Conceptual competence injustice

Social Epistemology A Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Policy

ISSN: 0269-1728 (Print) 1464-5297 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/tsep20

Conceptual competence injustice Derek Egan Anderson To cite this article: Derek Egan Anderson (2017): Conceptual competence injustice, Social Epistemology, DOI: 10.1080/02691728.2016.1241320 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02691728.2016.1241320

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Date: 01 March 2017, At: 10:42

Social Epistemology, 2017 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02691728.2016.1241320

Conceptual competence injustice Derek Egan Anderson Department of Philosophy, Boston University, Boston, MA, USA

ABSTRACT

This paper identifies the phenomenon of conceptual competence injustice, a form of epistemic injustice that occurs when a marginalized epistemic agent makes a conceptual claim and is illegitimately regarded as having failed to grasp one or more of the concepts expressed in her testimony. The notion of a conceptual claim is given a deflationary account that is coextensive with the class of a priori knowable claims. This study reveals a form of oppression that severely hinders marginalized epistemic agents who seek to create or communicate conceptual knowledge. Conceptual competence injustice is compared and contrasted with three other forms of epistemic injustice: testimonial injustice, hermeneutical injustice, and contributory injustice. The final section investigates a number of damaging effects that conceptual competence injustice has on marginalized persons pursuing a career in academic philosophy.

KEYWORDS

Epistemic injustice; epistemic oppression; concepts; the a priori; testimony; social epistemology

1. Introduction Some disputes cannot be settled on the basis of empirical evidence, or at least there are disputes such that we do not presently know how we could settle them on the basis of empirical evidence. Many philosophical disputes have this character, as well as many conceptual disputes in other areas of academic, scientific, and public discourse. When we do not know how to settle a dispute on the basis of empirical evidence, our decision about what to believe becomes highly sensitive to our judgments of conceptual competence and intellectual authority. In a society in which judgments of competence and authority are negatively influenced by the existence of interlocking systems of oppression, conceptual debate becomes a site of epistemic oppression. This paper aims to identify and investigate a notion I call conceptual competence injustice, a form of epistemic injustice (Fricker 2007) in which a member of a marginalized group is unjustly regarded as lacking conceptual or linguistic competence as a consequence of structural oppression. Conceptual competence injustice is a wrong done to a person specifically in their capacity as a knower of those claims that would traditionally be regarded as conceptual or linguistic truths. This form of injustice is systematic and structural in that it only exists in societies that facilitate the systematic oppression of certain groups and the dominance of others. In its connection to structural oppression, conceptual competence injustice is also a form of what Dotson (2014) identifies as epistemic oppression—­persistent, unwarranted infringement on the epistemic agency of marginalized persons that hinders their ability to contribute to the production of knowledge.

CONTACT  Derek Egan Anderson 

[email protected]

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

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In the first section, I introduce and elucidate the phenomenon of conceptual competence injustice. In the second section, I explore some connections between conceptual competence injustice and three other forms of epistemic injustice: testimonial injustice (Fricker 2007), hermeneutical injustice (Fricker 2007), and contributory injustice (Dotson 2012b). In the third section, I discuss a number of ways that conceptual competence injustice is especially harmful within academic philosophy.

2.  What is conceptual competence injustice? Consider the following scenario. A philosophy graduate student who is a woman of color is giving a presentation in a philosophy of language seminar, during which she asserts, “Natural kind terms are not rigid designators.” A first-year, white male graduate student takes her to have said something false. His judgment springs from his understanding of Kripke’s (1980) Naming and Necessity together with an implicit belief that women of color do not typically excel at metaphysics and philosophy of language. This implicit belief is a manifestation of a general epistemic bias against women of color stemming from the interlocking systems of oppression that beset women of color in the US. In conformity with this general epistemic bias, the white male graduate student ascribes the presenter a significantly lower degree of credibility than he ascribes to himself, and thereby judges that she has less competence with the concept of a rigid designator than he does. The first-year student mistakenly assumes the speaker’s arguments are confused and thus does not engage in actively thinking through her presentation. In fact, the presenter has caught on to the considerations that motivate Soames (2002) to argue that natural kind terms can’t be understood as rigid designators in the way that Naming and Necessity assumes.1 The presenter has a more sophisticated understanding of the concept of rigid designation than the first-year student but the first year student—under the influence of covert social norms of credibility ascription that propagate and sustain the epistemic oppression of women of color and facilitate the epistemic privilege of white men – takes himself to have the greater conceptual competence. This case presents an instance of conceptual competence injustice. A person who is marginalized on the basis of her social identity makes a conceptual claim and that claim is rejected in part because her audience illegitimately judges her to have less credibility than she in fact has. In a more just world, the white male graduate student would have taken the presenter’s assertion to challenge his own conception of rigid designation; he would have given her conceptual claim equal merit as his own conflicting opinion, and he would have proceeded to do what responsible philosophers do when they disagree with epistemic peers: engage in a respectful dialectic, treating each other as mutually qualified sources of insight. Instead, he disregards her claim, treats it as an expression of conceptual incompetence and takes her to be someone who should defer to his understanding of rigid designation. He does not treat her as a source of insight, but rather as someone who can be ignored—perhaps he even takes time during her presentation to think about other papers he is working on. His judgment conforms to a pattern of systematic epistemic disenfranchisement and intellectual delegitimation of those with a marginalized identity, in this case women of color. Moreover, his unduly low judgment of the presenter’s credibility undermines her ability to successfully communicate her ideas, as he takes himself to have no need to spend serious cognitive effort engaging with what she says. In addition to this harm, his mistaken judgment lowers his opinion of her credibility even further, which may lead him to commit further conceptual competence injustice in the future. Must conceptual competence injustice involve a judgment that is causally produced by some internal bias or prejudice? The answer is no. The causal etiology is not essential to the phenomenon. Consider a variation of the case in which the white male graduate student has no implicit bias against women of color, but only has an unduly high degree of confidence in his own intellectual authority. His judgment still conforms to the general pattern of epistemic bias against women of color. It still harms the woman in all the same ways that it would have harmed her had the man’s judgment been caused by an implicit internalization of the pervasive epistemic bias against women of color—his judgment still functions as part of the oppressive pattern of social norms that prevent marginalized persons from being full-fledged members of the epistemic community. To be sure, conceptual competence injustice

