CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2024
| Author | Singla, Shabnam |
|---|---|
| Title | "What? Could you explain it again?": The Burden of Bridging the Conceptual Gaps Between the Marginalised and the Dominant |
| Summary | How do some concepts become much more widely shared than others? Why do some ways of interpreting certain experiences become much more prevalent than others? How does social power play a role here? What does the process of negotiating what gets to be ‘the dominant concept’ look like? In this thesis, I analyse the interactive dimension of one of the kinds of epistemic injustice laid out by Miranda Fricker (2007), namely, hermeneutical injustice. Within hermeneutical injustice, I focus on the cases where hermeneutical injustice takes place at the level of communication. That is, I focus on the cases of injustice where an individual (or a group) faces difficulty in communicating their important experiences across social space because their experiences are not (yet) widely understood. Through discussing some of the major critiques of Fricker (2007), I establish the importance of acknowledging the existence of different hermeneutical resources across communities. I focus on the conceptual gaps that get created between the dominant and the marginalised hermeneutical resources owing to the varying amounts of social power these communities hold. My main argument throughout this investigation is that the marginalised end up having to do the work of bridging the conceptual gaps between the dominant and the marginalised hermeneutical resources. I term this work of bridging as ‘epistemic burden’. This requires the marginalised to translate and fit their experiences into the vocabulary of the dominant hermeneutical resource. But why do the marginalised end up with this epistemic burden? Through important illustrations, I show that the marginalised have an asymmetrical need to bridge the conceptual gaps to make their experiences known and communicate them to those who are dominantly situated. This need and dependence are often necessitated by the very nature of their marginalisation, which exists in relation to the privilege of the dominantly situated. Further, I argue that this work of bridging the conceptual gaps, that is, the epistemic burden is unjust. I do this by focusing on three important harms of epistemic burden. I show that this burden of bridging the gaps between different hermeneutical resources (i) reduces the status of the marginalised to an ‘epistemic other’, (ii) distorts the very lived experiences of the marginalised, (iii) results in significant practical harms. Finally, in the last section of my thesis, I focus on the question, “Who should carry this epistemic burden?”. I leave the query open by laying out two potential ways of tackling the epistemic burden without adding yet another burden on them. |
| Supervisor | Mason, Cathy; Passinsky, Asya |
| Department | Philosophy MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2024/singla_shabnam.pdf |
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