In this paper, I shall present the theoretical view on the reliability democracy as presented in Prijić Samaržija’s book Democracy and Truth, and examine its validity through the case of the division of epistemic labour in the process of deliberation on autism treatment policies. It may appear that because of their strong demands, namely, the demand for rejection of medical authority and for exclusive expertise on autism, autistic individuals gathered around the neurodiversity movement present a threat (...) to the reliability democracy. (shrink)

This cumulative dissertation comprises four articles addressing questions related to the socalled ‘epistemic crisis of democracy’, in particular regarding widespread contestation of expertise and denial of scientific consensus. These phenomena are worrisome for (deliberative) epistemic democrats, as they can undermine the epistemic merits of democracy. These worries are typically only understood in veristic consequentialist terms, or as instrumental concerns for democracy, leading to suboptimal outcomes. But this picture, I argue, is incomplete. This dissertation utilizes tools from the (...) social epistemology of testimony to analyse the epistemic crisis from a novel perspective and locates issues that have so far remained underexplored. The following research question guides this inquiry: How does the contemporary (online) epistemic environment affect testimonial exchange of political information, and what are the implications of these changes for epistemic democracy? Article 1-3 provide a deeper understanding of the epistemic challenges citizens face when gathering political information. Article 1, ‘Public Credibility Dysfunction and Unreliable, Unsafe Political Beliefs’, discusses how our (online) epistemic environment thwarts citizens ability to make apt credibility appraisals. It further argues that the widespread failure of credibility monitoring and policing, what I call ‘public credibility dysfunction’, not only explains widespread ignorance and increasing false beliefs, but also affects the epistemic status of our true beliefs. Article 2 and 3 illustrate how public credibility dysfunction frustrates public uptake of expert-testimony. Article 2, ‘Echo Chambers, Epistemic Injustice and Anti-Intellectualism’, discusses conceptual links between testimonial injustice and echo chambers, and how the latter can cause dismissal of experttestimony on politically sensitive topics (e.g. vaccination). Article 3, ‘Testimonial Injustice Without Social Injustice: Rejection of Expert-Testimony as Morally Significant Epistemic Negligence’, builds on these insights and provides a broader account of testimonial injustice, that acknowledges how (epistemically) privileged groups (i.e. experts) can be treated unjustly in testimonial exchange. Article 4 ‘Procedural Epistemic Democracy and Virtue-based Citizen Competence’, argues that procedural views are not irrelevant for discussions of challenges to epistemic democracy. It provides a broader understanding of citizen competence that includes virtue-based epistemic responsibilities, and argues that procedural accounts of epistemic democracy can generate such responsibilities by employing a procedural account of social epistemology. (shrink)

To find out what is in one’s own best interest, it is helpful to ask one’s epistemic peers. However, identifying one’s epistemic peers is not a trivial task. I consider a stylized political setting, an electoral competition of ‘Masses’ and ‘Elites’. To succeed, the Masses need to know which alternative on offer is truly in their interest. To find out, the Masses can pool their privately held information in a pre-election ballot, provided that they can reliably find out (...) with whom they should pool information. I investigate the process of finding the relevant peer group for information pooling by modelling this group formation process as dynamic network change. The simulations show that the Masses can succeed in finding the right peers, but they also suggest reasons why the Elites may often be more successful. This phenomenon generalizes to the notion of Epistemic Network Injustice. Such injustice arises when a subset of citizens is systematically deprived of connections to helpful epistemic peers, leading to their reduced political influence. Epistemic Network Injustice is a new form of epistemic injustice, related to but distinct from the notion introduced by Miranda Fricker. (shrink)

Knowledge can be acquired through the processes of listening or reading testimonies of other agents. How and, particular, to whom, one ascribes trustworthiness when listening or reading a testimony is of special interest in this paper, especially in terms of societal-epistemic deviations that appear in the form of epistemic injustice. Neurotypicals, individuals with typical neurological states and developmental pathways, perceive individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder as an aberration from neuro-normativity, unable to contribute on an equal basis to (...) the pool of epistemic resources and shared meanings. The latter is related to the stereotypes of the unreliability of autistic persons’ testimonies about their own experiences and conditions. Given that atypical social and behavioural conditions autistics share are clinically classified as a disorder, the question of whether we can justify the failure to extend trust to the autistics arises. (shrink)

This paper discusses the epistemic value of political parties and other partisan associations from the standpoint of epistemic democracy. It examines whether political parties contribute to the quality of democratic deliberation, thus increasing the epistemic value of democratic decision-making procedures, or represent a threat that polarizes the society and impedes and distorts the public deliberation. The paper introduces several arguments that support the epistemic value of partisanship. Partisan associations empower otherwise marginalized social groups or groups that (...) have disproportionally small political influence by facilitating political education or by connecting citizens and experts who share the same values. Partisan associations also help us resist the epistemically damaging effects of hermeneutical (epistemic) injustice by enabling marginalized citizens to construct alternative discourses. However, though partisanship might facilitate the transmission of knowledge, this deliberative tool will only be used in a group of like-minded citizens (i.e. within a political party), thus increasing the polarization between the parties and citizens alike, and decreasing the epistemic value of such collective decision-making procedures. The paper analyses some epistemic strategies (like red-teaming or building a critical thinking culture) that can help us avoid or (at least) reduce the epistemically damaging effects of polarization. However, internal action (from within a deliberative group) might not be enough. Making the deliberation on political issues public and spreading it through different forms of citizens’ organizations will ensure that political deliberation is not closed within a single homogenous deliberating group (i.e. the party). These practices should significantly reduce the damaging effects of group polarization. (shrink)

Snježana Prijić-Samaržija’s book discusses the epistemic grounding of democracy, stressing the epistemic role of experts in her political-epistemological favorite, the project of “reliability democracy”. Her proposal, inspired by Christiano, lets citizens play an important role in setting the aims, whereas experts deliberate about means of reaching them. I argue that it is not easy to reach consensus about goals and values. What is needed is democratic deliberation in deciding, encompassing both experts and laypersons. We (...) should retain the duality of less ideal deliberation in real world and of hypothetical contractualist deliberation, within moral-political thought-experiments, in the tradition of Habermas and Scanlon in the ideal theory. I leave it open whether our author might ultimately agree with this picture of reliability democracy. (shrink)

