The environmental image: the case of white ignorance for epistemic justice

This paper argues for a redrawing of the boundaries of epistemic normativity that takes epistemic environments as their centre. The argument sets off from a case of sanctioned white ignorance (Spivak, A critique of postcolonial reason: Toward a history of the vanishing present 1999, Martín, Philosophical Quarterly, 71, 2021) and builds an analogy between the epistemic and the political normative terrains. This analogy, I argue, brings to light a new dimension of epistemic normativity that concerns the organisation and management of the channels through which epistemic resources are produced and made available in a community of knowers. This is what I call the ‘environmental model’ of epistemic normativity. The environmental model is contrasted with existing ‘agential models’, which centre on the psychology or the sociality of epistemic agents. In shifting the perspective from agents to environments, the environmental model is shown to provide a broader set of normative tools compared to existing agential accounts, and offer substantive advantages when it comes to thinking epistemically about structures and about epistemic injustice more broadly. In the attempt to reframe epistemic normativity in this way a wider ambition of this paper also is brought to light—namely, to make space for an image of the epistemological domain as fundamentally political.