On Epistemic Justice

This dissertation is titled " On Epistemic Justice", under which I examined the social justification of knowledge. This is a research cross the boundary of epistemology and ethics, integrating the two human activities: the cognitive that deal with the world, and the ethical that deal with other persons. I try to illustrate that the two must be unified. The core idea of this dissertation is that knowledge should be justified by a just social process. Such process must maintain the equality, liberty among the participants. The slogan of this paper is "to treat everyone the unreplacible resource of knowledge".In chapter 1, the Introduction, I see about the usages and meaning of the phrase "epistemic justice". Then I explain how I am going to use it in this dissertation, to say, to bring ethical and political consideration into epistemology. After that, I introduced the relevant research and literature, sketching the general domain of this research.In Chapter 2, I start with justification theories of knowledge. First I examined the "three--element definition" of knowledge, and then the concept of "justification" as a evaluating notion. I see the inner justification theory must evolve to social justification, the private justification to public justification. "Justification" is the closest epistemological term to "Epistemic Justice". It is about "How can an subject legally hold a knowledge claim?" and so includes the objective and subjective aspects of cognition. In the justification of knowledge, both inner perspective and the outer perspective are necessary. The challenge inner justification meets shows that inner conditions along can not shoulder the burden of justification. Especially in the highly socialized knowledge production, the normativity of the social justification is an urgeing problem. The autonomic agent in classical epistemology is break through, and a turn to seek epistemic legitimacy in the community is made.In chapter 3, I take the relationship of science and democracy as a clue, according to contemporary knowledge production, see the theoretical need for the concept of "epistemic justice" to come forth. "Cognition" and "justice" belongs to different disciplines in the history of ideas. "Cognition" is a epistemological term and "justice" ethical or political. The former belongs to theoretical wisdom and latter practical. But the two are certainly connected to each other. They unified and separated through history. I try to show that they should support each other, complementary to each other, and be unified.In chapter 4, I identified serval "epistemic justice" problem in the process of knowledge production, transmission and interpretation. To say, I recognized the scenes where the problem of "epistemic justice" occurs, in which there is social justification of knowledge, combined with distribution of power and resource. They are: the justification of testimonial believes, expertise and the ethics of experts, local knowledge v.s. cultural authority, deliberative democracy, the public participation in science.In chapter 5, I redefined "epistemic justice", bring forward the concept of "Epidemic Justice", followed with the norms and bases for the norms. "Epistemic Justice" is the social justification of knowledge, which is illustrated generally in the second section. Then, I discussed distributive justice, corrective justice and justice of discourse that involved in the concept. Knowledge production depends on its social organization, and knowledge is bound to be justified in a social epistemic authority structure and a participating process. Both the structure and process must conform to distributive justice, corrective justice and justice of discourse .