Hidden Depths: Testimonial Injustice, Deep Disagreement, and Democratic Deliberation

ABSTRACTDeep disagreements are those involving a disagreement about (relatively) fundamental epistemic principles. This paper considers the bearing of testimonial injustice, in Miranda Fricker’s sense, on the depth of disagreements, and what this can teach us about the nature and significance of deep disagreements. I start by re-evaluating T. J. Lagewaard’s recent argument that disagreements about the nature, scope, and impact of oppression will often be deepened by testimonial injustice, since the people best placed to offer relevant testimony will be subject to testimonial injustice, pushing the disagreement into one about the bearing of certain epistemic sources on the original debate. I take issue with this last step, but I build on the argument to bring attention to unappreciated and worrying ways in which prejudices can make a disagreement deep in ways that can be hidden from one or more of the participants and from observers. Finally, I revisit some of the ways that deep disagreement has been thought to be problematic for the proper functioning of a democracy, and I examine whether the kinds of hidden deep disagreements I argue for in the paper make these problems any worse, concluding that they likely do.KEYWORDS: Deep disagreementepistemic injusticetestimonial injusticedemocracypolitical polarisation AcknowledgmentsThis publication was made possible through funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 870883.My thanks to audience members at the 2022 European Epistemology Network meeting, hosted by the Cogito Epistemology Research Centre at the University of Glasgow, particularly to Thirza Lagewaard, Guido Melchior, Chris Ranalli and Mona Simion, as well as to anonymous readers for this journal.Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1. Though if I regard you as an epistemic peer with respect to the issues under contention, there are tricky and widely discussed questions about whether and how I need to change my confidence in my original verdict while we wait for this further evidence. The restaurant example comes from Christensen (Citation2007, 193), and the horse race from Elga (Citation2007, 486–487).2. Such ‘faultless’ disagreements have often been thought to call into question the objectivity of the domain under dispute (for example, matters of taste), and to call for some kind of relativistic treatment, though it’s contested what exactly this involves. See, for example, Wright (Citation1992) and the papers in Wright (Citation2023), and MacFarlane (Citation2014, chapter 7).3. Lynch calls the kinds of cases we’re interested in ‘epistemic disagreements’ instead of the more standard ‘deep disagreements’.4. Reflecting my primary focus in section 5 below, this sketches de Ridder’s point rather than Lynch’s, though I do say a little about the latter below too.5. For Fricker, epistemic injustice involves a person being wronged distinctively in their capacity as a knower, or more generally, an epistemic agent. Testimonial injustice need not be systematic, but can result from more idiosyncratic or local prejudices (Fricker Citation2007, 27), but I will focus exclusively on systematic cases here, and so I mostly drop the qualification. Fricker also identifies a second variety of epistemic injustice, hermeneutical injustice, which involves people facing obstacles to making some of their significant social experiences intelligible, to themselves or to others, where those obstacles are due to their belonging to a social group that has been largely excluded from the practices and institutions that play the largest role in shaping a society’s shared hermeneutical resources. For more detailed discussion of how best to understand testimonial and hermeneutical injustice, see McGlynn (Citationforthcoming). I won’t discuss hermeneutical injustice and its relationship to deep disagreement here, but see Lagewaard (Citation2021).6. Ranalli in fact works with a more general notion of a hinge ‘commitment’; such commitments may take the form of propositions, but he wants to allow that what plays this Wittgensteinian hinge-role can take different forms (Ranalli Citation2021, 986 fn8). I am going to stick to the usual label here for reasons of simplicity and familiarity.7. Ranalli suggests that proponents of the Wittgensteinian account will likely accept that it’s too narrow, and will allow that a deep disagreement can be about claims acting as proxies for hinge propositions (Ranalli Citation2021, 988); for example, a disagreement over the permissibility of abortion may be a proxy for a number of deeper disagreements about claims concerning bodily autonomy, feminism, certain religious teachings, and so on, and these claims (or their negations) may be hinges for the participants.8. Ranalli presents the Wittgensteinian account and the fundamental epistemic principles account as two rival conceptions of deep disagreements. It’s worth noting that if one holds a view on which epistemic principles are to play the role of hinges, these won’t be genuine alternatives.9. Again, Ranalli thinks that on this conception deep disagreements can be over ‘proxies’ for fundamental epistemic principles of this kind, as when a disagreement over a particular theological claim is a proxy for an underlying disagreement concerning the epistemic status of religious experiences.10. As I note in the final section of this paper, de Ridder holds that this kind of conception of deep disagreement is too narrow for a different