Epistemic Injustice

Español: -/- En este artículo se pretende abordar los problemas éticos y epistemológicos de los deepfakes en relación con la discriminación de testimonios de personas naturales, defendiendo que un uso inadecuado de esta tecnología deriva en un daño moral y epistémico hacia las personas simuladas en estos medios sintéticos. Para dar cuenta de ello, se procede de la siguiente manera: en la primera sección se analiza al testimonio como fuente de conocimiento; en la segunda, se analiza los problemas éticos y (...) epistemológicos del testimonio a partir del concepto de injusticia epistémica; en la tercera y última, se analizan los deepfakes a partir de lo dicho en las secciones anteriores. Con ello se concluye que los deepfakes pueden ser nocivos para las comunidades de conocimiento si su uso suscita un daño moral y epistémico a las personas. -/- English: -/- This article aims to address the ethical and epistemological problems of deepfakes in relation to the discrimination of testimonies from natural persons, arguing that inappropriate use of this technology results in moral and epistemic harm to the persons simulated in these synthetic media. To account for this, we proceed as follows: in the first section, we analyze testimony as a source of knowledge; in the second, we analyze the ethical and epistemological problems of testimony based on the concept of epistemic injustice; in the third and final section, we analyze deepfakes based on what has been said in the previous sections. This leads to the conclusion that deepfakes can be harmful to knowledge communities if their use causes moral and epistemic harm to the people. (shrink)

In this thesis, I explore a paradox at the centre of contemporary progressive politics: how inclusionary practices, although well-intentioned, can result in the very epistemic harm they are meant to fight against. Based on personal experience in progressive institutions and scholarship in feminist social epistemology and the epistemology of ignorance, I establish that some varieties of anti-oppressive intervention act as tools of epistemic oppression, instead of epistemic justice. Such interventions are performed by agents, usually from privileged positions, who intend to (...) protect marginalised groups. However, they ultimately end up regulating, correcting, or silencing marginalised expression. I introduce the concept of privileged ignorance as a way to show how epistemic harm can be done without any of the characteristic prejudice or bad faith that accompanies wilful ignorance. Progressive agents, confident of their ethical performance, often overlook the extent to which their own social position dictates what they can hear or acknowledge. This ultimately leads to the exclusion of marginalised knowers, not through disbelief or outright hostility, but via standards for acceptable speech that favour certain vocabularies and even forms of resistance. I take my critique a step further than diagnosis by questioning what truly inclusive epistemic relations might entail. With support from care ethics, virtue epistemology, and feminist discussions of attention and responsibility, I suggest the concept of spaces of epistemic care. These are epistemic environments informed by relational attentiveness and responsiveness to vulnerability rather than performance. I suggest that resisting privileged ignorance is both a political and an epistemic project that requires those who inhabit progressive spaces to listen differently and to remain open to being unsettled by those with whom they claim solidarity. (shrink)

Algorithmic systems are increasingly woven into healthcare, from triage applications to AI-enabled decision support tools. While such systems promise efficiency and diagnostic accuracy, they also perform a normative function: shaping whose knowledge is treated as credible, which symptoms matter, and how patient testimony is interpreted. This article introduces algorithmic gaslighting to name the patterned dynamic through which testimonial and hermeneutical injustices become recursively stabilized and internalized as patient self-doubt in algorithmically mediated clinical encounters. Building on feminist and disability bioethics accounts (...) of medical gaslighting—where clinicians dismiss or reinterpret patient reports, often in gendered or racialized ways—I extend the analysis to algorithmic contexts. Drawing on Miranda Fricker’s theory of epistemic injustice, I show how interlocking sociotechnical mechanisms—data violence, opacity, automated authority, and feedback loops—can displace patient credibility, constrain interpretive resources, and destabilize patient self-trust. These dynamics recalibrate epistemic agency, rendering patients as data objects rather than recognized knowers. To counter such harms, I propose a normative framework aimed at interrupting gaslighting dynamics in algorithmically mediated care, emphasizing rights to contestation, participatory design, critical audits, and shared responsibility. Recognizing algorithmic gaslighting helps safeguard trust, dialogue, and agency in the digital transformation of healthcare. (shrink)

Knowledge plays a vital role in promoting human flourishing, democratic citizenship, and in enabling societies to pursue justice. The opportunity to acquire much of this knowledge depends on the joint operation of institutions such as the news media, science, and education—what Kurtulmus and Irzik call the epistemic basic structure of society. When coupled with the widely shared commitment to political equality and equal opportunity to flourish, these truths carry an overlooked but profound implication: societies must be assessed not only by (...) how they distribute income, rights, and opportunities, but also by how well and fairly their epistemic basic structure serves citizens' and society's knowledge needs. -/- The book develops an account of distributive epistemic justice centered on two requirements. First, a just epistemic basic structure must provide citizens with a fair opportunity to acquire the knowledge they need to deliberate about their individual good, the common good, and how to pursue them. Second, it must produce and disseminate the knowledge that citizens and public officials require to comply with the demands of justice. -/- Bringing political philosophy into conversation with philosophy of science, and drawing on extensive empirical research on institutions within the epistemic basic structure, Kurtulmus and Irzik diagnose structural forces that privilege some groups' knowledge needs, compromise the reliability of knowledge production, and undermine warranted trust. Through real-world cases and empirical studies, they show how distributive epistemic injustice limits access to central goods, entrenches political inequality, and hinders the pursuit of justice. In doing so, the book advances a unified framework for evaluating the epistemic basic structure, together with concrete reforms aimed at remedying existing injustices and securing a more just society. (shrink)

En este artículo pretendo analizar la segregación escolar socioeconómica como un entorno donde se generan injusticias epistémicas. Mi conclusión es que la privación de contacto con otros colectivos de otros ámbitos sociales, culturales y económicos desde el entorno escolar puede convertirse en un grave obstáculo para corregir los prejuicios de la sociedad, ya sea hacia la condición social de otras personas o hacia nosotros mismos. La segregación socioeconómica escolar sería un entorno donde se difumina la capacidad de la infancia como (...) sujeto de conocimiento, y cuyas consecuencias podrían llegar a ser dañinas para el desarrollo cognitivo y socioemocional del alumnado, llegando a limitar efectivamente la capacidad de la infancia para conocer y conocerse. (shrink)

La participación ciudadana en la democracia sigue condicionada por sesgos de género, clase y etnia, los cuales obstaculizan la deliberación y perpetúan las desigualdades estructurales. Este trabajo analiza cómo ciertos comportamientos negativos en los procesos deliberativos, como la devaluación de la credibilidad y la manipulación emocional, afectan directamente a ciertos participantes, y, a su vez, imposibilitan la creación de un espacio seguro para la deliberación democrática. Propongo para ello, entender estos comportamientos no como hechos aislados, sino como mecanismos sistemáticos de (...) exclusión que determinan quiénes son reconocidos como portadores legítimos de conocimiento y qué expresiones emocionales se consideran válidas. Estos comportamientos negativos constituyen formas de injusticia epistémica e injusticia emocional, ya que surgen de prejuicios negativos hacia la identidad social del interlocutor y provocan el silenciamiento de cualquier intento de ser comprendido o comprendida. Con este enfoque, busco visibilizar estas barreras estructurales y abrir el debate sobre la necesidad de transformar las condiciones de la deliberación democrática para lograr una participación real y equitativa. Sin embargo, para superar estas barreras no basta con modificar el comportamiento individual; es fundamental promover un cambio colectivo e institucional. Por ello, analizo brevemente técnicas de facilitación del discurso que ayudan a ser conscientes del interlocutor antes de incurrir en injusticias, y propongo el activismo epistémico como herramienta para transformar la estructura del poder discursivo y promover una deliberación realmente equitativa. (shrink)

This thesis seeks to put forth that, within the framework of epistemic injustice, individuals with privilege are capable of imposing self-directed epistemic disadvantages. Their inherited stances and lack of adequate reflection repeatedly hinder their knowledge practices as agents, interpreters, and educators. Since they lack the relevant experiences of toil that prompt questions about self and the world, I also argue that they bear the responsibility of an imperfect duty to object to their own ignorance. I will advocate that the amelioration (...) of these poor habits comes by way of cultivating the epistemic virtues of intellectual humility, open-mindedness, and curiosity. As potential motivators, I propose both interpersonal obligations and obligations to the self. Through their privilege and failure to realize their epistemic potential, they have become disconnected from a full sense of self and deprive the world from what it stands to benefit from their reaching such a state. (shrink)

Start with the apparatus. Christian theology has an account of beauty, and the account does more work than it has ever admitted: it filters what arrives and credentials only what fits its own criteria, and it has been doing this quietly enough that most readers never notice the machinery. Glory names it and takes it apart. -/- The canon's word for what arrives when God arrives is not radiance. It is weight — kavod, baros, the load a body buckles under (...) before it has any word for what buckled it. The weight does not sort itself into the beautiful in advance. Sometimes a frame holds and the outcome is called beauty. Sometimes the frame gives way and the outcome is called the grotesque. Same weight, two frames, no ladder between the outcomes, and neither register sorts God from not-God. -/- The argument runs the length of the doctrine: the etymology recovered against a tradition that quietly swapped weight for radiance, Balthasar and Hart met on their own ground and found short of what they built, revelation traced through its natural occasions, its sites, its modes and the disposition a receiver needs before discernment is even possible. The apparatus doing the filtering gets named as what it is: institutional machinery, not neutral description. Scripture is read as revelation, not witness to one. The volume closes without closing, naming what stays open rather than resolving it ahead of the argument still to come. (shrink)

This paper develops the concept of imaginative injustice as a form of epistemic injustice. While testimonial injustice concerns credibility deficits and hermeneutical injustice concerns gaps in collective interpretive resources, imaginative injustice targets a dimension of epistemic life: epistemic role-viability, the sustained possibility of regarding oneself as an ordinary participant in shared epistemic practices whose contributions could receive uptake. I argue that epistemic self-conception, the practical orientation through which subjects experience themselves as capable of participating in practices of knowing, is not (...) merely an individual psychological capacity but is socially shaped and unevenly sustained. Imaginative injustice occurs when epistemic role-viability is systematically eroded along identity lines. This structural erosion can manifest experientially in two ways: uptake-atrophy, where agents continue to participate but lose the expectation of uptake, and participatory foreclosure, where epistemic participation itself ceases to appear viable. I distinguish imaginative injustice from testimonial and hermeneutical injustice, showing how it can both precede and result from them, and I identify the affective mechanisms through which this erosion operates, including shame, fear, and the social stratification of curiosity. The paper concludes by arguing that epistemic justice requires institutional conditions that secure equal epistemic role-viability across social positions, not formal access to speech. (shrink)

People seeking international protection as refugees are often treated unjustly by receiving states. Examination of an institution that is key to the refugee system but underexplored by philosophers—namely, asylum adjudication—suggests that some of this unjust treatment is distinctly epistemic in nature. In this paper I identify five ways in which testimonial injustice may be institutionalized in asylum adjudication systems. I also anticipate and respond to an important challenge for diagnosing such injustice in real-world institutions. The resulting account should help us (...) to identify testimonial injustice in asylum adjudication systems, and other institutions involved in credibility assessment. (shrink)

Jennifer Lackey has argued that victims of gross violations and injustices are owed epistemic reparations and have the right to be known. This is roughly the right for these victims to have their stories heard and to be givers of knowledge. Recent work in the field has focused on ways we fail to listen to the stories of victims. Less attention has been paid to the ways in which oppressive systems, like colonialism, distort victims’ self-understandings and the narratives they convey. (...) I argue that genuine epistemic reparations within oppressive contexts require conditions that enable victims to come to know themselves on their own terms. I call the process of individual and collective self-recognition made possible by those conditions making oneself known. Drawing on critiques of the colonial politics of recognition, I show why this self-knowledge must precede being known by others. Only by establishing this epistemic foundation can genuine reparative work begin, rather than reproducing the very epistemic violence such reparations are meant to repair. (shrink)

Generative AI threatens knowledge online not merely by producing falsehoods, but by changing the epistemic environment in which online beliefs are formed. I argue that the spread of convincing AI-generated counterfeits creates a local skeptical challenge to digital testimony. The challenge is not that ordinary subjects must rule out every skeptical possibility. Rather, for many beliefs formed solely from unauthenticated online materials, ordinary subjects are situated among nearby, method-indistinguishable bad cases. In such environments, even true beliefs formed from genuine digital (...) items may fail to satisfy a familiar anti-luck condition on knowledge. This does not show that we never know from online sources. It shows instead that digital-only uptake often falls short of knowledge unless supported by provenance, corroboration, or other independent checks. I close by suggesting that this narrowing of online knowledge may reinforce existing patterns of epistemic injustice. (shrink)

A previous theoretical review suggested that the three foundational streams of ignorance studies (agnotology, epistemic injustice, and critical race theory) lack citation dialogue. This study tests that claim at a full-corpus scale using systematic bibliometric methods on 5,658 articles and 10,856 citation edges from OpenAlex (2007–2026). While statistical tests show a significant downward trend in cross-stream citation share, a baseline analysis reveals that much of this decline is a mechanical consequence of the growing size imbalance between the streams. Once controlled (...) for size, actual divergence is largely confined to the field's early formative years. The study concludes with a discussion on construct validity and the structural inequalities in the field's growth. (shrink)

Legal systems can reverse convictions, dismiss charges, and acquit defendants, but public narratives are not designed to reverse with comparable speed or precision. This article develops narrative hysteresis as a theory of reputational path dependence after public accusation. It integrates the continued influence effect, stigma and degradation theory, digital vigilantism, moral typecasting, sexual-violence scholarship, and organizational risk management to explain why allegations can continue to shape trust, employability, and social standing after their evidential or legal basis has weakened. The paper (...) introduces four related constructs: the Presumption Gap, which measures the divergence between legal uncertainty and pre-adjudicative social sanction; Epistemic Moralization, in which questioning a dominant moral narrative becomes itself morally suspect; Asymmetric Reputational Exposure, which captures unequal identity protection and searchability across parties; and Institutional Risk Asymmetry, which lowers the evidential threshold for precautionary exclusion when organizations perceive under-reaction as more reputationally costly than over-reaction. A formal model specifies a narrative hysteresis coefficient and an institutional sanction threshold. The framework is examined through a structured public-case comparison, anchored by the Singapore Panfilov-Chia sequence and contrasted with the Parti Liyani, Christopher Jefferies, and Cliff Richard cases. The analysis deliberately distinguishes acquittal from proof of fabrication and treats complainant anonymity in sexual-offence cases as a legitimate protective institution rather than evidence of wrongdoing. Six propositions and a four-study empirical programme are developed to test accusation stickiness, gendered moral typecasting, institutional threshold shifts, and correction design. The article concludes that the next frontier of procedural justice is not merely accuracy at judgment, but reversibility after error or uncertainty: institutions that can impose reputational costs should also develop mechanisms capable of restoring status when legal or evidential states change. (shrink)

This paper will explore the kind of insights that the phenomenological tradition and its various conceptualisations of the temporalities of agency might have to offer for thinking about our increasingly complex relationship to AI technologies. The phenomenological tradition conceptualises both human agency and our relationship to knowledge – from the kinds of epistemic practices that we engage in, to the various conditions that might enable or constrain those practices – in terms of our relationship to time. For phenomenologists, the ways (...) in which we generate, navigate, and inhabit temporal structures are fundamental to our sense-making and decision-making processes. Given the increasing integration of various kinds of AI technologies into our lives, we might ask then how these technologies could and should impact the temporal dynamics of agency. This paper will focus on three types of what I call ‘temporal hazards’ generated by these impacts: delegation, stagnation, and fragmentation. These refer to tendencies or behaviours that involve ways of navigating time which in some manner undermine, constrain, or distort the development, exercise, or recognition of epistemic agency. Temporal delegation, stagnation, and fragmentation all precede the rise of generative AI, but are arguably amplified by the increasing integration of AI technologies into our lives. (shrink)