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is typically caused by oppressive norms of credibility ascription, but this typical causal etiology is not a necessary condition on the occurrence of competence injustice. Conceptual competence injustice only requires that the judgment of unduly low credibility conform to a general negative epistemic bias that contributes to the epistemic marginalization of the speaker. The name “competence injustice” should be applied to a wider range of injustices than the cases that are my focus in the present paper. It should be applied to the class of all injustices that concern the under-ascription of competence to marginalized persons. A woman who is a mechanic may face competence injustice that has nothing to do with judgments of her conceptual competence. A person who is judged to be worse at communicating than they in fact are may be a victim of competence injustice. Conceptual competence injustice is just one kind of competence injustice. In what follows, I sometimes use the shorter locution “competence injustice” to refer to the particular type of competence injustice I am concerned with here, namely conceptual competence injustice. We can now give a general account2 of conceptual competence injustice. Conceptual competence injustice occurs when (1)  A member of a marginalized group makes a conceptual claim, and (2)  In making her claim she is accorded a lower level of credibility than she in fact has, (3)  This judgment of low credibility co-occurs with a judgment to the effect that the marginalized person has a lower degree of competence with some relevant word or concept than she in fact has. The notion of competence involved in this form of competence injustice is a notion of conceptual or linguistic competence (Burge 1979; Peacocke 1992; Higginbotham 1998) not to be confused with a broader notion of “competence” that is sometimes invoked (Coady 1992; Govier 1993; Fricker 2007; Goldberg 2010; Greco 2012; McKinnon 2015) meaning something like “reliability” or “the ability to produce true statements.”3 Let us call this broader notion veridicality. Veridicality is broader than conceptual competence. A person may be conceptually competent in making a claim—they may fully understand the words and concepts they are using – while simultaneously failing to be veridical. Consequently, veridicality injustice is a kind of competence injustice that is broader in scope than conceptual competence injustice. Dotson (2011) identifies a form of veridicality injustice called testimonial quieting that subsumes conceptual competence injustice. Testimonial quieting occurs when an audience fails to recognize a person as a knower. Dotson engages with Collins’s (2002) discussion of the ways in which controlling images function to perpetuate the idea that black women are not knowers, thereby perpetuating testimonial quieting against that group. Conceptual competence injustice may be thought of as a form of testimonial quieting that concerns conceptual or linguistic knowledge. It is instructive to examine an episode of veridicality injustice and contrast it with conceptual competence injustice in order to illuminate what is distinctive about conceptual competence injustice. Consider: an old birdwatcher with good eyesight might face veridicality injustice stemming from ageist norms of credibility to the effect that her eyesight is probably no good and thus her bird-sighting claims should not be trusted. The question of whether this woman is veridical concerning bird sightings can be answered by objective empirical evidence. We can check her claims against our own observations of birds in the area and thereby discover that her sighting claims are accurate. In this sense, it is an objective empirical question whether the woman is credible when she claims to see an egret. This kind of empirically determined objectivity is not available in scenarios where a person’s conceptual or linguistic competence is at issue. There is no way to determine a person’s credibility regarding purely conceptual or linguistic matters on the basis of objective empirical evidence. When someone says “Natural kind terms are not rigid designators,” or “Privacy is a right,” or “Racism entails the existence of systematic oppression,” there is no presently known way to use objective empirical evidence to check whether that person is credible. This is an important feature of conceptual claims, which we will discuss shortly in more detail.

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Another distinct but related conception of competence is formulated by Dotson (2011), where she discusses testimonial competence. An audience has testimonial competence relative to some piece of testimony when they have the ability to make intelligible sense of that testimony. Testimonial incompetence occurs when an audience fails to make intelligible sense of some testimony. Conceptual competence injustice is related to testimonial incompetence in that people who are testimonially incompetent in Dotson’s sense are likely to commit conceptual competence injustice.4 I will now briefly develop each of the three conditions listed above in some detail before moving on to investigate the relationship between conceptual competence injustice and other known forms of epistemic injustice.

