Abstract
A liberatory epistemology seeks social change through grasping the connection between knowledge and oppressive practices. By speaking of the reasonable need to overcome ignorance, such an epistemology offers reasons to understand others. Liberatory epistemology makes us better knowers by insisting we address facts about the experiences of others who may not share our social reality. Being reasonable, then, will require being intellectually cautious, open-minded, and fair in grasping the world around us. It will mean inquiring together with others in an effort to overcome exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence. It will mean, finally, pushing us toward greater justice in the world. Ultimately, reasonableness and understanding come together to create an epistemology of social justice.
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Notes
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After all, it’s difficult to reason with the epistemically irresponsible.
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In this way, Rawls is entirely correct: to be unreasonable, to be unwilling to cooperate with others, removes one from the domain of people who get to choose principles of justice. Put differently, I can offer reasons to the unreasonable person, but her unwillingness to cooperate means those reasons are not going to be irenic for her because she will not consider them. Reasonable argument demands cooperation.
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Elsewhere, I have argued that reasonableness be taken as a virtue concept. See, in particular, Heikes (2012).
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Notice the claim here is “from within any perspective,” not from a God’s eye point of view or from a metaperspective.
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These attacks have more mainstream expressions. Two of the most significant approaches are social epistemology and virtue epistemology. Social epistemology moves away from the individualistic approach of more modern ways of thinking and instead emphasizes how social relationships and institutions affect our ways of knowing. Not dissimilarly, virtue epistemology shifts the focus of knowledge to intellectual virtues, or, in other words, toward the ways we ought to form beliefs, assess evidence, evaluate testimony, and so on. These ways of approaching epistemology need not be at odds with one another, nor need they be at odds with the ethical dimensions of epistemology. Yet the radical potential of these epistemologies to challenge the ethical and epistemic landscape surrounding ignorance has not yet been tapped.
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Heikes, D.K. (2019). Postscript: Can We Have a Liberatory Epistemology?. In: Towards a Liberatory Epistemology. Palgrave Innovations in Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16485-0_5
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