reason. He is motivated by cases of deep disagreement about moral matters to propose that sometimes a disagreement can be deep because it involves disagreement over fundamental moral principles. I’ll follow Lagewaard here in taking epistemic principles to have a special relationship to deep disagreements, but nothing turns crucially on this choice in this paper.11. Compare also de Ridder (Citation2021, 229) and Lynch (Citation2021, 247–248).12. Compare de Ridder (Citation2021, 229).13. Note that the idea of a derived epistemic principle isn’t the same as Ranalli’s notion of a proxy disagreement, even if there are some superficial points of similarity and overlap. Ranalli’s notion concerns what a disagreement is really, at heart, about, and that’s not what Lagewaard is getting at all; as we’ve already noted, a deep disagreement about morals is about those moral issues, even if it also involves disagreement about epistemic principles. Relatedly, the propositions acting as proxies needn’t themselves be epistemic principles; in the example I offered above, a disagreement about a particular theological claim can be proxy for a disagreement about epistemic principles concerning religious experience, but the theological claim isn’t thereby a derived epistemic principle.14. Lagewaard supports this claim in part by appealing to standpoint epistemology, according to which there can be a position of epistemic advantage associated with disadvantaged social groups. Whether this appeal is crucial for Lagewaard’s argument is a good question; I’m inclined to think it’s not, but I lack space to pursue the point here.15. I lack space to go into details, but perhaps another example is offered by Elizabeth Barnes’s discussion of the way that testimony by disabled people about their own well-being is prejudicially dismissed (Citation2016, chapter 4).16. The third kind of disagreement about epistemic principles Lagewaard mentions here, (C), concerns hermeneutical injustice, and so it’s not relevant for the present paper.17. In more recent work, Fricker has expressly described the kinds of prejudices involved in testimonial injustice as implicit biases (Citation2016, 162).18. Tom Robinson’s inability to get the jury to take his testimony seriously due to their prejudices against disabled black men during his trial in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is one of Fricker’s two main examples of systematic testimonial injustice.19. Fogelin’s discussion makes it clear that he holds a version of what in section 2 we called the Wittgensteinian account of deep disagreement. I briefly suggested there that this need not be taken as a rival to a version which focuses on epistemic principles; but in any case, the difference between these conceptions of deep disagreement doesn’t matter for my discussion of Fogelin in this section.20. Thanks to Guido Melchior and Mona Simion for pushing me to address this worry more fully.21. That a disagreement is deep can be hidden in an uninteresting sense, when the relevant epistemic principles each accepts remains private to each participant; a disagreement over epistemic principles may simply not yet have come to light. What makes the cases I’m considering more interesting is that the depth of these disagreements can remain hidden even when the epistemic principles accepted by both parties are a matter of mutual or public knowledge.22. de Ridder also argues that deep disagreements put pressure on the idea that disagreement is good for democracy (see especially Citation2021, 226–7), though this is due to the worries about polarisation that I’ll turn to next in the main text. My distinctive claim here is that testimonial injustice gives rise to deep disagreements that can appear shallow (and so potentially democratically beneficial), even to those involved in them. The point is something of a converse of one made in Lynch Citation2021; Lynch argues that sometimes shallow disagreements can be mistaken for relatively deep ones, and that these misperceived shallow disagreements lead to polarisation in way that’s damaging to democracy.23. A complication I’ve ignored in the main text is that de Ridder has a slightly broader conception of deep disagreement that the one I’ve been working with in this paper since section 2, since he takes deep disagreements to involve disagreements about fundamental epistemic principles or fundamental moral principles, rather than just the former (Citation2021, 228–231). I’m disinclined to follow de Ridder here, but I don’t think it matters for any of my arguments. One might think that I should remove the references to moral disapproval in my discussion of de Ridder’s argument that deep disagreement leads to increased polarisation in the text, if I’ve dropped his suggestion that disagreements can be deep through involving further disagreements over fundamental moral principles. This would be to assume that intellectual disapproval results from finding out that one’s opponents don’t share one’s epistemic principles and that moral disapproval results from finding out that they don’t share one’s moral principles. That’s a neat but implausibly oversimplified picture, and I don’t think we should accept it (or attribute it to de Ridder).24. Arcila-Valenzuela and Páez (Citation2022) argue that it’s not possible to detect testimonial injustice in a particular instance (though they do not deny that it is a real phenomenon that can be detected on a larger scale and which requires mitigating strategies). I don’t mean to endorse anything nearly so strong here.