Much of what we know or come to believe is derived from the testimony of others. Public discourse and the free dissemination of information and ideas therefore play a critical role in the development of our knowledge of the world and of what matters to it: to know, we need to hear and take up the words of others, and when we do so, we shape our societies in turn.
In the age of free access to online social media, we have, in principle, access to an unprecedented range and number of perspectives and insight, and to the testimony of those whom many of us might never otherwise have sought out. In particular, members of socially dominant groups have access to the testimony of members of more marginalised groups. This access has significant potential to improve the condition of our individual and collective knowledge. Standpoint feminist perspectives (e.g., Harding 1993; Hartsock 1998), and work on epistemic meta-lucidity (Medina 2013), for example, propose that members of discriminated-against groups may have insight into society’s problems and challenges (and how to address them) in virtue of their lived experience of navigating these issues, making them “uniquely positioned” (Vasanthakumar 2016: 2) to identify how to address societal problems and challenges. It is therefore vital for a functioning public sphere that members of these groups can epistemically participate.
A number of mechanisms work against this in practice.
In this talk, I focus on the challenges to online testimonial knowledge when the problem is not one of availability, but of testimony which is not well-treated by dominant knowers. Miranda Fricker (2007) highlights that those who speak from positions of lesser power and status within a society often find themselves on the receiving end of testimonial injustice – a situation in which their words are given less credibility than they ought to be. The focus of work on this problem has often been on how to reduce or remove injustice in testimonial interactions.
However, I suggest that, when it comes to creation and participation in shaping individual and collective knowledge via the public sphere, as marginalised knowers we cannot always afford to wait for better epistemic treatment from dominant others such that the injustice does not occur. Instead, our goal is often to insert ideas and knowledge into public discourse by whatever means are necessary, in order to improve the longer-term prospects for justice. As such, I argue that our understanding of what we actually do when we provide testimonial knowledge online needs to be reframed, if we are to improve the condition of online testimonial knowledge and, ultimately, conditions for social improvement.
