José Medina

Similarity and the development of rules

Similarity-based and rule-based accounts of cognition are often portrayed as opposing accounts. In this paper we suggest that in learning and development, the process of comparison can act as a bridge between similarity-based and rule-based processing. We suggest that comparison involves a process of structural alignment and mapping between two representations. This kind of structure-sensitive comparison process--which may be triggered either by experiential or symbolic juxtapositions--has a twofold significance for cognitive development. First, as a learning mechanism, comparison facilitates the grasp of structural commonalities and the abstraction of rules; and, second, as a mechanism for the application and extension of previously acquired knowledge, comparison processes facilitate the application of abstract knowledge to new instances.

Identity Trouble: Disidentification and the Problem of Difference

This paper uses the conceptual apparatus of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy to tackle a foundational issue in the philosophical literature on group identity, namely, the problem of difference. This problem suggests that any appeal to a collective identity is oppressive because it imposes a shared identity on the members of a group and suppresses the internal differences of the group. I develop a Wittgensteinian view of identity that dissolves this problem by showing the conceptual confusions on which it rests. My Wittgensteinian view of identity tries to establish two main theses: first, that identity is bound up with difference and presupposes heterogeneity; and second, that the solidarity of identity groups, far from being obstructed by differences, actually requires diversity. Drawing from gender and sexuality studies, I use the mechanism of disidentification to show how there can be shared identities and identity-based solidarity without the erasure of differences.

The Relevance of Credibility Excess in a Proportional View of Epistemic Injustice: Differential Epistemic Authority and the Social Imaginary

This paper defends a contextualist approach to epistemic injustice according to which instances of such injustice should be looked at as temporally extended phenomena (having developmental and historical trajectories) and socially extended phenomena (being rooted in patterns of social relations). Within this contextualist framework, credibility excesses appear as a form of undeserved epistemic privilege that is crucially relevant for matters of testimonial justice. While drawing on Miranda Frickers proportional view of epistemic justice, I take issue with its lack of attention to the role that credibility excesses play in testimonial injustices. I depart from Frickers view of the relation between credibility excesses and credibility deficits, and I offer an alternative account of the contributions that undeserved epistemic privileges make to epistemic injustices. Then, through the detailed analysis of To kill a mockingbird, I elucidate the crucial role played by the social imaginary in creating and sustaining epistemic injustices, developing an analysis of the kind of social blindness produced by an oppressive social imaginary that establishes unjust patterns of credibility excesses and deficits.

Hermeneutical Injustice and Polyphonic Contextualism: Social Silences and Shared Hermeneutical Responsibilities

While in agreement with Miranda Fricker’s context-sensitive approach to hermeneutical injustice, this paper argues that this contextualist approach has to be pluralized and rendered relational in more complex ways. In the first place, I argue that the normative assessment of social silences and the epistemic harms they generate cannot be properly carried out without a pluralistic analysis of the different interpretative communities and expressive practices that coexist in the social context in question. Social silences and hermeneutical gaps are misrepresented if they are uniformly predicated of an entire social context, instead of being predicated of particular ways of inhabiting that context by particular people in relation to particular others. I contend that a more nuanced—polyphonic—contextualization offers a more adequate picture of what it means to break social silences and to repair the hermeneutical injustices associated with them. In the second place, I argue that the particular obligations with respect to hermeneutical justice that differently situated subjects and groups have are interactive and need to be determined relationally. That is, whether individuals and groups live up to their hermeneutical responsibilities has to be assessed by taking into account the forms of mutual positionality, relationality, and responsivity (or lack thereof) that these subjects and groups display with respect to one another. The central argument is developed through an examination of what in race theory and in contemporary epistemologies of ignorance has been termed “white ignorance”; that is, the kind of hermeneutical inability of privileged white subjects to recognize and make sense of their racial identities, experiences, and social positionality.

