Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-hvd4g Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-02-03T18:20:08.247Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Two Kinds of Unknowing

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 March 2020

Rebecca Mason
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Miranda Fricker claims that a “gap” in collective hermeneutical resources with respect to the social experiences of marginalized groups prevents members of those groups from understanding their own experiences (Fricker 2007). I argue that because Fricker misdescribes dominant hermeneutical resources as collective, she fails to locate the ethically bad epistemic practices that maintain gaps in dominant hermeneutical resources even while alternative interpretations are in fact offered by non-dominant discourses. Fricker's analysis of hermeneutical injustice does not account for the possibility that marginalized groups can be silenced relative to dominant discourses without being prevented from understanding or expressing their own social experiences. I suggest that a gap in dominant hermeneutical resources is ambiguous between two kinds of unknowing: hermeneutical injustice suffered by members of marginalized groups, and epistemically and ethically blameworthy ignorance perpetrated by members of dominant groups.

Type
Epistemic Justice, Ignorance, and Procedural Objectivity
Information
Hypatia , Volume 26 , Issue 2 , Spring 2011 , pp. 294 - 307
Copyright
Copyright © 2011 by Hypatia, Inc.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Brownmiller, Susan. 1999. In our time: Memoir of a revolution. New York: The Dial Press.Google Scholar
Fricker, Miranda. 2006. Powerlessness and social interpretation. Episteme 3 (1): 95–108.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fricker, Miranda. 2007. Epistemic injustice: Power and the ethics of knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Massey, Douglas. 2007. Categorically unequal: The American stratification system. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.Google Scholar
Mills, Charles. 1997. The racial contract. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Mills, Charles. 1998. Blackness visible: Essays on philosophy and race. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Mills, Charles. 2007. White ignorance. In Race and epistemologies of ignorance, ed. Sullivan, Shannon and Tuana, Nancy. Albany: State University of New York Press.Google Scholar
Taylor, Charles. 1992. Multiculturalism and the politics of recognition. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Tuana, Nancy. 2006. Speculum of ignorance: The women's health movement and epistemologies of ignorance. Hypatia 21 (3): 1–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar