Catharine (Cat) Saint-Croix

The Advantage Thesis is the centerpiece of standpoint epistemology. According to this thesis, standpoint occupants—those who bear a particular sort of epistemically fruitful relationship to marginalized social locations—have an epistemic advantage over those who do not, at least when it comes to questions concerning those social locations. Given this thesis, a question immediately arises: How should non-occupants respond? A common answer is epistemic deference. Non-occupants ought to defer to standpoint occupants when inquiring on relevant matters. Recently, however, the idea that standpoint epistemology calls for deference has been challenged. Opponents argue that epistemic deference is incurious, cowardly, or potentially harmful. But these worries are misplaced. They rest on three missteps: (1) conflating social and epistemic deference, (2) conflating settling P with settling why P, and (3) presupposing a maximalist conception of epistemic deference. Maximalism, however, falls short as a general account of epistemic deference, independent of the concerns of standpoint epistemology. Drawing on alternative accounts of deference in the literature, I show that epistemic deference is not inimical, but rather essential to the practices of inquiry that standpoint epistemologists recommend. After introducing and defending the term "zetetic deference" for the central feature of these practices, I show that epistemic deference is an essential component of them. In sum, epistemic deference is part, parcel, and prerequisite of the particular sort of courageous, inclusive inquiry standpoint theorists envision.

Models allow us to expose, explore, and excavate our assumptions. This is especially true for the sorts of assumptions that concern scholars of marginalization and resistance, who aim to show how patriarchy, colonialism, and related structures shape our lives. Yet within this scholarship, there is a recurrent skepticism toward practices of modeling, particularly formal or idealizing practices. These critiques portray modeling as anything from necessarily sexist to perniciously universalizing to oppressive. I argue that while these claims are mistaken, they nevertheless share a crucial and under-appreciated undercurrent: alienation. I argue that alienation provides a more fundamental and more precise framework for evaluating modeling practices. This reframing clarifies the normative stakes of exclusionary modeling while preserving formal techniques for the projects that they are especially well-positioned to promote: exposing entrenched assumptions, resisting “obfuscatory accommodation”, and facilitating engagement across epistemic and political divides.

Epistemology is rife with idealization. And, although concern about particular idealizations—logical omniscience, infinite iterations of common knowledge, and so on—is long-standing, systematic metaepistemological reflection has been lacking. This excellent new pair of books, Daniel Greco’s Idealization in Epistemology and Robin McKenna’s Non-Ideal Epistemology, aims to rectify this. Fruitfully, these authors take cues from different corners of philosophical inquiry, drawing on rich literatures within philosophy of science and political philosophy, respectively. Given their far-flung starting points, discovering strong parallels and congruities between these projects is surprising. In this review, therefore, I highlight these resonances, though not to the neglect of dissonance.

Protest is often theorized in terms of the relationship between the protest and its audience—lawmakers, the public, and the media. Refreshingly, José Medina’s The Epistemology of Protest balances this standard approach with consideration of the internal life of protest. Analyzing the complexity within what is often seen as a monolithic spectacle, Medina demonstrates that this internal perspective is important not only for understanding the experience, nature, and power of protest, but also for understanding how protests are—and ought to be—taken up by society. After reviewing Medina’s analysis, I offer three comments. The first concerns the verbal-content-independence thesis, which is a crucial link in Medina’s analysis of the communicative complexity of protest. The second concerns uncivil protest and attention—while uncivil protest may be an efficient way to gather the “raw materials” for epistemic activism, the work of waking people from their epistemic and political slumber, as Medina puts it, requires far more careful engineering of attention. I conclude with considerations concerning the internal structure of protest.

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.