2.1.  Concerning condition (i): conceptual claims and marginalized persons What is it for a marginalized person to make a conceptual claim? This involves answering three questions: What is it to make a claim? What is it to make a conceptual claim? What is it for a marginalized person to make a conceptual claim? For present purposes, making a claim amounts to asserting a proposition in a language. Later, I will consider the possibility that competence injustice might occur even if no assertion is made in language but only in thought. I will argue that a marginalized person can be the victim of conceptual competence injustice even if she does not speak. But for now, making a claim may be identified with making an assertion in a spoken natural language. What is it to make a conceptual claim? The traditional notion is metaphysically and epistemically robust: conceptual claims express relations between concepts and their truth or falsity can be known a priori by anyone who grasps the relevant concepts. This robust notion has come under fire in the past 65 years, so I will opt for a deflationary account of “conceptual claim.” For present purposes, a conceptual claim is simply a claim for which there is no widely agreed-upon method for deciding its truth on the basis of empirical evidence. This notion is vague because what counts as “widely ­agreed-upon” is vague—asking how many people must agree on something in order for it to count as widely ­agreed-upon is like asking how many hairs a person must lose in order to count as bald—but the deflationary account is extensionally adequate in the sense that all and only the clear instances of the traditional notion of a conceptual claim will be clear instances of the deflated notion. For example, claims that are clearly proprietary to mathematics, metaphysics, and normative ethics—claims such as “There is no greatest natural number” and “Free will is incompatible with determinism” and “Murder is wrong”—will count as conceptual claims on the deflationary explication, because there is no widely agreed-upon way to bring empirical evidence to bear on such claims.5 What is it for a marginalized person to make a conceptual claim? To be marginalized in the relevant sense is to be a member of a group of people who are systematically oppressed and disadvantaged by the social, economic, cultural, educational, and political aspects of their society. Marginalization is to be understood according to an intersectional framework (Crenshaw 1989, 1991; hooks 1989; Collins 2002). Our society is constituted to a great extent by a collection of interlocking oppressive social structures labeled by Collins (2002) as a matrix of domination. A matrix of domination generates intersectionality, the phenomenon in which multiple forms of oppression intersect and give rise to unique forms of oppression that are distinct from their component categories (Crenshaw 1989, 1991). Marginalized groups are individuated by the collection6 of intersecting oppressions their members face. To be a marginalized person is to be a member of such a group. When a member of a marginalized group makes a conceptual claim, there is the possibility of conceptual competence injustice. When a member of a non-marginalized group makes a conceptual claim, there is no possibility of competence injustice. This is because competence injustice is necessarily part of a systematic pattern of epistemic marginalization that is connected to broader patterns of social, economic, cultural, educational, and political marginalization. It cannot exist in the absence of such systematic marginalization.

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2.2.  Concerning condition (ii): credibility ascriptions What is it to ascribe to someone the level of credibility that they have? Credibility, in the first instance, is a property of testimony. Testimony is speech that asserts a proposition. A person S testifies that p if and only if (iff ) S asserts that p. The aim of testimony is the transmission of knowledge (Burge 1993; Williamson 1996). Credible testimony is testimony that should be taken as an expression of knowledge. If A judges B’s testimony to be credible, then A has sufficient reason to believe that B is a source of knowledge concerning what they assert. A person has credibility regarding some domain of discourse iff they produce credible testimony concerning that domain—that is, iff their assertions concerning that domain should be taken to express knowledge. Hence, a person should be regarded as credible concerning some domain only if they should be regarded as knowledgeable concerning that domain. But knowledge is not sufficient for credibility, since the testifier must also be trustworthy to give honest testimony. If a person is both knowledgeable and trustworthy, then that person has credibility. If a person is both knowledgeable and trustworthy concerning some conceptual domain, then that person has credibility when they assert conceptual claims concerning that domain. Because there is no objective empirical check on a person’s credibility regarding the conceptual claims they make, we cannot establish an objective measure of credibility concerning conceptual claims. The best we can manage in our practical judgments of credibility in such cases is a relative assessment, a partial ordering of credibility concerning a given domain. As Medina (2012) points out, ascriptions of credibility are always “comparative or contrastive: implicitly, being judged credible to some degree is being regarded as more credible than others, less credible than others, and equally credible as others (Medina 2011, 18).”  This observation is most apt in cases where a person asserts a conceptual claim, where there is no way to check how reliable the person is by comparing their claims with objective empirical evidence. Hence, when a marginalized person makes a conceptual claim, accurately judging that person’s level of credibility requires taking them to be more credible than those who know less than they do, less credible than those who know more than they do, and equally credible to those who are their epistemic peers.7 Conceptual competence injustice involves taking a marginalized person to be less credible than their epistemic peers, or taking a marginalized person to be less credible than those who know less than their epistemic peers.

2.3.  Concerning condition (iii): judgments of competence Condition (iii) would be redundant if everyone accepted the traditional robust account of conceptual claims, since a traditionalist holds that a person is credible in asserting a conceptual claim iff they are competent with all of the relevant concepts. However, since we are working with a deflated notion of conceptual claim, condition (iii) is not redundant. There is no built-in logical guarantee that judgments of credibility will entail judgments of competence. It is possible for a marginalized person to be denied credibility concerning a conceptual claim while being regarded as competent with the relevant concepts. For example, the white male graduate student from the earlier story might have believed that the presenter fully understood the concept of a rigid designator but he might have taken her to have slipped up in its application due to laziness or sloppy thinking. Although this judgment would most certainly constitute an instance of veridicality injustice, it would not be a case of conceptual competence injustice because the white male graduate student would not falsely impugn the speaker’s conceptual competence. Condition (iii) is therefore not redundant. It is constitutive of conceptual competence injustice that such events involve a judgment of conceptual or linguistic incompetence in addition to a judgment of unduly low credibility. Yet in practice there is still a very reliable connection between condition (ii) being satisfied and condition (iii) being satisfied, especially within academic philosophy where the traditional account of conceptual claims still influences judgments of conceptual competence. Conceptual claims that elicit low judgments of credibility often engender skepticism about the speaker’s conceptual competence as a matter of psychological regularity.