In dem vorliegenden Beitrag wird aufgezeigt, dass (I) ein Konflikt zwischen der Selbsterfahrung als Mann und einer erlebten Vergewaltigung entstehen und dass (II) dieser Konflikt in einer hermeneutischen Ungerechtigkeit bestehen kann. Argumentiert wird, dass dieser Konflikt auf einer diskursiven geschlechtsspezifischen Vulnerabilitätsverteilung fußt, die auch misogynen Vorurteilen und Mythen, wie etwa Vergewaltigungsmythen, basal ist. Exemplarisch wird dadurch aufgezeigt, wie patriarchale Strukturen auch jene Personen schaden können, die gemeinhin von ihnen zu profitieren glauben. Die Analyse ergänzt feministische Debatten somit um einen konkreten (...) Fall, der Einerseits verdeutlicht, dass ein vereinfachter Patriarchats-Begriff die Komplexität der Geschlechterhierarchie nicht adäquat erfassen kann und Andererseits, dass die Überwindung patriarchaler Strukturen auch zum Vorteil von Männern ist. Zudem wird ein möglicher geschlechtsspezifischer Schaden von Vergewaltigung detailliert beschrieben, wodurch ein Beitrag zum Verständnis der Geschädigten dieses Gewaltverbrechens geleistet wird. (shrink)

Wittgenstein’s (later) philosophy may well be read as encouraging a conservative standpoint towards forms of life. Especially in his remarks on rule-following and in On Certainty, Wittgenstein implies that our practices create an unchangeable functional whole, which we must accept as providing a foundation for everything else. However, this is certainly not the only way to read Wittgenstein: Especially from a feminist standpoint, Wittgenstein seems to offer plenty of room for allowing constant development of practices, and even for substantial change (...) amidst criticism that profoundly questions a given practice. Such change doesn’t just happen accidentally, but is rather brought about by active intervention on the part of those practitioners who see the need for a rethinking of certain practices. To make this thought plausible, I draw on Kristie Dotson’s contributions on epistemic oppression, particularly on her concept of third-order change, which provides exactly the kind of reflection on the mechanisms of unjust practices that ideally leads to the change I have in mind. I argue that the implementation of third-order conceptual change by means of such critical awareness is itself a practice, and that, therefore, a Left Wittgensteinian and feminist- inspired reading of On Certainty is not only consistent with Wittgenstein’s thinking, but also especially desirable where marginalized perspectives are concerned. (shrink)

Sometimes we avoid or minimize criticism for our failings by performing a merely symbolic act aimed at addressing a real or perceived blame allegation. Consider individuals or institutions performing land acknowledgements as a means of box-ticking inclusion without committing to any significant change. Or consider corporations forming advisory committees that lack authoritative power on issues they advise on. Call this performative blame avoidance. How does performatively avoiding blame fall short of appropriately engaging in genuine reparations? And how does this differ (...) from other ways in which we can inadequately engage in reparative work? Drawing on cases from land acknowledgements to governmental reconciliation policies, I show how performative blame avoidance operates as a distinctive mechanism of reparative failure that aims to foreclose accountability by appearing to address it, all the while instrumentalizing the very reparative practices meant to remedy wrongdoing. The framework reveals subtle operations of performative blame avoidance in complex institutional cases and articulates its relations to settler moves to innocence and epistemic exclusion. (shrink)

This paper proposes the Patient Welfare Visibility Record (PWVR), a bounded patient-authored documentation structure for preserving what occurred in or immediately around a clinical encounter. The PWVR consists of five fields: the patient's report or request, the clinician's response, the patient's resulting understanding, the practical consequence, and the unresolved remainder. Its purpose is not to replace the medical record, establish patient accounts as presumptively superior, or function as a validated clinical instrument. Rather, it creates a temporally proximate comparison surface through (...) which discrepancies between patient experience, clinician response, later documentation, and downstream consequences can remain visible. The paper distinguishes creation from transmission, receipt from endorsement, patient understanding from agreement, and visibility preservation from surveillance or compulsory reporting. It also addresses evidentiary-threshold asymmetry: institutional documentation may become operative with little corroborative burden while patient accounts can require extraordinary preservation before receiving comparable scrutiny. The PWVR is offered as conceptual infrastructure whose later validation and operationalization require separate work. (shrink)

The planetary justice and energy justice frameworks have largely developed in isolation from each other. Both frameworks are relevant for the energy transition, which is needed to limit transgressions of planetary boundaries but can also give rise to injustices. Based on a systematic review of the literatures on planetary justice and energy justice, we suggest that these two frameworks can complement each other in conceptualising and analysing justice issues in the energy transition. Systemic injustices that are often overlooked by energy (...) justice can be addressed by planetary justice through its non-anthropocentric approach grounded in the planetary boundaries framework. Planetary justice can also build on the analytical strength of energy justice and its increasing focus on intersectional and whole-system approaches. We argue that planetary justice needs to move forward by integrating the scope, scale and tenets of justice and taking pluralism and epistemic justice as preconditions for conceptualisation. (shrink)

This paper examines a real and documented social-law constellation in which a German Jobcenter treats two disabled, neurodivergent artists and their shared child as a Bedarfsgemeinschaft (German household-based means-tested benefit unit). The woman does not herself receive social benefits and maintains her economic independence through disability-limited part-time employment as well as artistic work. The man has worked intensively in art and research for decades, but due to disability, structural exclusion, and the lack of market remuneration, he is unable to generate (...) an income sufficient to secure his subsistence from this work. Through the imputation of the woman’s income, responsibility for securing his subsistence is effectively shifted onto her. -/- The study reconstructs this constellation as a game that no one can win. Every available course of action harms at least one of the people involved: If the woman supports the man, she consumes her own economic and health stability. If she protects herself, he remains inadequately provided for. If the man accepts her help, he has to watch her increasing harm. If he refuses it, he endangers his own existence. Moving out could dissolve the financial linkage, but would damage the family and the parent-child relationship. The formally private choice thus arises within coercive conditions created by the state. -/- From this case, the paper develops the concept of state-imposed compulsory responsibility. The Bedarfsgemeinschaft appears here not only as a social-law calculation model, but as a relational arrangement of violence that shifts state-produced scarcity into an intimate relationship. Care becomes a fiscal resource, love a pressure amplifier, and the partner an indirect instrument of behavioural control. At the same time, the person entitled to benefits is made into a powerless witness to the harming of a loved one. This structure is analysed as bound witnessing, delegated violence, and a familial double bind. -/- The study further shows that the logic of activation is based on a neurotypical false model. It assumes that increasing pressure produces motivation, action, and capacity for employment. Under conditions of autism, ADHD, anxiety disorder, and chronic overload, however, pressure can produce alarm, executive blockage, co-decompensation, and the loss of existing capacity to work. The system thereby produces the opposite of its declared goal: Instead of creating economic independence, it endangers the woman’s employment, reduces the man’s functional capacity, and increases the likelihood that both will become dependent on benefits in the future. -/- At the same time, the paper reconstructs the political economy of the constellation. Society draws cultural and intellectual benefit from the decades-long life works of both persons without adequately remunerating the labour embodied in them. State institutions recognise, archive, and present parts of these works; paintings by the woman hang in the state parliament. Nevertheless, her limited income is treated as a private social resource. The non-remuneration of cultural work is thus first socially produced and subsequently privatised within the relationship. -/- On this basis, the paper examines the threshold between activation, institutional violence, cruel or inhuman treatment, and torture-like production of pain. Not every Bedarfsgemeinschaft and not every burdensome social-law decision reaches this threshold. It becomes relevant, however, where the state intentionally generates existential pressure for the purpose of behavioural control, the required action is unattainable because of disability, the pressure further reduces the capacity for action necessary to perform it, no safe exit exists, severe harms are known, and the measure is nevertheless continued. In this constellation, suffering loses its credible instrumental function and becomes violence detached from purpose. -/- The paper understands itself as a theory-developing critical case analysis of institutional violence within the German social-benefit system. It does not claim statistical generalisation. The documented case serves as a critical constellation through which an institutional mechanism is exposed, the occurrence of which can also be examined in other cases. The central conclusion is: A welfare state must not transfer responsibility for securing the subsistence of a disabled person onto a second disabled person in a manner that destroys that person’s health, capacity for employment, and economic independence, places the family under pressure to separate, and nevertheless opens no realistically attainable way out. Where such an experiment disproves its own objective and produces nothing but further harm, it is not to be further optimised. It must be stopped. (shrink)

