Hermeneutical Injustice & Disability Pride | Elizabeth Barnes

[00:00:03]All right. So, thank you very much, Dawn, for organizing this, and thank you, everybody, for turning up. Can everybody hear me? All right. Thank you. Okay. So, what I'm going to talk about today is what I think to be some interesting and rather underexplored issues in the philosophical significance of pride movements. I'm going to focus specifically on the case of disability pride, partly because this is from a book that I'm writing on disability, so that made sense to talk about that, but also because I think disability pride is an area that people find kind of surprising, that there is such a thing, and that people are proud to be disabled, people have disability pride parades, so on and so forth, and actually that surprising nature of disability pride is one of the things that I'm going to focus on. So, there's been a lot of discussion about the importance of pride movements for their emotive importance. So, pride movements as combat to shame, pride movements as building solidarity, pride movements as ways to help collectively build self-esteem and build agency within a community, but what I'm going to focus on today and what I'm going to argue is that there is an important epistemic dimension to pride movements, that pride movements actually help us to know things that otherwise it's difficult for us to know, and so to that extent I think pride is as important epistemically as it is emotionally, and that part of its political importance is its epistemic importance. So, to argue that, I'm first going to focus on a concept that's introduced by Miranda Fricker in her groundbreaking book Epistemic Injustice. So, I think the bit from Fricker's book that people are most familiar with is the phenomenon that she labels testimonial injustice. So, testimonial injustice is when people's testimony is discounted or not believed as much as it would in other circumstances be believed, not because of any sort of evidence that they're unreliable knowers or anything that makes them seem less likely to be reliable sources of testimony, but because of who they are. So, because of identity prejudices about who people are, they're treated as less reliable sources of testimony. So, a paradigm case is eyewitness testimony from a person who is from black Americans is not taken as seriously by juries as eyewitness testimony from white Americans, and this is the kind of phenomenon that Fricker labels testimonial injustice.

[00:03:01]So, nothing to do with what these people saw, nothing to do with what position they were in when they were observing the phenomenon, or nothing about beliefs about them not having reliable perceptual capacities or something like that. Everything about beliefs and identity prejudices about who they are. Beliefs that certain kinds of people are just fundamentally less reliable. Often these beliefs are implicit rather than explicit. But in the end of Fricker's book, the last two chapters, she identifies another phenomenon that she labels hermeneutical injustice or hermeneutic injustice, she calls it both. So, hermeneutic injustice are cases in which aspects of a person's own experience or own self-conception are obscured because of dominant norms or schemas or stereotypes. So, testimonial injustice is two-way. You've got two people who are in a conversation and one person is devalued in their ability to know things because of this other person's prejudice about this kind of person not being the kind of person who's a reliable knower. Hermeneutical injustice doesn't have that same two-way element. So, hermeneutical injustice is when a particular person finds it hard to know or articulate things about themselves and their own social experience, or even in some cases their own self-conception. And the reason they find it difficult to know and understand aspects of their own experience is particularly to do with stereotypes and prejudices about the kind of person that they are. So, I'm going to talk about a few of the examples that Fricker gives to try to highlight what this phenomenon is, the phenomenon that she labels hermeneutical injustice. So, the first case that Fricker talks about in her book is the phenomenon of postpartum depression. So, postpartum depression is obviously something that now we're very familiar with. It's very easy for us to talk about. We can easily label and identify this phenomenon. But in the late 60s and early 70s, it was extraordinarily hard for women who had recently become mothers to understand their own experience to understand their own experiences of what was happening to them and how they were feeling.

[00:05:41]And to understand that what was happening to them wasn't obviously their own isolated personal drama. This was a systematic phenomenon that happens to women. And it is a common thing that happens to women. And that is a combination of a very real set of biological factors that can happen after pregnancy and then a very extreme psychosocial phenomenon of isolation that these women were experiencing after having given birth. But in a context that valorized motherhood so deeply, and you know that new motherhood was your completion as a woman and this was supposed to be the most joyful and amazing experience that you'd ever had in your entire life, and then that pathologized women's emotions. So, any overwrought emotion of course is women's hysteria and that's your own failing. That's your own fragility.

[00:06:42]It became very, very difficult for women to understand what was happening to them as anything other than their failing as mothers and their failing as wives, rather than a real psychosocial phenomenon. So, you can read all this stuff from early feminist movements, the consciousness raising seminars that a lot of women went to at the time, where what they were actually trying to do when they were discussing these own experiences was just grope for an understanding of what was happening to them. And even just trying to articulate it and realizing that this was a shared experience and that this was something that we could name and identify and wasn't just an individual women's experience of hysteria and of being a bad mother. That was a very difficult thing for women to do. And it was something that it took women a very long time to articulate what was happening, what this phenomenon of postpartum depression was in a context where our understanding of motherhood and of women's psychology was not particularly influenced by women's own experiences. And it was very heavily influenced by men's understanding of what women are like. So, Fricker thinks that this is a case that's going to be ripe for the creation of hermeneutical injustice, where the dominant norms, stereotypes, schemas, beliefs about what one group's experiences are like, in this case women, are unduly and overly influenced by someone other than that group. So, in this case men. So, our understanding of what women's experiences were like in this case was overly influenced by men's beliefs about women, rather than women's beliefs about themselves and women's dialogue and discussion about their own experiences. Which then made it very, very difficult for women to understand and articulate their own experiences. Another case that Fricker discusses at length is the phenomenon of sexual harassment. And she discusses the first major court case where lawyers in the early 70s actually created the label sexual harassment to try to identify what was happening to women in the workplace. Again, this was a phenomenon where women realized that something was happening, but they just found it incredibly difficult to articulate what it was that was happening and why it was so upsetting. Because you go back and look at the interviews from Carmita Wood, who was the woman who brought the first court case, and the vocabulary that she had to try to explain what was going on. She knew that her boss's flirting made her uncomfortable, and that she couldn't feel relaxed in the workplace, and that there was something about her boss's romantic inclination to her that made her not want to talk about her job, and made her feel sick. But the way that we would very easily describe what we look back now and see is a severe case of quid pro quo sexual harassment. It was incredibly difficult for her to articulate, because the only way that she had to try to explain what was happening were these terms of flirting, romantic inclination, and the only way that she could do that was to say, so the background assumption that she had that she was dealing with, of course, was that flirting in the workplace was kind of harmless. And bosses flirt with their secretaries, and secretaries are sort of meant to be sexually available to their bosses, and that's just part of the norm. That's part of the standard, the expectations.

[00:11:04]With that social background, she found it incredibly difficult to explain why it was that what was happening to her wasn't harmless, why it was that what was happening to her was so painful, and why she felt that she couldn't go to work, and she was having to take personal sick leave, because she was feeling so stressed in her office environment.

