Epistemic rights

Epistemic rights feature both implicitly and explicitly in the highly polarized pro-life versus pro-choice abortion debate in the US. This paper explores the nature and role of epistemic rights in that debate. I argue that the proper characterisation of epistemic rights allows us to identify a range of epistemic harms perpetrated by key actors and institutions in the debate amounting to epistemic rights violations. Using two case studies, I highlight where epistemic rights arise and are violated in the abortion debate and examine the consequences of these violations for individuals and epistemic communities. I conclude that epistemic rights violations in the abortion debate harm individuals, diminish the quality of the debate and lead to increased polarization.

We speak of the right to know with relative ease. You have the right to know the results of a medical test or to be informed about the collection and use of personal data. But what exactly is the right to know, and who should we trust to safeguard it?

This book provides the first comprehensive examination of the right to know and other epistemic rights: rights to goods such as information, knowledge and truth. These rights play a prominent role in our information-centric society and yet they often go unnoticed, disregarded and unprotected. As such, those who control what we know, or think we know, exert an influence on our lives that is often as dangerous as it is imperceptible.

Beginning with a rigorous but accessible philosophical account of epistemic rights, Lani Watson examines the harms caused by epistemic rights violations, drawing on case studies across medical, political and legal contexts. She investigates who has the right to what information, who is responsible for the quality and circulation of information and what epistemic duties we have towards each other. This book is essential reading for philosophers, legal theorists and anyone concerned with the protection and promotion of information, knowledge and truth.

‘Euro judges “open floodgates to illegals”’ (The Sun, 8 June 2016), ‘Fury over plot to let 1.5M Turks enter Britain’ (Daily Mail, 13 June 2016), ‘European criminals free to live in Britain’ (Daily Telegraph, 7 June 2016). These headlines all appeared in the weeks immediately prior to the UK referendum on EU membership, held on 23 June 2016. They present a stark and unified message regarding the nature, scale and impact of EU immigration in the UK It is hard to deny that a correlation exists between public concern with EU immigration at this time and media attention on the topic. That the media actively shaped the beliefs of its audience, regarding EU immigration, and that it did so through the propagation of misinformation and in the biasing and concealment of accurate information is also, I argue, overwhelmingly plausible. As such, the media handling of information concerning EU immigration during pre-Brexit campaigning provides a compelling illustration of the systematic violation of epistemic rights. In this paper, I outline the nature of epistemic rights and epistemic rights violations and demonstrate the widespread perpetration of such violations in pre-Brexit media coverage. This provides a case study for the investigation of epistemic rights violations across national and international media; a topic of central concern for contemporary epistemology.

The encounters of writing center tutors and clients, this essay argues, are tensional, asymmetrical, and productive negotiations of a coauthored we. As authorship and authorization are discursive processes, we offer an empirical examination of how personal pronouns mark important shifts in the dynamic creation of a shared academic manuscript in writing center consultations. Though it is tempting to analyze the work of we as simply inclusive, our analysis proposes that we is multifunctional, periodically signaling collaborative affiliation and disaffiliation, marking the negotiation of coauthorship, implying shared identity, and acting as an indicator of institutional asymmetry.