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And now the good fight with Yasha Monk.
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I'm Sally Satel. I'm a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a visiting professor of psychiatry at the Medical School at Columbia University. Recently, my article When Therapists Become Activists appeared in Persuasion. When I trained in psychiatry, an unbreakable rule is that therapists kept their personal politics out of the office. But today I see training programs, especially in the counseling profession, embracing a radical social justice agenda. The graduate counseling program at the University of Vermont, for example, intends to, quote, structurally align itself with the Black Lives Matter movement and begin the work of undoing systemic white supremacy. Johns Hopkins University Counseling center advised new students to consider us one of the many resources in the, quote, necessary work of engaging with internalized bias, recognizing privilege, and aligning values of anti racism. Accordingly, more and more counselors are encouraging their patients to understand their problems as a consequence of an oppressive society. White patients, for instance, might be told that their distress stems from their subjugation of others, while black and minority patients are told their problems stem from being oppressed. Patients labeled by their therapists as oppressors will of course feel alienated and confused, and those branded as oppressed and some are indeed so vulnerable that they may imbibe this lesson and will learn to see themselves as feeble victims. This, in my opinion, is nothing short of malpractice, and it's why I wrote this essay. Our job is to do the exact opposite to promote introspection and embolden people to experiment with new attitudes, perspectives, and actions, to learn how to observe themselves and discover how they may inadvertently sabotage themselves from attaining their desired goals. It's impossible for me to imagine how a healthy therapeutic alliance between a counselor and a patient, that core bond nurtured through a clinician's caring neutrality and compassionate detachment, could thrive under these conditions. Despite these worrisome developments, I do feel stirrings of optimism as new institutions are starting to spring up. In July, for example, the International association of Psychology and Counseling was launched, dedicated to professionalism and where advocacy should be the domain of individual conscience, not one's professional identity. Unquote Another new group is Fair in Medicine, dedicated to countering illiberal trends in medical school. Though I'm worried for my profession, for colleagues who feel pressured to conform, and for the patients who depend on them, I take heart from these flares of resistance. I'm confident that there is a silenced majority of clinicians who see the need to resist ideological encroachment into their field, and I'm hopeful that these new organizations have the potential to attract the critical mass of clinicians needed to rebuff approved narratives and to reassert the primacy of individual patients and all their complexity. I hope you get a chance to read the essay and that you enjoy it.
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Sally Sattel's piece called When Therapists Become
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Activists was published by Persuasion. To learn more about the community we're building at Persuasion and to get similar articles directly into your inbox, head to www. Persuasion.community
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My guest today is Rachel Fraser. Rachel is an associate professor of philosophy at Oxford, and she's a really interesting thinker on epistemology, on the study of how we can have knowledge, and particularly on standpoint epistemology. So she's fought really hard about a topic that I'm exercised by in the contemporary political discourse, which is in what ways does what we understand about the world depend on who we are, what kind of identity group we're part of, and is the kind of folk moral theory by which the oppressed have special knowledge? And the best way to remedy inequality is by asking people to defer to their kind of political viewpoints, to their kind of ways of understanding the world. To what extent is that a truthful and helpful way to think about politics? So if you do have questions about Stanford epistemology, which has been in various guises, not always under its academic title, a big part of contemporary political debate, I can promise you this conversation is going to leave you understanding it better, thinking more smartly about it, and thinking more clearly about how we ourselves should approach this topic. Rachel, welcome to the podcast.
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Thank you very much for having me.
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So I thought that I'd invite you on the podcast because you do really important work in epistemology, and there's a set of questions in particular about standpoint epistemology that I've been trying to think through. Perhaps the best part of a conversation is for me to give you, as I understand it, a kind of set of views about standpoint epistemology, which are increasingly prominent in political discourse. And then we can sort of slowly puzzle through those together and see what's Right. About that image and what's wrong, that image. So as I understand it, there's a kind of way of thinking about it where you say, look, you know, I have a set of experiences in the world. You have a set of experiences as a woman that are different. Somebody who's black may have a set of experiences that is different from those that either of us is going to have. And those give me a set of knowledge about the world that's different from yours. It's different from the black person. And in particular, there's some important pieces of knowledge about oppression, about injustice that members of oppressed of minority groups tend to have. And because they know something about the world that I don't, and because it is very hard for them and perhaps impossible for them to communicate the nature of those experiences perfectly to somebody who hasn't experienced them themselves, this means that they have a greater insight into what is just a greater insight into what should be done. And if we aim to create a just society, we should, in certain contexts at least defer to the political judgment, defer to how they think about the world, because that's the only way that we can actually remedy injustice, I guess. I have two questions. First of all, does that seem like a sensible description of a sort of part of political discourse today? Do you think that's a fair description of how some people are talking about politics now and then? Secondly, what in that image seems right and what in that image seems wrong substantively?
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D
Great, that's really helpful. So on your first question, the question of whether the sort of image or the sort of epistemological imaginary you've described seems like one which is kind of active and important and sort of doing important work and directing conversations in sort of political conversations today. That seems absolutely right. I think something like that picture is endorsed, broadly speaking, by a lot of people sort of on the left. And on the second question, the question of which aspects of the picture seem right and which seem wrong, I suppose I'm going to give a kind of irritating philosopher's answer to the question.
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B
I invited you on the podcast to be the irritating philosopher. That's your role. So lean into it.
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D
Right. So what you described as a kind of package or cluster of views, and most of those views admit of like a range of different precipitations, Right? So almost all of of those views could be given an articulation where they're making a relatively weak claim, that is a relatively plausible claim. But they could also be sort of precisified slightly differently so as to make A much stronger claim. And I think where I am is I think pretty much all of those claims I find extremely plausible when they're precisified in a sort of relatively weak or careful way. And almost all of them I find implausible when they're given a much kind of stronger articulation. And I think this is one of the problems in political discourse, right. Is that very often there is kind of slippage, whether in good faith or bad faith. It can be sort of weaponized ambiguity between which of the various theses are being discussed. Right. Whether we're discussing a strong version of a given epistemological claim or a much weaker and hence much more plausible version of a given epistemological claim. So, yeah, I think that's where I am. It's going to depend a lot on the details of exactly how you spell out each of views where I land on them.
