Epistemic Injustice Expanded: a Feminist, Animal Studies Approach
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Epistemic Injustice Expanded: A Feminist, Animal Studies Approach By Rebecca Tuvel Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in Philosophy August, 2014 Nashville, Tennessee Approved: Kelly Oliver, Ph.D. José Medina, Ph.D. Charles Scott, Ph.D. Lisa Guenther, Ph.D. David Wood, Ph.D. Lori Gruen, Ph.D. ! To my parents, for their constant support and generosity ii! ACKNOWLEDGMENTS For her amazing mentorship, I owe my deep gratitude to my dissertation chair, Kelly Oliver. She lent invaluable support, insight and much of her time throughout several versions of this project. I am thankful for her ongoing encouragement and inspiration. Thanks also to my committee members, José Medina, Charles Scott, Lisa Guenther, David Wood and Lori Gruen for their time, expertise and thoughtful feedback. I am especially grateful to Alison Suen for her constant friendship, general comic relief, and intellectual support, particularly as a fellow feminist animal ethicist. My graduate career would not have been as meaningful without her. Special thanks also go to Andrew Forcehimes for his unwavering support, brilliant insight and indispensable feedback. His ability to cut to the core of any argument is unparalleled, and his critique urged my work toward greater clarity and precision. Finally I would like to acknowledge my mother, Harriet, who taught me how to write. iii! TABLE OF CONTENTS Page DEDICATION .................................................................................................................... ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .................................................................................................. iii INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................... 1 Chapter I. VANCOUVER’S MISSING WOMEN: TESTIMONIAL INJUSTICE AND EPISTEMIC ABJECTION .............................................................................. 10 Testimonial Injustice ....................................................................................... 15 Abjecting the Vancouver Missing Women ..................................................... 25 Kristeva’s Abject ....................................................................................... 26 Abjecting Prostitutes ................................................................................. 29 Epistemic Abjection .................................................................................. 33 Fricker’s Rational Knowers ............................................................................. 38 Kantian Rationality .................................................................................... 40 Reason-Responsivity ................................................................................. 44 II. EPISTEMIC INJUSTICE AGAINST ANIMALS .......................................... 48 A Defense of Animal Knowledge ................................................................... 50 The Pitfalls of Epistemic Internalism ........................................................ 51 Language and the Exchange of Reasons ................................................... 58 Fricker’s Account of Knowledge .................................................................... 62 Epistemic Injustice Against Animals .............................................................. 70 Epistemic Exemption ................................................................................. 71 Testimonial Injustice and Animal Silencing ............................................. 80 Imaginative Reorientations ........................................................................ 84 ! III. SOURCING WOMEN’S ECOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE: THE WORRY OF EPISTEMIC OBJECTIFICATION ................................................................. 90 Epistemic Objectification ................................................................................ 91 Gender Mainstreaming .................................................................................... 95 Situating Epistemic Objectification in Context ............................................... 98 Toward Epistemic Justice .............................................................................. 107 Collective and Individual Responsibility ...................................................... 110 iv! ! IV. POLLUTED KNOWLEDGE AND ANIMAL EXPERIMENTATION ...... 112 ! Oppression in Animal Experimentation ........................................................ 113 Morally Polluted Knowledge ........................................................................ 126 Epistemic Pollution ....................................................................................... 132 The Scope of Epistemic Pollution ................................................................. 136 ! CONCLUSION: FROM EPISTEMIC OBJECTS TO EPISTEMIC SUBJECTS .......... 141 ! REFERENCES ................................................................................................................ 150 v! INTRODUCTION In 2011, the New York Times ran a story on the role of dogs in enabling courtroom testimony: Rosie, the first judicially approved courtroom dog in New York, was in the witness box here nuzzling a 15-year-old girl who was testifying that her father had raped and impregnated her. Rosie sat by the teenager’s feet. At particularly bad moments, she leaned in. … “When they start talking about difficult things,” Dr. Crenshaw said, “Rosie picks up on that and goes over and nudges them. I’ve seen it with my own eyes.”1 This story raises many moral, legal and political questions. What are the moral implications of having a rape victim recount her trauma in front of a courtroom of people, including the perpetrator? What are the legal implications of allowing dogs to enter courtrooms, especially when dogs often make “the difference between a conviction and an acquittal”?2 What are the stakes of using dogs to serve human purposes, and how might the reliance on animals to enable human testimony challenge the traditional species hierarchy (Oliver 2011; Suen 2012)? Does the fact that dogs can play such a role in our society suggest they deserve political citizenship (Donaldson and Kymlikca 2011)? Perhaps less obvious, though, are the various epistemic dimensions to this story. How might the girl’s gender, race, class, age or manner of speech impede her ability to testify, and to have that testimony receive uptake by the jury? What does it mean that an authoritative white, male lawyer may need to serve as a conduit to render the girl’s testimony intelligible? How might the unavailability of adequate hermeneutical resources !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1William Glaberson, “By Helping a Girl Testify at a Rape Trial, a Dog Ignites a Legal Debate,” The New York Times, August 8, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/09/nyregion/dog-helps-rape-victim-15- testify.html?pagewanted=all. 2Ibid. ! 1! in the dominant social imaginary3 impede the girl’s ability to make sense of her experience (Fricker 2007, 7)? And what are the implications of saying that Rosie picks up on a witness starting to discuss a difficult subject? Is Dr. Crenshaw engaged in mere anthropomorphic projection when she says this, the same way one might say that a thermostat “picks up” on the temperature? Or does the idea that Rosie “picks up” on things suggest she can recognize what is happening, and respond accordingly? What does Rosie know? Is she even an epistemic agent? For the most part, mainstream Anglo-American epistemology has treated matters of power and knowledge as though they belong to two distinct spheres of philosophy. On traditional accounts of what Lorraine Code calls “S-knows-that-P” theories of knowledge, questions about the gender, race, class, ethnicity, ability, sexual difference etc. of the knower have seemed largely irrelevant, if not inappropriate (2006, ix). When it comes to knowledge, traditionally it has not been the who but the what that matters: What qualifies as knowledge? Is knowledge justified true belief? Is it justified true belief plus something else? Although these questions are important for epistemic inquiry, they have remained problematically divorced from the messy social and political circumstances in which knowledge exists. As Linda Alcoff laments, “the issue of power has been striking in its absence from Anglo-American epistemology” (2013, 214). Standpoint theory, postmodernism, feminist empiricism, black feminist epistemology, epistemologies of !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 3I borrow the term “social imaginary” from Lorraine Code. For Code, the social imaginary encompasses “the normative social meanings, customs, expectations, assumptions, values, prohibitions, and permissions—the habitus and ethos—into which human beings are nurtured from childhood and which they internalize, affirm, challenge, or contest as they make sense of their place, options, responsibilities within a world, both social and physical, whose "nature" and meaning are also instituted in these imaginary significations” (2006, 30). ! 2! ignorance, strands of social epistemology and more have all intervened to change this situation for the better. With their acknowledgment that “social difference…makes for epistemic difference,” unsustainable assumptions about knowledge and knowers have been challenged (Fricker and Horsnby 2006, 7). Some have