[00:11:27]So again, this was a case where it was really difficult for her to articulate what was happening to her, and it ended up falling back on what she felt like were her own weaknesses. She was like, I don't know why this flirting that for everyone else just must be harmless is making me so stressed out. It's probably me. I'm probably overreacting. Flirting in the office is just stressing me out. I just must be stressed about my job. And it wasn't until people started bringing court cases for sexual harassment, and even just created the label sexual harassment, that people began to realize that this was a systematic phenomenon, that this wasn't just an isolated thing that happens to isolated women, that this was a thing that was happening to women in the workplace as a general, very common feature of their experience.

[00:12:27]But again, at the time, this was a very hard thing for women to understand, and a very hard thing for them to articulate. So that's another case that Pricker identifies as hermeneutical injustice. So hermeneutical injustice isn't just, isn't merely a case where you can't properly understand or articulate your own experience. So Pricker contrasts the kind of cases she's interested in to the kind of cases that might just be mere ignorance.

[00:12:59]So she talks about a person who has a strange or obscure disease that medical science doesn't yet understand. There's a real sense in which this person doesn't understand their own experience.

[00:13:11]They don't, there's epistemic gaps in their ability to understand or articulate what is happening to them. But this person is just kind of epistemically unlucky. Nobody yet has the knowledge or the tools to explain to them. Science hasn't progressed far enough to explain to them what's going on. They don't understand what's happening in their body.

[00:13:32]Pricker wants to contrast these kind of cases of epistemic unluckiness to the cases she's interested in, where the reason that you don't understand your own experience, or you can't really understand or describe what's happening to you, or even your own self-conception, are because dominant ideas and norms of what it's like to be someone like you are not really informed by people like you, and they're overly informed by other people, generally people in power. So a really salient case of this that I'm going to come back to and talk about a lot is the case of people who were gay in the 1950s and 60s. So Pricker talks a lot about Edmund White's memoir, A Boy's Own Story. And this is all about his coming to age as a gay adolescent young man in the late 50s and early 60s. And dealing with his emerging sexuality, which he really was beginning to experience as a positive thing, as it contrasted to the only ways he really knew how to understand what it was to be gay, of course at the time what it was to be a homosexual, which were deeply medicalized, deeply rooted in the idea that being gay was a psychological deviation. So he had all these ideas of the homosexual as someone with a psychological disorder, someone who was psychologically deviant, someone who was the villain in the period drama that's just sort of kind of a little bit off, just not quite right, kind of a flaky person who needs help. And he sought out psychiatric care. He went to all sorts of therapists. He went to his doctor. But he experienced this in deep tension with his emerging understanding of his own sexuality. And then there comes a point in the book where he says, looking back, I realized that what I wanted was to love men and be loved by them in return, but not to be a homosexual. And the idea was that such was his difficulty grasping his own experience that that thought made sense. It made sense that it was like, right, well I want, I'm a man and I want to love men and be loved back by men, but I don't want to be a homosexual. Because whatever it is to be a homosexual, something wrong, that's something deviant, that's something, that's the kind of person who needs help. I'm not a kind of person who needs help, but wait, if I'm a homosexual, I obviously do need help, but if I have these desires which I like, that means I'm a homosexual.

[00:16:37]So he experienced this deep set tension, which he eventually was able to move past, but it was extraordinarily difficult and damaging for him because he couldn't articulate the idea that it was okay for him and it wasn't deviant for him to actually like these desires that he had and to actually be okay with these desires that he had. So again, this is a case that Fricker points to where this is someone who finds it difficult to understand and articulate his own experience. And the reason that he finds it difficult to understand and articulate his own experience is because the norms about sexuality were overly influenced by heteronormative ideals of what sexuality should be like. They made it really hard for somebody to articulate the idea that it was fine to have these desires and in fact these desires were something that he really wanted to celebrate and it didn't mean that he needed some kind of psychiatric care. So that's the phenomenon that Fricker labels hermeneutical injustice. Hopefully I've said enough at this point to make the basics of it clear. So what I'm going to argue in what follows is that hermeneutical injustice is something that disabled people are regularly subject to in the modern times. And then that pride is going to be an important part of combating this type of hermeneutical injustice. So, spoiler, that's where we're going.

[00:18:18]So before I do that, I want to introduce kind of a rough and ready distinction that I'm going to try to put some work to now. When I say rough and ready, I think we can understand the paradigms of what I'm introducing for this distinction. I'm sure there will be all sorts of borderline cases. I'm sure the distinction is vague. I'm sure there are lots of other normatively interesting distinctions in the area. This is one and it's one that I think is interesting and relevant. So that's why I'm going to talk about it.

[00:18:49]So I think we can draw a distinction or draw a contrast between distinctions that we make that are purely descriptive and distinctions that are in some sense either implicitly or explicitly normative. The very way that we draw the distinction carries normative baggage.

[00:19:11]The distinction itself is normatively laden. So the kind of thing I'm talking about with a purely descriptive distinction is people who are from Spain contrasted with people who are not from Spain. Or people who have blonde hair contrasted with people who do not have blonde hair. So that's sort of, okay, here's what you're observing the world. Here's some ways the world can be. You can be from Spain or you can be not from Spain. You can have blonde hair. You can have hair that's some other color than blonde. Sort of describing ways that the world can be. Unless maybe there's some surprising semantic content going on there. I take it that there's not a lot of normative baggage just built into that carving of those distinctions. Contrast that to what I'm going to take as a paradigm case of a distinction that you have to understand the normativity involved to even understand what the distinction is. The distinction between the saints and the sinners. So the distinction between the saints and the sinners is not like the distinction between people who come from Spain and people who don't. The distinction between the saints and the sinners, you have to have some normative concept already at work just to draw that distinction. There's normativity built into the very nature of that distinction. It's not purely descriptive.

[00:20:36]Now I think you can draw prejudicial conclusions or you can make prejudicial judgments using either kind of distinction. So I can first, but the idea is that for purely descriptive distinctions you kind of have to do a little bit of a two-step. So first I can draw the distinction people from Spain, people who are not from Spain. And then I lay some normativity over top of that. Then I say, and people from Spain are lazy. I draw the distinction between people who have blonde hair and people who don't have blonde hair. And then I say, and people with blonde hair are flighty, or they can't do math, or whatever people say about people with blonde hair. I talk about people who are from New York, people who aren't from New York, and then I say people from New York are rude. So contrast that to the way that we can make prejudicial judgments using normatively laden distinctions. So you can also make prejudicial judgments using normatively laden distinctions. I can say the sinners are going to hell. That's a prejudicial judgment, but it doesn't have quite as much of the same two-step. I don't just draw a purely descriptive distinction and then add some normativity on top of it.

[00:22:02]I'm just adding a further normative claim to a distinction that was already normative.

[00:22:08]What I'm going to contend is that sometimes our distinctions and the prejudicial judgments that we make about social categories are more like the saints and the sinners judgments than they are like the people from New York versus people not from New York. So I take it that when we're considering the Edmund White case, where the idea of being gay in the late 50s, early 60s, there's a distinction between the homosexual and the heterosexual.