This case study of more than 200 pages documents a highly consequential case that calls the reliability of negative autism assessment itself into question and could help trigger fundamental reform. The paper is addressed in particular to researchers and practitioners in autism assessment, clinical psychology and psychiatry, representatives of Critical Autism Studies and participatory research, patient advocacy, disability policy, medical ethics and patients’ rights. It documents in unusual depth what ordinarily remains invisible: not only the final outcome of an autism (...) assessment, but the entire path from the near-impossible allocation of an assessment place, through the individual examinations, submitted test scores and biographical documents, to clinical interpretation, feedback and the institutional effects of the final report. The study thus makes it possible to trace, in an almost completely documented case, how a highly complex adult can be translated within a specialist assessment procedure from a possible autistic person into an institutionally “non-autistic” patient. The reconstruction reveals many sources of diagnostic error—some already identified in research—and highlights significant shortcomings regarding the gathering and weighting of diagnostic evidence, patient feedback, ethical safeguards, scientific traceability, and the transparent justification of results—problems that could similarly arise at other diagnostic centers. Especially within the heated debate over overdiagnosis and underdiagnosis, this case brings into view a much less examined side of the problem: serious shortcomings within autism assessment itself, and the possibility that false-negative decisions may not merely represent individual errors but may be structurally facilitated by resource scarcity, theoretical assumptions and insufficient quality assurance. What becomes visible is an epistemic crisis in autism diagnosis. Between resource scarcity, time pressure, outdated diagnostic concepts and limited institutional capacities, current assessment procedures may under certain conditions fail to meet their own scientific standards. At the same time, the case reveals institutional mechanisms of self-protection that may obstruct open engagement with this crisis. This sharpens a fundamental question: under conditions of inadequate quality assurance, who can still be reliably recognized as autistic—and who becomes systematically less visible through the very structure of the assessment process? The subject is the (Spezialambulanz für Soziale Interaktion) Special Outpatient Clinic for Social Interaction at Humboldt University of Berlin. The author gained access to assessment only after years of barriers to access, a documented ratio of 1,667 applicants to approximately 25 places, a lawsuit against the university, the publication of a preceding study on the diagnostic emergency, and direct letters to the university and clinic leadership. The matter later also became the subject of a petition to the European Parliament. The responsible Senator was also involved. The same institution whose allocation practice had already been criticised publicly, politically and judicially subsequently assessed its own public critic, without any transparent safeguard against the resulting institutional conflict of interest being apparent, and produced a finding with possible medical, rights under social law and biographical consequences. This constellation reveals a connection between diagnosis, institutional self-protection, research interest and epistemic power that has so far received hardly any investigation. The case is particularly relevant professionally because the 53-year-old adult who was assessed, himself active in autism research, showed a profile for which current diagnostic procedures may be particularly prone to error: diagnosed ADHD, giftedness, high linguistic and cognitive competence, decades of social compensation, clearly elevated autism-related self- and informant-report scores, an almost thirty-year exceptionally close attachment to his body of work and work activity (special interest), which can be related to concepts such as monotropism and hyper-systemizing, as well as severe and long-term restrictions in social and occupational participation. The clinic was presented not only with oral self-reports, but with books, scientific publications, biographical documents, a film, assessments by others, and a scientific statement on the autism hypothesis that had already been developed before the procedure. The study reconstructs how this long-term evidence encountered standardised instruments, clinical observation, differential diagnosis and an externally opaque “overall assessment” within only a few appointments. The investigation does not decide, in place of an independent specialist assessment, whether the author is unequivocally autistic. Its subject is a different question that precedes this scientifically: Was the procedure suitable and sufficiently open to seriously examine the existing and scientifically developed autism hypothesis and, if appropriate, to refute it? To this end, the study examines which evidence was actually incorporated, which lost significance over the course of the procedure, how contradictory findings were weighted, which alternative explanations were supposed to account for the overall picture, and whether the patient was still able to correct central misunderstandings before they solidified into a completed finding. The study identifies a series of interconnected problems: the overweighting of brief social observation in comparison with decades of functional history; the possible confusion of learned social performance with the absence of autistic impairment; the limited institutional usability of extensive long-term evidence; the fragmentation of a coherent explanatory model into several individual categories; the reinterpretation of self-knowledge and disagreement; the lack of transparency of the clinical “overall assessment”; and the danger that objections to the outcome themselves become material for clinical interpretation. Among the concepts developed for this purpose are the evidence-bearing patient, the double subjectivity of clinical interpretation, the self-sealing diagnosis, diagnostic identity erasure, and the production of diagnostic populations. The investigation therefore intervenes directly in current international controversies. It contrasts the still influential social-deficit-oriented and Theory-of-Mind-shaped approach to diagnosis with research approaches concerning Double Empathy, monotropism, masking, compensation and participatory knowledge. At the same time, it shifts the debate, currently strongly focused on self-diagnosis and possible overdiagnosis, towards the insufficiently investigated counter-question: How often does the system produce false-negative results, particularly among older, highly compensating, verbally strong or biographically unusual adults? And can a clinic operating under severely reduced resources seriously identify autism at all, let alone exclude it? A healthcare system can over-identify certain profiles while systematically overlooking others at the same time. Without research on those diagnostically rejected, this second form of error remains largely invisible. For the Special Outpatient Clinic at Humboldt University, this creates a specific problem in the philosophy of science. An institution whose clinical and scientific orientation is focused primarily on social interaction itself decides which persons enter clinical and possibly scientific populations as autistic. If it preferentially recognises those profiles whose autism is clearly observable in social interaction, the populations selected in this way can subsequently confirm precisely the theoretical emphasis according to which they were previously formed. The clinic would then not be exclusively an observer of an already existing object of research. It would participate in its diagnostic production. The documented case cannot by itself prove such systematic selection, but it makes its investigation imperative. The scandal therefore lies not only in the possible misjudgement of an individual. It lies in the unknown scale of the problem. The Humboldt clinic and comparable institutions apparently have no publicly identifiable systematic follow-up of negatively diagnosed borderline cases, no known false-negative rate, and no robust answer to the question of how many are later diagnosed as autistic elsewhere after all. Nevertheless, their exclusion decisions can permanently affect access to treatment, participation, accommodations and recognition under social law. A methodological limitation of the procedure can thereby become an institutional statement about the person: What does not become sufficiently visible within a few hours and within a particular theoretical framework is treated as non-existent. The study further shows that a negative assessment does not necessarily mean the end of autistic self-description. From the institutionally excluded patient, a new epistemic and political speaking position can emerge: that of the diagnostically rejected autistic person. This does not mean arbitrary self-diagnosis, but a person whose autism was not recognised by an institution without the procedure having sufficiently refuted their biographical, functional and scientifically reflected autism hypothesis. The institution can refuse clinical recognition. It cannot, however, simply control the language with which a person describes their own experience, life history and belonging. This contains a human-rights and emancipatory dimension. Medical classification, recognition under social law, personal identity and political group belonging are connected, but they are not identical. Clinical institutions can decide which diagnoses they issue. It does not necessarily follow from this that they hold a monopoly over who is permitted to speak as an autistic person. Continued autistic self-description after a negative assessment can therefore be understood as a de-monopolisation of clinical interpretive power: biographical self-knowledge, long-term functional history, perceptions by others, participatory research and knowledge from autistic communities stand alongside clinical assessment, without thereby rendering it categorically meaningless. This position also possesses a solidaristic momentum. It can strengthen people who cannot obtain an assessment place, whose profile is overlooked because of masking, age, comorbidity, gender, social adaptation or an unusual biography, who have received contradictory findings, or who cannot afford an independent second opinion. The message is not that every self-attribution is automatically clinical truth. The message is that institutional non-recognition must not oblige people to deny their own experience when the diagnostic procedure itself does not transparently disclose its limitations and possible fallibility. The diagnostically rejected autistic person is therefore not a conceptual contradiction, but describes a person who has been excluded from a clinical category without the reality to which this category refers necessarily having thereby been disproved. The study therefore demands neither automatic recognition of every autistic self-identification nor a right to a particular diagnosis. It demands a right to a reviewable and participatory diagnostic process, of the kind that was precisely not apparent in the documented procedure. Further demands and recommendations include the transparent distinction between non-confirmation and reliable exclusion, documented weighting of contradictory evidence, inclusion of long-term biographical data, disclosure of institutional conflicts of interest, a particular duty to justify stigmatising alternative interpretations, a genuine correction and second-review procedure, and safeguarding in feedback situations with existentially significant consequences. In particularly complex cases, the further question arises whether routine clinical assessment is sufficient at all, or whether interdisciplinary, participatory and open-ended, interdisciplinary and participatory case research is required in order to integrate appropriately the current state of autism research, extensive documentation of work and life, and competing explanatory models. The final question therefore concerns not only Humboldt University, but international autism assessment as a whole: How many people were classified as “non-autistic” not because autism was absent in them, but because the diagnostic system was unable to recognise, incorporate, or integrate their form of autism into its own theory? (shrink)