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3.  Conceptual competence injustice and other forms of epistemic injustice Conceptual competence injustice in its most typical guise is a form of testimonial injustice. Testimonial injustice occurs whenever a marginalized person makes an assertion and is accorded less credibility than they are due.8 Conceptual competence injustice quintessentially involves making a specific kind of assertion, viz. an assertion of a conceptual claim. Not all instances of testimonial injustice are instances of conceptual competence injustice. Fricker’s (2007) central case of testimonial injustice drawn from Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird is not an instance of conceptual competence injustice. Tom Robinson, a black man living under Jim Crow, is unjustly disbelieved when he testifies in his own defense before a courtroom concerning the events that took place on the day he is alleged to have raped a young white woman. Robinson’s testimony concerns matters of fact that can be settled (in principle if not in practice) by empirical evidence; hence, his claims do not count as conceptual claims. So Fricker’s central case of testimonial injustice does not count as a case of conceptual competence injustice. It is worth considering whether there are also cases of conceptual competence injustice that are not cases of testimonial injustice. In Section 2.1, I suggested that for purposes of exposition the idea of “making a claim” should be understood as “making an assertion in a spoken natural language.” I now want to expand the definition of conceptual competence injustice to include assertions made in the “language of thought,” or what (for present purposes) amounts to the same thing: having a belief. Someone counts as making a conceptual claim in the language of thought when they have a belief that would be expressed by a conceptual claim in natural language. Suppose that a person has a thought that could be regarded as making a conceptual claim. Can that person be the victim of competence injustice, even though they do not speak? The answer is yes. There are at least two ways for a person to suffer conceptual competence injustice without speaking. In the first way, the marginalized person comes to doubt her own competence with some concept. Her experience of epistemic marginalization causes her to refrain from asserting some conceptual claim that she knows. The persistence of epistemic oppression might also cause a marginalized person to completely lose confidence in her conceptual knowledge to the point where she no longer believes what she previously knew to be true—perhaps now she suspends judgment because she is so unsure of herself—and in this way she could lose knowledge she previously had. The harm may go even further. Constant exposure to competence injustice has the potential to damage a person’s self-trust in her conceptual capacities. Jones (2012) discusses the nature and importance of self-trust and the ways that social injustice can damage self-trust. Conceptual competence injustice damages a particular type of self-trust, our trust in our ability to understand conceptual claims. Once a marginalized person’s self-trust in her conceptual capacities has been significantly damaged, competence injustice can occur as episodes of self-doubt. This will often happen when the marginalized agent is not even thinking of offering testimony.9 Competence injustice can also occur in scenarios where a marginalized person is discredited as a source of conceptual knowledge without having spoken. Often, marginalized persons are expected to remain silent concerning conceptual matters that they are presumed not to understand. They are not consulted as a source of conceptual knowledge, because their competence is considered doubtful. Enfranchised agents might “dumb down” a discussion when speaking with a marginalized person. An enfranchised person might even avoid discussing “difficult” conceptual topics with marginalized persons altogether as a consequence of their low estimate of the marginalized person’s competence. These are cases of competence injustice where the mere expectation of incompetence contributes to epistemic oppression. Can conceptual competence injustice also exist in purely structural ways that lack individual perpetrators? I think the answer is yes, because institutions can make judgments of credibility. Standardized testing, for example, is a structural institution that serves as a method of assessment for conceptual competence. The questions on standardized tests may be posed and graded in ways that penalize

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members of marginalized groups, effectively pronouncing unwarranted judgments of low conceptual competence. The second form of epistemic injustice discussed by Fricker (2007) is hermeneutical injustice, the injustice in which “the powerful have an unfair advantage in structuring collective social understandings.”10 According to Fricker, hermeneutical injustice occurs when there is a lacuna in the conceptual or linguistic resources of a society, such that a distinctive and wrongful social experience shared by members of a marginalized group cannot be adequately conceptualized or described. Fricker’s primary example is the experience of Carmita Wood, who was subjected to sexual harassment before there was an accurate name for the phenomenon or any mastery of the concept. The non-existence of relevant conceptual resources harms members of the marginalized group; in Fricker’s example, the women subjected to sexual harassment are harmed by their inability to comprehend their experiences. Departing somewhat from Fricker, let us say that the harm brought on by a lack of appropriate conceptual resources counts as epistemic injustice insofar as it is the result of a matrix of domination (Collins 2002), i.e. when the existence of interlocking systems of oppression is the reason why the relevant conceptual resources do not exist. Can an instance of conceptual competence injustice ever be an instance of hermeneutical injustice? The answer is no. In every instance of competence injustice, the victim begins with some level of mastery with a concept or word and then their level of mastery is doubted. A fortiori, competence injustice always involves the possession of all relevant concepts. Hermeneutical injustice, on the other hand, always involves a lacuna in the conceptual resources available—every instance of hermeneutical injustice entails that the relevant crucial concept or word does not yet exist. Thus, conceptual competence injustice is fully distinct from hermeneutical injustice. There is, however, an important relationship between the two forms of injustice because conceptual competence injustice can be implicated in instances of hermeneutical injustice. According to Fricker, hermeneutical injustice results from hermeneutical marginalization. Hermeneutical marginalization occurs when a group is excluded from a location of social life, with the result that members of the marginalized group are “prevented from generating meanings pertaining to areas of the social world.”11 Competence injustice is an engine of hermeneutical marginalization. It causes people to doubt the conceptual and linguistic competence of marginalized persons. This contributes to the exclusion of marginalized persons from many professional and intellectual endeavors: business, politics, academia, and many others. Consider, for a very limited but familiar example, the locations of social life that exist within academic philosophy. As I will show in Section 4, competence injustice is devastatingly effective in blocking marginalized persons from accessing the ranks of professional philosophy. Marginalized persons are thus hermeneutically marginalized with respect to philosophy simply by being excluded from occupying positions within academic philosophy. This marginalization is in no small part the result of conceptual competence injustice. More generally, competence injustice functions to exclude members of marginalized groups from many positions in the social world that would provide them with the opportunity to create and share new conceptual resources, and so competence injustice promotes hermeneutical injustice in Fricker’s sense. There is another way that conceptual competence injustice is implicated in a form of hermeneutical injustice, a form that Fricker’s (2007) discussion fails to acknowledge or account for: cases in which the relevant hermeneutical resources exist but access to those resources is limited by the existence of epistemic oppression. As Dotson (2012b) points out, we do not all rely on the same conceptual resources. Marginalized groups develop their own conceptual resources for understanding their experiences (Collins 2002; Dotson 2012b). But these conceptual resources “from the margins” are not readily available to all who need them.12 A marginalized person may be denied access to crucial conceptual knowledge by the matrix of domination. This can happen in structural ways, as when marginalized groups are denied access to education. It can also happen in ways that are more closely related to conceptual competence injustice. The marginalized epistemic agent is in danger of being browbeaten by the pervasive pattern of epistemic oppression into doubting her own capacities for conceptual

