You Ought To Know Better

Acknowledgement and Epistemic Injustice

Abstract

I would like today to talk about the connection between testimony and social experience, about how the
ways one speaks and, moreover, is heard may affect the way in which one may negotiate his or her experience. I would like to see how a discussion regarding the relationships between identities, social groups, prejudices, and knowledge claims may lead to a greater understanding of how who ‘we’ (in a specific socially stratified sense) are may affect what ‘we’ (in both general and specific senses) can know. Examining the relationships between attempts at speaking and being understood, attempts at understanding one’s experience, attempts at negotiating one’s social identity, and attempts at knowing
about the world, all with an aim towards virtuous action, will, I hope, provide a space to speak toward both how the ways in which situated individuals attempt to know and how such individuals are situated in society may influence what can be known by both the individuals involved and society at large. Beyond an aim for greater lucidity regarding these relationships, I hope to further suggest ways in which individuals and societies can come to ‘know better’. Such a phrase suggests both a moral and epistemic reading; one
may come to normatively ‘know better’ than to consciously participate in epistemically unjust practices
(practices that emerge from social prejudices often based upon gender or race), and, as a consequence, both individuals and societies will have an opportunity for a claim on greater, or ‘better’, knowledge.