This session will feature a paper from PhD student Carline Klijnman, who will be interviewed by Benjamin Ferguson. The abstract for Carline’s paper is below. We look forward to seeing you there! 

Epistemic Injustice and Expertise

A fundamental characterization of modern societies is epistemic dependence. We rely on (expert-)testimony of others to inform ourselves on complex, politically relevant matters. Especially in the online epistemic environment, the increasing spread of misinformation and the disintermediation of traditional epistemic gatekeepers (a combination I call Epistemic Pollution) have made it harder for citizens to determine the credibility of different information sources.  

Take for example the vaccination debate. In anti-vaccination echo-chambers, the testimony of health-care experts is persistently undermined, whilst the anecdotal stories of concerned parents claiming their child’s disease was caused by vaccination are believed without evidence. These mechanisms of distrust seem to echo Miranda Fricker’s account of ‘testimonial injustice’, wherein the speaker “receives a credibility deficit owing to identity prejudice in the hearer”. However, unlike Fricker’s central cases of systematic testimonial injustice, prejudice against healthcare experts is not rooted in social injustice. Still, as I will argue, the severity of testimonial injustice shouldn’t be measured only by its impact on the individual speaker. Structural prejudice, even if not rooted in social injustice (e.g. against healthcare experts) can undermine epistemically fair conditions of public discourse (in this case re. vaccination debate). This is both epistemically and ethically problematic. 

Please contact Johan Heemskerk for further information (j.heemskerk@warwick.ac.uk)