The epistemic basic structure of a society consists of those institutions that have the greatest impact on individuals’ opportunity to obtain knowledge on questions they have an interest in as citizens, individuals, and public officials. It plays a central role in the production and dissemination of knowledge and in ensuring that people have the capability to assimilate this knowledge. It includes institutions of science and education, the media, search engines, libraries, museums, think tanks, and various government agencies. This article (...) identifies two demands of justice that apply specifically to the institutions that belong to it. First, the epistemic basic structure should serve all citizens fairly and reliably. It should provide them with the opportunity to acquire knowledge they need for their deliberations about the common good, their individual good, and how to pursue them. Second, the epistemic basic structure should produce and disseminate the knowledge that various experts and public officials need to successfully pursue justice and citizens need to effectively exercise their rights. After arguing for these duties, I discuss what policies follow from them and respond to the worry that these duties have illiberal implications. (shrink)

Autism is a psychopathological condition around which there is still much prejudice and stigma. The discrepancy between third-person and first-person accounts of autistic behavior creates a chasm between autistic and neurotypical (non-autistic) people. Epistemic injustice suffered by these individuals is great, and a fruitful strategy out of this predicament is much needed. I will propose that through the appropriation and implementation of methods and concepts from phenomenology and ecological-enactive cognitive science, we can acquire powerful tools to work towards (...) greater epistemic justice for autistic individuals. I will use the resources found in the skilled intentionality framework, integrated with various phenomenological theories. From these approaches, we can view autistic impairments and disability relationally and how epistemic enablement and disablement form. Phenomenology and its methods help us learn more about the perceptual and social experiences of autistic individuals. The voices of the autistics themselves will be of the greatest importance here. I will show that, through restructuring our landscape of affordances and with a greater phenomenological understanding of the autistic inner world, we can devise new strategies that afford greater epistemic enablement and epistemic justice. (shrink)

In this paper, we explore some links between deliberative democracy, natural testimony, and epistemic injustice. We hope to highlight the exclusionary effects of some cases of testimony-related epistemic injustice within the deliberative democratic framework and, in particular, two subtle ways of epistemic injustice that are not often highlighted in the political domain. In other words, we hope to highlight two specific mechanisms of epistemic exclusion within the democratic deliberative process that are not explicitly noticed in the (...) relevant literature. In section 1, we present the deliberative model of democracy and the deliberative process. We then introduce the notion of epistemic (dis)enfranchisement, which we distinguish from formal enfranchisement, and explain the role that natural testimony plays in establishing citizens‘ epistemic enfranchisement. In section 2, we introduce Fricker‘s notion of testimonial injustice and two further testimony-related forms of epistemic injustice which seem to have been largely neglected in the debate so far, namely, discursive injustice and testimonial void. We also point out negative epistemic consequences of positive identity-prejudicial stereotypes. In section 3, we argue that these testimony-related forms of epistemic injustice can lead to epistemic disenfranchisement, which, we note, is an obstacle to deliberative democracy that warrants serious consideration. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Can Virtue Be Bought?Eugene Garver1. The problem: Epistemic elitism or cognitive dominanceDemocracy and rationality can be enemies. Superior intelligence and information can silence people, and the voices of reason can be drowned out by anti-intellectual populism. Given the dearth of both democracy and rationality in contemporary American politics, I hope that each can be fortified by association with the other, but I don't think that mutual reinforcement is (...) easy. I start by giving short quotations from two of the most significant contemporary thinkers who question the relation between democracy and intelligence.First a thesis from James Bohman that sets the challenge for practical intelligence and rhetoric in a democracy: "Deliberative democracy should not reward those groups who simply are better situated to get what they want by public and discursive means; its standard of political equality cannot endorse any kind of cognitive elitism" (1997, 332).1Next, a longer passage from Henry Richardson:The fatal objection to an objectivist interpretation of arbitrary power [in which the public good is thought of as a determinate object] is that it excludes from counting as domination what should be counted as one of its primary cases, namely domination on the basis of superior knowledge and information. Whatever the content of the public good may be, we may suppose—absent liberal justificational restrictions—that there are some people who are relatively expert in discerning it. One way to track the public good with reasonable reliability, then, is to turn political decisions over to those experts or wise persons. If we accept an objectivist interpretation of what "nonarbitrary power" means, then we could not count such Platonic guardians as dominating us. Intuitively, however, I think that we would: They would be dominating us precisely in virtue of their superior knowledge and information about the public good. (2002, 41)2 [End Page 353]Bohman worries about the injustice of unequal powers of eloquence. Richardson worries about what I think is a harder problem, the injustice of unequal powers of practical intelligence, the domination by superior knowledge. These two concerns, rhetorical and epistemic, are related. In Hobbes's wonderful phrase, "eloquence is seeming prudence," everything turns on the permanently contested relation between the appearance of facility with public and discursive means and the reality of superior practical knowledge. The only practical knowledge worth worrying about is manifested practical knowledge.Richardson and Bohman pose the ethical problem of what happens to community when there are claims to superior practical wisdom. The question isn't whether such claims are true or false, but the conditions under which they can be asserted and accepted. When are successful claims to knowledge "arbitrary," "dominating," or in a word, unjust? Thus, David Estlund writes, "Even granting that some people might be far better at making the morally and technically best political decisions, such invidious comparisons among citizens are bound to be open to reasonable disagreement" (2000, 137). But the issue is whether such reasonable disagreement is itself grounds for denying the comparison. Why is a judgment of better and worse necessarily "invidious"? When is disagreement about what is the best political decision a "reasonable" disagreement?Of course we should worry when eloquence silences people. But many other things silence citizens, too. Some argue, for example, that the discursive power of cross-burning "has a silencing effect" since it intimidates African Americans, and similar arguments have been made about how pornography silences women, but it would be strange to call these powers superior eloquence, certainly not in the sense that Bohman, Richardson, and Estlund worry about (Fiss 1996, 119).3 Many forms of coercion and ways of limiting freedom have nothing to do with silencing, as they prevent us from even getting to a point where there can be discussion. Extra-discursive signs of power, such as age, wealth, or difference, can inhibit me from speaking my mind. The personal experience of a purported victim is hard to argue against. So are people with access to powerful symbols.For example, consider the resistance to some forms of victim impact statements. Opponents argue that these are too emotional to have probative value. Their presence is unfair. They are unfair because... (shrink)

In this article, we delve in debates around the usefulness of the notion of epistemic injustice in psychiatry to show that the concept has been misportrayed in the literature. We suggest that epistemic injustice should revolve around phenomenology and regard first and foremost the failure of mental health professionals to acquire and utilize information that service users are experts in, i.e. first-person testimony pertaining to what it is like to be them. We use this conceptualization to demonstrate (...) the unique benefits that the concept of epistemic injustice can bring to psychiatric practice, and we illustrate these through specific case studies, focusing particularly on autism. (shrink)

