Epistemic Justice: Trusting the Other in Cognition as a Theoretical and Practical Problem

One of the problems of contemporary epistemology, the exploration of which can contribute to a fuller understanding of cognition as both an individual and collective process, is epistemic injustice. It is defined as the denial of epistemic trust to the Other, grounded in explicit and implicit identity biases existing in society. The author believes that the issue of epistemic injustice extends beyond the scope of investigating social injustice in general, serving as a serious obstacle to the achievement of epistemic values by an individual and society as a whole. The impact of this phenomenon on human cognitive activity is due to the actual totality of communicative knowledge or testimonial knowledge. Testimonial knowledge is obtained not through direct interaction with objects, but rather through the beliefs held by other subjects about these objects. The ideal of a fully self-sufficient epistemic agent, i.e. the ideal of epistemic autarky, seems to the author to be unrealistic and unattainable, since a person cannot fully cognize the world around him/her oreven himself/herself alone. The codependency of individuals in the cognitive process emerges as the main prerequisite not only for negative socio-political implications but also for the epistemic consequences of epistemic injustice. From the author’s point of view, epistemic injustice can be opposed not by unprejudicedness, but by such epistemic virtues as epistemic justice (Miranda Fricker) and proper epistemic trust (Benjamin McCraw). Context sensitivity is seen as an important element of these virtues, accompanied by the ability to revise and question certain criteria underlying trust in others as knowers and epistemic agents. The results of investigations related to these virtues can address practical problems and challenges within such fields of knowledge and practice as medicine and health care. 

Keywords:trust, cognition, testimony, communicative knowledge, autarky, autonomy, epistemic egoism, epistemic injustice