‘Feminist logic’ may sound like an impossible, incoherent, or irrelevant project, but it is none of these. We begin by delineating three categories into which projects in feminist logic might fall: philosophical logic, philosophy of logic, and pedagogy. We then defuse two distinct objections to the very idea of feminist logic: the irrelevance argument and the independence argument. Having done so, we turn to a particular kind of project in feminist philosophy of logic: Valerie Plumwood's feminist argument for a relevance logic. Plumwood's work serves as our primary case study as we turn to the project of considering three different ways we might understand her argument and revisionist arguments like it: as a priori theorizing, as ameliorative conceptual engineering, or as instances of anti-exceptionalist approaches to logic. After arguing that the anti-exceptionalist approach seems to provide the most promising means of understanding the kind of project undertaken in a feminist challenge to classical logic, we briefly address the consequences that this might have for logic instruction. Here, we argue for the perhaps unexpected conclusion that feminist programs ought to offer more, not less, instruction in logic for those who take interest.

Root, branch, and blossom, attention is intertwined with epistemology. It is essential to our capacity to learn and decisive of the evidence we obtain, it influences the intellectual connections we forge and those we remember, and it is the cognitive tool whereby we enact decisions about inquiry. Moreover, because it is both an epistemic practice and a site of agency, attention is a natural locus for questions about epistemic morality. This article surveys the emerging epistemology of attention, reviewing the existing literature and sketching avenues for future investigation. It also argues for a reorientation of epistemology itself. This argument is the focus of Section 1. Section 2 briefly reviews philosophical accounts of attention, Section 3 focuses on issues in traditional, individualistic epistemology, and Section 4 turns to social epistemology.

Virtue signaling—using public moral discourse to enhance one’s moral reputation—is a familiar concept. But, what about profile pictures framed by “Vaccines work!”? Or memes posted to anti-vaccine groups echoing the group’s view that “Only sheep believe Big Pharma!”? These actions don’t express moral views—both claims are empirical (if imprecise). Nevertheless, they serve a similar purpose: to influence the judgments of their audience. But, where rainbow profiles guide their audience to view the agent as morally good, these acts guide their audience to view the agent as epistemically good. They are instances of epistemic virtue signaling. The first goal of this paper is to offer an account of epistemic virtue signaling. I argue that epistemic virtue signaling occurs through both behavioral and propositional signals, and serves purposes similar to those of moral virtue signaling across a wide variety of discourses. The second is to show that there is much work for this concept to do. In particular, this concept illuminates a double bind faced by those who suffer from and seek to overcome testimonial injustice. I close by demonstrating how this double bind arises in the dissolution of medical autonomy, focusing on the care gap faced by pregnant women of color in the United States today, as compared with their white counterparts.

The idea that our epistemic practices can be wrongful has been the core observation driving the growing literature on epistemic injustice, doxastic wronging, and moral encroachment. But, one element of our epistemic practice has been starkly absent from this discussion of epistemic morality: attention. The goal of this article is to show that attention is a worthwhile focus for epistemology, especially for the field of epistemic morality. After presenting a new dilemma for proponents of doxastic wronging, I show how focusing on attention not only allows us to defuse that dilemma, but also helps to substantiate accounts of what goes wrong in cases of doxastic wronging.

The tragedy of heterosexuality is this: modern straightness dooms once-hopeful, loving couples to share dull, frustrating, and lonely lives together. After all, men are from Mars, women are from Venus, and what’s a heterosexual to do about it? Against this dismal state of affairs, Jane Ward’s The Tragedy of Heterosexuality offers a scholarly, empathetic intervention from the perspective of queer culture. Ward’s book reveals that the titular tragedy is rooted in the misogynistic ideology permeating straight culture, according to which women are at once objects of desire and derision. In a culture animated by this antimony, women and men are very different creatures and, by the same token, they are bound to struggle...