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Yeah. And I think there is a real danger of a sort of modern Beatty effect, right. Where you use the very intuitive weaker claim in order to gain credibility for the view, but then actually use it to make people use the stronger claim as a basis for political action or reflection about the world. Right. It's sort of a version of love is but a word, right? Of course love is a word. But when you try to imply with that that, you know, romantic feelings aren't a hugely important motivator in human life, or that it might not give you a real attachment to a partner, then that sentence starts to be deeply misleading. And I think that maybe versions of some of these claims that are a little bit similar in that way.
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D
So just to jump in, I think that's absolutely correct. But I think you also get a very interesting kind of inverse effect where sometimes people are actually relying on, or at the very least only need to rely on, a very weak plausible version of the claim, but then somehow get painted or presented as relying on these incredibly implausible claims and thus are sort of rendered incredible because of that. So, yeah, I think both of these are sort of real features of social discourse, right. Where people try and smuggle in the strong claims by presenting themselves as actually only making this really plausible, weak claim. But also you get cases where people are sort of saddled with these very strong implausible commitments where actually they're making like a perfectly sensible, broadly empiricist argument.
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B
That's fair, I think, and that's certainly something in a highly heated cultural debate that's often used as an argument. Right. Like you're saying, oh, look, like there's these people making these crazy claims about stamp and epistemology and therefore anything that sounds like any element of the image I presented at the beginning of a conversation must be wrong. That's also dangerous.
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I think the best way for us to proceed in the conversation is to break down the sort of broad image I presented at the beginning into its constitutive parts. And it seems to me like there's three or four of them. And perhaps you can refine my breakdown. So the first of them seems to be a claim about lived experience, that there is some way in which I come to understand the world through my own lived experience. And that depends in part on the kind of identity group to which I belong. Then there seems to be a sort of second claim that gives me some important form of political insight, but may not be easily, readily, or perhaps at all available to people who don't belong to that same identity group. Then I guess there's a third one, which is the nature of an insight is such that it can't be communicated, or at least is only limitedly communicable. So if I have this insider can't just say, hey, I've had this experience because I belong to this identity group. Listen to me and you'll see that it has its political implications. There's something that makes that difficult to do. And then I think there's a fourth claim, which is about the demand to defer to members of groups who have those non communicable insights. And that's really a question about what kind of basis political solidarity would have. So that's how I break it down to a sort of four steps. Does that seem helpful as a roadmap for our conversation?
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D
Yeah, I mean, I think it's really, really helpful to distinguish between these different kinds of claims, for sure. And that seems like a sort of reasonable first pass way of sort of chunking up the different claims that are often bundled together in this conversation.
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B
Great. So let's start with the first one. What of that idea that my experiences determine what I see about the world, what I know about the world? In what version is that claim sensible? And there's clearly a real intuitive power to it. And in what version do you think that goes too far?
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D
One thing that I think is helpful is when we're thinking about the question of standpoint epistemology is to introduce like a few more bits of terminology. So broadly speaking, the claim that you've just put on the table, this is a claim which sort of in the academic literature and standpoint epistemology, particularly the earlier versions, so we're talking like stuff that was written in kind of like the 80s and the 90s. The claim that you've just put forward, this idea that broadly speaking, social position affects what you can know, that's often cashed out not as a standpoint theory, but as a slightly weaker theory, what's called situated knowledge. So the situated knowledge claim is, roughly speaking, this claim that what you can know or what you're in a position to know is heavily influenced and shaped by your social position. So situated knowledge claims, I think, are highly plausible when given a kind of sensible articulation. So some sort of situated knowledge claim, I think is just going to fall out of any, like, broadly empirical theory of knowledge. So here is an argument for a situated knowledge thesis. It's very simple. Both of its premises are really, really plausible. One, what sorts of experiences you have depends on your social location. So in some sense that's clearly true. Like white people on the whole have different kinds of experiences from non white people. Women have different kinds of experiences from men, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Obviously this claim is implausible. If it's rather saying that all women have some set of experiences which no man have, that's not true. But clearly I think the claim is not making that sort of claim. Right. Rather it's saying something like social position is a reasonably good, if not perfect, predictor of certain kinds of experiences. So that's the first premise in the argument for the situated knowledge thesis. Then the second premise in the argument for the situated knowledge thesis is just a sort of very broad brush, sort of empiricist claim which just says what you're in a position to know depends on what your evidence is. And then as long as you're willing to grant, as we all should, that experiences can constitute a kind of evidence, you pretty much get a situated knowledge thesis for free. The idea that what you're in a position to know depends on your social location. So, yeah, I think that when we sort of understand the situated knowledge thesis as sort of, broadly speaking, a thesis which is sort of motivated by these two kinds of claims, like empiricism, on the one Hand, the idea that experience is sort of interestingly linked to social location, you get a version of a situated knowledge claim, which is just highly plausible. And that I just think nobody should really be invested in trying to push against, because there's nothing at all mysterious going on here. The idea is simply that experience is a kind of evidence and that different social locations give rise to different kinds of experience and hence different evidential bases. And the idea that if two people have different kinds of evidence, they're in a position to know different kinds of stuff, that's like the most banal platitudes. And nobody should really be invested in pushing back against that kind of claim.
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B
And one of the things that makes us plausible is that you can just as readily apply this to categories that aren't the particularly politicized identity categories of today. It's clearly true of some of the politicized identity categories. It's clearly true of men versus women, but it's also true of New York residents versus London residents. Right. Clearly people who live in New York have different kinds of access to knowledge and reality. When people live in London just because the kind of situations they're in, the kinds of people they see, the kinds of places they see are different, I
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D
think that's really helpful. One sort of really interesting case, actually, I think, is the difference between rural and non rural residents. So this is clearly a divide which does have kind of political resonance, especially in the US context. But the thought is that actually this is a divide for people who are on the left are often inclined to overlook the kind of distinctive experiences of poverty faced by rural populations. And so I think it's a helpful kind of distinction to appeal to just because it sort of slightly reverses the kind of customary, I don't know, rhetorical feeling that these distinctions.