Against the background of an increasing dependency of governance on specialized expertise and growing calls for citizen participation, this study discusses solutions to the tension between knowledge and democracy. It asks: Which institutions and practices add to striking a balance between knowledge-based decision-making and the involvement of the affected? Based on the social studies of science, knowledge and expertise as well as democratic theory with a focus on participation, representation and inclusion, the study first identifies quality criteria of expertise and (...) participation, and then, with reference to two quite different, up-and-coming empirical answers to the epistemic-democratic tension, spells out the conditions of realizing these criteria in practice. In focus are a) highly complex, multi-layered structures of policy deliberation and advice that combine expert panels with a range of public input channels and b) the involvement of ‘lay experts’ into policy-making through participatory knowledge practices such as ‘service user involvement’ or ‘citizen science’. The study underlines, inter alia, how claims that transcend individual viewpoints and integrate a multiplicity of experiences and concerns are of particular democratic and epistemic value; it points to the key role of organized advocacy groups when it comes to credibly combining a mandate to speak for others with useful and reliable experience-based expertise; and it illustrates the relevance of conflict-minimising institutions for the making of public policies. (shrink)

When states perpetrate injustices, do their individual citizens develop liabilities to repair such wrongdoings? Most existing accounts of citizens’ liabilities for state-perpetrated injustices, whilst applicable across certain democratic contexts, struggle to provide robust accounts of the grounds and nature of liabilities for citizens in non-democratic contexts. This problematically leaves a lacuna when it comes to the responsibilities and appropriate responses of citizens in these states. This article advances a distinctive two-pronged authorisation-based account applicable to non-democracies. Objective authorisers are individuals who (...) derive presumptive benefits, are comparably better-off under, and can reliably influence the decision-making processes over the injustice perpetrated by the state. Subjective authorisers are citizens who autonomously endorse their state as credible interpreters and upholders of their aims in relation to the injustices in question. Both objective and subjective authorisers of the state in relation to particular injustices perpetrated, are liable to compensate, actively oppose, and commemorate the victims of state-perpetrated injustices. This account will be shown to be empirically applicable to a large number of minimally decent non-democratic states, where the political elite enjoy moderate popular support over their incorporation and reflection of citizen interests and preferences in their governance, despite the absence of formal democratic electoral mechanisms. This authorisation-based view differs from existing accounts oriented around complicity and participatory intentions, in better accounting for non-participants who are nevertheless intuitively liable for the actions of their authorised state, as well as circumventing structural shortcomings affecting complicity-centric accounts. (shrink)

Responsible public policy making in a technological society must rely on complex scientific reasoning. Given that ordinary citizens cannot directly assess such reasoning, does this call the democratic legitimacy of technical public policies in question? It does not, provided citizens can make reliable second-order assessments of the consensus of trustworthy scientific experts. I develop criteria for lay assessment of scientific testimony and demonstrate, in the case of claims about anthropogenic global warming, that applying such criteria is easy for anyone (...) of ordinary education with access to the Web. However, surveys show a gap between the scientific consensus and public opinion on global warming in the U.S. I explore some causes of this gap and argue that democratic reforms of our culture of political discourse may be able to address it. (shrink)

One of the challenges facing complex democratic societies marked by deep normative disagreements and differences along lines of race, gender, sexuality, culture and religion is how the perspectives of diverse individuals and social groups can be made effectively present in the deliberative process. In response to this challenge, a number of political theorists have argued that empathetic perspective-taking is critical for just democratic deliberation, and that a well-functioning democracy requires the cultivation in citizens of empathetic skills and virtues. In this (...) paper, we begin by distinguishing several kinds of imaginative projection and corresponding kinds of empathy. On the basis of this analysis, we suggest that genuine empathetic perspective-taking, especially across gendered, racial and embodied differences, is more challenging than is often assumed in the literature. This poses a dilemma for theorists who place great store on the role of empathetic imagination to overcome the challenges of democratic deliberation. On the one hand, placing responsibilities for empathetic perspective-taking primarily on the socially privileged raises risks of inaccurate and inappropriate projection. On the other hand, mitigating the risks of projection by calling on the socially marginalised to articulate their experiences and feelings in a way that can engage the imagination of the socially privileged, risks perpetuating epistemic injustice. We suggest that while this dilemma may be difficult to overcome, its effects can nevertheless be mitigated through both the cultivation of individual deliberative virtues and pragmatic institutional responses. (shrink)

Citizen science projects have started to utilize Machine Learning to sort through large datasets generated in fields like astronomy, ecology and biodiversity, biology, and neuroimaging. Human–machine systems have been created to take advantage of the complementary strengths of humans and machines and have been optimized for efficiency and speed. We conducted qualitative content analysis on meta-summaries of documents reporting the results of 12 citizen science projects that used machine learning to optimize classification tasks. We examined the distribution of tasks between (...) citizen scientists, experts, and algorithms, and how epistemic agency was enacted in terms of whose knowledge shapes the distribution of tasks, who decides what knowledge is relevant to the classification, and who validates it. In our descriptive results, we found that experts, who include professional scientists and algorithm developers, are involved in every aspect of a project, from annotating or labelling data to giving data to algorithms to train them to make decisions from predictions. Experts also test and validate models to improve their accuracy by scoring their outputs when algorithms fail to make correct decisions. Experts are mostly the humans involved in a loop, but when algorithms encounter problems, citizens are also involved at several stages. In this paper, we present three main examples of citizens-in-the-loop: when algorithms provide incorrect suggestions; when algorithms fail to know how to perform classification; and when algorithms pose queries. We consider the implications of the emphasis on optimization on the ideal of science and the role of citizen scientists from a perspective informed by Science and Technology Studies and Information Systems. Based on our findings, we conclude that ML in CS classification projects, far from being deterministic in its nature and effects, may be open to question. There is no guarantee that these technologies can replace citizen scientists, nor any guarantee that they can provide citizens with opportunities for more interesting tasks. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that the asymmetrical mediated communication of the broad democratic public sphere can profitably be understood through the lens of deliberative democracy only if we adopt a system approach to deliberation. A system approach, however, often introduces a division of labor between ordinary citizens and experts. Although this division of labor is unavoidable and I believe compatible with a deliberative principle of legitimacy, it flirts with elitist theories of democracy: epistemic elites come up with (...) the agendas, ideas, and policy positions and democratic publics ratify or repudiate the agendas but do not generate or really engage with them. This I argue would violate an essential defining feature of deliberative democracy, namely that epistemic quality and equal participation are tightly linked. I turn to Habermas and his idea of a feedback loop as a possible solution to this dilemma. (shrink)

