Understanding Oneself through Others Day 2

This is a report by Jodie Russell and Lisa Bortolotti. On 23rd and 24th September Eleanor Byrne and Kathleen Murphy-Hollies organised a workshop at the University of Birmingham, bringing together researchers interested in the area of the intersection of epistemic injustice and distributed cognition. The venue for the workshop was the beautiful Winterbourne House and Garden. 

You find a report of day one here.

Winterbourne

On day two, Katherine Puddifoot offered her keynote presentation, entitled "Affect, Attention, and Injustice: The Injustice of Neglected Affect". Katherine started from the observation that affective states, like anxiety, worsen in some illnesses like COPD (Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease). Should we draw attention to those affective states? The talk focused on there being an injustice of Neglected Affect. The injustice occurs where people have affective states like fear and anxiety which are preventing them from having their objective basic needs like health, education, and longevity met.

Slide from Katherine Puddifoot's presentation

The people who are experiencing the affect could benefit from being given information about their affective states and how to modulate them. However, drawing attention to the affect risks leading them to engage in negative self-stereotyping, and fear judgement and generally distrust others—each of which could prevent them from gaining knowledge and understanding about their affective states and how to modulate them. 

This presents an epistemic dilemma for those who notice that others have affective states like fear and anxiety that are undermining their objective basic needs: whether they draw attention to the affective states or not, they risk causing the person experiencing the affect to miss out on knowledge and understanding about how to modulate it. Already vulnerable people, who possess affective states that are negatively impacting their objective basic needs, are further disadvantaged because they are unable to access knowledge and understanding that would support their objective basic needs by modulating their affect. 

J.P. Grodniewicz is presenting and Ellie Byrne chairing

The second talk was by J.P. Grodniewicz and Anna Drożdżowicz, and concerned epistemic injustice in the context of psychotherapy. For J.P, and Anna, psychotherapy is a form of psychological service that involves a collaborative process based on the relationship between (at least one) psychotherapist and (at least one) client/patient. Although psychotherapy can be a valuable experience with multiple positive outcomes, the path to achieving these outcomes may be long and difficult. Specifically, in some cases, patients/clients can be vulnerable to various forms of harm and injustice.

In this talk, they discussed the epistemic goals of psychotherapy and specific risks related to clients’/patients’ attempts to achieve these goals. First, they argued that the main epistemic goal of psychotherapy is deepening one’s self-understanding, characterized as a kind of objectual understanding which consists of grasping coherence-making relations between constituents of a body of information about oneself.

Second, they argued that patients/clients may risk various forms of epistemic injustice that may further hinder them from acquiring and/or deepening self-understanding in psychotherapy. Epistemic injustice arises when one’s capacity as an epistemic agent is denied. Epistemic injustice is widely discussed in the context of psychiatry; however, epistemic injustice in psychotherapy has received relatively little attention.

They offered examples that illustrate how three forms of epistemic injustice can arise in psychotherapeutic encounters:

• Testimonial injustice in psychotherapy occurs when the client’s words and/or capacity to provide knowledge are wrongfully assigned less credibility by the psychotherapist due to epistemically irrelevant factors rooted in systematic or interpersonal dynamics.
• Hermeneutical injustice in psychotherapy occurs when clients are wronged in their capacity to make sense of their experiences due to limitations in their conceptual resources or due to having the conceptual resources of the psychotherapist imposed on them against their interest(s).
• Contributory injustice occurs in psychotherapy when clients cannot contribute their perspectives and interpretations because their contribution is dismissed or undermined by the psychotherapist.

In each case, they argued that epistemic injustice may result in specific epistemic harms related to achieving and/or deepening one’s self-understanding in the course of psychotherapy. In the end, they briefly discussed some ways of mitigating these risks.

Slide from David Hahn's presentation

The third talk was by David Hahn and was entitled: "Self-Illness Ambiguity, Alienation, and Distributed Self-Understanding". David started from the observation that feeling uncertain about who we are can affect our agency and our relationships so it is important to resolve self-illness ambiguity. But how should we do so? In realist accounts, what is internal is who we really are but mental illness is simplified as it appears like a virus that "attacks" the self. The self is actually more intertwined and complex; the definition of what 'self' is, is a judgement or decision.

Self-discovery approaches presuppose self-knowledge, and reify both the self and illness. Most authors advocate for a narrative view of the self that can be just as reifying as the realist view even if the self is constructed. One of course could ask whether the narrative is "good" in the sense of authentic, but this may not be helpful to someone who is experiencing self-illness ambiguity.