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knowledge. For example, Kadi (1996) describes the experience of being a working-class person in an academic environment. She was taught through experience to doubt her capacities for obtaining conceptual knowledge, and she struggled to overcome that conditioning and gain a conceptual grasp of her own oppression. While this type of oppressive circumstance is not itself an instance of competence injustice—indeed, it is an aspect of a much more insidious form of oppression—the existence of such circumstances is facilitated by the existence of conceptual competence injustice. Widespread competence injustice creates a society in which marginalized persons face more difficult challenges in gaining legitimation for their conceptual knowledge, and this in turn throws up barriers between the marginalized person and conceptual knowledge in a wide variety of practical and intellectual domains. So even when the crucial hermeneutical resources exist, conceptual competence injustice makes it more difficult for marginalized persons to access those resources. Dotson (2012b) criticizes Fricker (2007) for implying that testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice exhaust the potential forms of epistemic injustice.13 Dotson shows that Fricker’s account is not exhaustive by introducing a new form of epistemic injustice, contributory injustice, which is distinct from the two forms that Fricker considers. Contributory injustice occurs when a marginalized person has the conceptual tools to comprehend her experience of oppression and the linguistic tools to articulate it, but her attempts at communicating her ideas are thwarted by the fact that her audience willfully misunderstands her. In this way, it is thoroughly distinct from hermeneutical injustice: the marginalized person has the ability to understand and say exactly what is going on, but her “articulations generally fail to gain appropriate uptake according to the biased hermeneutical resources utilized by the perceiver.”14 This failure is an active, willful ignorance on the part of the audience. Instead of accepting what the marginalized person is saying (or perhaps struggling to understand it, but trying) the perpetrator actively upholds and applies his own biased conceptual scheme, a scheme that cannot capture the ideas or experiences being expressed. By doing so, he makes what the marginalized person is saying unintelligible to himself. The marginalized person’s attempt to communicate is thereby thwarted and she is rendered unable to effectively contribute her conceptual resources to the discussion. Conceptual competence injustice and contributory injustice are closely related in a number of ways. First, the aspect of contributory injustice in which the hearer clings to his own biased conceptual scheme can be a catalyst for competence injustice. If a marginalized person makes a conceptual claim that expresses concepts that are not part of the hearer’s conceptual repertoire and the hearer refuses to update his conceptual repertoire, i.e. he refuses to defer to the speaker in her use of those concepts, then the hearer is apt to regard her assertion as nonsensical and vacuous. The hearer may take himself to be justified on those grounds in regarding the marginalized person as less credible and competent than she is. In this way, contributory injustice can cause conceptual competence injustice. Competence injustice also provides the oppressor with a convenient way to perpetrate contributory injustice. Suppose the marginalized person makes a conceptual claim that would contribute to the hearer’s conceptual resources in a way that would improve his ability to understand the situation at hand. By denying the marginalized person the credibility she is due and by denying that she has competence with concepts he doesn’t understand, the hearer can effectively disregard the speaker’s conceptual claim, thereby thwarting her ability to contribute her understanding to the shared pool of epistemic resources. This method of perpetrating contributory injustice relies less heavily on the steadfast use of biased hermeneutical resources and more on the biased norms of credibility ascription that are characteristic of conceptual competence injustice. Yet it still carries the spirit of contributory injustice in that the perpetrator unjustly refuses to incorporate the well-conceived conceptual resources of the marginalized epistemic agent into his own conceptual scheme. Despite their close connection, there are important differences between contributory injustice and conceptual competence injustice. First, contributory injustice can be perpetrated without competence injustice. Dotson’s primary illustration of contributory injustice, an exchange between Barbara Smith and Deborah Chay, illustrates one way that the two forms of injustice can come apart. Smith’s (1979) landmark essay powerfully engages with the lack of literary criticism concerning black women writers.

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Smith’s aim is to raise consciousness and foster a community of black feminist critics. She launches attacks against the prevailing racist and misogynist literary criticism of the day and challenges those who have neglected the works of black women to engage with them; she shows by example how a black lesbian feminist perspective can illuminate the writings of black women; she outlines her vision of black feminist criticism, including the idea that “[the critic] would think and write out of her own identity and not try to graft the ideas or methodology of white/male literary thought upon the precious materials of Black women’s art.”15 Chay (1993) attacks Smith’s reliance on “an experience-based account of black women’s literature, criticism, and identity,” arguing that this account constitutes a form of essentialism that is incompatible with a certain collection of poststructuralist ideas. Smith (1993) rebuts Chay’s poststructuralist criticism, writing, ‘Arguments against so-called “essentialism” and [against] relying upon “the evidence of experience” are profoundly apolitical, because they view identity as an intellectual construct with insignificant political or material consequences within a white supremacist, misogynist, capitalist and patriarchal state.’16 Dotson sums up the exchange: Smith effectively charges Chay with exhibiting willful hermeneutical ignorance that maps onto her epistemically culpable failure to judge Smith’s essays fairly. For Smith, Chay’s employment of hermeneutical resources incompatible with Smith’s own causes her to deliberately distort the meaning of her text.17