The deliberative turn in political philosophy sees theorists attempting to ground democratic legitimacy in free, rational, and public deliberation among citizens. However, feminist theorists have criticized prominent accounts of deliberative democracy, and of the public sphere that is its site, for being too exclusionary. Iris Marion Young, Nancy Fraser, and Seyla Benhabib show that deliberative democrats generally fail to attend to substantive inclusion in their conceptions of deliberative space, even though they endorse formal inclusion. If we take these criticisms seriously, (...) we are tasked with articulating a substantively inclusive account of deliberation. I argue in this article that enriching existing theories of deliberative democracy with Fricker's conception of epistemic in/justice yields two specific benefits. First, it enables us to detect instances of epistemic injustice, and therefore failures of inclusion, within deliberative spaces. Second, it can act as a model for constructing deliberative spaces that are more inclusive and therefore better able to ground democratic legitimacy. (shrink)

This paper looks at Alexander Guerrero’s epistemic case for ‘lottocracy’, or government by randomly selected citizen assemblies. It argues that Guerrero fails to show that citizen expertise is more likely to be elicited and brought to bear on democratic politics if we replace elections with random selection. However, randomly selected citizen assemblies can be valuable deliberative and participative additions to elected and appointed institutions even when citizens are not bearers of special knowledge or virtue individually or collectively.

Understanding the relationship between experts and laypeople is crucial for understanding today’s world of post-truth and the contemporary crisis of liberal democracy. The emergence of post-truth has been linked to various phenomena such as a flawed social and mass media ecosystem, poor citizen education, and the manipulation tactics of powerful interest groups. The paper argues that the problem is, however, more profound. The underlying issue is laypeople’s inevitable epistemic dependence on experts. The latter is part and parcel (...) of the “risk society” in which people question the scientific consensus and thus are able to manipulate the facts. It is a powerful weapon in the hands of illiberal democrats, though liberal democrats can make no use of it. The latter downplay the problem of citizens’ epistemic deficits and of the epistemic asymmetries between them. The third and fourth generations of deliberative democrats are a perfect example. The paper argues that the concepts of interactional expertise and epistemic dependence explain why understanding between experts and laypeople is impossible. The said phenomena undermine liberalism’s unrealistic assumptions concerning citizens’ decision-making competence. (shrink)

This paper identifies strands of reasoning underlying several theories of democratic authority. It shows why each of them fails to adequately explain or justify it. Yet, it does not claim (per philosophical anarchism) that democratic authority cannot be justified. Furthermore, it sketches an argument for a perspective on the justification of democratic authority that would effectively respond to three problems not resolved by alternative theories—the problem of the expert, the problem of specificity, and the problem of deference. Successfully resolving these (...) problems is at least evidence for the viability of a justification of democratic authority. This perspective integrates procedural concerns with those about the quality of democratic outcomes. It shows that democratic authority, if there is such a thing, requires reliable democratic procedures as the only sort citizens could rationally accept. (shrink)

Epistemic inequality is something we face in our everyday experience whenever we acknowledge our epistemic inferiority towards some and our epistemic superiority towards others. The negative side of this epistemic phenomenon has received due attention in the context of the debate on epistemic injustice: whenever an epistemic subject deflates the credibility of another or fails to recognize their authority qua knowers, unjust epistemic inequality is easily produced. However, this kind of inequality has an (...) important positive side, as it can amount to a fundamental opportunity for the subject to achieve epistemic goods—such as knowledge, understanding, and intellectual virtues—from those who are epistemically superior to them. This thesis inquires into the key features of the interaction between non-peer agents to provide a compelling account of epistemic inequality as a positive phenomenon, that is, as an inescapable and reliable source of epistemic goods. To achieve this overarching aim, the proposed analysis shall address three main questions, one conceptual, one normative, and one practical. The conceptual question asks what it takes for an epistemic agent to be epistemically superior to someone else. The normative question investigates the rational boundaries of the interaction between non-peer agents. From the standpoint of the epistemically superior agent, I examine the permissibility of epistemic paternalism, namely whether it can be legitimate for one to interfere with another’s agency for the epistemic benefit of the subject interfered with without consulting them on the issue. From the standpoint of the epistemically inferior agent, I examine which attitudes it is rational to have towards individuals epistemically superior to us. The practical question is about the implications of this analysis for a paradigmatic instance of interaction between non-peer subjects, such as the educational relationship between teachers and students. As a response to the conceptual question, I shall offer a pluralistic virtue-based framework that allows individuating various ways in which an individual or a collective agent—such as groups, committees, and research teams—can be epistemically superior to another. In particular, I shall distinguish between experts, authorities of belief, and authorities of understanding. As a response to the normative question, I argue that epistemic paternalism is permissible only insofar as the interferers are epistemically better positioned than the subjects interfered with, and I outline an account of what I call a “virtuous paternalist interferer”. Furthermore, I argue that there are cases in which it is rational for an epistemically inferior subject to set aside whatever belief they might have and defer to the epistemically superior interlocutor—thereby endorsing a limited version of the so-called preemptionist view of epistemic authority. Finally, as a response to the practical question, I shall propose an exemplar-based account of education, explain how it can be employed to educate the young to intellectual virtues, and defend the view from several objections raised against virtue-based approaches to education. (shrink)

Democratic legitimacy is often grounded in proceduralist terms, referring to the ideal of political equality that should be mirrored by fair procedures of decision-making. The paper argues (§1) that the normative commitments embedded in a non-minimalist account of procedural legitimacy are well expressed by the ideal of co-authorship. Against this background, the main goal of the paper is to argue that structural forms of epistemic injustice are detrimental to the overall legitimacy of democratic systems. In §2 I analyse Young’s (...) notion of political powerlessness and claim that in structurally unjust social contexts members of powerless groups often are not properly acknowledged as functioning members of the polity, hence being jeopardized in their ability to develop part of their personal identity. In §III, I define gerrymandering as an example of political disempowerment that involves an epistemic harm for oppressed citizens, namely, to be prejudicially excluded from the community of epistemic trust. My thesis is that being epistemically disempowered has a negative impact on the way in which citizens understand themselves as political actors, since they suffer a lack of social recognition that may impede a proper development of their reflexive agency. In §IV, I discuss the proposal of granting epistemic privilege to members of oppressed groups, given their specific experience of social injustices. I introduce two concerns about this proposal, one morally grounded and one pragmatically oriented. Finally, in §V, I briefly sketch some institutional remedies that can be employed in order to politically fight systemic forms of epistemic injustice. (shrink)

