Deborah Heikes

Assuming some beliefs are actually undesirable, are we responsible for the undesirable beliefs we hold? This depends on whether we are responsible for beliefs simpliciter. While epistemic involuntarists deny responsibility, other epistemologists seek to maintain it. A variety of tactics have been used to salvage epistemic responsibility, but the most promising of these focuses on affecting belief formation. Beliefs may be involuntary, but we can influence the sorts of beliefs we adopt, and we are certainly answerable for the reasons we have for our beliefs—although those reasons will reflect our epistemic communities and frameworks. A problem, however, lies in knowing when to trust our reasons and when to challenge them. The decentering of epistemic authority away from the individual and toward society makes it more difficult to account for epistemic responsibility, especially for individuals who are immersed in communities that collectively, systemically hold undesirable beliefs. Of course, communal agency is no simple concept, further muddying the waters surrounding epistemic responsibility. Still, joint epistemic action seems not only possible but something useful for helping us understand how we arrive at the beliefs we do—and how we are responsible for these ways in which we come to hold beliefs.

Given trends toward social epistemology, what evidence or reasons we have for beliefs depend upon framework assumptions and practices within our epistemic communities. Furthermore, treating fact and value as inseparable entails that the undesirability of a belief cannot be entirely dictated from outside of the epistemological framework within which that belief is held. Thus, what one epistemic community finds undesirable, another community will find quite desirable—and this works both ways. Taking seriously the social location of knowers means we have to consider the social location not only of those who fight against marginalization, silencing, and oppression but also of those whose beliefs may reinforce these practices. The problem, at heart, is whose intellectual authority ultimately gets to count? To resolve this, we must engage with those epistemic communities that “we” find to hold undesirable beliefs. This engagement demands we seek some common ground or principles—something shared—but it also demands we seek an equality of voices, even those of the so-called oppressor. Determining the undesirability of belief ultimately depends upon a contextual and interactive empiricism in which epistemic communities jointly navigate desirability.

Even if we have epistemic responsibility, exculpatory reasons exist for holding undesirable beliefs. One of the most important of these is ignorance. While a variety of ignorances exist, some ignorance is a socially constructed obfuscatory practice. When this occurs, individuals may not reasonably be expected to know any better—and if we can’t know better, then there is an important sense in which we are not responsible. In systemically racist or sexist societies where those beliefs are built into the epistemic practices of the community, individual epistemic agents might just have good epistemic reasons to hold undesirable beliefs. We can ask, however, to what extent we are obligated to overcome socially constructed ignorance. While it is surely impossible for us to challenge all our biases, it is possible for us to challenge some of them. There are occasions when we encounter other epistemic communities with beliefs that challenge our; there are times when we encounter evidence that potentially undermines the beliefs we hold. That there may be some specific instances of exculpation does not mean all socially constructed ignorance is always exculpatory. Each of us has an epistemic responsibility, but not each of us has the same epistemic responsibility.

When are we responsible for undesirable beliefs such as racist or sexist ones? Several factors make this question difficult. For one thing, ignorance is intertwined with knowledge—and ignorance can be epistemically exculpatory. Many ignorances are hidden by social factors or are otherwise actively constructed. For another, it is not always clear what makes an undesirable belief actually undesirable. Different epistemic communities have different standards of truth and justification, different reasons that give different evidence for claims. Once contextualism takes hold, undesirability becomes a slippery concept. Furthermore, it is not always evident that we are responsible for any of our beliefs. Epistemic involuntarism is a serious threat to the search for better, more just belief. If we are to be genuinely responsible for undesirable belief, we must be able to say whose knowledge or epistemic authority determines undesirability, what sort of influence we actually have over our beliefs, and what role social constructed ignorance plays in exculpating individuals who hold undesirable beliefs. Finally, for me to be epistemically responsible for my undesirable beliefs, individual agency must be explained in light of the social turn in epistemology toward communities as epistemically primary. For some, undesirable belief may not be my fault.