[00:22:48]Maybe on the face of it, it looks like a purely descriptive distinction. There are people who engage in these kind of sex acts, and then there's people who engage in these kind of sex acts. That's the descriptive distinction, and then we add some normativity on top of that. But if you actually look at the way the distinction was used, the way it functioned, the way it was wheeled out to make characterizations, a homosexual wasn't just somebody who engaged in certain kind of sexual behavior. By very definition, a homosexual was someone who had a, who was a sexual medium, who had a psychological disorder. So there was normal sexual orientation, there were normal behaviors, and they didn't need to be statistically normal. There's all sorts of ways you could be statistically atypical, but still be straight. And then there were people who were queer. There were the homosexuals, the people who, the very way of understanding what it was to be a homosexual was that your sexual desire was a deviation from the heterosexual norm. What it was to be queer was to have orientation that was queered from the heterosexual norm. So what I think about distinctions like that when you look at, when you look at how they function, is that at least for some of our social judgments, they function more like the saints and sinners distinction than they do like the people from New York, people not from New York distinction. But as a result, I think for distinctions like that, it makes them particularly hard to give counterexamples. It makes them particularly hard to show why the distinction, why the judgment that you're making is wrong-headed, or why the judgment that you're making is misguided, or something like that. If you're making a judgment that's based on a normatively-laden distinction rather than a judgment that's based on a purely descriptive distinction, that kind of judgment is particularly socially entrenched. It's hard to get rid of in a significant way. Because think about the kind of judgments that we make, stereotypical judgments that we make based on purely descriptive distinctions. So you say people from Spain are lazy. I give you a long list of the great achievements done by people from Spain. I talk all about the, in fact, how long hours people from Spain work. They just break it up in various parts of the day. You say people from New York are rude. And I tell you a little bit about cultural variation of norms for politeness, and then give you a long list of perfectly nice experiences with people from New York that fit a certain cultural norm of politeness. You say people with blonde hair aren't very intelligent, and I give you a very long list of people with blonde hair. That's not to say that that's going to get rid of the stereotype or get rid of the prejudice, but you can at least understand a counterexample if you've just got a purely descriptive distinction that you're making a prejudicial judgment based on. The problem with the way we understood the homosexual heterosexual distinction in the 50s and 60s was that it was actually really hard to even understand what a counterexample would look like. So you say being a homosexual is to engage in sexually deviant behavior and experience sexually deviant attraction. So the very understanding of what it is is by this idea of deviation, someone who is inherently psychologically troubled. How am I going to give you a counterexample to that? What I want to give you is an example of someone who is flourishing and thriving and having a wonderful life, but they're a happy, flourishing gay person. But the problem is the person who thinks that homosexuality is deviant doesn't see that as a counterexample. They just see that as further evidence that, oh, look, that person, that's really deviant. That person is so deviant that they're really happy about the fact that they're deviant. So it becomes very, very difficult to even provide counterexamples to this kind of prejudicial judgment because the normativity is actually just built into the way we understand the difference, in this case, between the homosexual and the heterosexual.

[00:28:11]So you want to say, okay, here's a case of a homosexual who's not deviant. Well, if I understand homosexual definitionally as someone who's a deviant, I don't even know how to process that counterexample that you're trying to give me. So I think one way, certainly not the only way, but one way that prejudicial judgments can become very entrenched is when our very way of understanding social categories and distinctions between social categories is normatively blatant in this way. So one thing that I think is pretty clear when you think about it for not that long a time is that the way we understand the distinction between the disabled and the non-disabled, or between the disabled and the able-bodied, is a normatively blatant distinction. Our way of understanding the difference between, or at least our folk conception of the difference between the disabled and the non-disabled has a lot of normativity built into it. The word is suggestive of that, right? There's ability, and then there's disability. But beyond that, I think our basic folk conception, which disabled people have tried for many years to argue against, our basic folk conception of what disability is, is an importance in departure, or negative departure from normal functioning.

[00:30:19]A limitation in ability. I think a lot of times the way that people think about what it is to be disabled is, oh, you take the set of abilities that the normal person has, and then you just take a strict subset of that. That's what the disabled person has.

[00:30:38]So disability is just like a strict limitation. Disability is just like the normal abilities minus something. In a way, we think of disability as misfortune. Disability as a sort of loss.

[00:30:58]So if you think maybe homosexuality was deviant, I think the counterpart to that is that disability is tragedy. So I think a lot of times we think about, especially if we're thinking about physical bodies, physical disability. We think about, your body is kind of like the outcome of a natural lottery. We don't anymore think about physical disability the way we used to, where physical disability is a sign of divine malfeasance, or a sign of, you know, if you have too many physical disabled people in your community, it's time to burn a witch.

[00:31:34]We don't say, you know, rabbi who sins, this man or his parents, that he was born blind.

[00:31:40]At least we don't say that kind of stuff out loud anymore. But we have a more naturalistic notion of disability as tragedy. So it's like, you know, you kind of, you roll the dice when you get your body. The bodies are kind of the outcome of a natural lottery. Some people get really lucky. Some people have these live, athletic, beautiful bodies, and they all come from Scandinavia, and they're like really tall, and they do sports, and they have very symmetrical faces, and they're, you know, they just, I don't know, they got lucky. And then there's people who maybe got a little less lucky. They're kind of, they're short, or they have weird hair, or they, you know, maybe are kind of really uncoordinated, or, you know, but they're okay. I think we tend to think of disability as kind of the lower bound of what goes on in the natural lottery. So disability, these are people who play the natural lottery, and they lost. They did not get lucky at all. Disability is a kind of, just a natural misfortune. We no longer think of it as a divine misfortune. But certainly when people see you out on the street with a disability, or you disclose a disability, their first and overwhelming reaction is, you're disabled? I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry.

[00:33:08]Often immediately followed with, is there any hope for a cure? Is there any hope for a cure? And the other thing that you get a lot, when people invariably feel entitled to touch you, and put your hand on your shoulder and say, you hang in there. Thank you, stranger.

[00:33:34]I will do that. You hang in there, too. So there's this idea that disability is a sort of, you know, natural bad luck. If homosexuality in the 50s was deviant, disability is misfortune or tragedy. We've gone a little ways beyond tiny Tim, but maybe not as far as you might like to think. And one way in which this is absolutely manifest is the way in which we expect successful disabled people to disavow disability. To disavow disability as something they think about, or to disavow any sort of disabled identity. So if you ever watch interviews with Carol and Tim, after they've done something successful, if you ever watch interviews with somebody who's on whatever sort of news show or CNN or something being profiled because they're riding their wheelchair across the country, or they're climbing a mountain, or something like that, 98% of the time, you will hear the phrase, well, I've never really considered myself disabled. Now, the social meaning of that phrase comes apart from the literal content of what is said. What they do not mean when they say, I've never really considered myself disabled, is that they don't consider themselves to have a physical condition which marks them out, given current social norms, as having a disability. They will still park in the disability specific parking spaces, they will use the disability specific bathroom stalls, they will enter the disability specific sporting events, all of which would be really weird things to do if you didn't actually think of yourself as disabled in some sense.