Idealization is a necessity. Stripping away levels of complexity makes questions tractable, focuses our attention, and lets us develop comprehensible, testable models. Applying such models, however, requires care and attention to how the idealizations incorporated into their development affect their predictions. In epistemology, we tend to focus on idealizations concerning individual agents' capacities, such as memory, mathematical ability, and so on, when addressing this concern. By contrast, this dissertation focuses on social idealizations, particularly those pertaining to salient social categories like race, sex, and gender. In Chapter II, Privilege and Superiority, we begin with standpoint epistemology, one of the earliest efforts to grapple with the ways that social structures affect our epistemic lives. I argue that, if we interpret standpoint epistemologists' claims as hypotheses about the ways that our social positions affect access to evidence, we can fruitfully employ recent developments in evidence logic to study the consequences. I lay the groundwork for this project, developing a model based on neighborhood semantics for modal logic. Adapting this framework to standpoint epistemology helps to clarify the meaning of terms like "epistemic privilege" and "superior knowledge" and to elucidate the differences between various accounts of standpoint epistemology. I also address a longstanding criticism of these views: Longino's (1990) bias paradox, which suggests that there is no objective position from which to judge the goodness of a particular standpoint. Chapter III, Evidence in a Non-Ideal World, turns to the broader social context, looking at how ideology affects the availability of evidence. Throughout the chapter, I take the formation, justification, and maintenance of racist, sexist, and otherwise oppressive beliefs as a central case. I argue that these beliefs are, at least sometimes, formed as a result of evidential distortion, a structural feature of our epistemic contexts that skews readily available evidence in favor of dominant ideologies. Because they are formed this way, such beliefs will appear justified on prominent accounts of justification, both internalist and externalist. As a result, epistemic norms that fail to account for such non-ideal conditions will deliver verdicts that are not only counter-intuitive, but also morally unpalatable. This, I argue, reveals a kind of structural epistemic injustice, especially where oppressive ideology is involved and suggests the need for epistemic norms that are sensitive to agents' social contexts. Much of the discussion in Chapters II and III depends on social categories like race and gender, arguing that they have a distinctive influence on our epistemic lives. In Chapter IV, I Know You Are, But What Am I?, my co-author and I focus on social categories themselves, distinguishing between self-identity, social identity, and social role. We self-identify as gay or straight, men or women, couch-potatoes or gym rats. Sometimes, these identities affect our social roles---the way we are perceived and treated by others---and sometimes they do not. This relationship between our internal identities and our preferred public perceptions begs for explanation. On our account, this relationship is captured by what we refer to as 'social identity'---roughly, internal identities made available to others. We argue that this account of social identity plays an illuminating role in structural explanation of discrimination and individual behavior, dissolves puzzles surrounding the phenomenon of 'passing', and explains certain moral and political obligations toward individuals.

How does being a woman affect one’s epistemic life? What about being Black? Or queer? Standpoint theorists argue that such social positions can give rise to otherwise unavailable epistemic privilege. “Epistemic privilege” is a murky concept, however. Critics of standpoint theory argue that the view is offered without a clear explanation of how standpoints confer their benefits, what those benefits are, or why social positions are particularly apt to produce them. For this reason, many regard standpoint theory as being out of step with epistemology more broadly. But this need not be so. This article articulates a minimal version of standpoint epistemology that avoids these criticisms and supports the normative goals of its feminist forerunners. This account serves as the foundation for developing a formal model in which to explore standpoint epistemology using neighborhood semantics for modal logic.

What’s important about ‘coming out’? Why do we wear business suits or Star Trek pins? Part of the answer, we think, has to do with what we call agential identity. Social metaphysics has given us tools for understanding what it is to be socially positioned as a member of a particular group and what it means to self-identify with a group. But there is little exploration of the general relationship between self-identity and social position. We take up this exploration, developing an account of agential identity—the self-identities we make available to others. Agential identities are the bridge between what we take ourselves to be and what others take us to be. Understanding agential identity not only fills an important gap in the literature, but also helps us explain politically important phenomena concerning discrimination, malicious identities, passing, and code-switching. These phenomena, we argue, cannot be understood solely in terms of self-identity or social position.

Since it was presented in 1963, Chisholm’s paradox has attracted constant attention in the deontic logic literature, but without the emergence of any definitive solution. We claim this is due to its having no single solution. The paradox actually presents many challenges to the formalization of deontic statements, including (1) context sensitivity of unconditional oughts, (2) formalizing conditional oughts, and (3) distinguishing generic from nongeneric oughts. Using the practical interpretation of ‘ought’ as a guideline, we propose a linguistically motivated logical solution to each of these problems, and explain the relation of the solution to the problem of contrary-to-duty obligations.