Por: Angel Ontiveros C.
A look at Bolivia from the perspective of Miranda Fricker with her work: Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing[1]
The essence of reason is not to assure man a foundation and powers, but to question him and to invite him to justice. Emmanuel Levinas
Social life is full of power relations and some groups seems to be more easily victims of injustice than others. Prejudice plays a crucial role: they give the speaker more credibility than another, or the opposite: less credibility than another. The skin color, the mark of an accent when speaking, the physical appearance, the shyness or the multiple factors that we deal with: the modes of reasoning, the use of language, the fluency of the expression, the order to expose, the ignorance of the technical language. These elements can create advantages or disadvantages that, as is so often the case in courts, undermine the truth and reward eloquence. This results in an injustice originated in a deficit. In fact, Fricker points out, the essence of epistemological injustice is its deficit. She talks about epistemic injustice or knowledge, which she believes mainly affects groups that are also disadvantaged, such as women and ethnic minorities. An epistemic injustice occurs when a subject’s ability to convey knowledge and make sense of his social experiences is nullified.
Miranda reveals to us the ethical and political aspects that underlie our way of knowing and understanding and is committed to bringing our epistemic conduct back into a field of rationality and justice. The author determines two types of epistemic injustice: Testimonial Injustice, for example, is when a witness is not believed due to prejudices against her gender, social or ethnic group. Hermeneutic injustice is that which occurs in the face of the inability of a collective to understand the social experience of a subject due to a lack of interpretive resources, putting him at a disadvantage and reduced credibility. The characterization of these two phenomena sheds light on a myriad of issues, such as social power, prejudice, reason or the authority of a discourse, and reveals the ethical traits intrinsic to our epistemic practices.
Access to the labor market and women’s wages are even lower than that of men. People of indigenous, peasant or Afro-descendant origin have the greatest disadvantage in many circumstances, older adults are often rated as a burden, that is unfair. It is common to see people from a poor background in Bolivia being potentially treated as inferior, that is also unfair. The simple, but secular and perhaps empty definition of injustice is a condition where someone is treated unfairly. It’s often about material things, like money, work, home or mistreatment due to prejudice, gender, provenance, and age. But, there is one aspect of injustice that we often neglect, which is, the concept of knowledge, what Fricker calls Epistemic Injustice, which is when no one believes in you, because they minimize your knowledge, disqualify your experiences. The Bartolinas movement, or Feminismo Comunitario, is a reaction to this. The philosopher Fricker states that the root of epistemic injustice is the structures of unequal power relations and the systematic prejudices that constitute it. For those who knows how, and under which circumstances the process to build the Bartolinas organization, and the cleavage of Feminismo Comunitario of another more orthodox feminist group expose, how the issue of hermeneutic injustice occurs even within feminist groups, in this case in Bolivia. Power relationships that “constrain women’s ability to understand their own experience.” Fricker talks about hermeneutic lagoons. Marginalization comes not only from material power but also from the asymmetries of understanding, from the unjust distribution of knowledge.
And why it is important to study injustices around knowledge, what Fricker calls: Epistemic injustice, why is it relevant to study injustice in this way?… If we regard injustice as a phenomenon in our common reality, in the society we share, what we regard as unfair, and what we want to represent when we speak in terms of injustice, it has to do with social relations. It has to do with the influence that some people have on others, with mutual dependence, on good intentions or not of those who wield power over others. There is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the articles of which grant all human beings of rights, for example, article 2 which says: Everyone has all the rights and freedoms proclaimed in this Declaration, without distinction of race, color, sex, language, religion, political or another opinion, national or social origin, economic position, birth or any other condition. In addition, no distinction shall be made based on the political, legal or international status of the country or territory of whose jurisdiction a person depends, whether it is an independent country, or a territory under fiduciary administration, not autonomous or subject to any other limitation of sovereignty. So, what can be found in this article? Here can we find a kind of demand for equality and justice around the interpretation of our common reality, about the societies we share.
