Epistemic Paralysis and Non-recognition: The Case of (Mis)education

Three core concepts orient this research: recognition, epistemic paralysis, and (mis)education. In this dissertation, I defend the claim that ‘epistemic recognition’ is a condition for the possibility of knowledge. My starting point is the burgeoning discourse within critical social epistemology that brings into dialogue Axel Honneth’s recognition theory and Miranda Fricker’s notion of epistemic injustice. Drawing on this discourse, I develop an account of how the denial of the recognition of a knower’s capacity for knowledge, as well as the validity of the sources and methods of justification for the knower’s knowledge, result in the phenomenon I call ‘epistemic paralysis’. Epistemic paralysis is my term for the stunting of the development of knowledge which, in its pernicious form, manifests in terms of the oppression of knowers and the unwarranted suppression of knowledge/s. I argue that these manifestations harm subjective identity-formation and prevent the kind of social transformation that could arise whenever the knowledge/s that are in a society’s collective interest to know are disclosed. By way of illustrating epistemic paralysis, I use as my case in point the way in which the legacies of colonial ‘(mis)education’ in the Philippines continue to paralyze critical consciousness and practices of resistance through ideological conditioning and a politics of fear. (Mis)education also manifests in the institutionalized discipline of philosophy in the Philippines through the promotion of decontextualized and de-historicized thinking which foreclose the development of critical traditions attentive to the epistemic effects of history and context. Here I claim that (mis)education is an example of a systematic form of qualitative ‘epistemic non-recognition’ that betrays its promise of enlightenment and emancipation since it gives rise to, and supports practices of, ignorance rather than knowledge. Finally, I contend that epistemic resistances which counter epistemic paralysis resulting from practices of epistemic non-recognition, are struggles for freedom but also for knowledge.