EIRA: Epistemic Injustice, Reasons and Agency
In partnership with Veli Mitova, University of Johannesburg and with the support of a British Academy Newton Advanced Fellowship Award starting on 30 Sept 2018 (NAFR1180082)
How should we understand epistemic injustice? Most theorists concerned with this question employ the framework of virtue epistemology to answer it. We suggest that we would gain much from thinking about it, in addition, through the lens of the relationship between epistemic reasons and agency.
Our central hypothesis is this. Further to already identified strands of epistemic injustice, e.g. testimonial and hermeneutic, there is a more fundamental type, which affects unprivileged knowers as agents across the board. Its pervasive effects are due to the fact that unprivileged knowers’ reasons for action and belief are treated as being ‘of the wrong kind’ by default. In other words, their reasons are conceived as explanatory at best, but not as potential justifications. The upshot is to undermine agency overall since, in an important sense, unprivileged knowers are denied knowledge of what they are doing. Instead, privileged observers or critics are assumed to have better understanding of what such knowers are up to. This underexplored yet insidious mechanism of epistemic injustice paves the way for two related epistemic wrongs: (1) misappropriating the voice of unprivileged knowers and (2) dispossessing them from past achievements and future initiatives.
Epistemic Injustice I
University of Johannesburg, 28 Feb-1 March 2019
Epistemic Injustice and Reasons II
Annual SWIP-UK Conference
University of Kent, 1-2 May 2019
NABC: Norms of Action and Belief in the Clinic
In partnership with Regent Lee, Nuffield Department of Surgical Sciences, University of Oxford and the VBP Collaborating Centre, St Catherine’s College, University of Oxford.
The NABC Network and underlying Programme I lead aims to address the challenges widely experienced in translating research into practice, such as ignoring guidelines as irrelevant to practice or forsaking professional judgment for formal compliance.
Our guiding hypothesis is that these challenges derive in part but importantly from unrecognised conflicts between the norms of belief (underpinning evidence-based clinical guidelines for optimising health outcomes) and the norms of action (underpinning the role of patient choice and professional judgment in shared clinical decision-making). NABC work expands on the ‘two-way connection’ model of the relationship between norms of belief and norms of action I recently proposed.
Papers:
Lee, R., Radoilska, L. Fulford, KWM and A. Handa (2018). A Novel Theoretical Framework to Address the Gap between Universal Guidelines and International Variations in the Threshold for Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm Surgery. Annals of Vascular Surgery 53: 275-277.
Radoilska, L. (2017) Aiming at the truth and aiming at success. Philosophical Explorations 20:sup1, 111-126. Open Access.