Wittgenstein and nonsense: Psychologism, kantianism, and the habitus

This paper is a critical examination of Wittgensteins view of the limits of intelligibility. In it I criticize standard analytic readings of Wittgenstein as an advocate of transcendental or behaviourist theses in epistemology; and I propose an alternative interpretation of Wittgensteins view as a social contextualism that transcends the false dichotomy between Kantianism and psychologism. I argue that this social contextualism is strikingly similar to the social account of epistemic practices developed by Pierre Bourdieu. Through a comparison between Wittgensteins and Bourdieus view and an analysis of the notion of habitus , I try to show how social contextualism can account for the distinction between sense and nonsense without falling into transcendental constructivism or social behaviourism.

Wittgenstein as a Rebel: Dissidence and Contestation in Discursive Practices

Abstract Through a new interpretation of Wittgenstein’s rule‐following discussions, this article defends a negotiating model of normativity according to which normative authority is always subject to contestation. To refute both individualism and collectivism, I supplement Wittgenstein’s Private Language Argument with a Social Language Argument, showing that normativity cannot be monopolized either individually or socially (i.e. it cannot be privatized or collectivized). The negotiating view of normativity here developed lays the foundations of a politics of radical contestation which converges with Chantal Mouffe’s framework of ‘radical democracy’, while departing from her agonism in preserving the structuring and constraining role that tacit agreement in action plays in rule‐following practices. My account of the ‘burdens of eccentricity’ elucidates how the normative force of dissidence can be properly recognized and used effectively for social transformations. I argue that there is a ‘presumption of normalcy’ in favour of the established consensus of action, but that this presumption is defeasible: in normative disagreements, a violation of expected normalcy shifts the burden onto the shoulders of rebellious agents who must show that their dissenting behaviour can be a legitimate extension, revision, or transformation of the practice in question.

The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice

Bu kitap, 2007 yılında Miranda Fricker’ın çıkardığı “Epistemic Injustice – Power & Ethics of Knowing (Epistemik Adaletsizlik – İktidar ve Bilmenin Etiği)” kitabının onuncu yılında Routledge’ın çıkardığı bir el kitabıdır. Bu noktada el kitabını “1) hazır referans olarak kolay bir şekilde taşınabilen kitap; 2) belli bir konuyu içeren kısa referans kitabı” olarak tanımlamak mümkündür (www.merriam-webster.com). Routledge’ın ve Oxford’un çıkardığı pek çok alana, disipline, alt disipline ve konuya ilişkin “el kitaplarına” rastlamak mümkündür. Örneğin Oxford’a bakacak olursak yönetişim (Levi-Faur, 2012), kriminoloji (Maguire ve diğerleri, 2007), internet çalışmaları (Dutton, 2013), metafizik (Loux ve Zimmerman, 2005), sözlü tarih (Ritchie, 2011) vb. başlıklarda el kitapları olduğunu görürüz. “El kitabı” tanımını hatırlayacak olursak bu hacimli kitapların “kolay taşınabilen” kitaplar olmasından çok (eğer kindle versiyonlarına sahip değilsek) “bir konuyu içeren kısa referans kitabı” olarak görülmeleri daha mümkündür. Çünkü hacim büyük olsa da bir kavramın, konunun, disiplinin veya çalışma alanının günümüzün artan disiplinlerarasılığı içinde oldukça farklı alanlarla bağlantılandırılması ve pek çok örnek olaya uyarlanarak her biri bir başına farklı çalışmalara konu olması mümkündür. Bu durumda literatür sonsuzdur ya da en azından sonsuz olmaya müsaittir. Fakat “el kitaplarının” bu hacimli halleri yanında o meseleye ait “ana literatürü” verdikleri ve genellikle alanının en bilenen yazarlarını barındırdıkları için konunun “özüne” ilişkin tüm bilgiyi vermeyi amaçladıkları söylenebilir. “Epistemik adaletsizliğin”, bu anlamda, oldukça spesifik bir kavram olarak görünmesine rağmen basımının onuncu yılında bir “el kitabına” kavuşması, her şeyden önce, ona referansta bulunan önemli bir literatürün göstergesidir. Bu literatürün oluşmasının elbette birtakım nedenleri vardır. Bu nedenlere ULUSLARARASI POLİTİK ARAŞTIRMALAR DERGİSİ August 2018, Vol:4, Issue:2 Ağustos 2018, Cilt:4, Sayı 2 e-ISSN: 2149-8539 p-ISSN: 2528-9969 journal homepage: www.politikarastirmalar.org KİTAP DEĞERLENDİRMESİ THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF EPISTEMIC INJUSTICE