If we reject both realist and constructivist view of the self-illness ambiguity, what is left? The self is not constituted of new facts but interpretations and a critical theory is needed, drawn from Jaeggi's account of alienation. On Jaeggi's account, alienation is a relation of relationlessness, a disrupted appropriation of inner and outer world. It is not to be understood as a lack of knowledge but as an inability to lead one's life, due to an alienated relationship between self and world.

So, overcoming ambiguities doesn't involve asking what is "really me" but, instead, asking practical-ethical questions in the process of learning how to live an unalienated life.

Slide from the presentation by Vespermann and Tirkkonen

Daniel Vespermann and Sanna Tirkkonen discussed existential injustice and focused on the phenomena of background feelings (which are phenomenologically different from emotions). Distressing background feelings of uncertainty, existential guilt, or worthlessness are enduring and remain unaffected by momentary changes of social situations. These feelings condition episodic emotions, thought processes, and behavioral tendencies. As affective states, they also impact on a person’s commitments, concerns, and values. Background feelings thus have an important guiding function in our lives.

Daniel and Sanna argued that distressing feelings require hermeneutic labor and prompt regulatory efforts, which are often scaffolded by the social environment. Given this premise, background feelings are generally vulnerable to unjust social influences. Despite the burgeoning literature on affective injustice and hostile scaffolding, how background feelings can be subject to social injustice has remained underdeveloped in these debates.

Because of their fundamental role for people’s affective, cognitive, and practical capacities, Daniel and Sanna call the wronging of background feelings existential injustice. They introduced two dimensions of existential injustice that lead to feelings of inadequacy and thus exacerbate mental distress. First, attention guidance and narrative practices can impede understanding and regulating one’s background feelings by limiting potential perspectives on one’s affective condition.

Second, they analyzed the regulatory role of attention guidance. Patterns of attention predetermine sources of affect regulation. Directing attention away from distressing stimuli or thoughts again helps to modulate emotional strain. However, what becomes perceptually salient is shaped in specific sociocultural contexts and these selection histories can lead to maladaptive adaptations to context-specific values.

Third, Daniel and Sanna clarified the idea that different narrative practices shape self-relevant information. Since narratives can be a means of determining criteria for the appropriateness and fittingness of affective states, they may also impose unjust demands on individuals’ affect regulation. Thus, narrative practices can generate cognitive frames that prevent beneficial reappraisals of affective interaction patterns.

Together, these dimensions reinforce the painful salience of distressing background feelings and foreclose experiences of support or validation. Being hindered from reframing one’s condition evokes feelings of inadequacy, that one’s affective condition is inappropriate or even incoherent.

Slide from the presentation by Isern-Mas

 

Carme Isern-Mas presented on "The Affective Injustice of therapy Speak". Although therapy speak is not properly analysed in philosophy, it is an important phenomenon to study in relation to epistemic injustice because it can be seen to promote both epistemic and affective injustice. Carme used some interesting examples to how how therapy speak can be weaponised, including the case of Jonah Hill who talked about 'boundaries' to control his partner's behaviour, or the case of a boss sending employees on a 'wellbeing' course to deal with burn-out caused by the stress in the workplace.

Obviously, therapy speak isn't always a bad thing and it can even help overcome epistemic injustice, challenge stigma around mental health, and help identity new phenomena. However, it can be misapplied, and lead to over-simplification, trivialisation, dilution of meaning, pathologization, and inappropriate self-diagnosis. As a consequence, people using therapy speak can discredit the testimony of others for no good reason, evade responsibility for their behaviour, signal that their status is privileged, and give to an impartial observer the impression that they are adopting an objective stance.

Therapy speak also exploits the authority of medical advice, conflates descriptive and normative terms, hides normative claims, and provides to the person who uses it the opportunity to merely deny the other person's perspective on the basis of this more "scientific" and "objective" stance that however may have no medical justification and a very vague relationship with the concepts actually used by therapists.

Therapy speak also perpetuates affective injustice by contributing to deny uptake for the other person's testimony, silencing different perspectives or objections to the "medicalised" interpretation of the situation, testimonial smothering, perpetuating the claim that the other person suffers from a credibility deficit and demanding that the listener (who may be the oppressed member of the group) regulate their own emotions in line with the speaker's interpretation. On a broader scale, it may also result into an example of emotional imperialism.

Day one speakers!

Day two speakers!