Epistemic Innocence and the Ethics of Stereotypes

Chapter 4 develops a challenge to two ideas that will be tempting to some: (i) harbouring and applying social attitudes that reflect social realities can only be good from an epistemic perspective, and (ii) harbouring and applying social attitudes that fail to reflect social realities can only be bad from an epistemic perspective. It is shown first that there can be epistemic costs associated with stereotyping, even where a stereotype reflects an aspect of social reality. Then it is argued that there can be epistemic benefits associated with having social attitudes that fail to reflect these realities where the alternative would be to suffer the epistemic costs of stereotyping. It is argued that social attitudes that are egalitarian but fail to reflect social realities can be epistemically innocent and the lesser of two epistemic evils. Finally, the chapter outlines some implications of these points for existing theories of the ethics of stereotyping, accounts of epistemic injustice and moral encroachment views.

Where Ethical and Epistemic Demands Meet

Chapter 5 explores the idea that we face a dilemma with respect to stereotyping: that when stereotypes reflect social reality, people can either do what is best from an epistemic perspective, and allow the stereotypes to influence their judgements, or they can do what is best from an ethical perspective and avoid stereotyping. This chapter shows that although ethical and epistemic demands sometimes conflict in this way, sometimes they can both be met through stereotyping, and at other times they can both be met by not stereotyping. Rather than facing a relatively straightforward dilemma, we face a serious practical difficulty of discerning, in any specific context, whether the application of a stereotype will facilitate the achievement of either or both ethical and epistemic goals. The argument in this chapter is primarily focused on the case study of stereotyping in medicine but applies broadly to stereotyping across various social domains.

Did Ethiopia Survive Coloniality: Eurocentric colonial interpretations of Ethiopian history; Struggle against territorial colonialism; The three unique historical aspects of Ethiopia; Challenges of modernization; Did Ethiopia Avoid Colonialism

What is unique about Ethiopia is, the history of survived colonial conquest. The Ethiopian patriotic forces defeated Italian army at the Battle of Adowa in 1896. Ethiopia has a long history of voluntarily pushing modernisation in the context of development. The major drive of modernization aimed at transforming Ethiopia from feudal ‘traditional’ society to ‘modern’ society. Hence, Ethiopia has been in-charge of its development trajectory, compared to other colonised Africans. Ironically, alike other African countries Ethiopia is still struggling with challenges of development. This is historical, an interpretive and conceptual study, executed in thematic terms. Theoretically, the study predicated on decolonial epistemic perspective, that articulates application of modernization to development, as its units of analysis. The findings indicate the need for epistimic decolonization to avoid the invasion of cognitive empire with its modernist influences of civilisation and development.

Evidence, Risk, and Proof Paradoxes: Pessimism about the Epistemic Project

Why can testimony alone be enough for findings of liability? Why statistical evidence alone can't? These questions underpin the ‘Proof Paradox’. Many epistemologists have attempted to explain this paradox from a purely epistemic perspective. I call it the ‘Epistemic Project’. In this paper, I take a step back from this recent trend. Stemming from considerations about the nature and role of standards of proof, I define three requirements that any successful account in line with the Epistemic Project should meet. I then consider three recent epistemic accounts on which the standard is met when the evidence rules out modal risk (Pritchard 2018), normic risk (Ebert et al., 2020), or relevant alternatives (Gardiner 2019 2020). I argue that none of these accounts meets all the requirements. Finally, I offer reasons to be pessimistic about the prospects of having a successful epistemic explanation of the paradox. I suggest the discussion on the proof paradox would benefit from undergoing a ‘value-turn’.

Ecologies of Knowledge in Chirere’s Tudikidiki (2007): on Decolonial Ontological Turn

This article is an attempt to bring decolonial strands of critical thinking to African/Zimbabwean literary tradition. It explores how Memory Chirere uses the short story genre as a territory of practical life where decolonial practical relations of emancipatory knowledge production are weighed. It argues that the anthology, Tudikidiki, (2007) as Chirere's territory of artisanship of practices, evokes ecologies of knowledge crucial for developing decolonial options. From decolonial epistemic perspective, the article posits that the enduring historical duration of coloniality has elucidated the presence of unequal relations in African knowledge production systems. In its multiple manifestations, coloniality has disfigured, distorted, reconfigured and eventually transformed African ways of knowing. The result is epistemicide, in which Western epistemic systems are valorised as indispensable and unassailable, while indigenous forms of African knowing are vilified as setting a site for conflicting savage desires and derisions. Against this background, this paper considers the imperative need for engaging both indigenous theoretical and practical epistemological projects in terms of the nuances of decoloniality within literary studies. It insists that decolonial turn necessitates a process of ontological change that speaks to the emergency of nascent ecologies of knowledges.

Group epistemic value

Sometimes we are interested in how groups are doing epistemically in aggregate. For instance, we may want to know the epistemic impact of a change in school curriculum or the epistemic impact of abolishing peer review in the sciences. Being able to say something about how groups are doing epistemically is especially important if one is interested in pursuing a consequentialist approach to social epistemology of the sort championed by Goldman (Knowledge in a social world. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999). According to this approach we evaluate social practices and institutions from an epistemic perspective based on how well they promote the aggregate level of epistemic value across a community. The aim of this paper is to investigate this concept of group epistemic value and defend a particular way of measuring it.

Egophoricity and Perspective: A View From Spoken Swedish

From the point of view of everyday talk and especially, casual conversation, it is obvious that language use is highly perspectivized with a clear focus on the speech-act participants. This fact is supported by observations regarding the pervasiveness of egophoric pronouns and the frequent use of the modal particles ju and väl in spoken Swedish. The paper demonstrates how egophoric pronouns, modal particles, and mental verbs are used to signal the epistemic perspective of the speech-act participants, i.e., when the knowledge and attention of the speech-act participants are at stake. These formally distinct resources show patterns of co-distribution that permit an analysis of forms in terms of how they signal shared/private access to events from the perspective of the speaker and the addressee.

Facing the Three Ds

In this chapter, the author provides a unique set of insights concerning the policy of urban dynamics that is part of a complex process. The focus is on how disasters and development are understood and experienced through the lens of decolonial thinking based on a discussion of the displaced issue in a complex global socio-economic context of the city. Because the third world is associated with development needs to be reformulated in terms of dialogues from different enunciation loci, it becomes pertinent to consider the decolonial epistemic perspective in a space that constantly faces disasters that jeopardize its development in the framework of the effects on the environmental landscape and local development initiatives of Hurricane Dorian. Based on an informative discussion of an institutional level analysis, the author concludes with important insights about the case of Haitians in the Bahamas to demonstrate some interesting implications for (mis)management through NGOs.

The Epistemic Goods of Higher Education

In this paper, I investigate two clashing perspectives regarding the good of the university: a socio-economic and an epistemic perspective. I position current writing on the university in the philosophy of education as being largely socio-economic and contrast this view to an earlier tradition of writing about the university that I position as mostly epistemic. Following on from this discussion, I review the university’s role in the distribution of social and epistemic goods. I hold that the university directly controls only the latter, not the former and hold that whatever socio-economic roles the university plays in society, it must do so through the distribution of knowledge in society. Next, I explore what this means for the university’s socio-economic functioning: I hold that seeing the good that the university distributes as knowledge places limits on its socio-economic functioning. Lastly, I ask what the university can do to promote epistemic justice in how it conducts teaching and research. I hold that one of the most important things that the university can do in the name of epistemic justice is to educate others (especially employers) about the true worth of a university degree.