APSE Reading Talk & Circle - Veli Mitova (University of Johannesburg): Hermeneutical Reparations and the Right to be Known

Dear all,
we warmly invite you to the next APSE (Applied Philosophy of Science and Epistemology) Talk and Reading Circle. The talk will be held by Veli Mitova (University of Johannesburg).

Talk:

When: Thursday, 22.05.2025, 15:00 - 17:00
Where: HS 3A, NIG (Universitätsstraße 7, 1010 Wien)

Hermeneutical Reparations and the Right to be Known
According to an increasingly influential view in social epistemology, we owe victims of gross human rights violations not only economic and social reparations, but also reparations for the distinctively epistemic wrongs that attend such violations (Lackey 2022). One type of epistemic reparation is honouring victims’ ‘right to be known’ (ibid.)­—their right to have their true story known. This talk has two aims. First, I argue that the right to be known cannot be successfully exercised in hermeneutically unjust environments, i.e., environments in which the explanatory and epistemic resources of the oppressed do not feature in the mainstream knowledge economy (Dotson 2012, Fricker 2007). Thus, the successful exercise of the right to be known requires what I call hermeneutical reparations. The second aim of the talk is to sketch three distinct kinds of hermeneutical reparations. If the arguments work, we will have put into dialogue two bodies of scholarship that have, curiously, not yet talked to each other. The dialogue will not only be of mutual theoretical benefit to both, but will also up our chances of attaining epistemic justice.

Speaker Bio

Veli Mitova is Professor in Philosophy and Director of the African Centre for Epistemology and Philosophy of Science at the University of Johannesburg. She works at the intersection of epistemology, ethics, and social epistemology. She is the author of Believable Evidence (CUP 2017), and the editor of Epistemic Reparations and the Right to Be Known (forthcoming SI of Philosophical Studies), Epistemic Decolonisation (2020) and of The Factive Turn in Epistemology (CUP 2018). Before joining the University of Johannesburg in 2015, Veli taught and researched at Universität Wien, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de México, Rhodes University (her alma mater), and Cambridge (where she obtained her PhD).