Knowing Well amid Inequality and Diversity

• In Event: The Fate of Fellow Travelers: Regenerating the Relationship of STS, Analytic Philosophy, and Social Epistemology

Abstract

Working in parallel, both STS and social epistemology have identified inequality as a problem for knowledge: STS shows how technocratic structures privilege credentialed experts and delegitimate “lay” knowledge, while theories of epistemic injustice chronicle the myriad ways that individuals with structurally marginalized identities are not given their due as knowers. At the same time, both fields refuse relativism. They remain committed to the ideas that some facts are more robust than others and, more importantly, that some ways of knowing, hearing, and justifying knowledge claims are better than others.

But what does it mean to know well in a diverse and unequal society? What is required of us as responsible knowers? I combine the largely virtues-based approach of epistemic justice and related epistemological theories with more structurally focused, but less normative, STS research, in order to outline several core aspects of knowing well amid inequality. Further, drawing on empirical research with environmental justice activists that reveals how individuals on the front lines of pollution think about knowing well, I raise additional aspects of our responsibility to know that neither STS nor social epistemology has adequately grappled with. In particular, I suggest that responsible knowing entails obligations to act, and that the extent of our obligations to know (and act) is determined by moral rather than epistemological principles.

Author

• Gwen Ottinger, Drexel University