In specific situations of judicial proceedings, for example, what does it mean to lack credibility, to be a not a valid interpreter of the society being shared? [2] Recurrent and morbid phenomenon in Bolivia’s judicial standing. This characterizes the daily reality of social interactions, being regarded as an unreliable interpreter of his own situation, or of the common or shared situation, and that this in itself is a manifestation of injustice. This is an important insight, assuming that justice is something that takes place in a common context. It is in the act of listening, or of airing opinions that society constitutes its vision of reality, the worldview on which a political vision is structured. All of this is then based on who is believed, the vision of who has an impact? Or also of those who dare not believe in their own experience, because there are those who cannot give language to their experiences because they ignore the proper terms to do so, as is the case with Boo Radley (in the novel To Kill a Mockingbird), who receives a punishment that far exceeds that which might have been imposed on him in a court. And how many Mamanis or Condoris don’t exist in Bolivia like Boo Radley?
Miranda Fricker sees in the same vein as the philosopher Michel Foucault, social interaction as an exercise in power relations. Two parts are put in a relationship with each other in which one of them wields power over the other. Power may depend on shared notions of social identity, stereotypes, and prejudices of gender, class, or ethnicity. An example of testimonial injustice according to Fricker is when a victim testifies about a crime to which he has been exposed, but is not believed, or if his credibility is questioned for reasons of prejudice by the recipient. The other epistemic injustice called hermeneutic injustice is about what concepts it has to deal with. Having defined witness injustice, Fricker begins to think about the concepts a person requires to understand a particular social experience, and it is striking that someone who belongs to a group that does not have access to certain concepts (an interpretively marginalized group as she calls it), may find themselves in a situation where he or she requires, but, lacks a certain concept to be able to discover, and they themselves understand that in what they have been involved in. The social situation is such that collective interpretation is a hatch, which prevents them from making sense of the experience, which is largely in their interest to make it intelligible, and communicative as she writes in her book. Any type of social, cultural or political harassment can be an example. Since Feminismo Comunitario, for example, the concept of complementarity heterosexual couple (chacha/warmi-man/woman) is considered to have replaced the original notion of a complementary peer, a basic principle of the Aymara worldview that would effectively expand the social, political and symbolic representation of a community. Feminismo Comunitario becomes an established organization for the compensation of witness injustice and hermeneutic injustice. The author referring to testimonial injustice clearly defines it as someone who testifies but is not believed or distrusted. But how does Fricker understand hermeneutic injustice or interpretive injustice? A starting point for her, in general, is a change in the vision of a society, compared to how philosophers make an approach to injustice, often stating that the key to philosophizing about injustice is that this will develop an understanding of what injustice is, how a just society is shown. Instead, for Fricker the starting point is another, for her the normal is injustice. Injustices are “normalized” in societies and the realities in which we develop. Therefore, what we must first understand is that philosophizing about injustices means trying to understand where injustices are, how they are expressed, why they are given, and who suffer it. She begins from a society characterized by injustices.
The basis of departure is then that people are in an unfair society. The world is unjust, and to belong to a subordinate group in an unjust society is to live in a reality created by others both materially and in the epistemological, this is the appendix that she provides. It is not, then, only about the low access to the labor market, or the low wages, but who has the possibility of interpreting our common experiences, or who’s is the knowledge that counts. Fricker’s great contribution among others is that we can now understand many injustices under the single concept of epistemic injustice. This makes it easier to understand that many injustices that were previously apparently disjointed from one another can now be understood as parts of a single concept. It is not only the fact of relating them but being able to make them intelligible and show them as expressions of injustice. There are many ways to realize this idea, a current example in Bolivia is the categorization of some groups as Masistas, who are given certain negative attributes, as long as certain neo-fascist groups are understood as the most democratic and patriotic, that they are the true Bolivians thus trying to create a monopoly of interpretation over the common reality of those who live and constitute Bolivia. The interesting thing, in this case, is; who has the social power, and who is in a position to decide which social group has the most credibility or not? [3] In a country where full control of the media is a monopoly of a social class, of a political caste, of an economic elite. This is a way of exercising power based on prejudice. Miranda uses the concept of prejudice as a central thing in that kind of social power, which involves shutting up the other, because the other is not considered as possessing knowledge, or as an interpreter of an experience. Prejudices can challenge a certain practice, prejudices also depend on categories, such as the Masista category that is fed by the prejudice of how the Masistas are, and what can be expected of them, etc. These categories are central both in the way they challenge, and they are also necessary to strengthen prejudices.