In the context of academic research, a diversity of ethical issues, conditioned by the different roles of members within these institutions, arise. Previous studies on this topic addressed mainly the perceptions of researchers. However, to our knowledge, no studies have explored the transversal ethical issues from a wider spectrum, including other members of academic institutions as the research ethics board (REB) members, and the research ethics experts. The present study used a descriptive phenomenological approach to document the ethical issues (...) experienced by a heterogeneous group of Canadian researchers, REB members, and research ethics experts. Data collection involved socio-demographic questionnaires and individual semi-structured interviews. Following the triangulation of different perspectives (researchers, REB members and ethics experts), emerging ethical issues were synthesized in ten units of meaning: (1) research integrity, (2) conflicts of interest, (3) respect for research participants, (4) lack of supervision and power imbalances, (5) individualism and performance, (6) inadequate ethical guidance, (7) social injustices, (8) distributive injustices, (9) epistemic injustices, and (10) ethical distress. This study highlighted several problematic elements that can support the identification of future solutions to resolve transversal ethical issues in research that affect the heterogeneous members of the academic community. (shrink)

Dominant forms of contemporary big-data based digital citizen science do not question the institutional divide between qualified experts and lay-persons. In our paper, we turn to the historical case of a large-scale amateur project on biogeographical birdwatching in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to show that networked amateur research can operate in a more autonomous mode. This mode depends on certain cultural values, the constitution of specific knowledge objects, and the design of self-governed infrastructures. We conclude by (...) arguing that the contemporary quest for autonomous citizen science is part of a broader discourse on the autonomy of scientific research in general. Just as the actors in our historical case positioned themselves against the elitism of gentlemen scientists, avant-garde groups of the twenty first century like biohackers and civic tech enthusiasts position themselves against the system of professional science—while “digital citizen science” remains to oscillate between claims for autonomy and realities of heteronomy, constantly reaffirming the classic lay-expert divide. (shrink)

Recent years have witnessed growing controversy over the “wisdom of the multitude.” As epistemic critics drawing on vast empirical evidence have cast doubt on the political competence of ordinary citizens, epistemic democrats have offered a defense of democracy grounded largely in analogies and formal results. So far, I argue, the critics have been more convincing. Nevertheless, democracy can be defended on instrumental grounds, and this article demonstrates an alternative approach. Instead of implausibly upholding the epistemic reliability (...) of average voters, I observe that competitive elections, universal suffrage, and discretionary state power disable certain potent mechanisms of elite entrenchment. By reserving particular forms of power for the multitude of ordinary citizens, they make democratic states more resistant to dangerous forms of capture than non-democratic alternatives. My approach thus offers a robust defense of electoral democracy, yet cautions against expecting too much from it—motivating a thicker conception of democracy, writ large. (shrink)

The contrast between third- and first-personal accounts of the experiences of autistic persons has much to teach us about epistemic injustice and epistemic agency. This paper argues that bringing about greater epistemic justice for autistic people requires developing a relational account of epistemic agency. We begin by systematically identifying the many types of epistemic injustice autistic people face, specifically with regard to general assumptions regarding autistic people’s sociability or lack thereof, and by locating the source (...) of these epistemic injustices in neuronormativity and neurotypical ignorance. We then argue that this systematic identification pushes us to construe epistemic agency as resulting from a fundamentally relational and dynamic process between an individual, others around them, and their social, cultural, or institutional environment, rather than as a fixed and inherent property of individuals. Finally, we show how our relational account of epistemic agency allows us to introduce the novel concepts of epistemic disablement and epistemic enablement. We argue that these two concepts allow us to more accurately track the mechanisms that undermine or facilitate epistemic agency, and thereby to better understand how epistemic injustice arises and to design more effective interventions to foster greater epistemic justice for autistic people. (shrink)

The purpose of the current study was to apply and evaluate a procedure to elicit expert judgments about correlations, and to update this information with empirical data. The result is a face-to-face group elicitation procedure with as its central element a trial roulette question that elicits experts' judgments expressed as distributions. During the elicitation procedure, a concordance probability question was used to provide feedback to the experts on their judgments. We evaluated the elicitation procedure in terms of validity (...) and reliability by means of an application with a small sample of experts. Validity means that the elicited distributions accurately represent the experts' judgments. Reliability concerns the consistency of the elicited judgments over time. Four behavioral scientists provided their judgments with respect to the correlation between cognitive potential and academic performance for two separate populations enrolled at a specific school in the Netherlands that provides special education to youth with severe behavioral problems: youth with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and youth with diagnoses other than ASD. Measures of face-validity, feasibility, convergent validity, coherence, and intra-rater reliability showed promising results. Furthermore, the current study illustrates the use of the elicitation procedure and elicited distributions in a social science application. The elicited distributions were used as a prior for the correlation, and updated with data for both populations collected at the school of interest. The current study shows that the newly developed elicitation procedure combining the trial roulette method with the elicitation of correlations is a promising tool, and that the results of the procedure are useful as prior information in a Bayesian analysis. (shrink)

The epistemic basic structure of a society consists of those institutions that have the greatest impact on individuals’ opportunity to obtain knowledge on questions they have an interest in as citizens, individuals, and public officials. It plays a central role in the production and dissemination of knowledge and in ensuring that people have the capability to assimilate this knowledge. It includes institutions of science and education, the media, search engines, libraries, museums, think tanks, and various government agencies. This article (...) identifies two demands of justice that apply specifically to the institutions that belong to it. First, the epistemic basic structure should serve all citizens fairly and reliably. It should provide them with the opportunity to acquire knowledge they need for their deliberations about the common good, their individual good, and how to pursue them. Second, the epistemic basic structure should produce and disseminate the knowledge that various experts and public officials need to successfully pursue justice and citizens need to effectively exercise their rights. After arguing for these duties, I discuss what policies follow from them and respond to the worry that these duties have illiberal implications. (shrink)

The practice of Emergency Management in Michigan raises anew the question of whose knowledge matters to whom and for what reasons, against the background of what projects, challenges, and systemic imperatives. In this paper, I offer a historical overview of state intervention laws across the United States, focusing specifically on Michigan’s Emergency Manager laws. I draw on recent analyses of these laws to develop an account of a phenomenon that I call epistemic redlining, which, I suggest, is a form (...) of group-based credibility discounting not readily countenanced by existing, ‘culprit-based’ accounts of epistemic injustice. I argue that epistemic redlining plays a crucial role in ongoing projects of racialized subordination and dispossession in Michigan, and that such discounting tends to have structural causes that can be difficult to identify and uproot. Contrary to the general thrust of recent work on the topic, I argue that epistemic redlining ought to be understood as a form of epistemic injustice. (shrink)

The epistemic structure of society, with its division of epistemic and cognitive labour, can help us deal with the citizenry incompetence threat that many contemporary conceptions of democracy suffer as long as a certain intellectual character is possessed by the citizens. Keywords: expert testimony, collective deliberation, intellectual virtue, democracy.