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B
Have you started to hint at when this plausible idea starts to go over rail and you were sort of implying that when it's not, hey, a lot more women are going to have experience X than men. And so therefore, on average, or the typical woman is going to have a better understanding of a certain kind of thing, or there's a different understanding, let's say for now, of a different kind of thing than men. And so clearly you're social identity as a man or a woman is going to influence what you know about the world and how you perceive the world in some important respects. That seems to be the plausible version of that. You are hinting that it starts to be implausible and you say, well, this is an essence of womanness. And all women have this kind of experience, and men as a whole category are excluded from it. Cash it out a little bit more. I mean, when does this seemingly quite straightforward premise of a lot of more controversial stuff that happen itself start to go off the rails because the claim is inflated in implausible ways?
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D
So the idea would just be something like one might try to come up with some kind of experiential core of womanhood, right? So some kind of experience that all women share, and then also argue that no men share this experience. And then you're going to be in a position where you're sort of hunting around for some kind of shared core of womenhood. So people have variously, at different times within feminism, try to sort of argue that this is something like motherhood, maybe something like certain kinds of reproductive labor or housework, maybe certain kinds of experiences to do with like, fear of sexual assault. And basically, I think nobody takes these kinds of claims seriously anymore. Nobody takes seriously the idea that there's some kind of experiential core that all women have and no men have, largely actually because of pressures internal to feminism. So people to take very, very seriously the idea that like black women are going to have very different experiences from white women, working class women are going to have very different experiences from middle class women. And so if you want to do any kind of justice at all to the way in which the class of someone like women is very internally complex, then you're going to have to abandon any kind of simple idea that there's some kind of experiential core that all and only women have.
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B
And that's an interesting implication in a way of intersectionality, because it basically means that you can keep dividing it further down. So you might say, well, look, women don't have common experiences, but black women do. But then within black women, you say, well, middle class black women are going to have a very different experience from working class black women. And many are going to say, well, but queer working class black women are going to have a different experience from straight working class black women. So you can always subdivide the category further. And that, I guess implies precisely that even on one level down from women, you're not going to have, or 2, 3, 4 levels down from women, you're not going to have that universal attribute of the experience of womanhood that the stronger versions of this claim would require.
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D
I think that's right. I think it's also worth noting. I mean, this is kind of maybe a little bit of an into the weeds point. But if you actually look at the academic feminist literature, one thing that's very kind of interesting is that people who are vexed by this kind of intersectional insight, right? People who really take seriously the idea that we can't find this common experiential core on the whole, the lesson that people draw from that is not, oh, so we need to keep subdividing the category so that we can come up with at least some category, maybe, you know, like middle class, disabled black women who have a common experiential core. That's really not the lesson that people tend to draw. Rather, the lesson they tend to draw is that, oh, okay, so this whole project of searching for some common experiential core, that was like a bad project. The lesson is not to search elsewhere for this core. It's rather that we were hunting for something that was never actually an important thing to search for in the first place. So the lesson people draw from intersectionality is not, oh, so we need to find a common experiential core elsewhere. Rather, it's that this whole sort of project of searching for a common experiential core, that wasn't a sensible project in the first place. It's not a politically valuable project. We need to locate the grounds of political solidarity elsewhere, which I think, interestingly, is very much where you're coming from. I think you want to say, look, it's silly to think of political solidarity as requiring some common experiential core. And one thing that I think is very interesting is that that I think is broadly the consensus in the feminist literature that comes out of these attempts to kind of reconcile certain kinds of standpoint epistemology with intersectional feminism. That's kind of the result that you get, but that somehow I don't think has really impacted that insight, hasn't made such a big difference to more folk political conversations.
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B
Oh, that's very interesting. That sort of. Where the academic literature that in some ways a folk political conversation leans on rhetorically has gotten to, in terms of its consensus, is actually very different from the implications that the folk political consensus takes from that literature.
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D
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A
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D
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B
We'll get back to the larger implications of the end organization, I think, but let's go to the second step. So we've established that on a thin version of a claim about situated experience that clearly is a plausible claim. We haven't yet said anything about the nature of the differences between those experiences. And I think the second step in the sort of folk political claim about stamping epistemology is then to say, well, is not just that the experiences of women are different from men or the experience of black people different from white people, it's that in general, people who are oppressed have a greater understanding of the world and particularly a greater understanding of political injustices in the world than those who are not, and that therefore they are epistemically privileged. Right. That they have insight into the world that the non oppressed are not going to have. So tell us your assessment of that second claim.
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D
So there's a lot in this second claim, and I think that actually one way to get a feel for what's going on in this second claim, it's actually really interesting or helpful to sort of zoom out and think about standpoint epistemology like a little bit more kind of genealogically. So the idea is, I think we can get a better grip on the sort of broad contours of standpoint epistemology if we understand itself. Job description. So what I mean by that is standpoint epistemology got introduced into Marxist theory in order to solve a problem internal to Marxist theory, and then got sort of taken up by various different feminists for a different set of reasons. But you can understand the kind of DNA of the concept or the theory, I think, really nicely by understanding the problem that standpoint epistemology was originally introduced in order to solve. And I think that's really key to understanding where this idea that political oppression disadvantage with respect to power breeds advantage epistemologically. I think understanding the kind of genealogy of the view is really helpful here
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B
to try and draw out the implications of this in a perhaps more explicit way to today. How does that speak to the sort of strange thing where we're always assuming within the conventional political narrative about this, that membership of an oppressed group is going to give you special political insight? But of course, one of the hallmarks of being a member of an oppressed group is precisely that there might be many groups from which you're excluded. So actually you are at the blunt receiving end of various forms of oppression. And no doubt it is plausible to think that that gives you a lived experience of various injustices that members of more privileged, quote unquote groups may not have. But at the Same time, it's of course true that there may be all kinds of forms of knowledge from which you are structurally excluded, which might actually mean that there are important facts about politics, including perhaps certain injustices that you are unaware of. Because you don't have an overview of a whole situation. You're not in the room where people say, oh, who. Who cares if this chemical is going to poison a bunch of people or any other of the sort of more local of power we might imagine in which you would actually gain knowledge about injustice as well. So I guess how does that fit into the debate of, well, in what ways do the oppressed have special knowledge, and in what ways are they actually excluded from relevant knowledge? And how should that make us think about politics?
