klee-schoeppl / epistemic-violence

Agent-based model simulating the effects of testimonial quieting and smothering on collective inquiry.

Modelling epistemic violence: How testimonial smothering and quieting undermine collective inquiry

The non-formal literature in feminist social epistemology hands us two phenomena, epistemic violence (see Dotson 2011) and the inversion thesis (see Hartsock 1983), the combination of which invites the straightforward argument that, when silencing those inhabiting epistemically advantaged standpoints, epistemic violence will cause epistemic harms on the macro level. This agent-based model, inspired by Hegselmann and Krause (2006) helps to make this argument more detailed and precise: It models group deliberation in the presence of epistemic as a communication game, in which players choose between the strategies of (i) giving naive testimony, or (ii) succumbing to smothering, based on how much testimonial quieting they expect to face. In the model, ignorant majorities’ willingness to commit epistemic violence then serves to silence the contributions from the above-par standpoint inhabited by the minority. As a result, epistemic violence may slow down collective convergence to the truth, or out-right stop it, as intuition would suggest: The more entrenched and extreme the divide between the groups, the more common one would expect EV to become, and subsequently, the more noticeable and impactful its macro-effects.

Feel free to reach out to me for a paper draft.

Key references:

• Kristie Dotson (2011) “Tracking Epistemic Violence, Tracking Practices of Silencing.”
• Nancy Hartsock (1983) “The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a specifically feminist historical materialism.”
• Rainer Hegselmann & Ulrich Krause (2006) “Truth and cognitive division of labor: First steps towards a computer aided social epistemology.”