I analyze the relation between deliberative democracy and trust through the lens of epistemic justice. I argue for three main claims: (i) the deliberative impasse dividing majority and minority groups in many democracies is due to a particular type of epistemic injustice, which I call ‘hermeneutical domination’; (ii) undoing hermeneutical domination requires epistemic trust; and (iii) this epistemic trust is supported by the three deliberative democratic requirements of equality, legitimacy, and accountability. In arguing for those claims, (...) I contribute to the conceptualization of both epistemic injustice and domination, as well as to discussions of trust and deliberative democracy. (shrink)

The chapter develops a taxonomy of views about the epistemic responsibilities of citizens in a democracy. Prominent approaches to epistemic democracy, epistocracy, epistemic libertarianism, and pure proceduralism are examined through the lens of this taxonomy. The primary aim is to explore options for developing an account of the epistemic responsibilities of citizens in a democracy. The chapter also argues that a number of recent attacks on democracy may not adequately register the availability of a minimal approach (...) to the epistemic responsibilities of citizens in a democracy. (shrink)

This paper revisits a debate in epistemic democracy about the value of the Diversity Trumps Ability Theorem (Hong and Page 2004 and Page 2008) in supporting the claims of epistemic democrats in favor of more inclusive decision-making processes in politics. We conduct a systematic review of DTA results and conclude that while they generally support the epistemic claims of deliberative democrats, they also support reintroducing experts in certain contexts. We use these results to complicate Plato’s metaphor (...) of the cave by identifying different areas within it where ordinary citizens, experts, or a mix of both are in a better position to make decisions. (shrink)

Through a detailed analysis that draws on work across philosophy, the law, and social psychology, this book shows that, from the very beginning of the American criminal legal process in interrogation rooms to its final stages in front of parole boards, testimony is extracted from individuals through processes that are coercive, manipulative, or deceptive. This testimony is then unreasonably regarded as representing the testifiers’ truest or most reliable selves. With chapters ranging from false confessions and eyewitness misidentifications to recantations from (...) victims of sexual violence and expressions of remorse from innocent defendants at sentencing hearings, it is argued that there is a distinctive epistemic wrong being perpetrated against suspects, defendants, witnesses, and victims. This wrong involves brute State power targeting the epistemic agency of its citizens, extracting false testimony that is often life-shattering, and rendering the victims in question complicit in their own undoing. It is concluded that it is only through understanding what it means to respect the epistemic agency of each participant in the criminal legal system that we can truly grasp what justice demands and, in so doing, to reimagine what is possible. (shrink)

Can ordinary citizens in a democracy evaluate the claims of scientific experts? While a definitive answer must be case by case, some scholars have offered sharply opposed general answers: a skeptical versus an optimistic. The article addresses this basic conflict, arguing that a satisfactory answer requires a first-order engagement in judging the claims of experts which both skeptics and optimists rule out in taking the issue to be one of second-order assessments only. Having argued that such first-order judgments (...) are necessary, it then considers how they are possible, outlining a range of practices and virtues that can inform their success and likelihood, and drawing throughout on ancient Greek insights as well as contemporary social psychology and sociology of knowledge. In conclusion the ethics of democratic judgment so developed is applied to the dramatic conviction of the members of an Italian scientific risk commission in L'Aquila. (shrink)

The literature on epistemic injustice has thus far confined the concept of testimonial injustice to speech expressions such as inquiring, discussing, deliberating, and, above all, telling. I propose that it is time to broaden the horizons of testimonial injustice to include a wider range of expressions. Controversially, the form of communication I have in mind is non-verbal expression. Non-verbal expression is a vital, though often overlooked, form of communication, particularly for people who have certain neurocognitive disorders. Dependency upon non-verbal (...) expression is a common feature of some forms of neurocognitive disorders such as ‘intellectual disabilities’, autism and late-stage dementia. According to the narrow definition of testimonial injustice currently championed in the literature, people who express non-verbally are exempt from testimonial injustice. However, when we consider cases where meaningful communications from non-verbal people are dismissed or ignored in virtue of identity prejudice, there seems to be a distinct testimonial harm at play. Using late-stage dementia as a case study, I argue that the definition of testimonial injustice should be expanded to include all communicative practices, whether verbal or non-verbal, to encompass the epistemic harms inflicted upon some of the most marginalised in our society. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn Democratic Reason, Hélène Landemore argues that deliberation and the aggregation of citizens' dispersed knowledge should tend to produce better consequences than rule by the one or the few. However, she pays insufficient attention to the epistemic processes necessary to realize these democratic goods. In particular, she fails to consider the question of where citizens' beliefs and ideas come from, with the result that the democratic decision mechanisms she focuses on are insufficiently powerful to justify her consequentialist defense of (...) mass decision making. If “the few” are technocratic experts, Landemore supplies little reason to resist their rule on epistemic grounds, for she does not secure a knowledge base for the citizens that might compete with the knowledge that is often attributed to such “experts.” Aggregating and deliberating about poor information is no substitute for good information. Her book can therefore be seen as a call for a new phase of epistemic political theory that compares the real-world knowledgeability of ordinary citizens and putative experts, but it does not convincingly deliver on its goal to demonstrate the epistemic superiority of the former. (shrink)

