Jonathan Ichikawa

An intuitive conception of objectivity involves an ideal of neutrality—if we’re to engage in objective inquiry, we must try to sideline our prejudices, values, and politics, lest these factors taint inquiry and unduly influence our results. This intuition underlies various “purist” epistemological frameworks, which grant epistemic significance only to “epistemic factors” like evidence or the truth of a belief. Feminist epistemologists typically condemn purist frameworks as inimical to feminist aims. They argue that purist epistemology is divorced from the ineliminably social and value-laden nature of our epistemic practices, and, moreover, that it abstracts away precisely those features that are needed to explain how power shapes knowledge. As they see it, purist frameworks simply lack the conceptual space needed to ask the right kinds of questions. Thus, they go in for “impurist” frameworks, which grant epistemic significance to “non-epistemic” factors, and so shed the confining constraints of purism. I turn the tables on the impurists—where they have connected purist norms with perniciously disengaged epistemology, I connect impurist norms with a creeping anxiety that is diminishing feminist epistemology’s political possibilities. First, I demonstrate that it’s increasingly common for impurist epistemologists to use moral considerations as a means to bypass the evidence, which betrays a lack of faith that the evidence will bear out feminist commitments. Second, I demonstrate that there is needless pessimism about our capacity to understand, as evidenced by the increasingly widespread idea that privileged social positions place robust limits on what people can know about oppression that they don’t personally experience. In both cases, moral and political considerations are invoked to give the illusion of being socially engaged, while in fact they allow people to give up on the difficult project of figuring things out. An extended case study on rape culture illustrates the stakes of doing inquiry that is only superficially socially engaged; I show that the two anxious traps I’ve identified have prevented contemporary feminist theorists from detecting and rooting out racist distortion in their accounts of rape culture because both traps interfere with a genuinely intersectional approach to feminist theorizing.

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The aim of this thesis is to develop and defend an epistemic contextualist theory of testimonial ‘knowledge’. Epistemic contextualism is a semantic thesis which holds that the truth-conditions of the word ‘knows’ partially depend on the context of attribution. They so depend because the strength of evidence required for a subject to ‘know’ a proposition depends on features of the context of attribution. As a second-order semantic thesis, however, epistemic contextualism doesn’t tell us what constitutes evidence within a context. That is, it is neutral regarding the first-order matter of what particular epistemic properties are sufficient for an attribution of ‘knowledge’ to be true in any particular context. Taking advantage of this neutrality, I combine epistemic contextualism with a first-order theory of testimonial knowledge. The result is a unique contextualist theory of testimonial ‘knowledge’ – Contextualized Pluralism. On this view, what it takes for a listener to ‘know’ some attested-to proposition depends on the context of attribution, and this because the standard of evidence required for the listener to satisfy this attribution depends on context. Motivation for Contextualized Pluralism comes from several sources. First, I will suggest that certain pairs of cases which are taken to motivate epistemic contextualism also motivate a specifically testimonial form of contextualism. Second, I will argue that Contextualized pluralism can also fruitfully contribute to debates both within and out with the epistemology of testimony. Regarding the epistemology of testimony, I will maintain that Contextualized Pluralism can shield testimonial transmission from recent counterexamples. Moreover, it can provide a compelling solution to testimonial versions of familiar sceptical puzzles. Outside of testimony, I will argue that my theory can make substantive contributions to contemporary research programs in both the epistemology of knowledge attributions and feminist philosophy of language. Regarding the former, I will argue that if we find a function-first approach to knowledge attributions plausible, then we have good reason to adopt Contextualized Pluralism. Regarding the latter, I argue that Contextualized Pluralism can model a form of epistemic injustice which occurs when agents use identity power to manipulate contextually-governed epistemic standards.

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