Lauren Leydon-Hardy

I identify a further harm of agential testimonial injustice and explore its implications for epistemically reparative work. The central idea is that within the criminal legal system, the socio-epistemic norms apt to elicit false confessions are widely and deeply held to be predictive of good epistemic outcomes. Thus, many practitioners are poorly epistemically positioned in respect of their culpability/complicity in gross epistemic misconduct. This is significant for some victims of agential testimonial injustice. For false confessors, for instance, there is a further epistemic injury in that those most responsible—and with the greatest power to restore their standing—are among the furthest from the light of truth. This bears on the pursuit of epistemic reparations. Ensconced within epistemically hostile contexts, we might worry that epistemic reparations are out of reach. However, where perpetrators have a perfect duty of epistemic repair, non-perpetrators have imperfect epistemic obligations. Whenever possible, we can and should bear witness. Discharging our imperfect duties may not be ideally restorative. Nevertheless, the reparative value in this work may extend to both victims and perpetrators. It could be that by bearing witness nonculpable agents stand to promote the conditions in which perpetrators begin to reckon with their proper epistemic obligations. If so, then in epistemically hostile contexts, imperfect epistemic duties are all the more compelling.

The first part of this paper presents a dilemma for arationalism about propaganda. Arationalists hold that propaganda is constitutively reliant on bypassing audience-side rationality. According to the twin pillars of arationalism, then, propaganda is distinguished by the arationalism of audience-side uptake, and criticizable for its circumvention of audience-side rationality. Here, I argue that if the twin pillars of arationalism hold, then arationalists must either deny that bald-faced propaganda is propaganda or deny that bald-faced propaganda is objectionable qua propaganda. Against arationalism, I argue that propagandizing is apt to epistemically infringe on an audience. Propagandizing constitutively involves the systematic contravention of the norms typifying the relationship between communicator and audience, with the characteristic effect of eroding the audience's epistemic agency. The epistemic harm of propaganda is that it has the power to alienate its audience from itself both epistemically and politically by illegitimately constraining what is epistemically possible for its audience.

Predatory grooming is a form of abuse most familiar from high-profile cases of sexual misconduct, for example, the Nassar case at Michigan State. Predatory groomers target individuals in a systematic effort to lead them into relationships in which they are vulnerable to exploitation. This is an example of a broader form of epistemic misconduct that Leydon-Hardy describes as epistemic infringement, where this involves the contravention of social and epistemic norms in a way that undermines our epistemic agency. In this chapter, Leydon-Hardy looks at the distinctive epistemic harm caused by epistemic infringement. She argues that this harm cannot be understood simply as the victim’s having a false belief, or even as her being alienated from her belief-forming mechanisms. A deeper understanding of the harm caused by infringement shows that it stems from damage to one’s epistemic agency, and indeed, to one’s personhood.

There are noncontroversial ways in which our words are context dependent. Gradable adjectives like 'flat‘ or 'bald‘, for example. A more controversial proposition is that nouns can be context dependent in a reasonably similar way. If this is true, then it looks like we can develop a positive account of semantic content as sensitive to context. This might be worrying for the epistemology of testimony. That is, how can we garner knowledge from testimony if it‘s the case that, though our syntactic utterances are identical, the semantic content of them may fail to be uniform? What if we mean different things by the same words? I argue that these kinds of semantic divergences provide the groundwork for a new kind of Gettier case. That is, given the likelihood of divergent semantic content, we can see a way to scenarios in which, despite that the semantic content is uniform, we might get justified true beliefs that nevertheless fail as knowledge. This, because it just as likely could have been the case that relevant contexts were dissimilar, and thus relevant semantic content would have been divergent. Lastly, where the phenomenon does occur, we never would have known the difference.