Eric Bayruns García

I will present three accounts of bearing witness vis-à-vis epistemic reparation of subjects’ violation of their right to be known. I will argue that the Understanding Account of bearing witness more fully captures bearing witness’ epistemically reparative features than the Knowledge Account and the Belief Account. To this end, I will present three conditions that compose the epistemically reparative features of bearing witness. These conditions are the Recognition Condition, the Relational Information Condition and the Modal Condition. This argument will put into view not only the kind of epistemic state into which truth and reconciliation commissions should aim to put their audiences, but also a way of judging more and less epistemically reparative instances of audience uptake of the testimony of those who have suffered injustice and grave moral wrongs.

I consider the question of why Latin American refugees often fail to transmit understanding of the strength of the moral demand on US agents, legislators and administrators to provide them with refuge in the US. To answer this question, I present two forms of hermeneutical injustice that are novel with respect to the epistemic injustice literature. These forms of hermeneutical injustice are what I call misleading resource injustice and psychological commitment injustice. I submit that these two kinds of hermeneutical injustice put into view a dual remedy that involves, on the one hand, diversifying news organizations that populate the social imaginary with interpretative resources and, on the other hand, promoting the number of non-dominant group-controlled news organizations.

I will argue that the diminishment of hip hop music as a hermeneutical resource for Black and Latinx persons by white supremacy promotes the ubiquity of ignorance of racial injustice in North America. To this end, I will defend what I call the hermeneutical-diminishment thesis. According to this thesis, white supremacy has diminished hip hop as a hermeneutical resource for Black and Latinx persons. To defend this thesis, I will substantiate two sub-theses. The first is the prescriptive-rap sub-thesis. According to this sub-thesis, white supremacy has caused prescriptive rap to predominate the content of hip hop in comparison to descriptive rap. The second sub-thesis is the descriptive-rap sub-thesis. According to this sub-thesis, if (i) hip hop can have prescriptive or descriptive content; (ii) hip hop with prescriptive content is a poorer hermeneutical resource for Black and Latinx people; and (iii) hip hop is dominated by rap music with prescriptive content; then (iv) hip hop is a poorer hermeneutical resource for Black and Latinx people. The defense that I present of the hermeneutical-diminishment thesis will take the following form. If the prescriptive-rap sub-thesis is true and the descriptive-rap sub-thesis is true, then the hermeneutical-diminishment thesis is true. I here show that both sub-theses are true, and therefore the hermeneutical-diminishment thesis is true.

Watson’s monograph, The Right to Know: Epistemic Rights and Why We Need Them, clearly, succinctly and deftly introduces the notion of the right to know or epistemic rights to the epistemology literature. She does this partly by connecting the conclusions and theoretical motives of the moral and legal rights literature to the epistemology literature. In part, motivated by this book’s great value, I present two objections to some of the book’s central claims. The first objection is that there is tension between (i) the book’s claim that information distribution is a basic epistemic duty that epistemic rights generate and (ii) the book’s claim that epistemic rights are complied with if subjects receive epistemic goods such as understanding and knowledge that respect their final value. The second objection is that the dyadic nature of Watson’s account of epistemic rights violation does not comport with plausible cases in which non-dominant groups’ epistemic rights have been violated and as a consequence the book’s claim that epistemic rights provide those who wield them an especially forceful rhetorical tool requires further motivation.

In Charles Mills’ essay, “White Ignorance,” and his trail-blazing monograph, The Racial Contract, he developed a view of how Whiteness or anti-Black-Indigenous-and-Latinx racism causes individuals to hold false beliefs or lack beliefs about racial injustice in particular and the world in general. I will defend a novel exegetical claim that Mills’ view is part of a more general view regarding how racial injustice can affect a subject’s epistemic standing such as whether they are justified in a belief and whether their degree of confidence in the belief is rational given their evidence. Then, in light of this novel exegetical claim, I show how this interpretation of Mills’ view that racial injustice causes ignorance relates to how epistemically justified philosophers and social scientists are in the views that dominate their respective scholarly literature.

I present a novel position vis-à-vis the views in the Latin American philosophy literature regarding whether subjects more aptly use "Hispanic" or "Latinx" to refer to Hispanic- or-Latinx people. To this end, I will argue (C) the term "Afro-Latinx" is more apt than "Hispanic" or "Latinx" in a significant number of cases. This conclusion is based on three premises. The first premise (P1) is that use of "Afro-Latinx" provides subjects with understanding of how certain events depend on anti-Black racism, US society's racially unjust structure and US colonial policy. The second premise (P2) is that that neither the term "Hispanic" nor the term "Latinx" provide subjects with this understanding of how certain events depend on anti-Black racism, US society's racially unjust structure and US colonial policy. The third premise (P3) is that the term "Afro-Latinx" provides subjects with more understanding of these events than the terms, "Hispanic" and "Latinx.” I present three cases which feature the experiences of Afro-Dominican people. The 1992 murder of Dominican man Kiko García by New York Police officer O’Keefe is first case. The second case is the Washington Heights Uprising that ensued Kiko García’ murder. An instance where a nightclub bouncer in the Dominican Republic denies a Dominican women entry because of her hair texture composes the third case.