Epistemic responsibility is different for different communities, and it is different for individuals than it is for communities. Given the push towards social epistemology, a tension exists between the community and the individual. Epistemic communities are said to be the primary agents of knowledge. So, are individual epistemic agents actually responsible for holding undesirable beliefs? This depends on the epistemological dynamic between communities and specific knowers. We take our epistemic cues from our communities, and communities often define which beliefs are desirable and which are undesirable. Some bias and some undesirability is to be expected, but given that epistemic communities are not monolithic and homogenous, alternative evidence is usually available to us. At times, however, we find ourselves caught within epistemic communities that have limited evidence or that actively exclude outside voices. Does that mean that I can be absolved of responsibility for the influences that affect my beliefs? At times, perhaps, yes. My undesirable beliefs may not be my fault.

Socially constructed ignorance hides important features of the social world. It also has roots in a modernism that willfully and purposively overlooks the epistemic and moral agency of those neither male nor white. Such overlooking has consequences for how power is distributed in our world. We often invisibly retain an unwillingness to see the structural inequalities that make knowledge white and male. Opening the circle of epistemic authority to wider groups of epistemic agents requires, first, understanding the requirements of knowledge-sharing and, second, coming to terms with the situatedness of our knowledge practices. It also requires a means of opening our ears to hear what less advantaged groups are saying. This cannot be had without genuinely understanding the social reality of those different from ourselves.

A liberatory epistemology seeks social change through grasping the connection between knowledge and oppressive practices. By speaking of the reasonable need to overcome ignorance, such an epistemology offers reasons to understand others. Liberatory epistemology makes us better knowers by insisting we address facts about the experiences of others who may not share our social reality. Being reasonable, then, will require being intellectually cautious, open-minded, and fair in grasping the world around us. It will mean inquiring together with others in an effort to overcome exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence. It will mean, finally, pushing us toward greater justice in the world. Ultimately, reasonableness and understanding come together to create an epistemology of social justice.

Justice matters. Unfortunately, this claim can be difficult to defend in a climate which touts cultural relativism as a corrective for the narrow and exclusionary tendencies of Enlightenment thinking. The solution is a liberatory epistemology. Yet liberatory epistemologies come with certain assumptions. This chapter addresses assumptions concerning reason/rationality and our ability to know. It argues that we need a broad concept of rationality and a willingness to avoid skeptical thinking in the absence of some reason to be skeptical. It also addresses the push toward cultural relativism that arises when diversity becomes the emphasis of epistemology. In the end, we need a liberatory epistemology that can ground our understanding of those with different social realities. This is done through the concept of reasonableness.

Understanding involves the grasping of networks of ideas, which itself involves seeing connections and arriving at further conclusions and interrelations. To understand people, then, is to synthesize information in ways that allow a comprehensive and systematic vision of what is going on in someone else’s life. Instead of allowing for ignorance, understanding requires an open-mindedness that considers multiple ways of interpreting experiences and that defends views using reasons that others can accept. It also requires placing knowers in social situations, taking into account the relations of epistemic agents acting in the world. In the end, understanding involves learning to adopt different perspectives so that one can clearly see what it is like for others to live in the world around them.

A moral obligation to understand the social realty of the other requires a normative ground. This ground can be found by considering the concept of reasonableness, which appeals to norms in much broader and open-ended ways than methodological accounts of reason. To be reasonable is to apply the skills and formal elements of rationality in real life contexts—and to do so from a variety of perspectives instead of just one privileged perspective. With such a change in emphasis, impartiality becomes linked with open-mindedness and a willingness to correct for prejudice when considering the credibility of others. Being reasonable, then, is a contextually determined virtue that guides us toward the overcoming of ignorance and a genuine understanding of others.

This book considers whether we can be epistemically responsible for undesirable beliefs, such as racist and sexist ones. The problem with holding people responsible for their undesirable beliefs is: first, what constitutes an “undesirable belief” will differ among various epistemic communities; second, it is not clear what responsibility we have for beliefs simpliciter; and third, inherent in discussions of socially constructed ignorance (like white ignorance) is the idea that society is structured in such a way that white people are made deliberately unaware of their ignorance, which suggests their racial beliefs are not epistemically blameworthy. This book explores each of these topics with the aim of establishing the nature of undesirable beliefs and our responsibility for these beliefs with the understanding that there may well be (rare) occasions when undesirable beliefs are not epistemically culpable.

