Making Sense of “Microaggression”

Heather Stewart
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引用次数: 1

Abstract

Though philosophers are beginning to pay attention to the phenomenon of microaggressions, they are yet to fully draw on their training and skills in conceptual analysis to help make sense of what microaggression is. In this paper, I offer a philosophical analysis of the concept of microaggression. I ultimately argue that ‘microaggression’ as a concept gets its meaning not by decomposing into a set of necessary and sufficient conditions, but rather by means of what Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953) has called “family resemblance.” That is to say, what unifies the concept of microaggression is a set of common, overlapping features that link related instances together, but are not necessarily all present in all cases. I identify and explain a common set of features that together form the basis for a family resemblance account of the concept. I then argue that despite the difficulty that microaggressions pose in terms of being reliably recognized and understood as such, some people, in virtue of their epistemic standpoint, are better suited to recognize these features and subsequently identify instances of micraoggression in practice. I argue this by drawing on the vast literature in feminist standpoint epistemology (Alcoff, 1993; Hill Collins, 1990, 2004; hooks, 2004; Harding, 2004, 2008; Wylie, 2013).
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理解“微攻击”
虽然哲学家们开始关注微侵犯现象,但他们还没有充分利用他们在概念分析方面的训练和技能来帮助理解什么是微侵犯。在本文中,我对微侵略的概念进行了哲学分析。我最终认为,作为一个概念,“微侵略”不是通过分解成一组必要和充分条件来获得其意义,而是通过路德维希·维特根斯坦(1953)所说的“家族相似性”来实现的。也就是说,统一微侵犯概念的是一组共同的、重叠的特征,这些特征将相关的实例联系在一起,但不一定在所有情况下都存在。我确定并解释了一组共同的特征,这些特征共同构成了家庭相似性概念的基础。然后我认为,尽管微侵犯在被可靠地识别和理解方面存在困难,但有些人,凭借他们的认识论立场,更适合识别这些特征,并随后在实践中识别微侵犯的实例。我通过借鉴女权主义立场认识论的大量文献来论证这一点(Alcoff, 1993;Hill Collins, 1990,2004;钩子,2004;哈丁,2004,2008;威利,2013)。
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