Clement Mayambala
Innsbruck University, Institute for Christian Philosophy
Our cognitive faculties are often furnished with biased associations which influence how we perceive, and believe about, people based on their membership in certain social groups. For example, the association of black people with uncleanliness and irrationality, or women with emotionality, or LGBTQ people with perversion. Such associations can affect our evaluations of people’s cognitive capacities too. For instance, if someone associates women with emotionality, this person is primed to take the reasoning of all women less seriously, and thereby disposed to dismiss, silence, or fail to notice, the cognitive capacities of individual women she encounters.
This paper argues that such biased associations, and the resulting beliefs, are mere instances of a larger social problem I call social-epistemic structured ignorance (SESI). SESI is a form of ignorance that arises from the social-political system of a dominant social group, and has the effect of oppressing members of non-dominant groups. It arises when a person forms false beliefs about the cognitive capacities of those in non-dominantly situated groups on the basis of associations that, perhaps without her realizing it, are built into the cultural worldview she takes for granted. Importantly, it is not just people in dominantly situated groups who are prone to such false beliefs; due to the well-documented phenomenon of stereotype threat, members of non-dominantly situated social groups may be primed to form these false beliefs about themselves. In summary, many people are ignorant (on my account of SESI) simply on the basis of their ethnicity, gender, race, religion, sexual orientation, nationality etc.
This paper mainly aims to study and explore the oppressive phenomenon of SESI from a social epistemological point of view by placing the daily experience of members of non-dominant groups at the centre of our social epistemological analyses.
Chair: Rafaela Schinner
Time: September 13th, 10:40 – 11:10
Location: SR 1.003
SOPhiA 2026 