[00:35:28]What they mean when they say, I've never really thought of myself as disabled, is something to the effect of, I've never thought of myself as, I've refused to see myself as limited, or less than, or lacking, in some important sense. Disability is tragedy, it's limitation, it's misfortune, and I don't think of myself like that. So, I've never really thought of myself as disabled. And it's a very striking thing that we expect that from our most successful disabled people. Imagine the counterpart of that, if you're looking at really successful and barrier breaking people from other social groups. Imagine if somebody had said to Madeline Albright, asked her for her thoughts about becoming the first female Secretary of State, and she said, well, you know, I've never really considered myself a woman. I've just been determined to overcome my gender. And she didn't say anything about that in terms of claiming a particular non-binary gender identity or something like that. She just said, you know, I've never really considered myself a woman. I've just been determined to overcome my gender identity. Or if, when asked the same question Colin Powell had said about race, well, I've never really considered myself black. I've just been determined to overcome my race. We allow other people to celebrate being barrier breakers for their membership in social groups. For disabled people, we expect them to say, well, I've never really thought of myself as disabled. Interestingly, if you look back historically, we actually did used to expect the very same kind of thing from very successful or barrier breaking women.

[00:37:25]So if you look back in, particularly in the late middle ages and early renaissance, you get examples of strong female leaders specifically disavowing their femininity. And that was specifically disavowing their womanhood because womanhood was lessened. So the most famous of these, although there's quite a lot of them, is the speech that's attributed to Queen Elizabeth I when she's rallying the troops and she says, I may have the body of a weak and frail woman, but if I choose, I have the heart and stomach of a king. So she was very specifically disavowing femininity because she was going to overcome it. She was going to have the heart and stomach of a king, even if she had been put in this weak and frail body of a woman. But certainly we expect of successful disabled people that they disavow disability. And on the flip side of that, when someone says to you, you know, I've never really considered you disabled, that is a compliment. That is an incredibly well-meaning compliment that people say to disabled people. I take it what it means is, again, not I've never considered you to have a particular physical feature that marks you out as disabled.

[00:38:48]What it means is I've never thought of you as a sad sack. I've never thought of you as, you know, particularly sad or depressing or limited. Good for you. Because otherwise there's it would be such an odd thing to say, you know, especially to an out and visibly disabled person. I've never really considered you disabled. That's strange. That's a strange fact about you. But it's something that people say to disabled people all the time. And it is intended very much as a compliment. And I take it that what it means is I've always thought you're just as capable as the rest of us. I've really thought of you as closer to normalcy than maybe other disabled people. So I think that there's a pretty strong case that the way we understand disability is normatively weighted. Has a lot of normative baggage with it. So our understanding of disability carries with it notions of loss, misfortune, lacking, being less than, so on and so forth. Which is why these disavowals of disability make sense.

[00:40:18]So in that context, it can become very hard for people to understand and articulate the their own experiences. To understand and articulate their own experience of well-being.

[00:40:41]Because certainly disabled people experience a relatively high amount of well-being. At least perceived well-being. And a lot of disabled people, especially disabled people who are socially integrated. So this is closely correlated with disabled people who are socially integrated.

[00:41:03]And even more closely correlated with disabled people who have been able to establish some sort of disability community. So they feel a sense of community with other disabled people.

[00:41:14]And particularly those who have gotten involved in the disability rights movement. They don't feel that they are thriving in spite of their disability. They don't feel that they are working every day to overcome their disability. They feel that they have bodies that are interestingly different than the status quo or the perceived norm. But that they, these are interesting and good ways for bodies to be. These are good bodies to live in. And that they value their experience of disability. But this is a very, very, very hard thing to articulate or make sense of. In the context of disavowals of disability. So, I'm going to read a quote from the filmmaker Bonnie Sher Klein. Who is a famous feminist filmmaker who became disabled after a stroke when she was in her late 40s. And she talks about her first experience going to a disability rights event. And she says, a gutsy nervous young woman with a thick draw of cerebral palsy is MC. Not only is her speech different, but a new language is being spoken here. I feel like a privileged eavesdropper at first. But she is speaking for me. Or about me. Or is me. Or is she? She cues us for a chant. Disabled and the crowd responds. Proud. My throat jams on the word mid-chant. Is this honest? Who am I trying to fool? It's one thing to accept, but another thing to be proud. I'm proud of surviving and adapting, maybe. But am I proud of being disabled? But it feels good to be shouting with hundreds of other bodies who look happy despite. Or is it because of their deformities?

[00:43:20]Or is the word differences? So, Sher Klein describes that initial experience. And she talks further about how difficult it was for her to not feel like disability pride was some kind of oxymoron. That celebrating disability rather than just fighting for rights and for access didn't make any sense. Because here's this thing. It was this tragedy. It was this loss. The thing that she was supposed to feel bad about. And then she went to a rally where people were saying, this is something that we're celebrating. And it was so psychologically jarring that she literally wasn't sure it made sense. It felt like an oxymoron. So it actually kind of starts to sound like there's this fantastic animated film called Wreck-It-Ralph that's about computer games. And they have a villain support group. And the mantra of the villain support group is, I'm bad and that's good. I'll never be good and that's not bad. And I think, you know, if you have, if you go into the context with the very sort of normatively laden notion of disability and then people start talking about disability pride, you're thinking, I'm sorry, that doesn't make any sense. I'm sorry, that doesn't make any sense. What on earth is there to be proud about? I mean, unless you're just being willfully obtuse. But this is exactly the point at which I think the epistemic role of pride is incredibly important. And when we think about pride movement, it's as important to focus on their epistemic import as it is on their emotive or their sort of social solidarity import. Because when you think about what happens, especially in the gay pride movement in the 60s and 70s, how did we begin to change the idea that homosexual was just by definition a deviant? Homosexuality was just deviation or sickness. Well, it seemed that the goal of the pride movement was to say, all right, we cannot just, through some version of respectability politics, try to provide counterexamples to the standard way of thinking about this distinction. This distinction has got to be turned on its head. It's got to be overthrown. So the message of the gay pride movement was, okay, this thing that you are telling us is shameful and is deviation and that we need to seek psychological help for and that you only talk about with your doctor and maybe your priest, we're having parties about that in the streets. We are throwing carnivals, and does it not just look like tons of fun? Don't you want to come and join this party because it looks a lot more fun than the party that you're having? And the idea and what seems to have happened collectively with pride was that it gave both gay people and straight people a different way of thinking about what was going on. It gave people access to the idea, and certainly when Edmund White talked about it, it gave him access to a way of understanding his sexuality that just wasn't available to him before. Rather than saying, okay, homosexuality is deviation, so these things that I'm experiencing that I'm fine with must be deviation and I don't know how to reconcile that. It gave him a different way of understanding his experience, was to say, this thing that people are telling you is bad and wrong and deviation, this is good. This is something that you can celebrate.

