194, 196, 198–201, 200n5, 201n10 Nguyen, Thi, 212–216, 213n23, 217n26, 218, 220, 221 Nottelmann, Nikolaj, 36n2, 44, 45, 69, 70n40, 103

T

227

Rorty, Richard, 15, 40–43, 43n15, 61, 79n52, 80, 170n25

Saul, Jennifer, 178n34 Socrates, 15, 18, 57, 149, 149n8 Spivak, Gayatri, 133 Steup, Matthias, 100, 106, 107n31

Tollefsen, Deborah, 196–198, 198n3, 200, 207

P

Palermos, Orestis, 30, 78, 194, 202, 202n11, 203, 206–208, 208n20 Payne, Keith, 99, 129, 165 Peels, Rik, 97, 100, 104n28, 110 Peirce, Charles, 53, 91, 92, 174, 222n27 Proctor, Robert, 20n10 Putnam, Hilary, 43n15, 47, 48n18

V

Vuletich, Heidi, 99, 129, 165 W

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 3, 5, 44, 91n9, 115n39, 128, 208n20 Wolf, Susan, 73, 74

Subject Index1

A

Agency, 8, 16, 30, 30n21, 47, 59, 127, 130, 148, 158, 159, 163, 167, 194, 195, 197–203, 198n3, 198n4, 200n6, 205–207, 215, 217–219 Anti-vaxxer, 186 Arrogance, epistemic, 75 Authority, intellectual, 53, 58–67, 123 B

Bias, 15, 15n5, 20, 21, 21n14, 24, 38, 42, 43n14, 45, 49, 50, 50n23, 52, 59, 62–64, 74, 88, 88n3, 88n4, 89, 89n7, 93n13, 94, 95, 98n18, 99, 101, 105, 105n29, 113–115, 127–129,

129n59, 134, 150, 161, 165, 177–179, 178n34, 180n38, 181, 182 Bias paradox, 21n14, 63 Blame, 13, 25, 26, 30, 69, 73, 76, 89n7, 93, 95, 103, 105, 123, 131, 133, 143, 144, 144n2, 147, 147n5, 148, 151, 158, 160, 164, 168, 169, 172, 174, 177, 178, 180, 193, 196, 197, 199, 203, 204, 220, 222 Bubble, epistemic, 54, 54n26, 211–222 C

Character, 46, 53, 92, 112, 112n34, 114, 122, 123, 123n50, 220

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

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229

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Subject Index

Collaboration, 194, 202, 203, 206–208 Community, 1–4, 6–9, 11–13, 15, 16, 18, 22–24, 22n15, 26, 29–31, 35, 37–39, 42, 46, 47, 52–57, 59, 59n30, 62, 65, 66, 68–71, 75–78, 77n49, 88, 91, 99, 101–104, 107, 108, 114–116, 114n38, 121, 122, 125–132, 135, 136, 143, 146, 147n5, 148–151, 155, 158, 160–166, 162n18, 168–179, 181, 182, 182n39, 182n40, 185–189, 193–203, 197n2, 205–212, 206n16, 213n23, 214–223, 222n27 Criticism, 45, 51, 53–59, 61, 62, 64–69, 71, 75, 78, 79, 119, 124, 169, 170, 182, 182n42, 185, 200n5, 206n19, 210, 218 transformative, 53, 54, 56, 58, 59, 62, 64–68, 75, 113, 162, 182, 185, 186, 211–213, 217 Culpability, 17, 20, 22–26, 122, 124, 129, 145, 146, 147n5, 147n6, 148, 154, 159, 168, 174, 183, 187–189, 214, 215 Culture, 13, 27, 43, 46, 66, 71–73, 72n43, 75n45, 77–81, 79n52, 137, 147n5, 148n7, 161, 165, 166, 169, 172, 177, 179, 194, 203, 204, 220

liberatory, 1, 7, 17, 46, 48, 52, 59, 113, 164, 172, 173n28, 199, 201 social, 1, 4, 6, 15, 28, 37, 77, 77n48, 79, 122, 127, 158, 163, 163n20, 179, 187, 199, 200n5 standpoint, 7, 40n6, 48n19, 59 virtue, 111 Evidence, 4, 5, 11, 18, 21, 27n18, 39, 44, 45, 48, 50–52, 55, 55n27, 56, 62, 69, 74–76, 88–90, 93–100, 102, 103, 105n29, 110–115, 119–121, 123–126, 128–130, 138, 151–158, 160, 161, 168, 173, 179, 180, 182–186, 199, 207, 208, 210–222 Excuse, epistemic, 70, 76, 82, 103, 104, 106, 144, 161, 166, 170, 177, 193 F

Fact, 3–10, 14, 16–20, 22, 23, 30, 36n2, 37–39, 41, 42, 44, 46–54, 60, 71, 72, 75, 99, 102, 107, 109, 119, 121, 124, 145, 150, 153, 154, 159–162, 164–168, 173–175, 178–180, 180n37, 184, 187, 193, 210, 211, 216, 222 Forms of life, 5, 128