I argue that Bartolomé de las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda differed in their conclusions regarding the status of Indigenous persons at least partly because las Casas had significant, yet incomplete, understanding of Indigenous persons, culture and societies and Sepúlveda had mere knowledge of them. To this end, I show that the epistemic state of understanding explains why Las Casas properly concluded that Indigenous persons deserve the same moral status afforded to Europeans. And I show how las Casas’ understanding of Indigenous persons, culture and societies related to what he got wrong about Indigenous persons.

I argue racial injustice undermines the reliability of news source reports in the information domain of racial injustice. I argue that this in turn undermines subjects’ doxastic justification in inferences they base on these news sources in the racial injustice information domain. I explain that racial injustice does this undermining through the effect of racial prejudice on news organizations’ members and the effect of society's racially unjust structure on non-dominant racial group-controlled news sources.

Some, if not most, philosophy program admissions committee members assume that they can determine that one applicant will likely manifest a higher degree of philosophical skill than another applicant on the basis of differences between their materials. I challenge this assumption by explaining how applicants’ materials in significant measure reflect the racially unjust environment in which they manifest their philosophical skill. I explain how applicants’ racial-group membership in similar measure determines what these materials consist in.

Mallon and Kelly claim that hybrid constructionism predicts, at least, that (1) racial representations are stable over time and (2) that racial representations should vary more in mixed-race cultures than in cultures where there is less racial mixing. I argue that hybrid constructionism’s predictions do not obtain and thus hybrid constructionism requires further evidence. I argue that the historical record is inconsistent with hybrid constructionism, and I suggest that humans may not be innately disposed to categorize people by race even though we are likely disposed to categorize people into in and out groups. So, in this paper, I show that there is an evidence set that is inconsistent with hybrid constructionism.

I submit that the critical epistemology of race and standpoint literature has not explicitly focused on the properties of information about, say, racial or gender injustice in a way similar to how epistemologists have focused on propositions and information when they describe propositional justification. I describe information in the racial-injustice-information domain in a way similar to how epistemologists describe propositional justification. To this end, I argue (C1) that if subjects in racially unjust societies tend to violate norms that promote a community’s reliable information flow because racial prejudice is widely held in racially unjust societies, then racial injustice can make information flow less reliably in a community. I also argue (C2) that if racial prejudice can make information flow less reliably in a community, then information that non-dominant subjects are more likely to have will less reliably flow to community members who lack it.

I present distinctness conditions that an epistemic-injustice phenomenon should meet to count as distinct from other such phenomena and I use these conditions to evaluate anticipatory-epistemic injustice’s distinctness in relation to testimonial smothering. Even though I argue that the phenomenon that Lee helpfully describes may not be distinct from testimonial smothering, I argue that the notion of distinctness itself should not be the primary or most important criterion that epistemic-injustice theorists use to determine whether such phenomena should feature in the literature. This implies that anticipatory-epistemic injustice and other phenomena like it should indeed feature in the epistemic-injustice literature because they promote epistemic-injustice theorists’ development of remedies and prescriptive theses in relation to epistemic injustice.

I will argue that just and accurate assessment must involve taking into account how racial injustice affects students’ performance in their work. To this end, I will motivate what I call the RACIAL-INJUSTICE-ASSESSMENT THESIS. According to this thesis, instructors must account for how racial injustice affects a student’s work for an instructor’s judgment of her work to count as just. To motivate the RACIAL-INJUSTICE ASSESSMENT THESIS, I will defend the ACCURACY THESIS and the JUSTICE THESIS. According to the ACCURACY THESIS, the accuracy of an instructor’s judgment of a student’s work will covary with the degree to which she considers how racial injustice affects the performance enshrined in the student’s the work. According to the JUSTICE THESIS, the justness of instructors’ judgments of student work covary with the degree to which instructors consider racial injustice’s effect on student work.

I argue racial injustice undermines the reliability of news source reports in the information domain of racial injustice. I argue that this in turn undermines subjects’ doxastic justification in inferences they base on these news sources in the racial injustice information domain. I explain that racial injustice does this undermining through the effect of racial prejudice on news organizations’ members and the effect of society's racially unjust structure on non-dominant racial group-controlled news sources.