James Charles McCollum

In Epistemic injustice, Miranda Fricker employs the critical concept of hermeneutical injustice. Such injustice entails unequal participation in the epistemic practices of a community that often results in an inability of dominated subjects to understand their own experiences and have them understood by their community. I argue that hermeneutical injustice can be an aspect of institutions as well communites?to the extent that they too engage in epistemic practices that seek to understand the problems and experiences of their constituents. My primary example is the case of development theory and international development agencies where human beings were objectified in undesirable ways by the prevailing neoliberal economic theories that guided development practice. Here economic theory and the power to achieve its vision of unconstrained economic growth were combined in various organizations. Consequently such organizations systematically misunderstood the problems of the very people they were supposed to help. I argue that if hermeneutical injustice can be the result of the intersection of science and organizations, we need to create more participatory ways of gleaning information about social ills to alleviate institutionally mediated hermeneutical injustice

Sensitive readers of Dewey will note that his style and the confidence with which he expresses his views often obscure their radical nature. Dewey fully understood that Darwin overthrew both the necessity of human progress and the fixity of nature. Nonetheless, Dewey has been saddled by some critics with a naive intransigence about the hopeful prospects for human inquiry. Fortunately, Melvin Rogers has provided Dewey scholarship with a recovery of the Darwinian grounds of Dewey’s philosophy and its broader consequences for Deweyan thought. Simply put, because the world is fraught with prospects for both failure and success, or evolution and extinction, this makes active inquiry into morality and science all the ..