What about the concept, cultural capital? The fact that some people possess cultural capital by virtue of their knowledge. What can Fricker add to this for example? If we talk about witness injustice, many actually associate this with the courts, but, for a philosopher like Fricker, this is an extremely broad concept. In everyday life, this is related almost every time we seek our knowledge of another person, asking simple things such as: when the post office opens, what time the bus leaves, who you will vote for, etc. etc. is to say that almost all our knowledge comes from almost someone, then if we think about it, almost everything we know about our reality comes from that source. Every time we find someone to make a consultation, we wonder if that person is credible or not, Fricker claims that an epistemic injustice is characterized by the fact that he offends someone in his role as a subject of knowledge. Injustice is not only in the fact of distrusting someone but, in the fact that distrust is based on prejudice, allowing the self to make generalizations about another person, depending on what kind of categorization we make of that person. So, the unfairness lies in the fact that they prejudicially degrade someone in their role as an intermediary of knowledge.
Fricker asserts that in Anglo-Saxon philosophy it is customary to separate epistemic functions from ethical functions as if they had nothing to do with each other. But, she wants to change this, she claims that people are epistemic subjects when we ask about things when we share knowledge when we testify, etc. If the two were separated, then the idea of an epistemic injustice would be a categorical error. Justice belongs to the ethical and political level, while epistemology is about science, truth, knowledge, and other studies. As Fricker says, I began to see that there is an obvious and significant overlap between epistemology and especially ethics, precisely in the concept of epistemic injustice. If I have prejudices and I do not trust a certain type of people she says, not only am I unfair to them, but I myself lose knowledge and ideas that they could provide me if I were not prejudiced. Here is an explanation of why many parallel worlds coexist in Bolivia without any of them knowing each other. How can a country boast of being “Democratic” if neither the State nor its institutions open up real possibilities to different ethnic groups of being able to express themselves in the written, oral or television press, and only a small and very restricted possibility of having their own radios, being, moreover, that they are all the majority in that country. It is not strange then that ignorance, and prejudice, reach these surreal levels, where a few believe they have a monopoly on national discourse, supported by 95% of the oral, written, and visual press. How can we not understand that this problem goes beyond the classic political boundaries of the left and right? And that’s a rather epistemic issue of justice, just as Fricker raises it. There has to be ethical and epistemic symmetry so that this does not continue as it does now, a small social group that imposes its “epistemic monopoly” on largely excluded majorities in Bolivia. We could draw countless different moments from national and universal history from regrettable examples of prejudice clearly relevant to the context of the credibility judgment, like the idea that Indians are irrational, black people intellectually inferior to the white people, working classes morally inferior to the upper classes, and so to complete a nefarious catalog of stereotypes more or less likely to insinuate themselves into credible judgments of different moments of the history, Fricker writes. On the racial issue, for example, there is a long record of more than two centuries, of how the truth has been defeated countless times, by white-dominated juries[4].
When a social minority becomes a blind eye to the rights of others, they are unaware of the exclusion, oppression, the dictatorship of their prejudices, in this way opposed to several expert entities that affirm and visualize all of that. A social minority with a monopoly on information channels, they impose their universe of post-truths. The mysterious thing about all this, what we might ask here is (from an ethical perspective), how do so many people in this social minority let themselves be controlled by their own prejudices, without resisting it? Fricker would call this: a moral deficiency since the flip side of epistemic injustice is epistemic justice, the battle against prejudice would become a social and intellectual virtue, something that must be exercised, such as empathetic musculature[5]. This requires transparency and ability to suspect that oneself may be wrong and that the other person may be right, to give the other person credibility is included in the virtue of epistemic justice.