[00:47:22]This is something that you shouldn't want to go away. This is something you can have a party about. It was a sort of collective movement building that allowed people to understand their own experiences in a way that was previously actually very difficult for them to articulate, very difficult for them to explain even to themselves what was going on. And the way in which it helped combat hermeneutical injustice is that it's the people who are the underrepresented, the minority, who are beginning to be able to influence the common ground, the stereotypes, the norms about how we understand this distinction. So the reason that hermeneutical injustice arises is that how we understand the difference between homosexual and heterosexual is determined by heterosexuals. The pride movements are giving these people a way of influencing that common ground, saying, no, you need to ask us, and here's how we feel about it. So I think that there's an important sense in which pride is a way of combating prejudicial judgment based on norms of related distinction. Pride says, don't try to counterexample the distinction on a case-by-case basis. Show why the distinction is wrongheaded. Show why we need a new way of thinking about this distinction. This way of thinking about the distinction that we have is wrongheaded. And I think that that is very much what's needed in the case of disability because one thing that you see that's very striking about when disabled people try to describe their own experiences and their own positive experiences is that it's difficult for them to be heard. So just like when in the 50s and 60s gay people tried to describe being happy about their sexuality, depriving people who experienced gay sexuality, they were just interpreted as even more deviant because, well, good grief, if you're happy about it, if you're not even getting help. And that same kind of discounting and disbelieving we see in contemporary culture for people with disabilities. So one really famous case is the disability rights activist and lawyer Harriet McBride Johnson. She wrote this amazing article for the New York Times Magazine called Unspeakable Conversations, a lot of which is about her interactions with the philosopher Peter Singer and trying to have dialogues with him about disability and finding the whole thing incredibly uncomfortable. One of the things that she says in the article is how she and her colleagues in the disability rights movement and many people like her find their experiences of disability incredibly rewarding, they're things they value, but she's grown weary of trying to explain this to non-disabled people because they don't listen and because they think they already know everything that there is to know, so really what's the point? So she says this very eloquently in this article in the New York Times, and a few years after this article was published, she died. And the New York Times published an obituary for her, which they titled Happy Nonetheless. So she was right. Even though she had explained incredibly eloquently and articulately about her experiences and about how she's not, she very specifically says I'm not happy in spite of, I'm just happy with my life and I'm satisfied with my life, and yet she was interpreted as saying, nonetheless, I have overcome. So the stereotype of the tragic overcomer, the brave little soldier who's going to keep going, is very, very difficult to uproot. It's so deeply entrenched that it's hard for disabled people to just give individual counterexamples. So this is the point at which I think the epistemic import of pride is incredibly important. So I'm going to read another quote from Cher Klein, where she says, in retrospect, the clicks in my consciousness about disability parallel my coming to feminist consciousness two decades earlier. For a long time I denied I was disabled and kept my distance from other cripples in the hospital gym because I was an exception to the rule. Later I was sure I could overcome it. I would be super crip. I thought I would support the rights of other people with disabilities, but I was not oppressed. As time passed, I experienced with great pain the ways in which other people's attitudes and societal barriers disempowered me. At first I eternalized the oppression and lost all self-esteem. Then as I discovered my commonality with other disabled people, I began to see more clearly, and with solidarity came strength. And then here is the definition and characterization of disability pride from the largest disability pride parade in the country, which is in Chicago.

[00:52:46]Disability is a natural and beautiful part of human diversity in which people living with disabilities can take pride. That's a personal and radical concept. Persons with disabilities must live and breathe it in order to communicate it to one another and to society. The sad sack, the brave overcomer, the incapable are worn out stereotypes and the parade refutes them by giving us a time and a space to celebrate ourselves as we are.

[00:53:13]We are part of the richness and diversity of this country and this world. We are, by marching in this parade, giving the world a chance to express pride in us too. We will not hide behind doors. We are out in the streets. So I think that pride movements often in contemporary debate have a bit of a bad rap because they're associated with identity politics and sort of controversial things that people associate with movement building in the 90s. But I think in the case of gay pride in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and disability pride now, it's a place where identity politics is not as problematic as you might think.

[00:53:57]Precisely because it's a case where the epistemic importance of this is actually being able to specify that there is an identity here. That saying I am disabled is a social identity and that it's something that you can say and that you don't have to disavow. You don't have to be a successful disabled person and that's something that you can take pride in.

[00:54:24]And that's something that can be socially important to you. So that I think is the epistemic import of pride movements. It affects what people can know in addition to how they feel.

[00:54:39]Great. Okay. So I think it is perfectly consistent for a defender of the view that disability are on the whole, by themselves, neither good nor bad. They're just kind of mutual features.

[00:55:00]Even if they can certainly be bad for some people and certainly be bad in some context.

[00:55:06]To say that there are aspects of being disabled that are bad or harmful. On the flip side, there are aspects of being disabled that are good and enriching. And I think one thing that's telling is that when people who are not disabled think about what it's like to live as a disabled person, they tend to just focus on what they think of as the bad thing.

[00:55:38]And they don't so much think about what you might think of as the good thing.

[00:55:47]I'll draw an analogy and then I'll come back to the case of disability. I think that there are plenty of things that are bad. In some sense of bad. Harmful, negative, I would prefer they weren't around about being biologically female. There just are. We could talk more about it. But you can imagine the kind of things I'm talking about.

[00:56:12]On the flip side, there are some things that are good about being biologically female.

[00:56:18]Historically, the female body was pathologized. People focused on the bad things about the female body. In fact, they thought that the female body was just literally a deformed male body. But people have emphasized that, look, there's some good things, there's some bad things. Maybe in some context it's really bad. And in fact, you could want to get rid of some of the things. I take it that when Mary Wollstonecraft wrote Vindication of the Rights of Women, she was arguing both that it's not inherently bad to be a woman and to be biologically female. That doesn't mean we don't think it's an improvement that mortality rates have greatly been reduced in childbirth and that women now have a much greater degree of reproductive autonomy and you can buy tampons at the drugstore on the corner. All of these things make it much easier to inhabit a female body. It's not one thing to deal with the kind of things that people who inhabited female bodies in the 1800s dealt with didn't mean that you wanted to be male. It just meant that there was some stuff that you weren't that nuts about.

[00:57:43]So in the case of disability, I think a lot of times people who are non-disabled focus on what they take to be the really bad things. And again, they think of disability as just okay, you take a normal person's abilities and you just subtract from that. So in the case of say deafness, people think, well, look, listening to music is really good. It would be sad if I couldn't listen to music. So it would be worse. There's some sense in which being deaf is bad.

[00:58:16]A good friend of mine who's deaf talks a lot about how much pleasure she gets from experiencing music via vibration. That's something that hearing people can't do because the sound sensation pretty much overwhelms it. And she talks about how pleasant it is to walk around really big cities and not hear anything, right? Just feel like you're in this world of chaos and you just kind of are floating through it and everybody else seems to be really, really stressed about stuff that you're just kind of like, it just doesn't affect you.

[00:58:55]So, you know, I think it's perfectly consistent to say, are there some bad things about it?