The exchange between Smith and Chay is a clear instance of contributory injustice. Chay applies an inappropriate poststructuralist framework to Smith’s work in an attempt to marginalize and erase Smith’s ideas from the academic landscape, exhibiting a willful disregard of what Smith (1993) calls “the humanity with which [her work] was written.” Yet Chay’s attack on Smith does not imply that Smith incompletely grasped the concepts she was employing, or that Smith was less than fully credible in her assertions. As Dotson points out, Chay extends Smith a great deal of academic respect and credibility. Hence, Dotson’s primary case of contributory injustice is not a case of conceptual competence injustice. Conceptual competence injustice can also occur in scenarios where contributory injustice is not present. One way for this to happen is for the scenario to involve only shared conceptual resources between speaker and hearer but for the hearer to have false beliefs involving the concept in question. For example, suppose a white person hears a person of color assert, “In the United States, racism against white people is impossible.” Suppose also that this white person believes falsely that racism is merely prejudice on the basis of race and that therefore white people can be victims of racism. Upon hearing the conceptual claim that racism against white people is impossible, the white person judges the speaker of color to be conceptually incompetent—he thinks she fails to grasp the concept of racism. This is a clear instance of conceptual competence injustice. But if we were to say that it was also a case of contributory injustice, this would entail that the white person lacks the relevant concept of racism. We should not accept that racist white people who believe in “reverse racism” merely have a different concept of racism, for that is to concede that such people express a true belief when they say, “It is possible for black people to be racist against white people in the United States.” Such an utterance is false, no matter what the white person believes or tries to stipulate about racism. Therefore, when the person of color says that racism against white people is impossible and the white man disagrees and judges her to be conceptually incompetent, we have a case of conceptual competence injustice wherein all of the participants share the same hermeneutical resources. Hence, this is a case of conceptual competence injustice that is not a case of contributory injustice.

4.  Conceptual competence injustice and academic philosophy Marginalized persons engaged in the field of academic philosophy are acutely susceptible to being harmed by conceptual competence injustice. Professional success in academic philosophy requires making conceptual claims, having those conceptual claims legitimated by peers, teachers, and colleagues, and generally being perceived as conceptually competent. Thus, conceptual competence injustice constitutes a serious threat to marginalized persons pursuing philosophy in a professional capacity. I suspect that the widespread existence of competence injustice partly explains the well-established

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under-representation of marginalized groups within academic philosophy (Antony 2012; Dotson 2012a; Leslie et al. 2015). Whether or not this suspicion is correct, it is important and informative to explore the impact of conceptual competence injustice on marginalized persons in philosophy. Competence injustice within philosophy is responsible for a wide range of harms at all levels of professional development: undergraduate, graduate, junior faculty, and senior faculty levels. For the undergraduate in the early stages of a philosophy career, being perceived as linguistically and conceptually competent in the domain of philosophy builds confidence and interest in the field. Making successful conceptual claims and getting positive feedback from one’s peers and teachers at this stage is crucial for building both confidence and interest. The marginalized person who faces competence injustice at this stage may perceive the discipline to be concerned primarily with nonsense or sense that academic philosophy is biased against her culture or her mode of thought. Or she might simply doubt that she has any insight into the subject matter at all. In pursuing a major in philosophy, being perceived as conceptually competent in philosophical domains typically leads to better feedback and encouragement from faculty. This is necessary for developing mentoring relationships and securing strong letters of recommendation for graduate school. The undergraduate who is unfairly perceived as conceptually incompetent receives negative feedback when she voices her ideas. She experiences frustration at having her claims rejected or misunderstood. She tends to have a harder time getting the attention and support of faculty. The victim of competence injustice must work harder and be more impressive than an enfranchised epistemic agent in order to get the same quality letters of recommendation, and the letters she does secure have the potential to perpetrate further competence injustice. The harms of conceptual competence injustice are even greater for the marginalized philosopher in graduate school where respect, prestige, accolades, and faculty attention are all mediated to a significant degree by the perception of one’s conceptual competence. For the student who is often and unfairly perceived as failing to grasp the relevant concepts, graduate school presents a much more difficult challenge than it does for members of the enfranchised group. The harms present at the undergraduate level persist into graduate school, and their effect is intensified. The marginalized graduate student experiences frustration at having her conceptual claims misunderstood or rejected without due consideration. She faces a greater challenge than the enfranchised graduate student when it comes to building confidence and enthusiasm; she must make due with less positive feedback and persevere against a relentless pattern of unjustified credibility deficits. The marginalized graduate student will tend to have a harder time getting the attention, encouragement, and support of faculty. Conceptual competence injustice is more intense at the graduate level because philosophy graduate school tends to be immersive. Conceptual claims become the primary substance of everyday life. The sheer number of conceptual competence injustices increases in philosophy graduate school simply because so much of one’s time and effort involves making conceptual claims. Moreover, where the undergraduate is exposed to competence injustice primarily from faculty, in graduate school one’s peers become one’s colleagues. Their judgments of competence become more impactful. So the marginalized graduate student faces the risk of conceptual competence injustice from a larger group of people. The personal significance of competence injustice increases as well. As the graduate student comes to identify as a professional philosopher, the legitimation of her conceptual claims becomes coextensive with her professional success; hence, competence injustice becomes more of a personal attack. Philosophy is a dialectical process. In developing one’s philosophical projects, one needs to be able to talk in a productive way with one’s peers and mentors. The marginalized graduate student has a much harder time finding legitimate engagement in her philosophical discussions with peers and mentors. She must persevere in her work despite being doubted, illegitimately misunderstood, and regarded as failing to grasp the concepts she is working with. This can lead to what Dotson (2011) identifies as testimonial smothering, the condition in which a speaker perceives her audience to be unwilling or unable to uptake her testimony and is thereby forced to truncate her testimony so that it contains only content she can safely assume her audience will accept. The prevalence of conceptual

