Programm
A Social Connection Model of Speaking for Others
Olivia Erna Maegaard Nielsen
Universität Bremen, Deutschland
One area in which practical and theoretical philosophy are inextricably intertwined is feminist epistemologies. In particular, the question of speaking for others, which has received increasing attention in recent years, is as epistemological as it is political. This lies in the very nature of the word 'speaking', which is as much an expression of knowledge as it is an action with real-life consequences. Indeed, I would argue that the two are co-dependent: on the one hand, we need a degree of epistemic certainty because telling untruths about others can be politically harmful, and on the other, feminist epistemological projects are often motivated by a political resistance to exclusion and marginalization. Thus, the question of who can speak for whom often depends on the question of who should speak for whom, and vice versa.
In this project, I make both sides of the question explicit by developing four possible practical applications of the standpoint epistemological privileging of the marginalized perspective. Assuming that marginalized knowers are often excluded from the context of academic philosophy, but that they also have a privileged epistemic access to certain topics, those who are actually included might either 1) speak about others, 2) retreat from speaking about topics that do not affect them, 3) defer to a member of the affected group, or, 4) as I suggest based on Iris Marion Young’s social connection model of responsibility, use one’s dominant position as an epistemic access point.
None of the four approaches is ethically or epistemically perfect, nor can they be applied in complete isolation from each other. However, I ultimately favor the latter approach for its self-reflexivity and its ability to include important social issues that would otherwise be excluded due to epistemic injustices, without compromising the epistemic agency of the group spoken for. In this way, the project offers more than a theoretical overview of different positions, but also a guide to an ethical dilemma that many philosophers and academics are faced with in their practice.