Navigating difficult emotions in interpersonal contexts

Eindhoven

This is a report of a symposium at the OZSW Philosophy Conference in Eindhoven in August 2024. The symposium was entitled: "Navigating difficult emotions in interpersonal contexts", and featured three presentations.

The Affective Injustice of Therapy-Speak by Carme Isern-Mas and Manuel Almagro (University of Balearic Islands)

Carme Isern-Mas's presentation

When we break up with people we tend to use therapy-speak: this was highlighted in a viral tiktok video on how to to best tell a friend that we no longer want to hang out with them. Therapy-speak is weaponised to promote and perpetuate epistemic and affective forms of injustice.

What is therapy-speak? Therapy-speak is use of therapeutic language and concepts into everyday communication: "He's such a narcissistic!", "I need to set some boundaries." 

It can have advantages: it enables us to share some experiences that we might not have acknowledge before we had terms for them (think about the important notion of "post-partum depression"). 

But therapy-speak is also problematic because it exploits the epistemic power of medical evidence and causes us to conflate descriptive and normative terms. Moreover, when the speaker is challenged, the fact that they used therapy-speak enables them to say that their view is not just one view on the matter, which can be disputed, but the correct account of the situation. If someone does not share that account, then it must be because they do not understand the situation.

According to Carme, the use of therapy-speak illustrates three forms of affective injustice: affect-related testimonial injustice, affective injustice or emotion policing, and emotional imperialism. Carme reviewed each form of injustice, using examples.

Epistemic Justice as Care in Trauma-Sharing by Kathleen Murphy-Hollies (University of Birmingham)

Kathleen Murphy-Hollies's presentation

There are situations where we do not believe what people tell us and yet we feel bad about dismissing their reports. For instance, when people recall traumatic experiences and they have disorganised memories; or when a friend tells us about a painful break up and does get all the details of the failed relationship right; what can we do?

In those cases when a person makes a statement we do not believe, two credibility assessments are needed:

1. one concerns the propositional content conveyed by the statement; and

2. the other concerns the perspective of the person making that statement.

In agential accounts of self-knowledge, the agential capacity to make up our own mind is central. This is what makes self-knowledge special, the capacity to regulate our behaviour, not necessarily the capacity to introspect accurately. If our claims about ourselves do not get uptake, then we are robbed of an exchange with other people about those claims, and of the possibility to gain self-knowledge in this regulatory sense.

Even false claims about the self can embed know-how and dismissing them can be a case of epistemic injustice. Engagement with those claims is the best policy: so even if the propositional content of the person's statement is something we do not believe, we may still engage with the person's perspective and see where they are coming from when they make that statement.

Hermeneutical Crowding and Moving on from Non-Bereavement Loss by Pilar Lopez Cantero (Tilburg University)

Pilar Lopez Cantero in Q&A

What happens when we refuse to move on when love ends or we suffer from unrequited love? Couldn't we educate ourselves out of this sort of self-victimisation? Are we just irrational? Building on work on narrative identity theory, Pilar Lopez Cantero argues that we experience a lack of narrative competence. 

We have story making capacities that we use to interpret the world and in particular the events that happen to us, and we can be better or worse at exercising those capacities. Such capacities include:

1. multiperspectivalism 
2. diachronic projection 
3. unification 

In a break up, those capacities do not work so well. We fail at multiperspectivalism because we can only take the perspective of the sufferer. We fail at diachronic projection because we can't look to the future. We fail at unification because we can't see the good things that happen to us, only the bad ones.

So the solution seems to be that we need to foster our narrative competence. But once the break up happens, we still see it the end of love as being a tragedy. This situation can be better understood via the notion of hermeneutical crowding. 

There are a number of cultural narratives that crowd out an alternative narrative: "there is only one love", "the end of love is a failure", "divorce is a disaster"... these prevent us from telling ourselves a different story about the break up.

For Pilar, we have a duty to foster narrative competence before break ups occur, and learn to recognise our narrative incompetence in everyday life to prevent feeling like a victim when a crisis occurs. 

An Introduction to the ESPEECHI Project

In this post, Manuel Almagro and Carme Isern-Mas present a recently funded project on epistemic and speech injustices. The project is led by Manuel Almagro, and it features Carme Isern-Mas as researcher, together with Gloria Andrada (NOVA Institute of Philosophy), Virginia Ballesteros (University of Valencia) and Pilar Terrés (University of Valencia).

ESPEECHI (Epistemic and Speech Injustices) is a two-year research project funded by the government of the autonomous region of Valencia (Generalitat Valenciana), Spain. ESPEECHI aims to further explore the nature of different types of epistemic and speech injustices from two different angles.

First, we will address the relationship between the epistemic and the linguistic dimensions of different forms of injustice. Our general hypothesis is that analyzing forms of injustice from both domains can reveal important aspects of the nature of such injustices.

The working hypothesis of this first part of the project include:

1. Social structures and practices are especially relevant to account for, and intervene in, cases of epistemic and speech injustices.
2. Deep disagreements, properly understood, could be helpful in alleviating epistemic and speech injustices.
3. There are alternative approaches to speech act theory that can address and account better for speech injustice cases.
4. Offensiveness and certain speech injustices are two sides of the same coin if approached from a certain view on normativity.

In the second part of the project, we will study the particularities of epistemic and speech injustices in specific contexts. One of the features that makes research on epistemic and speech injustices so complex and interesting is that each of these injustices may have both an epistemic and linguistic dimension. Moreover, studying these injustices in specific domains can reveal previously unnoticed unjust practices and enhance our understanding of such phenomena. In this part of the project, we will further explore the presence of these injustices in two contexts: mental health, and STEM domains.

The working hypotheses of this second part of the project include:

• The psychiatric context, given its implications, has specific particularities that, although they can help us better understand epistemic and speech injustices, the conclusions and policies derived from research within this context cannot be generalized and extrapolated to other contexts.
• Appealing to subjective interests to explain gender and race gaps in STEM is misleading and harmful, because it hides some discriminatory practices and institutional structures, which foster epistemic and speech injustices, that contribute to these gaps.

We plan to organize two workshops on these topics that will be held at the University of Valencia, one in November of 2024 and the other at the end of 2025. We will publicize them through the project’s website, so be sure to check it regularly. Stay tuned for more updates!

Manuel Almagro is Assistant Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science at the University of Valencia, Spain, specializing in political epistemology, political philosophy of language, and experimental philosophy. Manuel works on political polarization, disagreement, offensive meaning, expressivism, epistemic injustice, and Wittgenstein’s philosophy.

Carme Isern-Mas is Assistant Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of the Balearic Islands, specializing in moral psychology and applied ethics. Carme works on blame, empathy, moral motivation, and self-deception, and has an interest in the bioethics of mental health, particularly epistemic and affective injustice, and the ethics of fame.