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competence injustice makes it much more likely that marginalized graduate students will engage in testimonial smothering in the conceptual domain. This effect begins in earnest in graduate school and persists indefinitely thereafter into the upper echelons of the discipline. Marginalized graduate students are likely to hear the very idea they offer in a seminar repeated in slightly different language by an enfranchised graduate student, with the reliable result that the enfranchised student’s comment is better received. Many of us have seen a woman graduate student make a point in class that is completely ignored, only to be subsequently raised by a male graduate student who fails to credit the initial speaker. Her point becomes the enfranchised student’s point. Later in the discussion someone says, “It’s like Brian said earlier, [insert Alice’s point].” Similar considerations apply to colloquia, where an objection raised by a marginalized philosopher tends to go overlooked or underappreciated until it is raised again by an enfranchised philosopher. This process is part of a vicious cycle, since these episodes deprive the marginalized philosopher of the boost in perceived credibility that they deserve, leading to future episodes of conceptual competence injustice. Graduate students who are perceived as less conceptually competent also face a greater risk of having their ideas appropriated by other graduate students and even faculty who purport to understand their ideas better than they do. Consider the following pattern. A marginalized graduate student presents an idea or an argument they are developing, either in front of a class or in conversation or in a meeting with their advisor. The enfranchised agent to whom they are speaking commits competence injustice, judging that the marginalized student fails to grasp some key aspect of the idea or argument which they in fact grasp perfectly well. The enfranchised agent takes himself to have a better grasp of the issue, more insight into the idea or argument, and goes on to develop his own version of the marginalized student’s project. He takes himself to be entitled to the project because he was the person who discovered whatever knowledge the marginalized student was supposedly lacking, or because he resolved whatever conceptual difficulty he imagined the marginalized philosopher was having. Owing to the difference in credibility, the enfranchised agent’s version of the idea or argument is taken more seriously than the marginalized graduate student who produced it. Thus, the marginalized student’s project is stolen as a result of competence injustice. A marginalized graduate student must also contend with the fact that her peers and mentors will tend to judge her work to be of lower quality and significance than it is. This can negatively affect the student’s grades. More importantly, it can affect the way in which she proceeds with her work. A marginalized graduate student is more likely than an enfranchised graduate student to be forced to stop pursuing her primary philosophical interest by the opinions of her peers and mentors. The underestimation of her work can also lead the marginalized philosopher to submit her writing to less prestigious journals, either indirectly as the result of encountering negative judgments or directly at the explicit direction of a mentor. In the most extreme case, and perhaps the most common case, the persistence of conceptual competence injustice forces the marginalized student out of the graduate program altogether, ending her career in professional philosophy. Since judgments of credibility in conceptual domains are essentially comparative, competence injustice is facilitated by the over-ascription of credibility to enfranchised agents. The problem can be illustrated by considering cases where a philosophy department imbues a white male graduate student with “boy-wonder” status. A boy-wonder is a white male graduate student who is considered to be a philosophical genius and “the next big thing” by important philosophers at a top department.18 A boy-wonder enjoys an unduly high level of default credibility. He is taken to have unique insight into many or even most areas of philosophy. This is a recipe for conceptual competence injustice. Since his unduly high perceived credibility will often outweigh the perceived credibility of marginalized graduate students, those marginalized graduate students will often be judged less competent than they in fact are by comparison. This phenomenon leads to the misallocation of resources and prestige in favor of the boy-wonder to the disadvantage of marginalized graduate students within top programs. Competence injustice also harms the job candidate who interviews with or gives a job talk to people who perceive her linguistic and conceptual competence to be lower than it is. Being perceived as conceptually competent is a crucial part of landing a job in philosophy. In addition to creating

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the perception of general incompetence, competence injustice can undermine the marginalized philosopher’s ability to communicate her ideas. The following happened to a woman philosopher on a fly out. During her talk, she presented a sophisticated analysis of the relationship between semantic interpretation and ontological commitment. Afterward, she received an email from a senior faculty member at the department where she was interviewing, directing her to read Quine’s classic essay “On What There Is.” The faculty member proceeded to explain Quine’s position. The email was not a sarcastic rebuttal of the woman’s position but an earnest attempt to say something helpful. But the idea that a philosopher who is giving her job talk on ontological commitment is not already intimately familiar with that canonical article is absurd. In sending that email, the faculty member revealed that he had completely missed the depth of the talk and underestimated the job candidate. This anecdote illustrates one way that conceptual competence injustice can function to undermine a marginalized philosopher’s success on the philosophy job market. Marginalized junior faculty who manage to procure tenure-track jobs face greater difficulties getting tenure, partly due to conceptual competence injustice. Getting tenure requires obtaining positive tenure letters, which requires being viewed as a competent philosopher by one’s colleagues outside of one’s home university. The marginalized philosopher faces the threat of silent conceptual competence injustice from her audiences in colloquia and at conferences. These silent underestimations have the potential to undermine her tenure case. Competence injustice can also make cutting-edge research seem false or less cutting-edge than it in fact is. This can be a factor in tenure review as well. Moreover, conceptual competence injustice can also make it difficult to find support in one’s home department. Fitting into a community of philosophers is difficult if those philosophers don’t treat you as an epistemic peer in conceptual matters. Getting tenure without fitting into one’s home department is an uphill battle. Even at the highest levels of the discipline when the marginalized philosopher’s career is established, conceptual competence injustice can have detrimental effects. Whether an established philosopher is considered “important,” and the degree to which her work is influential, can be negatively influenced by competence injustice. This may contribute to an explanation of why there are so few canonical articles written by women philosophers—in addition to the historical lack of women in the profession, perhaps the work of women philosophers has been esteemed less highly due to conceptual competence injustice. The impact of conceptual competence injustice may also be deeply significant for those marginalized philosophers who want more than mere professional success, whose aim is to author a great body of work that will influence the course of philosophy for generations. Such an aim is grandiose but perhaps praiseworthy. In this arena, conceptual competence injustice can harm even the most successful marginalized philosopher. The last harmful effect I will mention is the effect of conceptual competence injustice on the prestige attached to some less mainstream sub-disciplines of philosophy. Feminist philosophy and critical philosophy of race, for example, are perceived to be popular areas of study for marginalized philosophers. Conceptual competence injustice encourages the thought that these “specialty” areas are the domains of the less conceptually competent, that they are less difficult areas to work in than “purer” forms of philosophy such as mainstream metaphysics and epistemology. Thus, competence injustice may be a prime instigator of the myth that the “core” areas of philosophy are more difficult than the areas on the margins.

