Donggeon Kim
Sungkyunkwan University
The aim of this paper is to gloss the epistemic logician’s operator ‘K‘ in a novel way using the concept of epistemic environment suggested by Martin Miragoli (2025), so that we can account for the distinctively epistemic failure in a case of sanctioned white ignorance. To this end, I will refer to Sven Rosenkranz’s (2021) knowledge-first analysis of justification, which construes propositional and doxastic justification as kinds of higher-order ignorance about a proposition. Contrary to Miragoli’s account, my approach relies not on political or ethical considerations, but solely on the very concept of justification in explaining the failure that is conspicuous in the case. I will proceed with the paper in the following three steps:
In the first section, I outline the case designed by Miragoli: Drug X is effective for white European patients, but not for Indigenous Latinx patients. X has only been tested on white people, and published research regarding its medical efficacy is thus ethnically restricted. A diligent doctor, having consulted the available literature, prescribes X to an Indigenous Latina patient, falsely believing that (P): X is effective for her. Miragoli contends that this case motivates a radical image-shift toward the “environmental model” (EM) of epistemic normativity, which shifts the locus of epistemic normative judgments to the ground-level, namely, the epistemic environment.
In the second section, I introduce my own view to deal with the case. Due to the systemic racism in the medical community, it is clear that no existing evidence supports (¬P): It is not the case that X is effective for the patient. Miragoli’s idea is that the environment without such evidence leaves no room for the agential (or, “Cliffordian”) models of epistemic normativity. I, however, argue that we can still hold the agent epistemically accountable by adopting a Rosenkranz-style analysis of justification: Jφ ⟷ ¬K¬Kφ, where J is an operator for propositional justification and K for being in an epistemic environment to know.
In the final section, I clarify the logic of being in an epistemic environment to know. Specifically, I compare my novel gloss of ‘K‘ to the standard gloss of being in a position to know by referring to the problem of their normality in System L (cf. Yli-Vakkuri & Hawthorne 2022). I argue that a normal modal logic for being in an epistemic environment to know might be rescued, contrary to the case for being in a position to know. This is because the problematic axiom Kφ→◇Kφ might be dismissed under this novel gloss without committing us to any paradox. Intuitively, being in an epistemic environment to know is a necessary condition for being in a position to know, and thus the former itself does not entail the latter. Therefore, even though being in a position know is nothing more than being able to know, as Yli-Vakkuri and Hawthorne argue, we have no good reason to adopt this restrictive axiom for the environmental gloss. In conclusion, the normality of ‘K‘ may still hold, regardless of how radically being in a position to know fails to do so.
Chair: tba
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SOPhiA 2026 