Casey Rebecca Johnson on “Epistemic Care, Epistemic Autonomy, and Non-Domination”

My book, Epistemic Care explores the normative implications of a central observation from social epistemology: we are epistemically interdependent. This dependence makes us vulnerable to those others on whom we depend. We cannot pursue epistemic goods without their help. And so, I claim, our interdependence should figure in our epistemic evaluations. When we make epistemic assessments, we should assess how well inquirers are forming their beliefs and gathering evidence, but we should also assess how well their communities are meeting the epistemic needs of their members. In this presentation I will walk through the master argument of the book and discuss some evaluative criteria we can adapt from care ethics. Common objections to care-based theories come from those who are concerned about violations of autonomy. So, to close, I will consider and start to answer two such objections. I will argue that in place of autonomy, a care-based theory should value non-domination.

Casey Rebecca Johnson (University of Idaho)

To join the session on Zoom, please get in touch with Giulia Terzian at giuliaterzian@fcsh.unl.pt for the details.

This event is part of the ArgLab Research Colloquium organised by Maria Grazia Rossi, Giulia Terzian and Gloria Andrada at the Laboratory of Argumentation, Cognition and Language of the NOVA Institute of Philosophy. For any inquiries, please contact Maria Grazia, Giulia, or Gloria.

Event supported by the Foundation for Science and Technology (Fundação para a Ciência e para a Tecnologia) of the Portuguese Ministry of Education and Science under the projects UIDB/00183/2020 and UIDP/00183/2020.