With All Due Deference: Marginalized Epistemic Agents and What They’re Owed

Abstract

When we seek medical advice, we look to doctors. When we seek plumbing advice, we look to plumbers. And when we seek advice for how to make society more just and less marginalizing, we ought to look to those who are marginalized. According to feminist standpoint epistemologists, we have good epistemological reasons for listening to the marginalized with respect to matters of marginalization: knowledge is based on one’s perspective, as determined by one’s social identities like race, gender, and ability, and those in subordinate social groups have epistemic advantages compared to those in dominant social groups. This dissertation argues that the epistemic advantages of some marginalized people make them experts. These marginalized experts deserve deference in some contexts, just as one might defer to other experts in some contexts. The first chapter of the dissertation characterizes significant but often overlooked aspects of marginalized expertise, including the ability to generate non-knowledge epistemic goods like intuitions and all-in judgments, understandings, and skilled attunements with respect to some aspects of the world. In the second chapter, the dissertation develops the view that some marginalized people are experts and specifies in what cognitive and practical domains those marginalized people have expertise. Based on this account of marginalized expertise, in the third chapter, the dissertation lays the groundwork for how to have difficult but important conversations about injustice in advocacy, teaching, and policy settings. In particular, the dissertation argues that marginalized people deserve a defeasible presumption of expertise in these contexts, and that this presumption is both rationally defensible and can contribute to the aims of justice.