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Political Conviction and Epistemic Injustice Spencer Case 1 Received: 5 May 2020 / Accepted: 28 August 2020/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2020

Abstract Epistemic injustice occurs when we fail to appropriately respect others as epistemic agents. Philosophers building on the work of Miranda Fricker, who introduced the concept, have focused on epistemic injustices involving certain social categories, particularly race and gender. Can there be epistemic injustice attached to political conviction and affiliation? I argue yes: politics can be a salient social category that draws epistemic injustice. Epistemic injustices might also be intersectional, based on the overlap of politics and some other identity category like race or sex. Further, and more provocatively, I argue that political minorities in academia, in particular conservatives and libertarians, are most likely the victims of epistemic injustice on the basis of their politics. Such epistemic injustices might even be routine. Although more limited in scope and severity than other forms of epistemic injustice, political epistemic injustices in academia ought to be of special concern from a standpoint of social justice because of the academy’s central role in knowledge production and dissemination. Keywords Epistemic injustice . Social epistemology . Campus ethics . Ideological

discrimination . Testimony

1 Introduction Epistemic injustice occurs whenever we fail to respect others as epistemic agents in some significant way. Since Miranda Fricker (2007) introduced the concept of epistemic injustice, it has been a fruitful area of research in social epistemology. This research has primarily focused on racial minorities, women, and other historically oppressed groups, but there may be other forms of epistemic injustice worth investigating. Here I argue for two claims. First, people can be the victims of epistemic injustice on the basis of their political convictions and affiliations, even when there is no history of

* Spencer Case [email protected]

1

Wuhan University School of Philosophy, 113 Old Tom Road, McCammon, Idaho 83250, USA

Philosophia

oppression against their identities, and they aren’t marginalized in society at large. Second, and more controversially, I argue that that political minorities in academia, by which I mean primarily conservatives and libertarians (or those with views associated with these ideologies), are plausibly victims of epistemic injustice. Given the role of the academy as the central site of knowledge production and dissemination, epistemic injustices within this context merit special attention. If this is correct, then this highlights an important social problem and simultaneously address a lacuna in the epistemic injustice literature. In §1, I introduce the notion of epistemic injustice in general and two subtypes, testimonial injustice and epistemic silencing, in particular. In §2, I argue that there are some epistemic injustices that are based on the victim’s political comments and affiliations, and on the intersection o