[00:59:01]Yeah, sure. Are there some good things about it? Sure. Yeah. Is it on the whole bad for you or good for you? That probably depends on what you want, what your projects are, what social context you're in. I think it's sort of overly simplistic to just say, okay, it's bad. I think that's sort of simplifying the physical situation that a lot of disabled people find themselves in. Especially because a lot of the bad effects that disabled people face are socially mediated. They're because of lack of access. So I think, you know, there's a lot of evidence that is, in a very important sense, harmful to be gay. If you look at the suicide rates of gay teens. But we don't respond to that by saying, right, we should find a way, if at all possible, to eliminate being gay. We think, okay, we need to stop being so heterosexist. That's terrible. But for some reason we tend to look at disability and say, right, the solution to this problem is to get rid of the disabled people. Or not the disabled people, the disability. Depends on who you ask. Some people want to get rid of the disabled people. Right. Okay. So I think in terms of the way I would think of disability pride and I think how it's often defined in the disability pride movement is just the idea that disability is a part of human diversity that is worth, that is something that we should celebrate. That is not obviously something to be pitied or eliminated or cured.

[01:00:53]Now, that doesn't mean that we, I think there's a lot of really complicated issues around that. I don't think, for example, it's bad for scientists to look for what you might think of as fears for disabilities. I don't think that it's wrong for, you know, people to take those when they have them, so on and so forth. And I think that the core tenant of pride movements in general has been there's nothing sort of, there's nothing bad or wrong about this thing that we're celebrating. It's not something that needs to be pathologized.

[01:01:39]It's something that is worth celebrating. And it's something that, yeah, people can take pride in. I think it's not something, giving it much more of a precise definition than that I think is going to be difficult because it is more about a social movement.

[01:01:55]So, in response to your second question, I think that's a fantastic question. And I would have two separate things to say about it. Because I think there's this way of thinking about accessibility and accommodation that's very common, which I think is ultimately, ultimately misguided and ultimately masks a lot of the social elements of disability, which is that it thinks about accommodation as things that we give to individuals to make up for certain kinds of misfortune, certain kinds of inherent inequalities. It's like, okay, that's a shame for you. You've undergone this misfortune, so we will give you these accommodations to make up for this personal fact about you, which is your disability.

[01:03:00]But I think that oftentimes, what's actually happening with accommodation is that we, accommodation should be understood as a more social feature. What we're doing when we're offering accommodation is making up for the fact that spaces weren't designed for disabled people to begin with.

[01:03:22]Spaces and technology and all the kind of stuff, weren't designed thinking about disabled people. We kind of designed a lot of this stuff not actually taking into account the idea that disabled people deserve to be out and about and in society. So in a lot of cases of accommodation, not all of them, but in a lot of cases of accommodation, I think we should think about it not as giving to individuals to make up for an individual's misfortune, but instead making up for a social injustice. Making up for the fact that we designed spaces and we designed technology without actually considering disabled people. And of course now, when we go into boardrooms and universities and things, as women, we don't have to have special accommodation, but we did. There was a long time when you went to fancy elite universities or places like that where there would only be a men's restroom.

[01:04:32]There wouldn't be any, it would be single-sex accommodation and it would all be for men.

[01:04:37]There's all sorts of kind of terrifying stories about when they first tried to let women into various of the Oxford and Cambridge colleges, about how big of a deal this was for accommodation.

[01:04:51]It was like, where are we going to put the women? We don't have facilities for women.

[01:04:58]I mean, you might also think that there are issues of accommodation and accessibility for gay couples who want to have children. And we don't see these the same way that we see accommodation for disabled people, but that's in part because we now have this idea that, okay, so being gay, that's a perfectly socially acceptable thing. Here's this thing about gay couples, they can't have their biological children, so hooray, let's help them out in other ways. Let's explore other avenues. So we don't see it as much as sort of a personal deficit. That being said, I'm also skeptical about the idea of universal design. I think it's maybe a very pretty dream, but I'm not sure that it is feasible. I think different disabilities have different accessibility needs that sometimes conflict. I think we need to be realistic about this. But I'm also very sympathetic to the feminist criticisms that says what this should make us question is not the badness of disability based on the fact that disabled people are, you know, are going to have various demands on society, but rather this idea that somehow the goal is for us to all be autonomous little person parcels that never make demands on anyone. Because realistically we all have demands on society, right? And through various points of our lives are, you know, have more requirements on social structures and social institutions than at other parts of our lives.

[01:06:43]Yeah, so I absolutely agree with a lot of what you said there. And I didn't by any means want to suggest that like pride is where you're going to stop. Or pride is where it is what's going to be sort of a panacea to any of these problems. But I think one big thing that a lot of disabled people face is just understanding social phenomenon as social. Because it's so easy to understand the bad aspects of your experience as just individuals. Which is of course the same thing that happens to a lot of women in the workplace in the 60s and 70s and certainly what happens to a lot of gay people. It's really difficult to understand social aspects of your experience as social rather than as just individual failing or individual misfortune. So the way that I'm thinking about it is that pride is and pride movements are kind of an important starting point. Because they're something that allows a kind of movement building. It allows people to say, hey, you're thinking about this wrong.

[01:08:05]You're thinking about this in a way that's confused. And it allows them, I mean a big thing for me is just allowing disabled people to articulate their own experiences. Because that's a very, very hard thing to do. And I think that that's kind of a precondition to doing a lot of this other social work. Because to realize that a lot of this social work has to be done, you first have to be able to be able to articulate that disability is a social identity and disability is something that we can be proud of. To then be able to say, hey, other people aren't viewing this correctly. And I think one thing that's interesting is that there's a lot of empirical work that says this isn't just a sort of purely academic issue of how are we thinking about this. There's a lot of empirical work that suggests that the way that disabled people think about themselves and think about their disability is very strongly correlated and a very good predictor of their well-being and their sense of life satisfaction and their self-esteem. So sense of disability self-acceptance and positive attitudes towards disability are two of the best predictors of well-being for disabled people. But one thing that seems to be the case is that it's really hard for disabled people to develop that in isolation. So what seems to be the best way for disabled people to develop that is by integration with a disability community. Yeah. I think all that social work is really, really necessary. But I was thinking of it as a starting point. Right. Right. Okay. So that's an excellent question. And this is where I run into part of the difficulties of giving one chapter of a book. But yeah, so I absolutely agree that things like disability are a political category. But I also think, so one of my frustrations with sort of standard social constructionist approaches to political categories, especially as they're applied to disability, is that there's a sense in which there's an adverbial thing that the social constructionist wants to do, which is say you're paying too much attention to the biological or to the natural and everything. And that's obscuring the social reality of what these things are and the political reality of what these things are. But there's a sense in which sometimes that can kind of throw the baby out with the bathwater. Because at least for some of these categories, they are embodied. They are embodied things. And what your body is like can matter to them. So I want to say right off the top of the bat, I don't want to commit to the idea that there is a single category of disability that covers cognitive disability, physical disability, all types of neurodiversity. It might be that there is a single such category. It might be in fact that that tripartite distinction that we think about is just completely wrong headed. It might be that instead these kinds are maybe unified by analogy. The way I think that broccoli is healthy, running is healthy, and my marriage is healthy. But they're not all healthy in the same way. There's no one property of healthy that they all share. So they might instead have some sort of other commonality. So one thing that I've wanted to do is start small. So focus on physical disability. See if I can build up some interesting things to say about that. Hope that other philosophers will come alongside me and say some interesting things about other categories of disability. I know Kevin Simper right now is writing really interesting things about cognitive disability. And Eva Capay of course has written wonderful things about cognitive and psychosocial disability. And I think disability needs to be a big part. So I've been primarily focused on physical disability. But I think that Charles Mills has this theory of race where he wants to be a social constructionist about race. But he also thinks it makes sense because of the current political context to say, yeah, but what are you really? Apart from how you think about yourself or how you self-describe the way maybe DuBois' political theory of race would think about you or somebody like Chica Jeffers' theory of race as cultural identity or something like that. He thinks it makes sense to say, but what are you really?

