Social epistemology has been flourishing in recent years, expanding and making connections with political philosophy, virtue epistemology, philosophy of science, and feminist philosophy. The philosophy of the social world too is flourishing, with burgeoning work in the metaphysics of the social world, collective responsibility, group action, and group belief. The new philosophical vista now more clearly presenting itself is collective epistemology-the epistemology of groups and institutions. Groups engage in epistemic activity all the time-whether it be the active collective inquiry of scientific research groups or crime detection units, or the evidential deliberations of tribunals and juries, or the informational efforts of the voting population in general-and yet in philosophy there is still relatively little epistemology of groups to help explore these epistemic practices and their various dimensions of social and philosophical significance. The aim of this book is to address this lack, by presenting original essays in the field of collective epistemology, exploring these regions of epistemic practice and their significance for Epistemology, Political Philosophy, Ethics, and the Philosophy of Science.

Edited by an international team of leading scholars, The Routledge Handbook of Social Epistemology is the first major reference work devoted to this growing field. The Handbook's 46 chapters, all appearing in print here for the first time, and written by philosophers and social theorists from around the world, are organized into eight main parts: Historical Backgrounds The Epistemology of Testimony Disagreement, Diversity, and Relativism Science and Social Epistemology The Epistemology of Groups Feminist Epistemology The Epistemology of Democracy Further Horizons for Social Epistemology With lists of references after each chapter and a comprehensive index, this volume will prove to be the definitive guide to the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of social epistemology.

Equality is a widely championed social ideal. But what is equality? And what action is required if present-day societies are to root out their inequalities? The Equal Society collects fourteen philosophical essays, each with a fresh perspective on these questions. The authors explore the demands of egalitarian justice, addressing issues of distribution and rectification, but equally investigating what it means for people to be equals as producers and communicators of knowledge or as members of subcultures, and considering what it would take for a society to achieve gender and racial equality. The essays collected here address not just the theory but also the practice of equality, arguing for concrete changes in institutions such as higher education, the business corporation and national constitutions, to bring about a more equal society. The Equal Society offers original approaches to themes prominent in current social and political philosophy, including relational equality, epistemic injustice, the capabilities approach, African ethics, gender equality and the philosophy of race. It includes new work by respected social and political philosophers.

In this exploration of new territory between ethics and epistemology, Miranda Fricker argues that there is a distinctively epistemic type of injustice, in which someone is wronged specifically in their capacity as a knower. Justice is one of the oldest and most central themes in philosophy, but in order to reveal the ethical dimension of our epistemic practices the focus must shift to injustice. Fricker adjusts the philosophical lens so that we see through to the negative space that is epistemic injustice.
The book explores two different types of epistemic injustice, each driven by a form of prejudice, and from this exploration comes a positive account of two corrective ethical-intellectual virtues. The characterization of these phenomena casts light on many issues, such as social power, prejudice, virtue, and the genealogy of knowledge, and it proposes a virtue epistemological account of testimony. In this ground-breaking book, the entanglements of reason and social power are traced in a new way, to reveal the different forms of epistemic injustice and their place in the broad pattern of social injustice.

Equality is a widely championed social ideal. But what is equality? And what action is required if present-day societies are to root out their inequalities? The Equal Society collects fourteen philosophical essays, each with a fresh perspective on these questions. The authors explore the demands of egalitarian justice, addressing issues of distribution and rectification, but equally investigating what it means for people to be equals as producers and communicators of knowledge or as members of subcultures, and considering what it would take for a society to achieve gender and racial equality. The essays collected here address not just the theory but also the practice of equality, arguing for concrete changes in institutions such as higher education, the business corporation and national constitutions, to bring about a more equal society. The Equal Society offers original approaches to themes prominent in current social and political philosophy, including relational equality, epistemic injustice, the capabilities approach, African ethics, gender equality and the philosophy of race. It includes new work by respected social and political philosophers such as Ann E. Cudd, Miranda Fricker, Charles W. Mills, and Jonathan Wolff.

Edited by an international team of leading scholars, The Routledge Handbook of Social Epistemology is the first major reference work devoted to this growing field. The Handbook's 46 chapters, all appearing in print here for the first time, and written by philosophers and social theorists from around the world, are organized into eight main parts: Historical Backgrounds The Epistemology of Testimony Disagreement, Diversity, and Relativism Science and Social Epistemology The Epistemology of Groups Feminist Epistemology The Epistemology of Democracy Further Horizons for Social Epistemology With lists of references after each chapter and a comprehensive index, this volume will prove to be the definitive guide to the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of social epistemology.

The thirteen specially-commissioned essays in this volume are designed to provide an accessible and stimulating guide through an area of philosophical thought and literature that has seen massive expansion in recent years. They encompass all the core subject areas commonly taught in anglophone undergraduate and graduate philosophy courses, offering both an overview of and a contribution to the relevant debates. This volume will be essential reading for any student or teacher of philosophy who is curious about the place of feminism in their subject.

Epistemic Injustice explores the idea that there is a distinctively epistemic kind of injustice - injustice which consists in a wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower. Miranda Fricker distinguishes two forms of epistemic injustice: testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice. Testimonial injustice occurs when prejudice causes a hearer to give a deflated level of credibility to a speaker's word; as in the case where the police do not believe someone because he is black. Hermeneutical injustice, by contrast, occurs when a gap in collective interpretative resources puts someone at an unfair disadvantage when it comes to making sense of their social experiences. A central case of this sort of injustice is found in the example of a woman who suffers sexual harassment prior to the time when we acquired this critical concept, so that she cannot properly comprehend her own experience, let alone render it communicatively intelligible to others. In connection with each of these forms of epistemic injustice, Fricker develops the idea that our testimonial sensibility needs to incorporate a corrective, anti-prejudicial virtue that can be used to promote a more veridical and a more democratic epistemic practice. Epistemology as it has traditionally been pursued has been impoverished by the lack of any theoretical framework conducive to revealing the ethical and political aspects of our epistemic conduct. Epistemic Injustice shows that virtue epistemology provides a general epistemological idiom in which these issues can be fruitfully and forcefully discussed.

The thirteen specially-commissioned essays in this volume are designed to provide an accessible and stimulating guide through an area of philosophical thought and literature that has seen massive expansion in recent years. They encompass all the core subject areas commonly taught in anglophone undergraduate and graduate philosophy courses, offering both an overview of and a contribution to the relevant debates. This volume will be essential reading for any student or teacher of philosophy who is curious about the place of feminism in their subject.