Whose Meanings?: Resignifying Voices and Their Social Locations

My philosophical reflections in this essay will revolve around the following question linking meaning and identity: What is the relationship between cultural products and the individuals and groups that create them? More specifically, what is the relation between racial and ethnic meanings and the racial and ethnic groups in which they originate? There are two extreme semantic views that answer this question in highly problematic and inappropriate ways. On the one hand, there are those who tie meanings to their originating expressive communities in a rigid way, claiming that there are proprietary relations between semantic structures and the people who created them. On the other hand, there are those who think that meanings can be completely detached from their originating cultural contexts and completely decoupled from the experiences of their users, becoming portable semantic structures as soon as they are created, that is, becoming usable by any body in any context. Since meanings are treated as properties to fight over by these polarized views, I will use an economic metaphor to analyze and discuss them. I will call the first semantic view the Monopoly Model and the second one the Free Trade Model. By contrast, my own view departs from these economic views of meaning as property and understands meanings as relational?as complex sets of relations or relational structures?rather than as property. In the first section of this article, drawing on Alain Locke and Pierre Bourdieu, I will identify the pitfalls of polarized (economic) semantic models and will articulate a critique of their central assumptions. In section 2, I will sketch my relational model of ethnic and racial meanings, which can overcome the difficulties of the existing polarized views. My discussion will highlight the opportunities and obstacles that exist for subversion and symbolic transformations in our cultural practices, trying to show how they are either obscured or clarified by competing semantic models.

Communicative democracy and solidarity across racial and sexual differences

Building on Iris Marion Young’s account of communicative democracy, this chapter explores how to foster relations of solidarity for the formation of heterogeneous publics and of a pluralistic democratic culture. Drawing lessons from feminist and queer activism, the essay elucidates how multiple publics can be mobilised to join struggles for justice, arguing for Young’s social connection model of responsibility. The essay proposes the notion of chained action as a way of understanding shared (rather than merely collective) responsibility and community action in the struggle towards justice.

Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance (review)

Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance is collaborative philosophy at its very best. The essays that the editors have assembled constitute a very successful critical intervention in philosophy through a set of challenging dialogues on race and epistemic practices. This critical intervention raises exciting questions for future generations of scholars in epistemology, race theory, political philosophy, and philosophy more generally. Drawing on the pioneering work of Charles Mills and standpoint epistemologists (e.g., Marilyn Frye and Sandra Harding), the essays in this volume identify problematic limitations and assumptions in traditional ways of philosophizing that have been pervasive. They delineate the contours of blind spots that operate both in academia and in the social world outside it, tracing their origins and their consequences. They identify questions that have gone not only unanswered but unasked for too long. The critical work that this volume does is innovative and at the same time fi rmly grounded in rich theoretical traditions that have been marginalized by the philosophical establishment (race theory, feminist theory, and—more recently—queer theory). In this sense, Lorraine Code calls attention to the philosophical excavations of Michèle Le Doeuff, who uncovers a forgotten critical tradition of women philosophers (such as Gabrielle Suchon in the seventeenth century) who offered critical refl ections on the exclusions and distortions of masculine knowledge, providing critical tools to develop alternative epistemic practices. On the other hand, in African American philosophy there has been a long and important tradition of critical discourses that identify and diagnose racially motivated forms of ignorance. From DuBois to contemporary race theorists, racial ignorance has been shown to involve entrenched habits and attitudes that go well beyond a mere absence of true belief or a mere presence of false belief; racial ignorance has been shown to be based on a lack of interest to know and a lack of opportunities to explore social realities pertaining to race. As Elizabeth Spelman points out, this is the centerpiece of James Baldwin’s powerful indictment of white America: “that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it” (119). This ignorance is based on a deeply seated epistemic resistance to know. It is a very active and resilient form of not-knowing, not a mere unwillingness to believe, not a mere casual neglect or a simple form of self-deception. It is an ignorance that requires a carefully orchestrated and laboriously maintained form of epistemic neglect, an unknowingness carefully