Dr Emily McWilliams - orcid.org/0000-0002-8609-070X
Visiting Research Fellow, May - July 2023
Home Institution: Duke Kunshan University
Emily C. McWilliams is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and a member of the inaugural faculty at Duke Kunshan University in Kunshan, China. She received her BA from Tulane University in 2005, with majors in philosophy, psychology, and linguistics. She received her PhD from Harvard University’s department of philosophy in 2016. She is an epistemologist with primary research interests in epistemic normativity and feminist social epistemology.
Project Title: The Ontology of Epistemic Oppression and Epistemic Injustice
In the past 15 years, analytic philosophy has seen an explosion of research at the intersection of epistemology, ethics, and political philosophy. Miranda Fricker’s (2007) book on epistemic injustice invigorated discussion of the various forms that distinctly epistemic wrongs can take. She defines epistemic injustice as a hybrid moral and epistemic wrong that occurs when one is unjustly undermined in her capacity as a knower, or as an epistemic agent. Many responses to Fricker’s work have theorized related phenomena, and have sought to expand our working conception of both the types of, and the causes of epistemic injustice that exist. Kristie Dotson (2012, 2014) has also theorized the related notion of epistemic oppression. Given the richness and the breadth of these discussions, a set of questions arises about how best to understand the overall ontology of epistemic injustice and epistemic oppression. The question of conceptual ontology is important because these concepts serve the important moral and pragmatic functions of helping us to see, understand, and think through how to ameliorate the injustices that inhere in our social epistemic practices. Given that, how can we frame the ontology of epistemic injustice and epistemic oppression in a way that is (1) broad and open-ended enough to propel future theorizing of phenomena that would be illuminated under these conceptual umbrellas; and (2) specific and detailed in ways that help us best recognize, understand, and ameliorate epistemic injustice and oppression, given the internal diversity of its causes and manifestations? In my time at IASH, I will work on a series of papers that tackles these issues. I argue that these questions of conceptual ontology deserve a pragmatic, ameliorative approach.