I'll See It When I Believe It
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Standpoint theory
13 min read
The article directly critiques the concept of 'epistemic privilege' for marginalized groups - standpoint theory is the academic framework that formalized this idea, originating in feminist philosophy and later expanded to race and other identities
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Motivated reasoning
12 min read
The article's central argument about politicization causing people's 'IQ to drop by 30 points' and stopping attempts to find truth directly describes the psychological phenomenon of motivated reasoning, where emotional goals shape cognitive processes
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Epistemic injustice
14 min read
The article explicitly references 'epistemic injustice' as a key concept being critiqued - this Wikipedia article covers Miranda Fricker's original philosophical framework that introduced testimonial and hermeneutical injustice
1. The Idea of Epistemic Privilege
In the last several years, I’ve been hearing that “marginalized groups” have “epistemic privilege”, which means that you have to believe what they say about the oppression that they’ve experienced. Otherwise, you’ll be committing an “epistemic injustice”. E.g., if a black woman tells you that she is oppressed because of her race and sex, it would be wrong for you to doubt that. The rationale is that people know about their own experiences. If you’re only a white man, then you don’t know what black people or women live through, so you should accept their testimony about it.
What is new and destructive about this idea? Haven’t we always known that people know more about their own experiences than other people do?
2. Politicization
One thing that seems fairly new is the invitation to infect epistemology with moral judgments. We’re not just supposed to think “you should believe this testimony, otherwise your belief system will be less accurate or epistemically rational.” We’re supposed to think that people who doubt certain testimony are immoral. And immoral in a specific, ideologically charged way: they are aligning themselves with the forces of Racism, Sexism, etc. So doubting the testimony of a person with epistemic privilege makes you an enemy of the political faction that happens to control most of the cultural institutions of our society, including the main institutions for seeking truth.
This is rarely actually stated. But this is in fact the effect of introducing the idea of an injustice (not just an epistemic error) in doubting some testimony, and going on to illustrate the idea with ideologically slanted examples about Racism, Sexism, etc. (the sacred causes of the left).
And what’s wrong with politicizing epistemology?
What’s wrong is that political beliefs are notoriously unreliable. When they get activated, people’s IQ’s tend to drop by about 30 points. People may stop even trying to figure out the actual truth and just endorse whatever position they’re supposed to adopt to stay aligned with their chosen faction. Politicizing epistemology means corrupting your epistemic judgements, which corrupts your judgements about the actual political issues (which of course is the point), which in turn means you can’t solve any social problems but will only make them worse. Ideologues don’t care, though, because they’re not really trying to help society; they’re just trying to portray themselves as wanting to help
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