- [26:49]
D
Yeah, and I think this is sort of acknowledged by all serious parties to the debate. Right. Is that this claim that there's some kind of epistemic privilege associated with oppression is. The claim is definitely not that, all things considered, even generally in a better epistemic situation than the oppressors, because just like access to information, that pattern along conventional axes of advantage and disadvantage in exactly the way you'd expect, advantage goes to the oppressor, not the oppressed. So I think that in almost all careful articulations of standpoint theory, you see some kind of attentiveness to this. The idea is definitely not that there's nothing good that the oppressed aren't missing out on, it's that the situation isn't all bad. And I think this is actually one way in which, like, attending to the genealogy of the idea of standpoint theory is helpful. I think standpoint epistemology is often taken up by people who want to adopt a wholly kind of vindicatory attitude. They want to say, like, look, the fruits of oppression are a kind of virtue or a kind of admirableness. And I think that's just not there in the intellectual tradition. I think there's just a kind of naivete to that perspective that is very difficult to actually find in the academic work on this, where most parties to the debate are extremely, extremely, sort of almost cripplingly at times conscious of the real epistemic injuries wrought by various forms of disadvantage and are merely concerned to understand why the situation might be slightly more dappled, why the situation might be a little more complicated. There may be some kinds of particularly precious forms of insight that certain forms of real injury can allow one to grasp.
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B
That's again, interesting because the academic consensus you're presenting is, in this point, nearly 180 degrees off from how the stuff gets talked about. Right? I mean, even when you talk about the speeches of politicians now in the United States and so on and so forth, as they touch on something like this topic, the natural assumption seems to be, well, obviously the oppressed have deeper understanding and greater insight into the workings of work and the workings of injustice. Whereas you're saying that this sort of orthodoxy within the academic world to say, well, no, obviously you excluded from this local power. You don't. You know less about what's going on. The advantage, as you're saying, epistemologically, in other ways, goes to the oppressor, not the oppressed. But, hey, you know, perhaps there's a silver lining where there's a few forms of knowledge that the oppressed themselves can have. So that's very interesting.
- [29:26]
D
So one sort of vivid demonstration of this. So one of the absolute classics of feminist standpoint epistemology is this essay by feminist philosopher Nancy Hartsock. So she has this essay Towards a Specifically Feminist Standpoint or something like that. I may be getting the title slightly wrong. So she wrote this. It's kind of very of its time, this paper, but it is quite a dazzling achievement. So she wrote this in maybe 1980. Anyway, there is a later paper where she's responding to her critics, and lots of her critics, right, from within feminism are criticizing her precisely because they're like, heart, sock, you are doing this terrible thing. You're saying, oh, like it's epistemologically, everything's great for women. Like, they have this, like, magical feminine intuition that allows them to kind of grasp the structure of reality. And you're ignoring all the forms of epistemic disadvantage and injury rot on women. Right? You're romanticizing oppression, basically. And, you know, these are really quite vicious critiques, right? People really do think that Hartzock is doing this and that it's a problem. And Hartzock has this response where she's saying, like, look, this is such a wild misreading of what I'm doing. You know, she accepts that if she were doing this, it would be a big problem. But she's also very, very keen to say, no, if you think that's what I'm doing, you are misreading me quite radically. So, I mean, I think that that exchange is very instructive with respect to the kind of mood within the kind of feminist theory literature about these things, is that everyone accepts that it's like a desideratum on an adequate account, that it not have this romanticizing impulse.
- [31:03]
B
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D
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B
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- [31:15]
D
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- [31:21]
B
that's fascinating. So let's go to the third part of the question as we've broken it down because we have. There's plausible and implausible version of the way that I perceive the world is shaped by my experiences. Then we have a debate about that may inform how I see politics and what I know about politics, but is that necessarily an advantage or does it, as you just say, counts? Which say, well, that gives the oppressed a real advantage, actually romanticizing the nature and the experience of oppression. But there's a third important element to get to, a sort of folk theory of this which is, well, is it communicable? Because you might in theory think, all right, look, I mean, there are groups that have different experiences in part because they're oppressed. It does give them real insight at least into certain kinds of injustices they suffer and how we might need to remedy them. But perhaps in the third step, it's actually possible to communicate those experiences in a way that makes it possible for us to form sort of joint intentions and say, all right, we both think, but an injustice is going on. You because you've experienced it in some kind of first person way, I, because I've listened to your account of those experiences and we can sort of act together. And I think one of the really interesting things about a lot of the folk theory of this is that it denies in some important respects that communicability of an injustice. There's something about that that will never quite be expressible. So again, is there plausible version of this? What's the implausible version of this? Help us think through the extent to which we can actually communicate the experience of injustice in a helpful way to somebody who has not themselves had that same experience.
- [32:55]
D
I think there's a kind of familiar philosophical distinction here that's helpful. So philosophers draw this distinction between two different kinds of knowledge. So on the one hand there is propositional knowledge, and on the other hand there's qualitative knowledge or knowledge of what it's like. So very roughly, this distinction is something like, okay, well, what's propositional knowledge? Well, propositional knowledge is the kind of knowledge that I'm ascribing to Yasha when I say things like, Yasha knows that London is in England or Yasha knows that cats are carnivores, right? So the idea, there's. There's some claim and you have like a privileged kind of cognitive access with respect to that claim, a truth apt claim. And then on the other hand, there is qualitative knowledge or knowledge of what it's like. So, you know, there are experiences of various kinds. So here's a kind of classic philosophical example that I think helps us to get a grip on why this is an important bit of philosophical terminology or why it's more than mere terminology. So the philosopher Frank Jackson has this very famous experiment that's often called Mary's room.
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B
And when philosophers experiments, they're the thought experiments, right? This is experiment. Here is a very armchair kind of.