[01:13:13]What's the underlying metaphysics of race? And he thinks that the underlying metaphysics is socially constructed. The reason why that property is salient is for political reasons.

[01:13:23]But whether or not you have that property can be independent of how you self-identify.

[01:13:29]And I guess I think the same thing about disability. So I think the reason why disability is a socially interesting category is because of the disability rights movement. Because it's a category that people have found useful to organize themselves under in organizing a civil rights struggle. But then I think whether or not you are disabled isn't merely a matter of self-identifying. Because you can have the kind of physical condition that the disability rights movement is trying to promote justice for, whether or not you self-identify as having that kind of condition. So I think disability is definitely a political category, but that might extend beyond how people self-identify. That was a lot. Whether or not that's going to create hermeneutical injustice, I think not all aspects of people feeling tension and how their experiences are described are going to be the kind of things that Cricker is going to want to categorize as hermeneutical injustice. So if you take cases of intentional racial passing from the late 1880s, of people who could pass as white and were on purpose passing as white, and particularly they did not want to self-identify as any sort of black or non-white or anything like that because they felt they had prejudicial ideas about being black and they didn't want that to describe to them and they wanted the political reality of being white. I think it's not hermeneutical injustice to describe a category of black pride or solidarity or something along those lines that would include the race reality of those people. So I think just because somebody might not self-describe in a certain way or experience a social category in a particular way doesn't obviously create hermeneutical injustice as the way Cricker thinks. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It certainly should in the sense that they're blameworthy for not thinking about themselves like that or there might be a practical should where there does seem to be evidence that people who have a positive attitude towards their disability are just happier and tend to be more successful and do better. So if there's a sort of pragmatic ought, then I might be happy with that kind of normativity. But in terms of any kind of blameworthiness or sort of you're making an epistemic error or something like that, then absolutely not. And I think that's because to take the case of say the person, the gay person in the 1950s who went to a therapist or something like that who tried it, I think that person was absolutely responding to the evidence that they had available to them at the time. You can't fault someone, I think epistemically, for responding to the dominant norms and stereotypes that they have available to them at the time, even if maybe they would have been happier if they had thought about things differently or something like that. You can't say that they were doing something wrong. I think it's really important in situations like this that we don't place, we don't say it's like, okay, it's the epistemic burden on the people who already have plenty of other burdens to figure this stuff out and resist these stereotypes. I think that the epistemic mistake is entirely at the level of the people who are creating these stereotypes and creating these norms. They're the ones who are epistemically blameworthy. I think that's what I want to say about it. Absolutely. So, I mean, I think, how do you know, well, I mean, the kinds of, you look at the kinds of things that the disability rights movement has in fact done, so they've wanted to create awareness about issues of accessibility and stigma and prejudice for people who have physical, so in the case of physical disabilities, for people who have physical conditions who in some sense make an impact on their day-to-day life, right, are going to affect the way they navigate the world. So, then that's obviously vague.

[01:18:22]What kind of conditions make a, you know, make a significant impact on your day-to-day life? So, I certainly don't consider myself disabled because I wear these, because the, although it does impact my daily life in that I have to put them on, or put my contacts on, otherwise I can't see very well. It's not significant and I face no social stigma from it. In fact, if anything, if you're an academic and you wear glasses, that's a good thing. Especially if you're a woman, because it's like, it's maybe like plus one to your two-year smartness score. Smartness stat. So, the idea would be, you know, okay, well, then how, what kind of things count as having a substantial impact on your daily life? And then, you know, I'm kind of, I think it probably doesn't matter that much. You know, if, I think at that point, self-identity isn't, like, should play a role. And, you know, if you feel strongly that this is something that has a substantial impact on your daily life and you face stigma because of it and, you know, you have reasons to, you know, to need various issues of awareness and accessibility and so forth, then why not call it a disability?

[01:19:51]Because, I mean, one thing that I think would be really good for our conception of disability is if we understood it as more pervasive and more common. I think the only practical reason for not self-identifying as disabled is if you sometimes get people saying things like, oh, well, really, when you think about it, everyone is disabled. No, they're not. And that's a dumb thing to say. Don't say that. I think if you try to make it too pervasive, you lose out on the fact that, no, there is a substantial group of the population who is stigmatized because of what their bodies are like and who go through a lot because of what their bodies are like. And if you try to make it too much of a just, oh, really, when you think about it, you know, everybody's disabled and, you know, probably in virtue of being peer-sighted, I'm disabled, then you lose that element of stigma and of something that, you know, impacts, importantly, on your day-to-day life. So, like, just as a random example, you know, I don't identify as queer, even though I dated women in college because I've been married to a man for ten years. Like, I get all the heteronormative privilege that's out there in the world. I get it. Right? So there's no sense in which me trying to, like, oh, yeah, no, I face the stigma of being queer. No. No, of course I don't. So I think that would be the only reason to consider whether one ought to self-identify as, yeah, I mean, that's going to depend a lot on, you know, on just what it looks, you know, just how much progress is to make. Because I was trying to think through examples of when I would think somebody kind of isn't blameworthy. So I was trying to think, okay, well, would I think, you know, do I think that women who, you know, have difficulty understanding the idea of strong, independent women or something like that or, you know, women who are capable. But, you know, in a lot of cases, no, I don't blame them. Because, you know, sexism and misogyny is still a big thing. It's maybe gone underground. But it still, you know, maybe it's less understandable than it was a few hundred years ago. But it's still understandable. And not everyone is the same. So, again, I still in that case want to say it's not obviously the epistemic mistake of the woman. It's the epistemic mistake of social norms. So, I mean, in a case where I'm trying to, like, imagine a gender utopia where there was genuinely no sexism and no gender inequality. But then there was just somebody who had a hard time understanding the idea of or a capable woman or something like that. Then I think that person is super blameworthy, right? That person is making an epistemic mistake. You know, they think that just because women on average have less upper body strength or, you know, just because they're more likely to suffer from anemia or people who are female are more likely to suffer from anemia. Therefore, women aren't capable or something like that. Okay, at that point, yeah, you're blameworthy. So, if we could get to that place with disability, then I would say, yeah, the individual is blameworthy.

