Homework on Fricker, Epistemic injustice, and Anderson, The Social Epistemology of Morality


All answers must be in your own words. No handwritten homework will be accepted.
For the Fricker reading, you should focus on pages 154-157, and 164 to the end of the paper.

1. Give your own example in which a speaker is given a credibility excess or deficit by a listener. (2pts)

2. You took two "Implicit Association Tests" (IATs) before reading Fricker's article. What does the sort of thing studied by the IAT have to do with Fricker's paper? (1-2 sentences)(1pt)

3. Given what Fricker says, what do you think her answer would be to the following: If person A forms a belief by giving person B's testimony either a credibility excess or deficit, and A does not realize that this is a deficit or excess, can this affect the justification of A's belief? Why? (2pts)

4. Zagzebski thinks that the emotion of admiration plays an important, and appropriate, role in trusting others. How do Fricker's views of epistemic injustice potentially undermine Zagzebski's views? (2pts)

3. Anderson argues that those in privileged positions in a social hierarchy tend to make errors when reasoning about the morality of relations between the privileged and those in subordinate social positions.
a. Generally, what sorts of errors do they make? (1-2 sentences) (1pt)
b. Anderson argues that correcting these errors requires learning lessons from those in subordinate positions. What are two ways those lessons can be learned? (hint: one is the focus of Episodes 1 and 2, and the other she calls a "common pattern among feminist men") (2pts)