Should voting rights be conditional upon competence? Proponents of epistocracy think so, but most political theorists dismiss this view. At the same time, the practice of disenfranchising citizens below a certain age is widely endorsed. This paper raises a challenge for proponents of the voting age. Drawing on a revised version of Estlund’s influential account, I argue that electoral inequality is justifiable only if all qualified points of view can accept that it promotes the epistemic reliability of democratic (...) procedures. This condition rules out epistocracy, but it also implies that the voting age is harder to justify than commonly assumed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:IntroductionParenting Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders During the Transition to AdulthoodKelly Dineen and Margaret Bultas, Symposium EditorsThis issue of Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics is devoted to the personal stories of parents or guardians whose children with ASDs are transitioning or have transitioned to adulthood. The same parents who navigated the educational and health systems with little support twenty years ago once again find themselves as pioneers in somewhat (...) unchartered territory. Transition to adulthood, again, presents new terrain without well–defined parameters or reliable expectations for individuals with ASD and the parents who support them. At current, very little has been studied or written about the unique perspectives of parents during transition. What does exist suggests that parents of individuals with autism perceive their experiences as novel, even as compared with parents of children with other kinds of disabilities (Woodgate, Ateach, & Secco, 2008).One in 88 children is estimated to have an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in 2012, a 78% increase since 2007 (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2012). Although a variety of factors are certainly involved, the rate of diagnosis of individuals with ASDs has increased dramatically over the last twenty years and by all accounts the level and quality of support in health and social systems have lagged behind.While support and interventions have progressed significantly over time, attention on older populations has played a secondary role to early interventions. The proliferation of young people with ASD has outpaced supportive efforts at all levels. ASDs are usually diagnosed in childhood and funding for and access to research and interventions for children have resulted from, in no small part, the zealous efforts of parents. As this growing population of individuals with ASDs transitions to adulthood, finding appropriate supports and interventions have proven more elusive and more complicated. The hallmark symptoms of ASDs include social skill deficits and communication and behavioral difficulties—all traits that especially strain typical teenage and young adult relationships. Recent research backs up these difficulties and indicates that individuals with ASDs fare relatively poorly in traditional measures of independence such as employment, education and social relationships. Parents like the authors in this symposium continue to work to help their teenage and adult children navigate the demands, challenges and rewards of adulthood and independence with all its uncertainties and surprises.The editors of this issue of Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics solicited the personal stories of the parents who have navigated this transition. The call for stories was distributed to autism awareness groups, autism list–serves, bloggers, and social media outlets. Personal appeals to thought leaders and advocacy groups to distribute the call for stories also produced a number of responses. The [End Page 147] people and organizations that passed along our request and responded are too numerous to list here but our gratitude is sincere: their help made this issue possible.We hope the stories will give readers a sense of what parents find rewarding as well as especially challenging during this time and what actions and supports make a difference for the better. Stories about any aspect of the transition were welcome, ranging from navigating the health system to issues surrounding romantic relationships. We welcomed parents’ thoughts on any topic, including gender, level of function, provider behavior, stigma, friendship, services (existing or needed), decision making, independent living, co–morbidities, expectations, work, school or relationships.These topics and more emerged. Stories primarily came from mothers; however one father and one uncle also contributed. Consistent with diagnostic trends, most tell stories of parenting young men. The 12 stories that were selected for this edition represent just a fraction of the diverse set of issues, needs and commonalities of this growing population of adults. We received more stories than we could put in print. Twelve were selected to represent a range of experiences. Many other stories were so powerful that they will appear on–line in the Project MUSE edition of the journal.Commentators also represent a diverse group of professionals whose work includes direct care and support of individuals with ASD and their families, education, research, scholarship and advocacy. Some of our commentators also have a child or a loved one with ASD.Patricia Bashe... (shrink)

In a recent paper, María Pía Méndez (2022) offers an epistemic critique of epistocracy according to which the sort of politically well-informed but homogenous groups of citizens that would be empowered under epistocracy would lack reliable access to information about the preferences of less informed citizens. Specifically, they would lack access to such citizens’ preferences regarding the form that policies ought to take—that is, how these policies ought to be implemented. Arguing that this so-called Information Gap Problem militates against (...) epistocracy, Méndez instead recommends that we respond to problems created by widespread voter ignorance by improving the flow of information between political actors by adopting some participatory democratic institutions. In this paper I argue that the severity of the Information Gap Problem for epistocracy is overstated. After first sketching some background (Section 1), I argue that it is hard to see why information about citizens’ preferences for the form that policies ought to take is important enough that the expected costs of epistocracy outweigh its expected benefits if it selectively empowers people who lack access to such information (Section 2). Moreover, different forms of epistocracy are less threatened by the Information Gap Problem, assuming it is indeed a problem. For some forms of epistocracy, it may be no problem whatsoever. However, I conclude by suggesting that Méndez touches upon some more serious problems for epistocracy (Section 3). First, even setting aside the Information Gap Problem, there are open questions about the possible epistemic inferiority of epistocracy relative to democracy. Second, more comprehensive accounts of political competence that move beyond the possession of sufficient levels of political information are much harder to reliably test for, thus complicating the task of devising effective epistocratic selection mechanisms. Lastly, epistocracy arguably creates a serious risk of abuse that may outweigh any other benefits it brings. More research is needed to determine how (and whether) epistocrats can respond to such challenges. (shrink)

Trust is central to the therapeutic relationship, but the epistemic asymmetries between the expert healthcare provider and the patient make the patient, the trustor, vulnerable to the provider, the trustee. The narratives of pain sufferers provide helpful insights into the experience of pain at the juncture of trust, expert knowledge, and the therapeutic relationship. While stories of pain sufferers having their testimonies dismissed are well documented, pain sufferers continue to experience their testimonies as being epistemically downgraded. This kind of (...) epistemic injustice has received limited treatment in bioethics. In this paper, we examine how a climate of distrust in pain management may facilitate what Fricker calls epistemic injustice. We critically interrogate the processes through which pain sufferers are vulnerable to specific kinds of epistemic injustice, such as testimonial injustice. We also examine how healthcare institutions and practices privilege some kinds of evidence and ways of knowing while excluding certain patient testimonies from epistemic consideration. We argue that providers ought to avoid epistemic injustice in pain management by striving toward epistemic humility. Epistemic humility, as a form of epistemic justice, may be the kind disposition required to correct the harmful prejudices that may arise through testimonial exchange in chronic pain management. (shrink)