E

Echo chamber, 54, 54n26, 56n28, 57, 116n40, 182n41, 211–222 Epistemology

H

Habits, 28, 75, 90–94, 112, 114, 115, 176

  Subject Index 

Hero, epistemic, 171–177 Hubris, 116–124 I

Ignorance active, 75, 149, 160, 177, 178, 214, 217n26 affected, 16, 19, 24, 76, 77, 79, 81, 82, 147n6, 148, 149, 151, 152, 154, 158, 166, 168, 176, 185 meta-, 16, 18, 135, 154, 156–158 passive, 182, 185, 214 socially constructed, 15, 19, 20, 24n17, 28, 138, 149, 150, 152–157, 161, 165, 171, 174, 187, 209, 223 white, 16, 18, 19, 20n11, 25, 65, 135, 136, 144, 150n9, 152–154, 153n12, 156–158, 164, 176, 176n31, 184, 204 willful, 20, 152, 157, 157n15, 167 Individualism, 4, 77, 77n48, 79, 79n50, 159n17, 162, 169, 194–205, 218, 221 Industry sugar, 16, 159, 160, 189 tobacco, 16, 160, 189 Influence, 3, 7, 12–14, 17, 41n11, 47, 48, 51, 73, 76, 78, 87, 88n3, 90, 92–95, 97–99, 105, 107, 109–115, 125–128, 138, 143, 150, 155, 162, 163, 171, 175, 176, 181, 198, 211 Injustice, 2, 8, 9, 18–22, 37, 42, 49, 58, 65, 66n36, 67, 96, 100,

231

102n26, 132, 132n62, 133, 135–137, 144, 149–151, 153, 161, 173n28, 184, 187, 189 hermeneutical, 23, 24, 58, 59n30, 131, 132, 186 testimonial, 58, 131–133, 151, 217n26 Involuntarism, 1, 11, 13, 28, 87–89, 90n8, 97, 101, 104n28, 110 K

Knowledge, cumulative cultural, 71, 72n43, 167, 179, 194, 196, 199, 204, 220 Ku Klux Klan, 2, 12, 43n13, 113, 187, 208 L

Location, 46, 112, 163, 166 Logic, colorblind, 61 M

Marginalization, 8, 19, 49, 56, 58–60, 65, 67, 97, 146, 149, 151, 158, 176, 189, 216 N

Narrative, 3, 26, 27, 35, 39, 67, 68, 120n47, 124, 159, 172, 189 Not-knowing, 75, 80, 135, 143, 145–148, 150, 151, 159, 167, 177, 180, 185

232 

Subject Index

O

Objectivity, 4, 40, 44, 48, 50, 50n24, 51, 53, 59 Obligation, 9, 28, 30, 47, 75, 81, 87, 88, 97, 100, 101, 103, 114, 117, 121, 125, 130, 137, 167, 168, 178, 181, 189, 194, 200, 206, 219, 220 P

Post-truth, 8, 8n2, 9, 14, 23, 37, 68, 107, 120n47, 171, 172, 187 Power, 3, 5, 6, 10, 14, 17–20, 22–24, 26, 28, 29, 29n20, 38, 41, 41n9, 41n11, 47, 48, 58, 60, 89, 96, 98, 107, 115, 120n47, 125–127, 125n51, 133, 149, 150, 157, 158, 160, 161, 164, 165, 165n22, 169–173, 170n25, 175, 176, 184, 185, 187–189, 201, 203, 204, 208, 209, 212, 216, 217, 217n26 Practice, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 16, 17, 24, 27, 35–37, 40n8, 41–43, 45, 47–50, 52–69, 56n28, 71, 75, 76, 78–82, 79n52, 92, 93, 98, 103, 106n30, 115, 115n39, 128, 130, 132, 136, 143–146, 150, 151, 153, 157, 157n15, 158, 161, 162, 164, 166–168, 172, 173, 177, 178, 181–183, 182n42, 185, 198, 198n4, 200, 201, 203–208, 210–223, 217n26 Praise, 13, 14, 93, 95, 103, 108, 131, 133, 134, 143, 164, 177, 193

Privilege, 59, 64, 126, 135, 153–155, 157 Purposiveness, 117, 118 R

Responsibility, 1–31, 61, 70, 70n41, 72, 73, 75n45, 77, 78, 79n50, 80–82, 87–138, 143, 144, 149–163, 166, 167, 174, 176, 178, 180n36, 181–189, 182n40, 193–199, 200n5, 201–203, 201n9, 205–211, 215, 217, 218, 220, 222, 223 S

Slaveholder, 72–76, 72n43, 104, 177, 178, 204n14, 208, 210 Slavery, Greek, 76, 77, 79, 81, 82, 91, 104, 105, 106n30, 166, 167, 172, 174, 177, 178n33, 200 Stereotype, 20, 26, 128 T

Testimony, 55, 133–135, 173, 173n28, 207 Truth, 1–7, 9–11, 14, 15, 20, 23, 25, 26, 35–44, 36n1, 48, 50, 50n24, 52, 53, 59, 64n34, 67–70, 68n38, 72, 78–80, 93, 96, 102, 104, 107, 120, 120n47, 123n50, 130–132, 150, 157, 159, 165, 166, 169–172, 170n25, 171n26, 171n27, 183n44, 189, 189n48, 223

  Subject Index  V

Vaccination, 186 Value, 2, 8, 9, 35–38, 47–54, 56, 58, 73, 99, 107, 120n47, 202n11, 207 Vice, 16, 48, 110–112, 112n33, 124, 179, 209

233

Violence, epistemic, 133 Virtue, 68, 71, 92, 93, 110–113, 111n32, 112n33, 112n34, 120n47, 123, 125, 165, 179, 194, 196, 199, 209, 210 Voluntarism, 90–94, 99, 102n27, 111, 125–130