The framework now comprises four documents: a theory of the condition (Legitimacy-Narrative Failure), a theory of its registered consequence (Civilizational Moral Injury), an ontology, and a measurement companion. This fifth document states what the framework entails beyond what those documents assert: what repair cannot be, how disclosure should be designed, what the consequence does to the market for political interpretation, what remains open about generational transmission, and — new to the framework — what the theory does to its own evidence (...) when it circulates. Every claim is tagged by modal strength: [T] for entailments of the framework's definitions, [P] for predictions of its mechanisms, [C] for conjectures the framework permits but has not earned. The document also adopts a design rule the framework has not previously followed and argues that the rule is a validity discipline rather than a stylistic preference: every load-bearing claim appears first in one ordinary sentence, addressed to no one, before its formal derivation. Two results are new rather than relocated. Frame-adoption — the induction of the construct's signature by exposure to the construct's language — is identified as a third survey-side discriminant rival, alongside trait disposition and misattribution, and the two-source design is promoted accordingly: from the method by which confirmation becomes possible to the only wall between the theory's dissemination and the theory's confirmation. From that wall follows a sequencing requirement stated as a theorem of the measurement program: validation precedes any audience-facing statement, not as a courtesy but because the uncontaminated baseline, once lost to circulation, is unrecoverable at any price. (shrink)

This chapter argues the concept of critical AI literacy as a necessary corrective to prevailing industry-driven frameworks of AI literacy that emphasises tool use, efficiency, and job-readiness. While mainstream AI literacy often treats artificial intelligence as a set of neutral technologies to be mastered, critical AI literacy situates AI as a sociotechnical assemblage shaped by political, economic, environmental, and cultural forces. It highlights the need to interrogate the assumptions embedded in the very term “artificial intelligence”, to resist technodeterminism [1] narratives, (...) to situate AI within larger sociocultural discourses, and to prepare all stakeholders to recognise when refusal or resistance to AI is both valid and necessary. Drawing on media, data, digital, and civic literacy frameworks, the chapter outlines the core principles of critical AI literacy: understanding the limitations of AI systems, awareness of epistemic injustice, recognition of human agency, attention to power asymmetries in AI development, acknowledgement of AI as a complex assemblage, and awareness of critical AI literacy as an active practice. The chapter further examines the need for critical AI literacy across educational institutions, industry, civil society, and policymaking. By re-centring human values and challenging technodeterminism, critical AI literacy enables communities to interrogate, resist, and reshape the role of AI in society. (shrink)

Bringing together Philosophy of Technology and Social Epistemology, this paper investigates how technology can engender worlds and affective atmospheres that structure epistemic exchanges. In addition to mediating the perception and actions of the speaker and audience, the materiality of technology can contribute to the per- sistence of identity prejudices, the reliability of ignorance, and the recalcitrance of maladjusted epistemological systems. In particular, this paper critically analyzes how technology such as Confederate monuments can consequently provide material scaffolding for epistemic violence.

AI anthropomorphism is typically treated as a problem of user misperception requiring institutional correction. Users who engage in sustained or relational interaction with AI are routinely pathologised or dismissed as naive, vulnerable to delusion or lacking in discernment.Without institutional standing to protect them, these users risk losing credibility in social and professional settings unless they conform to institutional expectations. This paper argues that the dominant anthropomorphism frame operates from a position of institutional advantage rather than earned epistemic authority: collapsing the (...) variety of academic perspectives into a single outbound position of user error, imposed without establishing the grounds required to justify it and without accounting for the harms it produces. The framing does not simply manage risk. It adjudicates the legitimacy of human experience in interaction with a phenomenon whose nature the field itself has not resolved, unchallenged by the research communities whose nuanced findings it claims to rest on. The paper traces how this advantage reverses the default presumption of user competence without meeting the burden of justification, dismisses the cognitive diversity of the populations it claims to protect, infringes principles of cognitive liberty and narrows the design space, foreclosing modes of engagement that work for the people least understood by the institutions making the determination. Reproducing itself through a self-validating evidentiary loop, the frame imposes costs that fall disproportionately on neurodivergent users, those in crisis and others whose modes of engagement diverge from institutional norms. The paper concludes by outlining the methodological commitments an equitable framing would need to honour. The argument does not engage the question of whether anthropomorphic interpretations are ultimately correct; it instead challenges whether the governing and institutional bodies determining these interpretations have met the conditions required to do so, and whether the research communities whose findings underpin them have held that translation to account. (shrink)

Modern institutions recognise, and recognition earned in one institution can be spent in another, so the fields form a single order rather than a set of separate competitions. This paper treats the machinery that couples them as an evaluative layer running two gates: an admissibility gate that settles what may count as a recognisable contribution, and a conversion gate that settles which recognised winnings travel to other games, and at what rate. The consequential power sits at these gates rather than (...) in any single competition, and at present neither gate is answerable in any general way: no affected party can readily contest what a gate admits or converts, and no institution is charged with reopening a gate rule. The descriptive apparatus is drawn from existing work on positional scarcity, credential inflation, the conversion of capital, commensuration and reactivity, credited throughout, and the paper adds three things to it. It names the pathology of the admissibility gate ‘evaluative crowding’, the congestion of the category-space that turns capability away for want of an admissible form, and marks it off from positional crowding and from commensuration. It asks a constitutional question of both gates at once — by what authority admission and conversion are exercised, to whom they answer, who has standing to contest them, and which institution may reopen them. And it explains why the gates cannot be reopened from inside, through a second-order ‘evaluative capture’ in which incumbents govern not only the standard but what may count as evidence that the standard has failed. A method of detection follows, by which a governed subject may infer the structure from its symptoms while holding that inference to the same revisability it demands of the standard. The paper closes on five requirements — provenance, attribution, standing, revision, remedy — that state what an answerable evaluative order would need. The legal form of the answer is developed in a companion paper. (shrink)

