Abstract
My aim in this paper is to make the debates about epistemic injustice fruitful for an analysis of trust in the knowledge of others. Epistemic trust is understood here in a broad sense: not only as trust in scientific knowledge or expert knowledge, but also as trust in implicit, positioned and experience-based knowledge. Using insights from discussions of epistemic injustice, I argue for three interrelated theses:
1. Questions of epistemic trust and trustworthiness cannot be answered with reference to individual virtue alone; rather, they have a structural component.
2. The rationality of epistemic trust must be analyzed against the background of social structures and social relations of domination.
3. Epistemic trust is (also) a political phenomenon and epistemically just relations depend on political transformation processes that promote equality.
Keywords
Trust, knowledge, epistemic trust, epistemic (in)justice, social epistemology
ConTrust_WP7.pdf(1,34MB)Download
The text of this publication is published under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International. The exact wording of the license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 can be found here.
Recommended Citation
Regina Schidel, „Knowledge and Trust. What We Can Learn From the Debates About Epistemic Injustice“, ConTrust Working Paper, No. 7, Frankfurt am Main: ConTrust – Trust in Conflict, 2023, contrust.uni-frankfurt.de/wp-7.
Author
Dr. Regina Schidel (*1988) is a PostDoc in the cluster project ConTrust Trust in Conflict at the Research Centre Normative Orders at Goethe University Frankfurt.
She studied philosophy, German and classical philology in Tübingen and Paris. Her doctoral thesis entitled „Relationalität der Menschenwürde. Zum gerechtigkeitstheoretischen Status von Menschen mit geistiger Behinderung“ under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Rainer Forst“ will be published with Campus (Theorie und Gesellschaft) this year. Her research interests lie in the field of political philosophy, social philosophy and the philosophy of law. In her PostDoc project at ConTrust, she is working on the connection between trust and epistemic marginalization and exclusion in societies.