[01:23:47]But I can't, that's a long way to go, if that makes sense. You might think, I mean, so Fricker is a virtue epistemologist. So, I think for her, you know, she is interested in this idea of epistemic blame and epistemic, yeah. But that, I think for her, a lot of this is going to come in degrees. And I think that, you know, a hundred, so today, you know, a woman who just totally buys all the norms of sexism, even though a lot of other information is available to her, you might think, okay, there's a sense in which you're maybe somewhat blameworthy for that, even though sexism is a lot more blameworthy. You're still, there is other information available to you and you're in some sense not responding to some of the evidence available. But you're not as blameworthy as the person who was in a gender utopia and things like that. Maybe I'd want to say the same thing about disability. A hundred years from now, live in a wonderful, accessible society, and somebody still is just having a hard time understanding this kind of idea, then, you know, maybe they're partially blameworthy.

[01:25:02]I don't think it's something that has to be an on-off. So, I think it is the social, it's that we say, okay, that's the location of the epistemic mistake. Because for Fricker, she thinks, because these phenomena are systematic, and because they are social, sometimes we can't, there's no one person that we can point to and say, okay, this is the source. And collectively, we might not even say, okay, all the men, all the men are responsible for the sexism. That doesn't seem right either. Maybe it's, you know, just as easy for men to be influenced by dominant social structures as it is, or dominant social stereotypes as it is for women. So, the problem for her is the two-fold thing. So, it's that we have these stereotypes that are false, and then our way of producing knowledge is, we produce knowledge in a way that's power and balance, right? So, it's easier for men to contribute to the common ground than it is for women to contribute to the common ground. It's easier for straight people to contribute to the common ground than it is for gay people to contribute to the common ground. So, even if no individual man or no individual straight person is individually responsible for the creation of the stereotype, the situation in which knowledge is being produced, because it's hierarchical, because it has power and balance, is itself unjust.

[01:26:57]So, certainly for Fricker, she doesn't want to place the blame in these systematic cases on individual knowers. She wants to place the, locate the injustice on the situations in which knowledge is being created.

[01:27:12]Great. Okay, that's interesting. Yeah. So, I think it's really important to distinguish between cases where people feel like their own experiences aren't being accommodated within a movement, or people feel like their own experiences aren't being given voice to or aren't being represented, and cases in which people genuinely feel like they can't or they don't understand their own experiences. And the kind of case you were describing, it certainly happens a lot in social movements, and certainly if you look back at the history of the LGBT movement, and why we now call it the LGBT movement, I avoid, no, it's LGBT star now, is for exactly this reason that people were saying, hey, well, what about, you know, it's not just gay pride, it's gay and lesbian pride, and it's like, it's not just gay pride, it's gay and lesbian and bi, and it's, no, it's gay and lesbian, bi and trans, and then, but there's lots of, there's a whole spectrum, and et cetera, et cetera.

[01:28:09]But that was people sort of coming to a social movement and saying, allow me to describe my experience to you. Look how this, the way that you're representing this movement as covering all of us doesn't really adequately represent me. But for one thing, that kind of happens, I think it would have been harder for that to happen, for us to talk about all the different and varied ways that people can experience sexuality if you hadn't started with people saying, hey, it's okay to talk about these other alternatives, these other sexualities that have been described as deviant. No, we're not going to accept that deviant label. We're going to, you know, we're going to have pride. We're going to, we're going to celebrate these and treat them as part of a social movement rather than as something you can see your doctor about. So, likewise in the disability case, obviously there's a ton that needs to be ironed out, but not representing someone's experience is a different thing than a case where people literally just find it hard to understand or articulate their own experience. And I guess it's not clear to me that just by having a movement that looks like at the moment, which I'm sure it certainly is because it's a disability rights movement and beyond, is too coarse grained and doesn't represent enough variation and doesn't all of that. That doesn't, at least on the face of it, look automatically like it's going to lead to a phenomenon like hermeneutical injustice rather than just the kind of phenomenon like, you know, we saw in the gay rights movement, which was increasingly people coming forward and saying this needs to be more nuanced, this needs to have more representation, this needs to accommodate more types of people than you're currently allowing. And certainly, I mean, this has already happened in the disability rights movement where, you know, for a long time it was just, far and away the most prominent was people with very particular kinds of mobility limitations and people with sensory modality loss. And all of the stuff that they would talk about was just accessibility issues for those very particular things. And people in the disability community complained that it created kind of a hierarchy amongst disabled people. There's like the very visible disabilities that people are familiar with that are maybe more common, and those are the things that, you know, it was easier to fight for accessibility for. And then the less widely known ones are the less visible ones. And it almost started replicating the same structure of, okay, get accessibility for the common stuff and not accessibility for the less common stuff. So that's definitely the kind of thing that already has been going on and needs to be ironed out. And will continue to be struggled along with in the disability rights movement.

[01:31:24]Not clear to me that that's terminated.

[01:31:28]Right. So I think that's absolutely right. And I actually think what pride movements are doing is trying to replace these sort of normatively laden distinctions with a more value free one. But it's just what they have to do to do that is to go into this language of pride and celebration. So there's a view of disability, which I call the Magneto view of disability, which is, in fact, the disabilities are the best things and really non-disabled people are the ones with the inferior bodies and disabled people should just separate out and, you know, form a collective of freaks who will all be better. So that's, I think, clearly not the view of disability that the disability pride movement wants to endorse.

[01:32:21]I think when they're talking about pride, the idea is that you're licensing pride rather than demanding it. Because we take pride in all sorts of things that we think it's kind of a quirk of personality that you can take pride in. So it's like, you know, you can be proud of things that you think ultimately are value free. So you might be, you know, proud of the fact that your ancestry hails from Scotland, even though you think it's not like people from Scotland are better than people from Ireland. It's just like this is something that's your pride. You just feel an emotive attachment to it. Or you might be proud of your ability to, like, when you're in college, do a keg stand, even though you know that, like, there's actually nothing normatively important about being able to do it. It's just something you're proud of. You will show it off at any opportunity.

[01:33:18]So pride is more of a licensing. It's like a license to celebrate rather than to say you don't have, this isn't something you hide, this isn't something you need to feel sorry for, you know. But it doesn't obviously shift the valence in the other direction.

[01:33:35]Certainly in the early stages of the gay pride movement, I think there were people who did want to shift, especially amongst the, for lesbian pride, because there was the idea that, like, lesbianism was the end product of feminism, right? It was like if you were the true women's liberation feminist, then lesbianism was really where it was at, right?

[01:34:01]And it was somehow importantly morally better. But I think that was more or less a minority view, and I think a lot of times pride is more just about this being something that it's okay to celebrate, that it makes sense to celebrate, it's not oxymoronic to celebrate, you're not doing the villain support group thing, rather than saying it's mandated that you celebrate this.