Feminist philosophers are often concerned with rejecting Cartesian notions of objectivity which eliminate all subjectivity on the part of knowers. However, this rejection of a notion of pure (non-subjective) neutrality has led the dilemma that Louise Antony calls the “bias paradox” (Antony 1993, 188-90). At the heart of this paradox lies the seeming choice between objectivism and relativism. It has two fundamental commitments that clearly focus this dilemma: (1) the explicit rejection of the concept of impartial objectivity and (2) the desire to assert the reality of women’s oppression. The problem is that in the absence of impartiality (at least as an ideal), there appears to be a lack of principled, normative criteria for evaluating beliefs across differing epistemic perspectives. While this tension is dealt with most straightforwardly in discussions of naturalized feminist epistemology and feminist philosophy of science, the bias paradox, nonetheless, is not merely a problem for feminists. Any view that rejects the Cartesian ideals of pure objectivity and value-neutrality will ultimately be forced to confront the dilemma that seemingly results from the paradox; namely, to either endorse pure impartiality or accept an “anything goes” relativism.

Epistemologists debate the nature of epistemic responsibility. Rarely do they consider the implications of this debate on assigning responsibility for undesirable beliefs such as racist and sexist ones. Contrary to our natural tendency to believe and to act as if we are responsible for holding undesirable beliefs, empirical evidence indicates that beliefs such as implicit biases are not only unconsciously held but are intractably held. That is, even when we become consciously aware of our biases, we have enormous difficulty changing them and believing differently than we do. This paper considers five responses to epistemic involuntarism. It considers how each response provides or fails to provide a principled means for holding individuals epistemically responsible for their undesirable beliefs. The involuntaristic nature of at least some beliefs seems obvious, but, in the end, we can choose to cultivate epistemic virtues that can influence these beliefs.

Philosophy today is undergoing a transformation away from modernism. The problem is that it is far from clear what this transformation is moving toward. I examine the transition from the premodern to the modern philosophical world and contrast it with our current situation. While the moderns were clear in their rejection of Aristotelian scholasticism and sure of their methods, in our own time we are neither clear about the extent to which we reject modernism nor our methodology moving forward. I argue that the uncertainty of the postmodern philosophical world is, in an important sense, a necessary consequence of the rejection of modernism itself.

This book offers a compelling examination of our moral and epistemic obligations to be reasonable people who seek to understand the social reality of those who are different from us. Considering the oppressive aspects of socially constructed ignorance, Heikes argues that ignorance produces both injustice and epistemic repression, before going on to explore how our moral and epistemic obligations to be understanding and reasonable can overcome the negative effects of ignorance. Through the combination of three separate areas of philosophical interest- ignorance, understanding, and reasonableness- Heikes seeks to find a way to correct for epistemological and moral injustices, satisfying needs in feminist theory and critical race theory for an epistemology that offers hope of overcoming the ethical problem of oppression.

“Ignorance” is receiving an increased amount of philosophical attention. The study of it even has its own name, “agnotology.” Some ignorance remains simply a case of not having enough information, but increasingly philosophers are recognizing a whole other type of ignorance, one that is socially constructed and often actively promoted. In the first section of this paper I examine perhaps the best known type of socially constructed ignorance, “white ignorance.” White ignorance reflects a lack of genuine understanding of the social realities of others and it creates injustice. In the second section of the paper, I consider what it means to “genuinely understand,” arguing that when it comes to issues of justice those with epistemic power have a moral obligation to at least attempt to understand others’ social realities.

The age of Enlightenment has, upon refl ection, turned out to be an age of exclusion. Part of the explanation for this is that Descartes’ inward turn leaves reason unable to rely on anything other than its own resources. Rather than give in to cultural relativism, philosophers of the time deny the epistemic and moral agency of those who are different from themselves. Even as philosophy rejects its Cartesian heritage, the same dilemma faces us: fi nd some uniformity and regularity within cognition or accept the legitimacy of all sorts of cognition. This dilemma, however, can be dissolved by appealing to a practice closely related to being rational but that is decidedly non-modern in approach, namely, reasonableness. The concept of reasonableness accounts for humans’ diverse capacity to reason while providing some normative expectations across various practices.