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D
That is an important clarification because if Jackson had actually done what I'm about to describe, there would be questions. Yeah. So this is a thought experiment. Thank you very much for that clarification, Yasha. He asks us to imagine the following scenario. There's this woman, Mary, who has been raised in an entirely black and white environment. So she's been confined to this room in which everything is only black and white. But she's also a sort of world expert on color. So in her black and white room, she's like, read all the scientific literature on color. So any sort of scientific claim about color, like, you know, what it is to perceive color, the various wavelengths associated with different kinds of colors, like how the eye functions. She knows all of these claims. But then Jackson asks us to imagine, like one morning, Mary is freed from her black and white room, and she's shown a tomato for the first time. Jackson says, okay, here is something that seems true. Mary learns something new about red when she leaves the room, right? But the idea is this new thing that she learns, it can't be any propositional knowledge about color because she already knew all that stuff. Rather, she acquires a new bit of experiential knowledge. She learns what it's like to see rad. And one thing that's very interesting, I think, is that implicit in Jackson's presentation is this idea that nobody could have allowed Mary to know what it's like to see rad until she had that experience for herself. So that particular qualitative experience, the experience of what it's like to see red, Jackson is assuming tacitly that this is not communicable, Right. That nobody could have written a book that would have allowed Mary to grasp what it's like to see red.
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B
I guess the implication of this to the Topic at hand is, well, when you're thinking about something like political injustice and how to remedy it, how important is propositional knowledge versus how important is that kind of qualitative knowledge?
- [36:09]
D
Exactly. Yes. Here is sort of what I think about this. So I'm not really sure about the extent to which qualitative knowledge is communicable. I kind of go back and forth on this. I don't have strong views. Basically, I could be pushed either way.
- [36:25]
B
So the idea is that you can describe an experience you've had, right? You can say, look, if I'm a black man, I'm walking down the street and a cop looks at me and my heart starts to race and my adrenaline shoots up because I worry that they're gonna stop and frisk me or something like that. Yes, I think I'm with you. Clearly, I can understand some of that from that description and not just an abstract. Well, it shouldn't be the case, but I can through compassion, through literature, through movies, through conversation, through fiction, you know, put myself in the shoes of somebody who's experiencing that. And clearly, to some extent, that means that I can grasp what they experience. But also, I think quite plausibly, I don't fully grasp that. Right. If I was actually walking down the street and having that experience, it would feel different from what I can learn through fiction and so on. So I think I understand why you feel sort of torn on this. I think I feel torn on this, too.
- [37:15]
D
So, yeah, I mean, I think on any plausible view, there's just going to be a spectrum of communicability. Right? So, you know, if I've seen scarlet but never seen Crimson, you know, maybe I can kind of, like, imagine without actually seeing crimson. Maybe I can imagine what it's like to see crimson. If I've only ever seen black and white. I think it's kind of plausible that I'm never going to be able to like, even really in any interesting sense, approximate what it's like to see red. So I think, you know, experiences can be more or less similar to each other. So I think that if you've had very similar experiences, it probably is pretty easy in many cases, if you're sort of empathetic and imaginative to at least approximately grasp of what it's like of someone else's experiences. But then in cases where experiences are very remote, right, where two people have never really had any very similar experiences, it's going to be a lot harder.
- [38:07]
B
That's interesting. And then presumably, the assumption is that propositional knowledge is the Kind of knowledge that on the whole, perhaps for some exotic cases I'm not thinking of, is communicable, that Mary in her room, who's never seen color, can nevertheless acquire over propositional knowledge about color. She reads in scientific papers and so on. Presumably that should be true in this case as well. Even somebody who's not black may learn all of the facts about stop and frisk and may read sociological studies about the kind of impacts that has on communities and so on and so forth. So again, I think the sort of question of, well, is there something here that can't be communicated to some extent, then translates into the question of, well, how much of a really relevant knowledge about how to act politically to remedy injustice, for example, is propositional and how much of it is qualitative? So perhaps you can help us think through that part of the question.
- [38:59]
D
Right, so I think that's exactly right. So I think the thought of something like, largely speaking, I'm not. I mean, I'm interested because I'm interested in pretty much all philosophical questions, but I'm not really vaxxed politically by the question of whether experiential knowledge is communicable because I think really where the philosophical action is is in the question of to what extent does experiential knowledge really matter? Right. And to what extent can we like, do the political work we want to do with propositional knowledge? And I think at least to a large extent, we can do a lot of work with propositional knowledge. And hence this whole kind of very, kind of frenzied hair, gripping, clothes rending debate about the communicability of experiential knowledge is like basically a sideshow and a red herring. So here is an example that I think makes this really vivid. So this case concerns the politics of sex work. I'm going to go into a bit of detail about the example, if that's okay, just because I think it's actually very, very helpful. But you do need a bit of background to see why it's an instructive example. This example concerns the politics of sex work and in particular judgments about the adequacy of what's often called the Nordic model in sex work. So the Nordic model in sex work is, broadly speaking, a model where sex work is handled at the policy level by criminalizing the purchase but not the selling of sex. So this is for many feminists, at least on the face of it, an appealing model. Right? It's an appealing model because on the one hand, lots of feminists are tempted by the idea that there's something kind of objectionable about sex work, that it inflicts some kind of status harm on women as a class and thus we should want to eradicate sex work. But on the other hand, most feminists, if they're any good as feminists at all, are committed to the idea that, like, look, sex workers are an incredibly vulnerable population. They're frequently vilified and stigmatized and that, you know, feminism should not be in the business of contributing to that stigmatization and vilification. And the idea is that the Nordic model is supposed to be attractive because it's suppresses sex work. That's the aim of it. It's supposed to suppress sex work by suppressing demand. But it doesn't stigmatize or vilify sex workers because the people it's criminalizing are the clients rather than the sellers. So that's the kind of pitch for the Nordic model. I think the Nordic model is an extremely bad model and I've been persuaded of that by reading sex workers. So there's this fantastic book, Revolting Prostitutes, an amazing piece of writing written by two sex workers. And they talk about the Nordic model and its many failings. And here is what they say. They say, like, look, if you're a sex worker and somebody presents the Nordic model to you, here's what you're going to think. You're going to think, okay, well, what this policy is going to do is it's going to raise the costs associated with the purchase of sex for men. And so what that's going to do, first of all is it's going to suppress demand. And by suppressing demand, it's going to effectively constrain. It's going to undermine sex workers negotiating power, right? It's going to undermine and reduce sex workers bargaining power. Because the idea is, from the perspective of a sex worker, like when there is high demand, there are lots of potential clients. And so you can reasonably screen clients, right? You can take a look at some clients and think, okay, this guy looks really