Emily Colleen McWilliams

Work on testimonial injustice (Fricker 2007) and testimonial violence (Dotson 2011) shows that marginalised epistemic agents are unjustly undermined as testifiers when dominant agents fail or refuse to hear, understand, or believe their testimony. This work has been pathbreaking. But I argue that it restricts our focus to one way in which epistemic injustice and oppression target marginalised testimony, while overlooking another that is equally or more significant in shaping everyday practices. This has distorted our understanding of how epistemic injustices shape testimony. Often, when marginalised agents are unjustly undermined as testifiers, it is not because their testimony would not be understood or believed. Rather, it is that unjust divisions or uses of power dissuade them from speaking or cow them into silence. They withhold testimony because speaking comes with unjust costs. This paper turns attention away from epistemic constraints on uptake, and towards these unjust social, and political, and other practical constraints on marginalised testimony. I theorise an epistemic injustice called testimonial withdrawal, which occurs when a would-be speaker chooses to remain silent because they know or reasonably expect that speaking carries practical risks stemming from systems of injustice targeting the speaker or the content of their testimony.

Welcome to the second volume of the Balkan Analytic Forum’s proceedings, featuring contributions from BAF2: Dispositions and BAF2+: Dispositions and Values. It is a pleasure and honor to co-edit these proceedings with Dr. Miroslava Trajkovski for the second consecutive year. This volume showcases the vibrant intellectual community and the spirit of curiosity that animate the Balkan Analytic Forum. Now entering its third year, the Forum continues to foster regional philosophical community and international scholarly exchange while engaging global philosophical conversations. Rooted in analytic philosophy, it also seeks to bridge traditions, welcoming approaches that connect analytic methods with phenomenological, historical, and other philosophical perspectives and traditions. Reflecting this commitment to intellectual breadth, the essays collected here engage the concept of dispositions through a variety of philosophical methods and traditions. They explore dispositions as epistemological, ontological, and ethical phenomena, theorizing their nature and function within domains including evidentiary reasoning, cosmological theorizing, virtue ethics, aesthetic experience, and philosophy of mind. The Forum’s vibrant intellectual community owes immense gratitude to Dr. Miroslava Trajkovski, whose leadership and unwavering commitment have created a collaborative space where philosophical curiosity thrives. The Balkans’ rich intellectual history reminds us that philosophical vitality often emerges at the intersection of traditions. The Forum carries that spirit forward in the work collected here. Emily C. McWilliams

When and how are we subject to epistemic injustice as inquirers? A natural answer draws on our collective understandings of epistemic injustice and of inquiry: Epistemic injustice against inquirers happens when what we understand as epistemic injustice prevents us from engaging successfully in what we understand as inquiry. I argue that this approach offers too narrow a view of how we experience epistemic injustice as inquirers. The traditional, Frickerian framing of epistemic injustice was conceived against the backdrop of 20th-century analytic epistemology’s focus on analyses of epistemic success states like knowledge and justified belief. It centers on how knowers can be unjustly undermined in their capacity to attain and communicate these success states. But inquiry is a process rather than a state. It often takes place in community and in collaboration with others. It highlights our fundamental epistemic dependence and interdependence. I propose and demonstrate an expanded approach that starts by considering what we need to become good inquirers and to inquire well and then considers how systemic injustices can leave these needs unmet. My discussion produces two key results: It broadens our collective understanding of epistemic injustice, and it shows that our needs as inquirers extend beyond times when we are engaged in processes of inquiry.

Concepts like testimonial injustice (Fricker, 2007) and testimonial violence (Dotson, 2011) articulate that marginalized epistemic agents are unjustly undermined as testifiers when dominant agents cannot or will not hear, understand, or believe their testimony. This paper turns attention away from these constraints on uptake, and towards pragmatic, social, and political constraints on how dominant audiences receive and react to testimony. I argue that these constraints can also be sources of testimonial injustice and epistemic violence. Specifically, I explore a kind of injustice that I call testimonial withdrawal, which occurs when a would-be speaker chooses to remain silent because they know or reasonably expect that there is pragmatic risk associated with speaking, given their unjust marginalization. I argue that this unjustly undermines epistemic agency, and that expanding Fricker and Dotson’s umbrella concepts to accommodate this idea results in a better understanding of the moral and epistemic contours of both testimonial withdrawal and these broader categories.

This chapter examines Miranda Fricker’s concept of testimonial injustice (TI), in which speakers face unjust credibility deficits due to identity-based prejudice. While her framework has been foundational, critics highlight its limitations. Her focus on transactional cases involving individual prejudice risks overlooking structural injustices, non-assertoric speech harms, and earlier critiques of epistemic silencing from feminist and anti-colonial thought. The paper traces how subsequent scholarship has expanded TI’s scope to include interpretive and discursive injustices, credibility excesses, and structural injustice. It then examines competing accounts of TI’s primary harm, alongside Fricker’s virtue-based approach to redress. Situating TI within broader discussions of the natures of epistemic injustice, epistemic oppression, and epistemic violence helps reveal systemic forms of epistemic exclusion that challenge Fricker’s original framing.

