Royal Institute of Philosophy Stapledon Colloquium 2021-22
Socialising epistemic risk: on the risks of epistemic injustice
Veli Mitova,
University of Johannesburg
Epistemic risk is of central importance to epistemology nowadays: one common way in which a belief can fail to be knowledge is by being formed in an epistemically risky way, i.e., a way that makes it true by luck. Recently, epistemologists have been expanding this rather narrow conception of risk in every direction, except (to my mind) the most obvious one — to enable it to accommodate the increasingly commonplace thought that knowledge has an irreducibly social dimension. In this talk, I fill this lacuna by bringing issues of epistemic injustice to bear on epistemic risk. In particular, I draw on the phenomena of white ignorance and epistemic exploitation, to sketch a more social notion of epistemic risk. On the proposed view, the interests of one’s epistemic community partly determine whether a belief-forming procedure is epistemically risky. This expansion of the concept will benefit scholarship on both epistemic risk and epistemic injustice: it would allow the former to honour the importance of one’s community to the knowledge enterprise; and it would give the latter the tools to solve what Robin McKenna calls their ‘responsibility problem’.
The Stapledon Colloquium Series features external speakers and members of the Liverpool department of Philosophy presenting current philosophical research. The seminars are free and open to members of the public.
The seminar takes place on Thursdays, 3-5pm at the School of the Arts Library, 19 Abercromby Square, Liverpool L7 7BD. In 2021-22, we will be presenting a mixture of online and in-person seminars.
Read about Olaf Stapledon here.
For any organisational queries, contact Dr Vid Simoniti v.simoniti@liverpool.ac.uk
Zoom details to join this event will be available with your order confirmation.