shady. This guy looks like, you know, a bit more respectable, a bit more like, I'm going to be less at risk if I work with this guy. So you have more bargaining power, right? You have more choice. Whereas if demand is suppressed sex workers, because, you know, most sex workers are in sex work because they need money to survive, they're going to be less able to, you know, be choosy about which clients they work with and thus they're going to be more vulnerable to violence. It's Also the case that their bargaining power is going to be reduced in a whole host of other ways. So, for example, most sex workers will say things like, well, look, you're safer as a sex worker if you're working in an area where lots of people are around. You're less safe if you go to a remote area. But the kind of systematic effect of the Nordic model is that clients become very, very invested in accessing remote areas, and that makes sex workers more vulnerable to violence. So the idea is that there's this kind of range of effects that the Nordic model has, which makes sex workers much, much, much more vulnerable to violence by decreasing their bargaining power, by making sort of clients more invested in working in precisely the kinds of remote areas that make sex workers vulnerable to violence and so on. Okay, so here's the thought. The reason that the sex workers, Mac and Smith, who write revolting prostitutes, the reason they're able to come up with these insights is because of their lived experience, right? Which is like very, very different from mine. So they're using their lived experience to criticize a policy, but their critiques of that policy are like completely graspable by someone without any of their lived experience. Right? Actually, what's going on here is there are just some very general principles about, like supply and demand, about how bargaining power which underpin their excellent critiques of the Nordic model. These critiques of the Nordic model have systematically been missed by non sex working feminists because they lack the relevant lived experience. Right? So for Mac and Smith, it's pretty obvious that the Nordic model is going to have these effects because of their lived experience. It's not obvious to non sex working feminists, right? To non sex working feminists, the Nordic model often just appears in the way I presented it to you originally as like a really ingenious way of saying, steering between these two competing poles in feminist politics. But the idea here is to grasp the force of this critique of the Nordic model, you don't really need to grasp the experiential basis of the critique, right? The critique is what matters primarily, not its experiential basis. So the thought is that lots of non sex working feminists, if they read the work of sex working feminists, can think, okay, so it turns out that the Nordic model, which, you know, I used to think was appealing, is actually a really, really bad model because, you know, some of the most vulnerable women that the policy is supposed to protect the interests of are very poorly served by this policy. That's really good. Right? That's a case of like political discourse functioning extremely well. There's some new data that gets introduced to your assessment of a policy and you realize that actually this policy that maybe before I would have been inclined to support, I'm now inclined to oppose. And I think it's really, really important for feminists to oppose. And the important thing is here we have an example of a critique of a policy which is based on a very specific social experience where I think it's very plausible that I just, I'm never going to be able to grasp the experience of like a vulnerable sex worker trying to like distinguish between two clients. Like, that's just very, very foreign to me. But I don't need to grasp that to know and understand on the basis of sex workers testimony that the Nordic model is a bad model. So I think that's a really good example of why the role of experience in politics should not be overstated. Right. It is perfectly possible for various forms of important political convergence to emerge without experiences being communicated.
- [46:23]
B
That's really interesting. And I like the very clear explanation of how experience may in fact be key to coming up with certain insights. But the nature of those insights is then likely to be of such a nature that they can be communicated further on to people who have not had that experience. You know, I think the points you made about, for example, in the Nordic model, people want to purchase sex work being really invested in being sort of in as remote an area as possible, and how that would then obviously raise the risk of sexual violence down the road. That's very intuitive and plausible to people who haven't had any experience of sex work. So let's go to the fourth part of the question, which in a way is the one where I think we're furthest away from epistemology and getting deepest into something like, I suppose, political strategy. But more broadly, I think question about the vision of the kind of society that we want to build, the kind of, I mean, to speak in the language of a book that I have coming out, the kind of diverse democracy we should aim for in terms of how members of different groups think of each other and treat each other. And that's all right. So you have some version of a claim that the nature of our experience depends on which identity group we're in. People who are oppressed may have certain advantages from that, and there may be some element of that, but it's not communicable. I think we've put nice boundaries on each of these things, but each of those claims has some plausibility in its less ambitious versions. But then there's still a big question about, all right, so how do we then build political solidarity? And in the folk version of this theory, that often is the claim of saying, decenter yourself, take yourself back, defer to the oppressed. And the implication, often at its extreme at least, is to say, hey, you shouldn't be sitting in your own judgment about what kind of political action we should do. You don't understand any of this. And so you should simply identify the right spokespeople for the oppressed and go along with whatever they have to say. How does that strike you as a political strategy?
- [48:24]
D
Yeah, this is really interesting. So one thing I do think is helpful here is to see this as part of a broader question for democratic deliberation. And I'm going to say a bit about why that is so. I think that roughly speaking, one way of articulating a kind of plausible core of a lot of kind of people who are articulating sort of standpointy things is that they want to make a claim about expertise. They want to say, look, certain kinds of social position generate expertise, right? So, you know, women are experts in a certain kind of sense when it comes to sexism, right? And then I think the thought is, okay, well, if the question is, I
- [49:04]
B
know certain men who are experts in sexism too, but perhaps in a different way.
- [49:08]
D
Yes, yes. But the reason this is helpful, I think the reason it's helpful to use the idea of expertise to frame what's at issue and standpoint epistemology is that there's a very old sort of venerable question in democratic theory concerning how to balance the demands of expertise and those of democratic deliberation. Because the idea is like there's a kind of tension between two attractive ideals. On the one hand, there's this obvious truth that some people have expertise on various matters. And clearly it seems attractive to think that experts should be deferred to, that we should listen more to experts than we do to non experts. That seems just obvious when we think about things like vaccines, when we think about things like climate change and so on. Then on the other hand, there's this really attractive picture of democratic deliberation on which everybody engages in deliberation from equal starting point. Democratic deliberation is conceived of as this process in which everybody has a voice. You know, it's a conversation to which everybody is able to contribute. And so there's this kind of long tradition in democratic theory where people recognize the tension between these two ideals and try and work out how to Sort of steer a kind of middle way between these two competing ideals. And I think it's just very, very helpful to think of the debate about standpoint epistemology as a specific instance of this broader question. Right. It's a question about how democratic communities should handle and manage expertise epistemologically. I think that often this connection isn't drawn, but I think that actually at a certain level of abstraction, the sort of questions or puzzles that standpoints pose for democratic deliberation are also posed by more garden variety, like cases of expertise.
