Genae Matthews

It is common practice to think that facts about our social location – i.e., facts about our race, gender, class, etc. – justify us in increasing or decreasing confidence in our beliefs. However, it is also natural to think (as many epistemologists have) that my appreciation of the fact that I believe something – combined with an appreciation of some feature about myself as an epistemic agent – should not affect my confidence in whatever it is that I believe. In this paper, I vindicate the former practice against the latter thought by arguing for the view that facts about marginalized people’s social locations provide higher-order evidential support for some of their first-order attitudes. If my contentions are correct, then facts about marginalized people’s social locations enjoy the same kind of normative epistemic upshot that any other kind of higher-order evidential fact (e.g., the fact of one’s exposure to a condition like hypoxia) enjoys.

Recent philosophical work on inquiry yields important results about when it is appropriate to inquire and to what extent norms on inquiry are compatible with other epistemic norms. However, philosophers have been remarkably silent on the matter of what questions we ought to take up in the first place. In this paper, I take up this question, and argue that moral considerations constitute fit-related, right-kind reasons to adopt interrogative attitudes towards, and so inquire about, particular questions. This is a conclusion of more general interest, because – as I explain – we might think that moral considerations are at best wrong-kind reasons for attitudes. If my contentions are right, then there is at least one kind of attitude – namely interrogative attitudes – of which this is not true.