Are there epistemic duties to inquire? The idea enjoys intuitive support. However, prominent evidentialists argue that our only epistemic duty is to believe well (i.e., to have doxastically justified beliefs), and doing so does not require inquiry. Against this, I argue that evidentialists are plausibly committed to the idea that if we have epistemic duties to believe well, then we have epistemic duties to inquire. This is because on plausible evidentialist views of evidence possession (i.e., views that result in plausible theories of evidentialist justification), inquiry is sometimes a necessary constitutive means of forming doxastically justified beliefs—beliefs that are proportioned to and based on one's evidence. So, either evidentialist views of evidence possession commit them to epistemic duties to inquire or they lead to independently implausible theories of evidentialist justification. My discussion also has important implications for the zetetic turn in epistemology, since I argue that evidentialists who are staunchly opposed to epistemic norms on inquiry have reason to reconsider.

Recently, some work in feminist epistemology has received more uptake from mainstream western analytic epistemology than it had in the past. There has been recognition of the importance of topics like epistemic injustice, standpoint epistemology, and epistemologies of ignorance, for instance. But these discussions are often seen as orthogonal to core epistemic theorizing - they have not received uptake as fundamental contestations of the ways we understand epistemic value, or core normative epistemic concepts. I suggest that one reasons for this is the perception that insofar as feminist theorizing is responsive to moral and political concerns, it is not doing epistemology because it is not theorizing about epistemic value. This assumes a specific kind of epistemic value monism - a view whose popularity, I argue, derives at least partly from features of the methodologies that are popular in mainstream epistemology. I show that by using a different type of methodology - ameliorative inquiry - we see that there is a principled reason to doubt epistemic value monism. We can thus understand feminist theorizing in ways that are richer, more accurate, and that contribute to our understanding of the ways in which our practical, moral, and epistemic agency are intertwined.

This chapter concerns some ways that political beliefs are formed and maintained in polarized political environments. Specifically, it examines how self-serving, directional biases in the ways that agents gather and process evidence can make their beliefs resistant to change. It argues that although our intuitive judgment is that these mechanisms undermine the justification of resulting beliefs, this is not so according to an evidentialist theory of epistemic justification, which says the epistemic justification of a subject's doxastic attitude toward a proposition at a time strongly supervenes on the evidence that the person has at the time. It then argues that this gives us some reason to doubt that evidentialism gives us a complete theory of epistemic justification.

Empirical psychology documents widespread evidence of bias in the ways that people select, interpret, and selectively interpret evidence in forming and revising their beliefs. These biases can function to create and perpetuate epistemologies of ignorance. I argue that virtue epistemology can help us explain what goes epistemically wrong in these cases, and can offer positive advice, orienting us toward ways to right it. In particular, I defend the virtue approach from epistemic situationist worries about the empirical plausibility of individual agents' ability to develop corrective virtues. I argue that situational virtues are genuine responsibilist virtues, and are one of the tools at our disposal for overcoming epistemologies of ignorance.

My dissertation is in three parts. In “Evidentialism and Belief Polarization,” I consider the epistemic import of a belief revision process known as belief polarization, in which exposure to a mixed batch of evidence reliably causes people to increase confidence in whatever their antecedent belief was. I argue against Tom Kelly's claim that the beliefs that result from this process are justified on evidentialist grounds, and I take stock of what the phenomenon can teach us about evidentialism as a theory of justification. In “Access Is Not Necessary for Justification,” I focus on a debate between mentalism and accessibilism, as internalist theories of epistemic justification. I argue against the received view that mentalism, as distinct from accessibilism, is not worth defending. In “Epistemic Oppression and Ameliorative Epistemology,” I offer an account of a phenomenon that I call epistemic oppression. It occurs when members of a social group are subject to a systematic and unfair disadvantage within a social epistemic structure, resulting from the operation of a capacity to control exercises of their epistemic agency, thus systematically and unfairly limiting their epistemic flourishing. I argue that the concept of epistemic oppression helps us to identify and understand the kind of wrong that happens in these cases where an agent's capacity for epistemic flourishing is unfairly impeded.

Belief polarization occurs when subjects who disagree about some matter of fact are exposed to a mixed body of evidence that bears on that dispute. While we might expect mutual exposure to common evidence to mitigate disagreement, since the evidence available to subjects comes to consist increasingly of items they have in common, this is not what happens. The subjects’ initial disagreement becomes more pronounced because each person increases confidence in her antecedent belief. Kelly aims to identify the mechanisms that underlie this phenomenon and assess whether these processes undermine the justification of polarized beliefs. He concludes that given evidentialism, justification is not undermined by the polarizing mechanisms. I take on board Kelly’s description of the polarizing mechanisms, but challenge his conclusion. I argue that on plausible versions of evidentialism, the beliefs that result from these routes to polarization are not justified.

This report highlights and explores five questions which arose from the workshop on perceptual learning and perceptual recognition at the University of Toronto, Mississauga on May 10th and 11th, 2012: 1. How should we demarcate perceptual learning from perceptual development? 2. What are the origins of multimodal associations? 3. Does our representation of time provide an amodal framework for multi-sensory integration? 4. What counts as cognitive penetration? 5. How can philosophers and psychologists most fruitfully collaborate?