- [51:07]
B
Oh, that's really interesting. I hadn't thought of that in that context, I suppose, though, there is at least one or perhaps two additional problems which aren't exactly about expertise, or perhaps they have equivalence in expertise. Let me puzzle through this. So one of the things I worry about is that I just find the demand for that form of deferring to be very unlikely to be ineffective at any political scale. So when you think about how do you fight something like pervasive racial injustice in a context like the United States, I just think that the number of people who are so committed to fighting racial injustice at any price that they are willing to say, I'm going to completely take myself back and not act in accordance with what I consider the right view of the world or my own values, I'm just going to defer to those people is so miniscule. And it is people who are already likely to be so engaged in what at least what they take to be helpful action to fight racial injustice. But it just doesn't grow your coalition in any meaningful way, while likely off putting a lot of other people who are saying, well, hang on a second, you have to make arguments to me. You have to explain to me why from within my own values I should care about this particular policy. Just telling me shut up is not going to sway me. So that's one problem. The second problem that's related is that, and there perhaps there is an equivalent to expertise, the question is, well, who speaks for the group? And I think that even within the very limited number of people who are actually receptive to those kinds of appeals, yes, I should take myself back. I should just defer to what people are telling me they are then systematically going to choose as the appropriate spokespeople for the oppressed group to which we're deferring the people of whose political views they happen to agree anyway. So if you are on the far left, you're going to think of a certain number of people as the legitimate voice of black America. If you are moderate, you're going to think of quite different people as legitimate voice of black America. And if you are a trumpist conservative, you're going to think of Candace Owens as a legitimate spokesperson of trumpist America. Now, we might think that some of those are more realistic models of the world than others. But the point is that even anybody who actually gives weight to the argument about deferring, I think in reality is going to pick the spokespeople in such a way that they're not actually deferring at all. They're just finding somebody from within the group to articulate the point of view they hold. They're not actually changing their political behavior over political action on the basis of that. Because I just don't think that, save a few free cases, people are willing or capable of doing that.
- [53:46]
D
I think the second problem you've pointed to is what we might call the problem of expert disagreement. Right. And that's a very general problem because here's a bit of advice that seems like good advice. Defer to experts. But then, of course, it's very difficult to follow this advice if you have experts who disagree, as experts often do. Right. I mean, so think about competing expert opinions on whether lockdown should be lifted and at what point lockdown should be lifted. So I think the more empirical question of kind of how you build a kind of solidaristic community. Right. And which kinds of discursive strategies are most helpful in generating kind of broad based coalitions. This is a question which very strongly falls outside my area of expertise. I guess I'm inclined to sort of agree with you, but that opinion I don't think should be given much weight. But one thing I would say is that I think it's important to understand the psychological appeal of the deference model. So, I mean, to some extent, it's very easy to explain, explain the psychological appeal of the deference model for the people who get deferred to. Right. It's nice to have people listen to you and take you seriously. Right. So the kind of benefits or payoff of the deference model are obvious in that case. The thing I think is more puzzling is, you know, why the deferrers go along with the deference model. Right. Because a lot of people do. And I think a lot of people actually find this a very, very attractive. Right. The idea that you simply have to defer can be an extremely attractive proposition for people with a certain kind of temperament. And I think that's very interesting. And I think it's important to note that there are people for whom being told, no, simply defer. That's a very attractive way of going about things.
- [55:37]
B
Well, that's very interesting. I'm going to take this and run with it, if you don't mind, Rachel, in the sense that you're right, but on the sort of intuitive model, being told to defer is painful and being deferred to is nice. Right. And I think you're right to say, well, hang on, actually, there might be a lot of people who would enjoy deferring, perhaps because they care about politics, but they're never quite sure of their own opinions, but perhaps because actually it means you don't have to do for work. Right. It's actually a way of saying, well, it's not up to me, it's up to all of you, so tell me whatever to do. And I'm not going to think too hard about. I think there's another paradoxical element, which is that actually being deferred to can be quite unpleasant too. And I don't think I have great experience of oppression in my life, but I grew up Jewish in Germany, and I certainly have made the experience growing up there of being deferred to on various topics and being treated with extreme care in many situations. And I think one of the things that I've learned from that is that that is not a route towards a feeling of social equality. But even if people are treating you as this victim or this oppressed person who needs to be apologized to and who needs to be treated with special care and consideration with the best of intentions, it actually, in my case at least, made me feel like a social inferior and certainly made me feel like somebody who doesn't truly belong, certainly like somebody who's exotified in all kinds of ways. And so I actually feel find that that experience of being deferred to for wrong reasons or being deferred to just on the basis of your identity can paradoxically be quite unpleasant rather than pleasant as well.
- [57:10]
D
Yeah, there's a really nice paper on this, actually, that came out kind of recently. So there's this bit of philosophical ideology that maybe some of your listeners are familiar with called epistemic injustice or testimonial injustice. So testimonial injustice occurs when you're disbelieved for the wrong reasons, broadly speaking. Right. So the idea is when you're regarded as less credible as a testifier than you, in fact are for sort of, broadly speaking, like prejudiced reasons. And so in the core cases of testimonial injustice as they've been understood. We have what's called a credibility deficit, right? So people are treated as less credible than they should be. But there's this really fascinating paper by the philosopher Emma Lone Davis where she argues that there are actually cases that are kind of similar to the sorts of cases you were just suggesting there, where there can be an injustice involved in being given kind of more credibility than you maybe deserve, or being treated as, like, extremely credible. And she's interested in cases where members of marginalized groups are sort of treated as spokespeople for their groups. And, I mean, it's very clear that this could be particularly burdensome if you're suddenly. If everything you say is kind of freighted with this additional meaning, if every sort of stray comment is then taken as, like, the perspective of black women, that's going to be kind of stressful, to say the least. So, for sure, I think it's not clear that being given credibility is always a kind of unalloyed good any more than it's obvious that deferring is painful.