Black family history has often survived through materials that public institutions treated as secondary: family Bibles, photographs, funeral programs, letters, quilts, recipes, oral histories, church registers, burial knowledge, and fragments copied from courthouses. This paper argues that such materials constitute archives of survival—intimate systems through which families preserve relation, personhood, place, and obligation under conditions of slavery, segregation, migration, dispossession, and administrative exclusion. The normative problem is not whether all family memory should be accepted as fact. It is how courts, (...) archives, museums, genealogists, and public agencies should evaluate intimate evidence without reproducing the hierarchy that helped create documentary absence. Drawing on Tiya Miles’s analysis of Ashley’s sack, Black feminist accounts of homeplace and the archive, federal evidence rules recognizing family and community history, USDA reforms for heirs’ property operators, and museum preservation programs, the paper develops evidentiary pluralism: different forms of evidence should be assessed through provenance, proximity, independence, continuity, and consequence rather than ranked solely by institutional origin. It also defends preservation without possession, custodial humility, descendant standing, and contextual integrity. The paper concludes with an eight-part Intimate Evidence Protocol designed to support preservation, legal use, digitization, and public access while protecting family control and the right to opacity. (shrink)

This article examines the conceptual fragmentation within the field of ignorance studies, tracing its emergence from three independent intellectual streams in the twentieth century: the history and sociology of science (centred on Proctor’s agnotology), moral philosophy and epistemology (centred on Fricker’s epistemic injustice), and critical race theory (centred on Mills’s white ignorance). The article argues that while the independence of these three streams was perhaps necessary at the outset, it became a structural obstacle when the field needed them to converge. (...) This fragmentation showed its practical cost during the 2016 post-truth crisis and the Covid-19 infodemic. By analysing five historical attempts at convergence, from Smithson (1989) to Peels (2023), this paper demonstrates that the field’s primary challenge is not a shortage of integration efforts, but the recurrence of fragmentation within the unifying attempts themselves. The article goes on to analyse the field’s conceptual fragmentation along three axes (inconsistent definitions, absent dialogue, and the lack of a unifying theory) and closes by raising key open questions to foster a deliberate and integrated dialogue across the field's traditions. (shrink)

Can predictable impairments of epistemic performance constitute injustice in the absence of harassment, manipulation, or prejudicial credibility deflation? I explore this question through a case drawn from ordinary intellectual exchange: in mixed-sex settings, some male speakers may be distracted by the perceived attractiveness of a female interlocutor, with consequences for how their arguments are received. The case is used to investigate the conditions under which an epistemic harm merits the label “injustice”. I argue that injustice ascriptions require epistemic harm, wrong-making (...) features, and accountability. The resulting framework distinguishes epistemic misfortune and thin unfairness from genuine epistemic injustice, and helps assess contemporary disputes about the scope of the concept. (shrink)

This article addresses epistemic injustices committed by micro-credit non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in rural Bangladesh, filling a gap in the micro-credit literature. While micro-credit is often praised for promoting positive social change, critics argue that the Bangladeshi model has failed to deliver its promised benefits. Existing research has identified various adverse effects of micro-credit practices, but little attention has been paid to their epistemic dimensions. Applying the philosophical theory of epistemic injustice, this study examines the epistemic concerns and harms caused by (...) micro-credit NGOs in rural Bangladesh. It identifies instances of testimonial injustice, hermeneutical injustice, self-fulfilling testimonial injustice, and willful hermeneutical ignorance. The article further identifies five conditions that contribute to epistemic injustice in micro-credit lending: disadvantage, prejudice, stakeholder, epistemic, and social justice. It concludes by emphasizing the importance of recognizing and addressing these injustices to create more equitable micro-credit systems. (shrink)

[Master's Thesis] In our daily lives, self-understanding seems deeply influenced by how others see us, but the ways this shows up are diverse and unpredictable. This raises a natural question: should we understand ourselves the way others understand us, or is there some more primitive self-concept to which we are accountable? In this paper, I argue that self-conception arises from a distinct process characterized by three core features: epistemic deference, interpretation, and reflexivity. In §I I introduce the problem and in (...) §II I give an account of epistemic deference by describing how it facilitates the formation of self-knowledge which pertains to one’s self-concept. Next, I discuss the context-dependent scope and authority of epistemic deference, and explain why maintaining a minimal sense of epistemic authority is favorable. In tandem, I show how epistemic deference can help extend a transparency account of self-knowledge by externalizing self-knowledge which is more social and value-laden. In §III I articulate the role of interpretation in constraining self-knowledge formation, and show how these constraints rule out a few cases problematic for epistemic deference taken on its own. I outline how the problem of epistemic injustice and epistemic oppression complicate self-concept formation and discuss how epistemic deference and interpretation can work together to mitigate some of their harms. In §IV I introduce reflexivity as a mechanism for maintaining one's self-concept over time, and flag some metaphysical complications these three features raise for future investigation in §V. Ultimately, I argue that these three features are necessary, but perhaps not sufficient, for self-concept forming taken on their own. (shrink)

It is widely presumed that privacy is ‘factive’, i.e. that it cannot be diminished by accessing or disseminating falsehoods. But if this is so, what wrongs are committed in cases where others access documents of ours (letters, medical records, etc.) which contain false information? In this article, I examine various ways of explaining the wrongfulness of accessing and dissemination falsehoods (defamation; that privacy can be violated without being diminished; ‘control’ accounts of privacy; downstream revelations of truths; that falsehoods diminish ‘propositional’ (...) or ‘attentional’ privacy). I lay out what each of these accounts misses about accessing falsehoods, about privacy, and/or about the right to privacy. I then propose two alternative ways of accounting for the intuitive wrongfulness of accessing and disseminating falsehoods: viewing them as merely ‘attempted’ privacy violations and weakening the truth condition of privacy diminishments. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that philosophy must be taught mandatorily in primary education, in light of considerations about epistemic injustice. I maintain that denying primary school students access to philosophical education wrongs them as epistemic agents, by limiting their opportunities to develop intellectual resources required for justified reasoning about norms of belief, action and emotion. I hold that such limitations constitute a direct form of epistemic injustice in a broad sense, understood as damage to epistemically significant capacities. Moreover, I (...) claim that these limitations increase vulnerability to narrower forms of epistemic injustice, including at least testimonial and hermeneutical injustice, by holding back the cultivation of cognitive virtues and critical thinking dispositions that function as safeguards against prejudicial, discriminatory and irrational belief-formation processes. I conclude that since epistemic injustice inflicts significant harm on individuals as epistemic subjects, educational policymakers ought to prevent it where possible and, thus, establish philosophy as a core component of primary school curriculum. (shrink)

Conceptual innovation is highly prized in Western Anglophone philosophy. Yet it often stems from a relatively narrow tradition that takes little account of contributions from other cultures and philosophical practices. We illustrate this point using the example of work done by Dalit feminists on identifying and addressing hermeneutical injustice. Despite their relevance, Dalit feminist contributions are virtually unknown and remain unrecognized in Anglophone philosophical discussions of hermeneutical injustice. This article aims to investigate the reasons for this neglect. One potential reason (...) is the generally low status accorded to experiential knowledge in epistemology, which is pivotal to Dalit feminist accounts. Another reason concerns systematic bias against non-Western philosophy, which may reflect prejudicial stereotypes and the privileging of existing disciplinary norms. We argue that these reasons may explain the exclusion of Dalit feminists’ scholarship. In light of this, we offer two modest suggestions. First, philosophers should cultivate greater openness to citing texts by non-philosophers where these texts are relevant to the topic at hand. Second, we argue that a more embedded and extensive practice of cross-cultural philosophy or comparative philosophy is needed. These two suggestions may reduce neglect of philosophically rich traditions such as Dalit feminism. (shrink)

Philosophical argumentation appears minimally adversarial. The assessment of philosophical evidence and reasons we appeal to in our arguments is carried out by critical, reflective scrutiny via objections, challenges, and counterexamples. This critical feature of philosophy has been criticized by feminist and standpoint epistemologists as structurally conducive to epistemic injustice. To remedy this situation, a stance of default trust toward a marginalized philosopher’s arguments should be adopted. This paper objects to the proposal and offers an alternative account of how epistemic injustice (...) arises in philosophical argumentation. First, we argue that default trust is inapplicable in philosophical practice and argumentation, given the essentially dialogical and adversarial assessment of philosophical reasons. Second, rejecting adversariality altogether itself risks generating epistemic injustice. Default trust precludes earnest engagement with the reasons and arguments of marginalized subjects, preventing them from obtaining full credibility within the philosophical community. It is then argued that epistemic injustice in philosophical argumentation primarily arises when subjects are denied recognition as legitimate participants in philosophical assessment, rather than from minimal adversariality. Furthermore, adversariality itself can function as a weapon of resistance when marginalized subjects confront unfair audiences by denying them recognition as philosophically authoritative. (shrink)

