Evidence in a Non-Ideal World: How Social Distortion Creates Skeptical Potholes

In Hilkje Charlotte Hänel & Johanna M. Müller, The Routledge handbook of non-ideal theory. New York, NY: Routledge (2025)
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Abstract

Our evidential environments are reflections of our social contexts. This is important because the evidence we encounter influences the beliefs we form. But, traditional epistemologists have paid little attention to the generation of this evidential environment, assuming that it is irrelevant to epistemic normativity. This assumption, I argue, is dangerous. Idealizing away the evidential environment obscures the ways that our social contexts distort its contents. Such social distortion can lead to evidential oppression, an epistemic injustice arising from the ubiquity of ideologically-inflected portrayals of oppressed social groups. In some cases, this distortion can be so pervasive as to create a skeptical pothole in agents' epistemic environments---a limited region in which a skeptical scenario obtains. The skeptical challenge of social distortion is important because it suggests that prejudice and irrationality alone may not be enough to explain many harmful beliefs. Where justified belief is merely a matter of responding well to one's evidence, the ubiquity of ideologically-inflected evidence may impel a matching doxastic state, even for exemplary epistemic agents. Nevertheless, there is an asymmetry in blameworthiness between the Cartesian victim and someone laboring under evidential oppression. This asymmetry reveals the need for distinctively non-ideal epistemic norms. I offer a characterization of one such norm: the internalist practice of self-stewardship.

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Catharine (Cat) Saint-Croix
University of Minnesota

Citations of this work

Epistemic (de-)colonization in the midst of Europe.Hilkje C. Hänel - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.

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References found in this work

Echo chambers and epistemic bubbles.C. Thi Nguyen - 2020 - Episteme 17 (2):141-161.
The structure of empirical knowledge.Laurence BonJour - 1985 - Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
The wrongs of racist beliefs.Rima Basu - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 176 (9):2497-2515.
Epistemic norms on evidence-gathering.Carolina Flores & Elise Woodard - 2023 - Philosophical Studies 180 (9):2547-2571.

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