Human cognition is often taken to be a rule-governed system of representations that serve to guide our beliefs about our actions in the world around us. This view, though, has two problems: it must explain how the conceptually governed contents of the mind can be about objects that exist in a non-conceptual world, and it must explain how the non-conceptual world serves as a constraint on belief. I argue that the solution to these problems is to recognize that cognition has both empirical and apriori elements. While neither approach can function in isolation from the other, the empirical approach resolves the first of these problems while apriori structures of rational cognition overcome the second. Taken together, these two views offer a promising solution to the two problems of mental content

While feminist philosophy has had much to say on the topic of reason, little has been done to develop a specifically feminist account of the concept. I argue for a virtue account of mind grounded in contemporary approaches to rationality. The evolutionary stance adopted within most contemporary theories of mind implicitly entails a rejection of central elements of Cartesianism. As a result, many accounts of rationality are anti-modern is precisely the sorts of ways that feminists demand. I maintain that a virtue account of rationality can provide a satisfactory answer to Benhabib’s question in Situating of the Self: what concept of reason are we willing to defend?

Feminist philosophy is highly critical of Cartesian, and more broadly Enlightenment, conceptions of rationality. However, feminist philosophers typically fail to address contemporary theories of rationality and to consider how more current thoeories address feminist concerns. I argue that, contrary to their protestations, feminists are “obsessing over an outdated conception of reason” and that even the most suspect of “malestream” philosophers express an understanding of rationality that is closer to feminist concerns than Cartesian ones. I begin by briefly examining key features of Cartesian rationality and discuss how these features are largely rejected by contemporary philosophy and cognitve science. I then discuss how the philosophical accounts of Robert Nozick and Robert Audi refelect this rejection of Cartesian rationality. Finally, I discuss how the views of Nozick and Audi are in line with many feminist concerns, and I argue that feminists need to take seriously some theory of rationality.

In The Virtue of Feminist Rationality the author develops a specifically feminist account of rationality, an account which treats reason as a virtue concept. Contrary to some feminists claims that reason is inherently and irredeemably masculine, Heikes argues that the coherence of feminism demands a rational ground and that feminists must be willing to challenge the masculine connotations that have been historically linked to reason. While acknowledging contemporary philosophy’s vehement rejections of Enlightenment accounts of rationality, the author develops an understanding of rationality that relies on premodern roots that circumscribe the concept much less narrowly. As Heikes argues, a virtue account of rationality not only rejects many of what feminists hold to the be most objectionable aspects of philosophical accounts of reason, it is also capable of bridging the divide between several deeply ingrained philosophical dichotomies. Because philosophical dichotomies become most deeply polarized and entrenched during the modern era, the undermining of modern assumptions concerning reason and rationality also undermines the polarizing thinking that has defined rationality for the past several centuries.

The bias paradox emerges out of a tension between objectivism and relativism.If one rejects a certain the conception objectivity as absolute impartiality and value-neutrality (i.e., if all views are biased), how, then, can one hold that some epistemic perspectives are better than others? This is a problem that has been most explicitly dealt with in feminist epistemology, but it is not unique to feminist perspectives. In this paper, I wish to clearly lay out the nature of the paradox and the various attempts to avoid it. I also intend to show why it is a problem for any epistemological view that rejects absolute objectivity. Finally, I wish to briefly outline a possible solution to the paradox, a solution that requires recognizing that rationality necessarily requires both objective and subjective elements.

The history of philosophy is in many ways a history of how we understand rationality. However, philosophers have historically adopted a fairly narrow approach toward rationality, focusing almost exclusively on issues of structure and the justification of beliefs. In this essay, I argue that considerations of reflective equilibrium should lead philosophers to take into account the empirical features of rationality. After all, our philosophical understanding of rationality must ultimately reflect these features or risk failure. I consider what specific lessons philosophers might take from anthropology and psychology. Anthropology highlights cultural features of rationality which philosophers have tended to overlook, while psychology indicates that philosophers may be correct in emphasizing the importance of the self. Including such wider empirical considerations in their reflections, philosophers are forced to consider our more ordinary use of the concept of rationality, which often looks far different and requires a broader characterization than philosophical analysis allows. Shifting the focus in these ways allows us to re-focus what questions philosophy can ask about the nature of rationality.