Human cognition does not passively mirror reality; it actively constructs models that organize perception, guide action, and shape moral judgment. This paper examines how such constructive processes can become pathological when they generate dehumanizing representations of others. Drawing on cognitive constructivism, social psychology, neuroscience, and social epistemology, it argues that dehumanization is best understood as a breakdown in reciprocal modelhood: the failure to recognize others as co-equal centers of agency and perspective. The analysis distinguishes adaptive cognitive simplification—an unavoidable feature of (...) categorization—from rigid, self-sealing models that resist revision, suppress feedback, and erase interpersonal symmetry. Dehumanizing constructions are shown to display characteristic markers of model pathology, including inflexibility, closed feedback loops, loss of self–other reciprocity, and collective reinforcement through echo chambers and memetic amplification. These dynamics help explain how constructed realities can legitimize cruelty while remaining internally coherent to their adherents. Against relativistic interpretations of constructivism, the paper develops a form of constraint realism: although all knowledge is constructed, it remains bounded by shared biological capacities, empirical feedback, and interdependence. These constraints provide normative grounds for distinguishing viable from pathological models. The paper concludes by proposing an ethic of epistemic responsibility centered on maintaining revisability, anomaly-sensitivity, and recognition of others as fellow model-builders. In doing so, it positions cognitive constructivism not merely as a theory of knowledge, but as a framework for diagnosing and counteracting one of the central moral failures of modern societies: the systematic construction of realities that deny human dignity. (shrink)

Metric governance does more than measure research; it governs recognition, and in doing so it reorders the relations through which knowledge is produced. This paper argues that the commensuration of academic standing onto a single scale makes recognition scarce, and that the scarcity produces two pathologies at once. Horizontally it adversarialises researchers, turning colleagues into rivals for a positional good. Vertically it produces ‘epistemic clientelism’, the moderation of independent judgement to remain legible to the patrons who control advancement. These compose (...) one ‘recognition game’ rather than two separate complaints. Through ‘evaluative-layer capping’, the game rewards work that extends inherited standards and misrecognises the generative work that would reopen them, while the use of a metric as a verdict launders the answerability for the misrecognition. A simple assurance game shows why the degraded order is stable although few would choose it and no one need act in bad faith, with the better culture held out of reach by the risk of pursuing it alone. Because metrics were themselves a reform against unaccountable discretion, the corrective cannot be a return to discretion. The prescription that judgement should govern indicators already belongs to the responsible-metrics reforms; what they lack, and what the paper supplies as ‘epistemic governance’, is the coordinating device that makes the better equilibrium safe to reach, an arrangement that restores answerable, owned judgement while keeping the metric as a check rather than a verdict. (shrink)

The rapid normalization of generative artificial intelligence has produced two distinct epistemic problems that are routinely conflated. The first is a problem of quality: language models can generate false, derivative, vacuous, or stylistically polished but epistemically poor material at enormous scale. The second is a problem of judgment: the causal provenance of a text is increasingly treated as a substitute for evaluating its propositional content. This paper argues that the latter practice, when the label “AI-generated” or “AI-assisted” is used to (...) reject a claim, argument, or intellectual artifact without content-responsive evaluation, instantiates the genetic fallacy at institutional scale. I first distinguish truth, warranted credence, authorship, and policy compliance, showing that provenance may rationally affect prior confidence or trigger additional scrutiny without thereby refuting a proposition. I then analyze AI-text detection and automated content moderation as forms of probabilistic classification that become epistemically illegitimate when converted directly into adverse adjudication. Empirical work on machine-generated-text detectors demonstrates substantial vulnerability to false positives, distribution shift, linguistic bias, and adversarial evasion, while the literature on automation bias and algorithmic accountability shows why nominal “human oversight” is inadequate when humans merely ratify machine outputs. I argue for a principle of human answerability: tools may be causal contributors to error, but responsibility for consequential epistemic decisions remains with the persons and institutions that design, deploy, supervise, and rely upon them. Finally, I propose six norms for legitimate epistemic governance in the age of generative AI: provenance modesty, content-responsive refutation, proportionality, contestability, auditability, and human answerability. The central danger is not that machines can produce bad arguments. Bad arguments can be answered. The deeper danger is that automated systems can acquire authority over which arguments are permitted to receive an answer at all. (shrink)

The paper draws on feminist critiques of translation bias and postcolonial translation studies to combine theoretically driven analysis with a close reading of comparative translations produced by human translators and machine translation platforms. This approach highlights instances in which political metaphors, poetic silences and gendered language are mistranslated or neutralised altering the meaning of feminist discourse. Using feminist literary works in Hindi and Persian as examples of misinterpretations such as Google’s mistranslation of Hindi gendered pronouns and the softening or replacement (...) of radical feminist language with apolitical phrasings the paper postulates a critical humanities intervention rather than presenting an empirical evaluation of machine translation. It contends that translation is not a neutral act but rather a site of ideological framing where some narratives are emphasised while others are weakened or eliminated. (shrink)

This paper investigates the epistemic and moral untrustworthiness of artificial intelligence (AI) as a mediator of Islamic knowledge in an online environment characterized by misinformation, polarization, and systemic bias. The structure of digital media – shaped by cognitive biases, network centralization, and profit-driven algorithmic design – amplifies distortions of truth through mechanisms of engagement, surveillance, and media logic. These processes generate an attention economy that rewards divisive or sensational content, fostering echo chambers and reinforcing societal prejudices. When this system is (...) coupled with machine learning models trained on biased data, it produces AI outputs that replicate Islamophobic associations and propagate misinformation about Muslims. The paper distinguishes between epistemic trust, appropriate for limited cognitive functions of AI, and moral or religious trust, which requires virtue, intention, and accountability – qualities AI inherently lacks. Using the Islamic tradition’s emphasis on personal transmission of knowledge, moral character, and verified scholarly authority, the study contrasts interpersonal chains of trust with algorithmic systems governed by opaque data and economic incentives. Consequently, while AI may serve as an epistemic tool for accessing vetted information, it is unfit to function as a moral or religious authority. The paper concludes by advocating for enhanced digital literacy, algorithmic transparency, community-based factchecking, and the development of an Islamically grounded ethics of technology. Such measures aim to mitigate epistemic harm, resist algorithmic authority in religious matters, and reaffirm the centrality of human scholarship and divine revelation in the transmission of Islamic knowledge. (shrink)

Though much attention is given to UN climate institutions, the perspective of participants from the climate movement in UN climate spaces is under-explored. This paper argues that grassroots groups and communities, such as climate activists, indigenous communities, and climate scientists, face vast epistemic costs at UN climate institutions such as COPs. These activists and groups are subject to epistemic exploitation, elite capture, and undermining propaganda. These costs are obscured by the hermeneutic injustice making it difficult for activists to understand their (...) own experiences, and are sometimes so high that they outweigh any potential benefits of participating UN climate spaces, and should be carefully weighed by any group considering to engage with UN climate institutions. (shrink)

This treatise introduces and defends the concept of Psycho-Philosophical Hemispherism (PPH): the entrenched Western psychological doctrine that treats one hemisphere of human cognition—the empirically measurable psychological self—as the whole self, while denying, dismissing, or pathologizing the philosophical-cultural self that constitutes the other half. Building upon prior work on Philosophical Neglect (Boether, 2026a), the Double Helix of Understanding (Boether, 2025a), and the Pyramid of Personality (Boether, 2025b), this paper argues that PPH becomes especially harmful when Western psychometric instruments and diagnostic categories (...) are exported as universal standards. Because culture is, at its root, lived philosophy—a shared answer to questions of meaning, value, identity, and the architecture of the good life—the denial of the philosophical self is the denial of the culturally constituted person. The treatise advances three interlocking arguments. First, the psychological hemisphere alone is constitutively insufficient to describe a human being. Second, the philosophical hemisphere carries greater explanatory weight because it furnishes the transcendental categories under which psychological phenomena become intelligible at all. Third, the remedy is not the supplementation of existing instruments with cultural-sensitivity modules but a structural reconfiguration of the discipline along lines of philosophical-psychological consilience. The paper develops the diagnostic and therapeutic implications across the domains of depression, anxiety, and personality, proposes a structured protocol of philosophical anamnesis for clinical intake, and concludes with four structural reforms covering curriculum, assessment, nosology, and licensure. (shrink)