Although emerging evidence has implicated structural/functional abnormalities of patients with Autism Spectrum Disorder, definitive neuroimaging markers remain obscured due to inconsistent or incompatible findings, especially for structural imaging. Furthermore, brain differences defined by statistical analysis are difficult to implement individual prediction. The present study has employed the machine learning techniques under the unified framework in neuroimaging to identify the neuroimaging markers of patients with ASD and distinguish them from typically developing controls. To enhance the interpretability of the machine learning (...) model, the study has processed three levels of assessments including model-level assessment, feature-level assessment, and biology-level assessment. According to these three levels assessment, the study has identified neuroimaging markers of ASD including the opercular part of bilateral inferior frontal gyrus, the orbital part of right inferior frontal gyrus, right rolandic operculum, right olfactory cortex, right gyrus rectus, right insula, left inferior parietal gyrus, bilateral supramarginal gyrus, bilateral angular gyrus, bilateral superior temporal gyrus, bilateral middle temporal gyrus, and left inferior temporal gyrus. In addition, negative correlations between the communication skill score in the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule and regional gray matter volume in the gyrus rectus, left middle temporal gyrus, and inferior temporal gyrus have been detected. A significant negative correlation has been found between the communication skill score in ADOS_G and the orbital part of the left inferior frontal gyrus. A negative correlation between verbal skill score and right angular gyrus and a significant negative correlation between non-verbal communication skill and right angular gyrus have been found. These findings in the study have suggested the GM alteration of ASD and correlated with the clinical severity of ASD disease symptoms. The interpretable machine learning framework gives sight to the pathophysiological mechanism of ASD but can also be extended to other diseases. (shrink)

The latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders included the Social Communication Disorder as a new mental disorder characterized by deficits in pragmatic abilities. Although the introduction of SPCD in the psychiatry nosography depended on a variety of reasons—including bridging a nosological gap in the macro-category of Communication Disorders—in the last few years researchers have identified major issues in such revision. For instance, the symptomatology of SPCD is notably close to that of Autism Spectrum Disorder. (...) This opens up the possibility that individuals with very similar symptoms can be diagnosed differently and receive different clinical treatments and social support. The aim of this paper is to review recent debates on SPCD, particularly as regards its independence from ASD. In the first part, we outline the major aspects of the DSM-5 nosological revision involving ASD and SPCD. In the second part, we focus on the validity and reliability of SPCD. First, we analyze literature on three potential validators of SPCD, i.e., etiology, response to treatment, and measurability. Then, we turn to reliability issues connected with the introduction of the grandfather clause and the use of the concepts of spectrum and threshold in the definition of ASD. In the conclusion, we evaluate whether SPCD could play any role in contemporary psychiatry other than that of an independent mental disorder and discuss the role that non-epistemic factors could play in the delineation of the future psychiatry nosography. (shrink)

The rapid development in healthcare technologies in recent years has resulted in the need for health services, whether publicly funded or insurance based, to identify means to maximise the benefits and provide equitable distribution of limited resources. This has resulted in the need for rationing decisions, and there has been considerable debate regarding the substantive and procedural ethical principles that promote distributive justice when making such decisions. In this paper, I argue that while the scientifically rigorous approaches of evidence-based healthcare (...) are claimed as aspects of procedural justice that legitimise such guidance, there are biases and distortions in all aspects of the process that may lead to epistemic injustices. Regardless of adherence to principles of distributive justice in the decision-making process, evidential failings may undermine the fairness and legitimacy of such decisions. In particular, I identify epistemic exclusion that denies certain patient and professional groups the opportunity to contribute to the epistemic endeavour. This occurs at all stages of the process, from the generation, analysis and reporting of the underlying evidence, through the interpretation of such evidence, to the decision-making that determines access to healthcare resources. I further argue that this is compounded by processes which confer unwarranted epistemic privilege on experts in relation to explicit or implicit value judgements, which are not within their remit. I suggest a number of areas in which changes to the processes for developing, regulating, reporting and evaluating evidence may improve the legitimacy of such processes. (shrink)

The present paper argues that the standardised treatment of disaster research and practice perpetuates the production of systematic epistemic injustices against victims of disasters. On the one hand, disaster victims are often prevented from contributing with their opinions and knowledge to the processes of disaster mitigation and disaster conceptualisation. On the other hand, disaster victims tend to lack the hermeneutical resources to make sense of their experiences intelligibly, due to the existence of significant hermeneutical gaps in the hegemonic terminology (...) on the matter. I argue that both forms of epistemic injustice, the testimonial and the hermeneutical, are sustained by an epistemic privilege between the Global North and the Global South in matters of disasters. The second group comprises what I categorise generally as ‘disaster victims’. I identify two forms of structural prejudice that operate against disaster victims: one is the ‘non-expert’ prejudice, and the other is the colonial prejudice. Finally, because of the intercultural nature of disaster environments, I discuss the field of ‘multicultural competencies’ as a useful form of unveiling and counteracting the epistemic injustices contained in both disaster theory and practice. (shrink)

Objectives“Attachment difficulties” is an umbrella term often used to describe various forms of non-secure attachment. Differentiating “attachment difficulties” from autism spectrum disorder and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder has been characterized as challenging. Few studies have explored how this happens in practice, from the perspective of professionals.DesignQualitative study.MethodsWe conducted in-depth semi-structured interviews with healthcare professionals from five NHS Foundation Trusts in the United Kingdom. Participants were recruited using a combination of snowballing, convenience and purposive sampling. Data were analyzed using a (...) thematic approach.ResultsWe identified six interrelated themes that might reflect difficulties with differential conceptualization. These include: a clinical lexicon of attachment; approaching attachment with caution; contextual factors; perceived characteristic behaviors; assessing attachment and adjacent supports; spotlighting intervention and dual conceptualization.ConclusionOur results indicate some of the ways suspicions around attachment are raised in practice. We advocate for more dialogue between research and practice communities on issues of differential conceptualization. We call for collaboration between a panel of experts consisting of attachment and neurodevelopmental orientated practitioners and researchers, to clarify issues around differentiating between attachment difficulties, ASD, and ADHD. (shrink)

In Epistemic Injustice Miranda Fricker argues that there is a distinctively epistemic type of injustice in which someone is wronged specifically in his or her capacity as a knower. Fricker's examples of identity-prejudicial credibility deficit primarily involve gender, race, and class, in which individuals are given less credibility due to prejudicial stereotypes. We argue that children, as a class, are also subject to testimonial injustice and receive less epistemic credibility than they deserve. To illustrate the prevalence of (...) testimonial injustice against children we document examples of negative prejudicial treatment in forensic contexts where children frequently act as testifiers. These examples, along with research on the child's competence and reliability as a testifier, reveal widespread epistemic prejudice against children. Given that subjection to prejudice can have a detrimental impact on children we discuss ways to ameliorate this form of testimonial injustice. We argue that, both in formal and natural contexts, the child's testimony should be evaluated alongside the relationships that support her development as a testifier. The adult can play a central role in creating successful testimonial interactions with children by acting as a. (shrink)