5.  Concluding remarks I have described conceptual competence injustice, situated it relative to three other important forms of epistemic injustice, and given a partial account of the ways that conceptual competence injustice harms marginalized groups within academic philosophy. Conceptual competence injustice also has many harmful effects beyond the world of academic philosophy, including harmful effects on the political influence exerted by marginalized groups on the use of language in the public sphere. Of course, there is much more that should be said about the nature and scope of conceptual competence injustice and I do not presume to have exhaustively characterized the phenomenon. Work on conceptual

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competence injustice represents only a small step in expanding our understanding of the nature and scope of epistemic oppression.

Notes 1.  To elaborate the case further: the white male student’s understanding is focused on the natural kind term “water” and he thereby thinks that natural kind terms are names for substances, and so as names they are prime examples of rigid designators (terms that designate the same thing in every possible world), whereas the presenter has other natural kind terms in mind such as “tiger” and has noticed that the extension of such natural kind terms is different from world to world, since e.g. the actual number of tigers is not necessary. 2.  In the present context I will treat this account as giving necessary and sufficient conditions on an event’s being an instance of competence injustice; however, in keeping with Dotson’s (2012b) caution against closed conceptual structures and the possibility that such structures may further epistemic oppression, I consider this definition of competence injustice to be a tentative first formulation and likely subject to revision by myself or others. 3.  Thanks to Stacey Goguen for bringing this important ambiguity to my attention. 4.  There are a number of additional forms of competence that should be distinguished from the form of competence that is at issue in the present essay. One is communicative competence (Canale and Swain 1980), which is discussed as a theoretical basis for models of communicative approaches to teaching second languages. Communicative competence is determined by three more basic forms of competence: grammatical competence or knowledge of the rules of grammar, sociolinguistic competence or knowledge of the rules of language use in a social setting, strategic competence or the ability to compensate for breakdowns in communication due to performance variables or insufficient competence in another domain. A later version of this model (Celce-Murcia, Dörnyei, and Thurrell 1995) includes another kind of competence, discourse competence, concerned with the ability to link ideas across different sentences in a discourse. Chomsky’s (1965) notion of competence (opposed to performance) should also be distinguished from conceptual competence; Chomsky’s notion of competence is the body of knowledge that would allow an ideal speaker of a language to produce grammatical expressions and distinguish grammatical from ungrammatical expressions. None of these forms of competence are at issue in episodes of conceptual competence injustice. 5.  By relying on a deflationary account of conceptual claims, the present account of conceptual competence injustice avoids commitment to any particular theory of concepts, conceptual truth, or conceptual knowledge. 6.  This may be a collection of one. 7.  This notion of credibility is deflationary to the same extent that the notion of a conceptual claim is deflationary, and thus avoids any commitment to any substantive theory of what counts as conceptual knowledge. 8.  This differs from the definition Fricker (2007) gives. I do not assume that testimonial injustice must be caused by prejudice on the part of the hearer, as Fricker does, for the same reasons that I take such causal etiology to be inessential for competence injustice. I also assume that unduly low judgments of credibility only count as injustices when they are perpetrated against marginalized persons. 9.  Perhaps it should go without saying, but I pause to stress: in cases where a marginalized person unduly doubts her own credibility or competence, she should not be thought of as “oppressing herself.” Such a person is the victim of structural oppression and should not be thought of as having violated any duty to honor her own rationality or as harming herself in virtue of having internalized oppressive norms of credibility ascription. 10. Fricker (2007), 148. 11. Fricker (2007), 153, 154. 12. Collins (2002) discusses ways in which important hermeneutical resources are passed down within the marginalized communities that developed them, as when black mothers pass on their knowledge to their daughters concerning the nature of oppression faced by black women. However, such knowledge is not always available to all who need it, both within a given marginalized community and across different communities. It is part of the function of a matrix of domination that such resistance knowledge should be suppressed. 13. The present paper owes its existence in large part to Dotson’s criticisms. 14. Dotson (2012b, 32). 15. Smith (1979, 23). 16. Smith (1993, 655). 17. Dotson (2012b, 33). 18.  See Eric Schliesser, “On boy-wonders in philosophy,” online at: http://www.newappsblog.com/2013/09/on-boywonders-in-philosophy.html.

Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Notes on contributor Derek Egan Anderson is a lecturer at Boston University. He received his PhD from the University of Texas at Austin in 2016. His research currently focuses on topics in epistemology, logic, and semantics as these exist in the context of oppressive social structures.

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