- [58:39]
B
That's fascinating. So I want to zoom out to the broad picture, right? We started off with my best attempt at summarizing the sort of folk theory of stamp and epistemology. And I'm going to try and express where I'm at at the end of this conversation in terms of each of these four elements we've broken down. And I'd love to hear your view on how plausible you find that or perhaps your counter view of how you would sort of put the different puzzle pieces together. So it seems to me that it's quite clear that we make different experiences and that the nature of those experiences, among other things, is defined by certain identity groups we belong to. I think it is true that some of those experiences are ones of injustice and that they are going to be more visceral when we experience them ourselves. I think it's true that black men in the United States have an experience of mistreatment by police or fear of police, on average. Or at least in many cases, that is superior to that of white people and that gives them politically relevant knowledge. I think that a lot of that knowledge can be communicated in propositional form. That actually one of the great benefits of a lot of the traditional forms of storytelling and what I think of as liberal, humanist cultural activity is precisely to make it possible for us to put ourselves, at least to some extent, in the shoes of another. I'm just at a conference with Vikasvarup, who wrote the book Q and A which became the basis for Slamdoc Millionaire. By reading that book and watching that movie, I can have a little bit of an experience on what it is like to be a really underprivileged person in India. It doesn't mean I completely get it, but there are certain injustices that this person is likely to encounter. But I can learn about through reading this kind of novel. And the same is true of watching TV shows, of listening to music and all kinds of other ways. Now I think that requires real work. I think it requires commitment. I think we have an obligation as citizens of diverse democracies to take seriously our fellow citizens to not fall foul to this credibility gap, write off what they say, but actually, on the contrary, be very aware that it's likely to be experiences of serious injustices that we could easily be blind to. But I do think that if we put in that work, we are in fact likely to be able to get an understanding of the most important injustices. And then I think when it comes to political solidarity, I'm very, very skeptical of any account that says deferring is likely to be the way that we build effective of political coalitions. It seems to me that actually when I hear, for example, about what it is like to live in a neighborhood that's over policed, in which there's relentless stop and frisk, I can see from within my own set of values about what kind of society I want to live in, what kind of things are important to me politically, why we should be fighting against that. And it seems to me that trying to build towards those commonalities, those commonalities of values, those commonalities of political intention in which I'm invested in the fight for my own reasons is much more likely to succeed than the idea of, you're not going to understand anyway. Just trust that I know more than you and defer to me. And that's how we're somehow going to build a political coalition. That doesn't seem nearly as realistic to me. How would you put the puzzle pieces together?
- [61:51]
D
I think. I think that's a pretty sensible way of putting the puzzle pieces together. I think maybe. One thing I just want to say is that on this question of deference, the sense I'm getting from having spoken to you a bit about this before is that you know, you're broadly sympathetic towards sort of standpoint flavored claims. At least up until we get to this kind of deferential model of discourse, right? And that's where you're like, no, I don't buy it. And one thing that I think is really interesting here is the extent to which standpoint theorists agree with you. So Patricia Hill Collins, for example, one of the great standpoint theorists in the black feminist tradition. So I'm just going to read something she says, because I think it's very, very instructive when it comes to sort of seeing how the way in which standpoint epistemology in its kind of maybe vulgarized forms is sort of regulative of actual political discourses. It's very helpful to see how it diverges from the kind of much more sophisticated and I think, more attractive versions of the which kind of permeate academic discourse. So here's Patricia Hill Collins, and this is in her work in black feminist thought. One implication of some uses of standpoint theory is that the more subordinated the group, the purer the vision available to them. This is an outcome of the origins of standpoint epistemology in Marxist social theory itself, reflecting the binary thinking of its Western origins. Ironically, by quantifying and ranking human oppressions, standpoint theorists invert criteria for methodological adequacy that resemble those of positivism. So positivism is a big no, no for Patricia Hill Collins. Although it is tempting to claim that black women are more oppressed than everyone else and therefore have the best standpoint from which to understand the mechanisms, processes, and effects of oppression, this is not the case. Instead, those are ideas that are validated as true by African American women, African American men, Latina lesbians, Asian American women, Puerto Rican men, and other groups with distinctive standpoints. With each group, using the epistemological approaches, growing from its unique standpoint becomes the most objective truth. Each group speaks from its own standpoint and shares its own partial, situated knowledge. But because each group perceives its own truth as partial, its knowledge is unfinished. Okay, So I think the sort of rough idea that Patricia Hill Collins is getting here is she says, okay, there's this potential way of reading standpoint epistemology where we say, well, what we need to know is you first of all figure out how oppressed someone is and then the kind of assign them a credibility score based on that, and then organize political discourse so that someone is deferred to the higher their oppression score is. And Patricia Hill Collins is saying, this is completely the wrong way to think about things. If that standpoint epistemology, she says, I want no part of it. Right. Rather, what she wants to say is she wants to adopt a much more kind of pluralist, discursive model of political solidarity, where what you have is people with very different experiences who kind of with like grace and compassion rather than a kind of hostility, but sort of test each other's claims against each other. And then they use that process of sort of testing claims against each other to arrive at a consensus which is acceptable to all. And one of the things that is incredibly striking about this is just how similar it is in mood to things that John Stuart Mill says in his defense of free speech. Right. The idea is that it is precisely by testing ideas against competing viewpoints that you will arrive at the most sort of attractive and most sort of epistemically respectable picture of things. So obviously there are differences between what Patricia Hill Collins thinks and what John Stuart Mill thinks. But I do think it's a kind of striking parallel. And that drawing that parallel is an extremely helpful corrective to certain kinds of ways of thinking about standpoint epistemology, where people assume we can draw a very straight line from the standpoint tradition to this kind of deferential epistemology that you find, for good reason, unappealing.
- [66:12]
B
Rachel Fraser thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
- [66:15]
D
Thank you so much for having me.
- [66:26]
B
Thank you so much for listening to the Good Fight. Lots of listeners have been spreading the word about the show. If you two have been enjoying the podcast, please be liked. Rate the show on itunes, tell your friends all about it, share it on Facebook or Twitter. And finally, please mail suggestions for great guests or comments about the show to goodfightpodmail.com that's goodfightpodmail.com
- [66:53]
D
this recording carries a
- [66:54]
E
Creative Commons 4.0 International License License thanks
- [66:58]
B
to Silent Partner for their song Chess Pieces.
- [67:08]
E
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