Martin Miragoli

According to a popular account, epistemic reparations are intentionally reparative actions in the form of epistemic goods that perpetrators ought to give back to their victims in order to acknowledge the wrong and as a way to redress it. This account, due to Lackey (Proc Address Am Philos Assoc 96:54–89, 2022), conceives of reparations as fundamentally transactional obligations—i.e., obligations regulating epistemic exchanges between victim and perpetrator. In this paper, I look at the case of the military ‘comfort system’ in Japan during World War II to argue for an extension of Lackey’s framework to include epistemic reparations as structural obligations—i.e., obligations regarding the organisation and management of the resources and the background epistemic conditions that regulate interpersonal epistemic exchanges between agents. The upshot is the formulation of an account of structural epistemic reparation. If I am right, the notion of structural epistemic reparations becomes a fundamental theoretical tool for understanding (i) what’s at stake in major violations of human rights cases, like that of colonialism, and (ii) what we should do to take up our responsibility to right these wrongs.

Hinge epistemology’s main claim to fame lies with its purported advantages in dealing with the problem of radical scepticism. In this paper I argue that the framework reading, one of its most promising formulations, is unsuccessful. In a nutshell, the framework reading argues that the system of our rational evaluation is essentially local —i.e., resting on a set of arational propositions —hinges— that constitute the limits and the conditions of validity of our epistemic practices. The discussion develops in two main parts. First, I show that, unless important clarifications are made, the framework reading is incapable of offering any solace against the problem of radical scepticism. I then present two ways in which framework theorists may want to clarify their view —following lines of argument found in Coliva (2015) and Pritchard (2016)— but find them both wanting. To the extent that hinge epistemology represents one of the most relevant options available to internalists to avoid sceptical collapse, the results of this discussion contribute to cast a grim light on the chances of a successful defence of internalist epistemic justification more in general.

According to a popular account, epistemic reparations are intentionally reparative actions in the form of epistemic goods that perpetrators ought to give back to their victims in order to acknowledge the wrong and as a way to redress it. This account, due to Jennifer Lackey (2022), conceives of reparations as fundamentally transactional obligations—i.e., obligations regulating epistemic exchanges between victim and perpetrator. In this paper, I look at the case of the military ‘comfort system’ in Japan during World War II to argue for an extension of Lackey’s framework to include epistemic reparations as structural obligations—i.e., obligations regarding the organisation and management of the resources and the background epistemic conditions that regulate interpersonal epistemic exchanges between agents. The upshot is the formulation of an account of structural epistemic reparation. If I am right, the notion of structural epistemic reparations becomes a fundamental theoretical tool for understanding (i) what’s at stake in major violations of human rights cases, like that of colonialism, and (ii) what we should do to take up our responsibility to right these wrongs.

This paper argues for a redrawing of the boundaries of epistemic normativity that takes epistemic environments as their centre. The argument sets off from a case of sanctioned white ignorance (Spivak, A critique of postcolonial reason: Toward a history of the vanishing present 1999, Martín, Philosophical Quarterly, 71, 2021) and builds an analogy between the epistemic and the political normative terrains. This analogy, I argue, brings to light a new dimension of epistemic normativity that concerns the organisation and management of the channels through which epistemic resources are produced and made available in a community of knowers. This is what I call the ‘environmental model’ of epistemic normativity. The environmental model is contrasted with existing ‘agential models’, which centre on the psychology or the sociality of epistemic agents. In shifting the perspective from agents to environments, the environmental model is shown to provide a broader set of normative tools compared to existing agential accounts, and offer substantive advantages when it comes to thinking epistemically about structures and about epistemic injustice more broadly. In the attempt to reframe epistemic normativity in this way a wider ambition of this paper also is brought to light—namely, to make space for an image of the epistemological domain as fundamentally political.

From music recommendation to assessment of asylum applications, machine-learning algorithms play a fundamental role in our lives. Naturally, the rise of AI implementation strategies has brought to public attention the ethical risks involved. However, the dominant anti-discrimination discourse, too often preoccupied with identifying particular instances of harmful AIs, has yet to bring clearly into focus the more structural roots of AI-based injustice. This paper addresses the problem of AI-based injustice from a distinctively epistemic angle. More precisely, I argue that the injustice generated by the implementation of AI machines in our societies is, in some paradigmatic cases, also a form of epistemic injustice. With a particular focus on AIs employed as gatekeepers of our epistemic resources, this paper shows how their epistemically conformist behaviour is responsible for the marginalisation and the ostracism of minoritarian perspectives. Because it clarifies key structural flaws and weaknesses of current AI design, this paper helps make headway in critical discussion of current AI technologies. And because it forges new theoretical tools to understand forms of epistemic oppression, this paper also contributes to the advancement of feminist theorisation.

This paper has two aims. The first is critical: it argues that our mainstream epistemology of disagreement does not have the resources to explain what goes wrong in cases of group-level epistemic injustice. The second is positive: we argue that a functionalist account of group belief and group justification delivers (1) an account of the epistemic peerhood relation between groups that accommodates minority and oppressed groups, and (2), furthermore, diagnoses the epistemic injustice cases correctly as cases of unwarranted belief on the part of the oppressor group.