The fact that a woman-philosopher coins a concept, which has spread and used in wide philosophical circles. Should weak up in us the question, if the concept of epistemic injustice, as well as testimonial injustice, or hermeneutic injustice can also be applied in the area of the history of philosophy? Do both women and men count in order to have a place in the history of philosophy? Can women be well-known, knowledgeable, or with their own discourse (to use Fricker’s terminology)? We do not require to be historians of philosophy, we know that women have been excluded from many circles of knowledge, not only of philosophy, to the extent that this exclusion has been based on prejudices, we can say with a philosophical abstraction; That yes, we can applied the epistemic injustice in this area! However, the fact that many women have not even been able to study at university in the past, in many cases was more due to structural and institutional factors and did not have a direct relationship with prejudice, therefore, it cannot characterize it as an epistemic injustice, albeit in most Latin American cases, or of territories considered colonies, that yes it can be shown that there were bias factors of prejudice to exclude women, aboriginals or other groups from superior studies so, that in this case, we can say that there was an epistemic injustice.
Finally, how could we use this concept outside of philosophical schools, in reality, how can using testimonial injustice or hermeneutic injustice make things discernibility? How do we remedy epistemic injustice? Following Fricker’s logic, when we commit an epistemic injustice, we do not know how to listen to the other, when we minimize someone’s statement by prejudice, or when we do not understand what someone says because he or she lacks concepts to testify about an injustice, then we have to ask ourselves how we can become better listeners, how can we cultivate virtues that help us prevent or reduce the likelihood of committing more epistemic injustices. For example, we can try to confront our own prejudices and first try to understand what the speaker really says, if he or she doesn’t use the words we ourselves would use, then maybe it’s not just the mistake of him or her, maybe we just lack a common concept for social injustices. But being a better and more virtuous listener or recipient of a message is hardly the most important response to epistemic injustice, Fricker would say. The underlying structures of epistemic injustices are social and structural. People do not acquire their prejudices out of nothing, but they come from the social world around us, so it is about changing the social structures that promote prejudice, and the same with the interpretation of hermeneutic injustice. If you are part of a group that does not have the opportunity to contribute to the creation of meaning in the construction of society, then you have an unfair disadvantage to pass on your experiences to others in the community, and that can only be solved structurally, says Fricker, such hermeneutic marginalization goes hand in hand with other types of social impotence such as poverty.
We would have to make a long list of individual and structural measures to be able to deal with epistemic injustices. How do we fix this then? Perhaps an important starting point that Fricker doesn’t develop much in his work, are the political circumstances for this, that people don’t re-evaluate themselves just because they suddenly realize it should be correct. It is important to remember that when he talks about epistemic injustice, he really thinks that this epistemic problem is part of a philosophy about injustice in society, it is not a special thing that has its own life, but that it is part of social power-relations; unjust institutions, unequal opportunities, and not at least segregation. In other words, the shortfall in education and information. And that this creates a fundamental disadvantage to people: they lack the necessary resources to understand their social experiences, their exchanges with others. Thus, information and education are epistemic goods. Essential to act in the world.
She does not speak of the marginalized groups should be treated separately,
nor should they be treated in any special way because they are weak, or because
their knowledge is undervalued, etc. she does not develop anything about it,
and the point is that she is not a policy-philosopher. From his work,
conclusions could be drawn such as that society needs to be more
interventionist in some way, to counter inequality and segregation so that
people can better contact each other. In short, this is a problem of democracy,
that is, that democratic society must represent the people who depend on the
institutions of society.
[1] Miranda Fricker: Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford University Press, USA (28 Sept. 2009)
[2] For a brilliant understanding of what we try to explain in this note, read or watch the book and film with the same name: To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee. 1960
[3] Examples of how to minimize these structural weaknesses, or how to improve the democratic institutional deficit in Bolivia, can be read in the article: A peaceful or inclusive Bolivia: Utopia or a human right? 2019 A. Ontiveros 2019
[4] About the deficit of epistemological injustice, and how it can sometimes reach the one who originates it as well. A very clear example of this is the situation of Mss Mayella of the Ewell family, in Harper Lee’s novel. It is when the same procedure operates in the opposite direction: protective or justifiable prejudice, which legitimizes or exculpates or justifies persons of the same group, who are granted an a priori benefit, as a result of identification processes: membership of a socioeconomic status, same religion or race. One and the other, negative or positive prejudice is to blame from an epistemological perspective because they resist evidence. Its foundation is irrational.
[5] See article: A peaceful or inclusive Bolivia: Utopia or a human right? A. Ontiveros 2019
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