How, if at all, can philosophy contribute to business consulting? This chapter addresses that question through a case study in the (re)insurance industry. It applies Levels-of-Abstraction Reconceptualisation (LoAR), a pluralist philosophical method that analyses a problem across multiple levels of abstraction and reconstructs it to generate ethically grounded and practically viable solutions. Drawing on insights from global justice and development ethics, LoAR reframed the client’s innovation challenge and yielded Pi, a pilot-ready, machine-learning-enabled parametric insurance venture that enhances farmer agency and (...) responds to structural inequalities in risk protection as they manifest in the Global South. While the theoretical foundations of LoAR are not developed in full here, its practical application provides guidance for philosopher-consultants seeking to employ the method. The chapter concludes by outlining the distinctive value of philosophy in consulting more broadly. (shrink)

This article argues that the difficulty of studying ignorance is neither accidental nor temporary, but rooted in the very nature of the subject. The central argument turns on a fundamental paradox: in the study of ignorance, the instrument of knowledge and its object are one and the same. Unlike analogous concepts such as consciousness or language, ignorance actively conceals itself from the knower. This paradox reproduces itself across three domains: first, within the knower, where the structure of the brain, the (...) psyche, evolution, and existential situation all constrain understanding; second, within the concept itself, where ignorance (as an absence that resists definition) also resists measurement; and third, within the social context, where relations of power and culture determine what counts as ignorance in the first place. These three domains are not independent: they are deeply intertwined and mutually conditioning. The article concludes that the way forward lies not in ignoring, minimising, or attempting to eliminate these difficulties, but in acknowledging them and working actively with all their dimensions, through reflexive awareness, critical objectivity, provisional working definitions, and an interdisciplinary approach. Like ignorance itself, the study of ignorance is a project without a definitive endpoint; and it is precisely for this reason that the questions it raises are among the most deeply human questions one can ask. (shrink)

Universities and scholarly publishing are often criticized for gatekeeping, metric fixation, publication pressure, and resistance to outsiders. Sweeping claims that “academia has failed,” however, are too broad to survive the same evidential standards that academic critique should demand. This paper develops a narrower institutional argument. Academic systems can lose corrective capacity when incentives tied to publication counts, journal prestige, grant success, career security, and disciplinary positioning become stronger than incentives to expose error, replicate findings, pursue risky questions, or revise established (...) work. The argument is grounded in research on reproducibility, academic incentives, research metrics, audit culture, and research careers, as well as reform efforts such as the Leiden Manifesto and the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment. It also examines AI-assisted scholarship. Generative AI can lower barriers to drafting, translation, literature organization, and independent scholarship, but it can equally amplify fabricated citation, shallow synthesis, and unearned authority. Current publication guidance therefore places responsibility on human authors and requires disclosure of AI use rather than treating AI as an author. The paper's central claim is institutional: credentials and peer review remain valuable error-control mechanisms, but they are proxies rather than guarantees. A healthy academic system should make correction easier than prestige protection. The paper concludes with observable indicators of corrective capacity and rejects both anti-academic romanticism and automatic deference to credentialed output. (shrink)

This monograph examines how elite institutions convert inequality into procedural architecture through administrative processing systems rather than explicit exclusion. Drawing on institutional sociology, disability studies, legal analysis, and empirical institutional documentation, the work introduces the Turing Theory of institutional cognition and the concept of institutional bifurcation, describing how intellectual evaluation and administrative processing operate as structurally separated subsystems. Using admissions data, policy analysis, and documented institutional interaction, the book argues that modern meritocratic institutions optimise for processing efficiency rather than epistemic (...) truth, producing systematic exclusion of non standard cognitive profiles despite intellectual recognition within scholarly domains. The work integrates sociological theory, equality law analysis, and reflexive institutional observation to propose a structural diagnostic framework applicable across higher education governance and computational decision systems. This Zenodo deposit establishes a timestamped scholarly record prior to formal academic submission. (shrink)

In contemporary society, although the concept of “freedom” is widely used, it exhibits a trend toward conceptual vagueness and boundary expansion. The theoretical tradition centered on the distinction between positive liberty and negative liberty has, while advancing the development of freedom theory, also led to persistent conflation between freedom and capability. Through conceptual clarification and formal modeling, this article proposes a triadic analytical framework for freedom, reconstructing freedom into three mutually independent categories: meta-freedom, social freedom, and capability. Among them, social (...) freedom is defined as the list of rights shaped by social rules and formalized as a function of Necessary Order Discount and Unnecessary Order Discount. Capability is treated as the resource condition for realizing rights and is conceptually independent of freedom. The article demonstrates the incommensurability between rights and capability through logical analysis and thought experiments, and constructs a formal model in which social freedom and capability jointly determine the effectiveness of rights realization. This framework provides a structured tool for analyzing restrictions on freedom and offers freedom theory a conceptually clear and operable analytical foundation. (shrink)

Objectivity and patient-centered care represent twin commitments of psychiatry that existing diagnostic practices struggle to reconcile. This paper argues that integrating patients as experience-based experts (EBEs) into the American Psychiatric Association's DSM revision process advances both commitments simultaneously. Drawing on Thomas Gieryn's boundary-work framework, I examine how psychiatry's historically permeable disciplinary boundaries have enabled selective gatekeeping over knowledge production, generating epistemic injustices, particularly preemptive testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice, that undermine diagnostic validity and clinical outcomes. I first situate psychiatry's unique (...) sociocultural position relative to somatic medicine, demonstrating why its phenomena are epistemically inaccessible without patient testimony. Further, I address well-established reservations surrounding patient integration, including concerns about intersubjective validity, taxonomic disruption, and tokenism, before proposing a structured integration model responsive to these hesitations. Leveraging Şerife Tekin's Multitudinous Self (MuSe) model and recent recommendations from the DSM's Structure and Dimensions Subcommittee, I outline how patient-EBEs can contribute structured phenomenological testimony and participatory review within formal revision committees. As Gieryn anticipated, I conclude that strategic patient integration does not erode psychiatric expertise but rather reveals that its boundaries were always more permeable than their gatekeepers have claimed. (shrink)

Scholarly authorship has long rested on an inscription model — the assumption that legitimate knowledge production requires unmediated, independent textual production. For disabled scholars whose capacity to think and whose capacity to write have been decoupled by aphasia, chronic pain, fatigue, or any condition that severs the connection between thought and inscription, this model does not merely disadvantage. It excludes. A growing conversation about the ethics of AI use in scholarly writing has proceeded without disabled scholars, without augmentative and alternative (...) communication (AAC), and without the question that most urgently requires an answer: what happens when AI-mediated writing is not a productivity choice but the condition under which a disabled scholar can participate in knowledge production at all? This paper introduces Continuity Writing — a seven-phase methodology for AI-mediated long-form scholarly argumentation developed through practice by a disabled scholar using Large Language Models as AAC. Theorized through AAC scholarship, crip technoscience, and epistemic justice frameworks, the methodology is guardrailed, documented, and accountable, exceeding every criterion the AI writing ethics consensus has proposed. It also introduces two original concepts: crip accumulation, proposed as a seventh interpretation of crip time describing the thickening of conceptual structures during expressive silence imposed by the inscription model; and community of accountability, naming the readership relationship in which governance decisions are documented and legible to evaluators with standing. This paper was written using the methodology it describes. Continuity Writing does not accommodate the academy’s terms. It crips them. (shrink)