Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is from Karl Landström on his paper ' On Epistemic Freedom and Epistemic Injustice ', recently published in  Inquiry . Karl Landström ‘Seek ye epistemic freedom first’ is how Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni begins his book  Epistemic Freedom in Africa: Deprovincialization and Decolonization  (2018, 1). Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s book is a detailed study of the politics of knowing and knowledge production with emphasis on what he calls ‘the African struggle for epistemic freedom’. He locates the struggle for epistemic freedom in the continued entrapment of knowledge production in Africa within colonial, Euro- and North America-centric matrices of power.  The central contribution of the book is the development of a general account of epistemic freedom. For Ndlovu-Gatsheni, epistemic freedom entails the right to think, theorise and develop one’s own methodologies to interpret the world, and write from where one is located unencumbered by Eurocentrism. Further, he argues tha...

Katherine Puddifoot has recently edited a special issue of  Philosophical Psychology  on bias . In last week's post  Katherine considered new ways of conceptualising bias. In this post, Katherine introduces some of the methods for understanding and mitigating bias discussed by the contributors. James Chamberlain, Jules Holroyd, Ben Jenkins and Robin Scaife  examine empirical work that they argue fails to distinguish intersectional bias from non-binary categories, does not reflect the heterogeneity of bias, and assumes that when people harbor intersectional biases (e.g., the intersectional implicit bias associating traits with Black Women), these will be a complex compound of simple concepts associated with both of the intersecting identities (e.g., White women and Black men).  For Chamberlain and colleagues, it is crucial to do justice to the varying different experiences that members of a social group may have, and how these may change qualitatively based on th...