Rethinking Sanctioned White Ignorance: Socializing Knowledge-First Internalism contra the Environmental Model of Epistemic Normativity

Donggeon Kim

Sungkyunkwan University

Consider this: 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 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.

Intuitively, the doctor’s belief that P is not merely politically and ethically, but epistemically wrong. She, however, is prima facie complying with evidential norms. On these grounds, Miragoli (2025) argues that such paradigmatic cases of sanctioned white ignorance motivate 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 this paper, I aim to argue against Miragoli’s proposal by offering a novel account of the case grounded in Rosenkranz’s (2021) knowledge-first analysis of justification: a subject has propositional justification for a proposition φ just in case she is not in a position to know that she is not in a position to know that φ is true (i.e., Jφ ↔ ￢K￢Kφ).

In the case above, ￢KP is clearly true. The doctor, however, is capable of introspecting her ascertainable doxastic states and proactively reasoning about the evidential lacuna in the medical community. Consequently, she is capable of knowing that ￢KP (i.e., K￢KP), which yields ￢JP. This line of thought incorporates epistemic responsibility and self-stewardship into the original insight (cf. Johnson King 2022; Saint-Croix 2025); thus, I call it socialized knowledge-first internalism (SKFI).

SKFI resolves the two problems raised against EM: it demonstrates that the doctor’s belief is wrong on distinctively epistemic grounds, and it explains the diachronic reproduction of white ignorance by showing how such epistemic failure preemptively stalls the production of new relevant evidence.

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