Muchas gracias por venir a esta sección de la tarde.
Nuestros próximos hablantes son Laura Delgado y Claudia Picazo.
Claudia Picazo es una estudiante de PHD en UNED, más o menos.
Claudia Picazo es profesora de maestría en UNED
también, en el mejor departamento del mundo,
en el Departamento de Historia y Filosofía de la Ciencia.
La estudiante se centra en la filosofía de
la psiquiatría y la filosofía de la medicina.
Claudia trabaja principalmente en la filosofía
de la lengua, la filosofía de la mente,
sobre injusticia epistémica y muchas otras cosas.
Hoy van a hablar sobre injusticia hermenéutica y la psiquiatría.
Gracias.
Gracias, Christian, y gracias a los
organizadores, especialmente a Agatha.
Vamos a hablar sobre injusticia hermenéutica y la psiquiatría.
Algunas categorías diagnósticas usadas en la psiquiatría
han sido criticadas desde diferentes puntos de vista.
Por ejemplo, desde el criticismo feminista
sobre el disorder de personalidad borderline,
ha sido dicho que la psiquiatría es la
manifestación de las atemptas históricas
para explicar la manera en que las estrategias con algunas mujeres
se usan para sobrevivir y resistir a la opresión y el abuso
por describir estas estrategias como sintomáticas
de un disorder de personalidad disturbante.
Desde críticas antiracistas a oposición al disorder de defensa,
ha sido argumentado que la ODD es una diagnóstica exagerada.
Perpetúa esta normalización de legacias de opresión racial, patologización
de resistencia y control de comportamiento como intervención,
en lugar de una advocacia contra la violencia racial.
Estas críticas pueden destacar que
hay ciertas biases en estas categorías
que obscuran nuestra comprensión de
la realidad que se intende describir.
Sin embargo, creemos que estas críticas son de gran importancia,
en el sentido de en qué sentido estas categorías
son efectivas o en qué tipo de daño causan.
Nuestro objetivo en este debate es ofrecer
una taxonomía de diferentes daños conceptuales
que puedan iluminar las formas en las que las
categorías diagnósticas pueden ser efectivas y duras.
A este objetivo, usamos los herramientas desarrollados
en la literatura de la injusticia hermenótica,
pero al final, promovimos una noción más amplia
que va más allá de los daños puramente epistémicos.
Así que proponemos la noción de daños conceptuales.
Este es el plan de la charla.
Primero, presento algunos problemas con las categorías diagnósticas.
Segundo, Claudia presenta los principales
aprochos de la injusticia hermenótica.
Tras esto, presentamos la idea de daños conceptuales
y la taxonomía provisional de estos daños.
Esto es un trabajo en progreso.
Y finalmente, aplicamos este plan para
algunos ejemplos en la psiquiatría.
Algunos ejemplos en los que las categorías
diagnósticas parecen ser problemáticas.
El primer ejemplo, el crítico femenino sobre el VPD.
El VPD es un desorden de personalidad definido por el DSM
como una instabilidad pervasiva en relaciones interpersonales,
imágenes de sí mismo y afectos, así como impulsividad marcada.
Es importante recordar que alrededor del 75% de
las personas diagnosticadas con VPD son mujeres,
y el 70% de ellas han sufrido abusos.
Los críticos femeninos han argumentado que el VPD es una diagnóstica
básica de género que patologiza el comportamiento de las mujeres,
pero lo que lo hace es ponerlas en una situación doble,
por la cual las mujeres pueden ser patologizadas por cumplir con y por no cumplir
con las expectativas sociales contradictorias del comportamiento femenino.
La validez de algunos síntomas diagnósticos, como el enojo
inapropiado o la promiscuidad sexual, también ha sido preguntada.
Se ha argumentado que el VPD, en lugar
de ser un desorden de personalidad,
es la consecuencia de problemas sociales
como el abuso de niños o un ambiente sexista.
Algunos críticos, como Lester, han argumentado que el
VPD es una estrategia adaptada al ambiente opresivo.
Otras categorías diagnósticas que han sido criticadas por las
aprochas antirracistas son el caso del desorden oposito-defiante.
Siguiendo también el DSM, el VPD es un desorden de conducta y control impulsivo disruptivo de
infancia caracterizado por la enoja o irritabilidad, argumentatividad o defianza y vindictividad.
La investigación en los Estados Unidos ha encontrado que las diagnósticas
del VPD son 35% más prevalentes en niños negros que en niños blancos.
Lega argumenta que esta disparidad no se origina de diferencias de comportamiento
de los niños negros, sino de las biases racializadas de la defianza.
Argumenta que los adultos son más probables de percibir a los niños negros como más
fuertes, más adultos, menos inocentes y menos deservidos de atención que los niños blancos.
Estas biases de adultificación impactan
especialmente en las niñas racialmente minorizadas.
Los negativos estereotipos de las mujeres negras como serias, agresivas y
hipersexuales, permiten a los adultos a tratar a las niñas negras inapropiadamente,
y a las poner en peligro por infracciones subjetivas
como disrupción o desobediencia que les afecta.
Así que, en lugar de ser un desorden mental, ha sido argumentado que los
comportamientos considerados síntomas en el VDD son actualmente reacciones al racismo.
El Elega points out that VDD diagnoses become racist when applied indiscriminately to racially
minoritized children as a "bad kid" level, placing blame of them for these unwanted behaviors.
Doing so is especially problematic when these
behaviors serve as reactions or adaptations to racism.
This misattribution can incite adverse outcomes, including mistreatment, opportunities
for misdiagnosis, failure to protect against racism, and harsher disciplinary practices.
So, from these anti-racist approaches, it is argued that ODD diagnosis
is not helpful, neither a good explanation of these behaviors,
but a stigmatizing level that overlooks daily experiences
of racism, sexual abuse, and difficult environments.
So, according to this criticism, VPD and ODD, it seems that some diagnostic categories hide
structural realities and obscure, rather than illuminate, some experiences and behaviors.
Also, according to this criticism, the application of the categories can be biased, which further
obscures the experiences and identities of those to whom the category is currently applied.
The third criticism we present was posted by Tzatmar and Karel. It concerns the neurotypical
notion of "good life" and its repercussions for neurodivergent modes of flourishing.
They argue that dominant conceptions of the "good life" rely
on species-typical intuitions about what is good and desirable,
and this is problematic when accounting for neurodivergent
modes of flourishing that may be based on atypical intuitions.
This entails that autism and other cognitive variations
are excluded of the possibility of real flourishing life,
and neurotypical ideas about flourishing life
exclude alternative ones from neurodivergent.
Ok, so we've seen that there are some
criticisms concerning diagnostic categories,
and what I'm going to do now is to present the tools that we have
from the literature, the discussion on hermeneutical injustice.
So the idea in these criticisms is that we have some notions or
some concepts, some diagnostic categories, which are concepts,
that are either biased or are wrongly applied or have some defect.
And these defects that these categories have are obscuring
our understanding of certain behaviours, certain experiences,
the way we understand other people, the
way we understand ourselves as well.
And so we think it's useful to use the notions that have
been developed in the literature on hermeneutical injustice.
To make more precise what the problems with these categories are.
So hermeneutical injustice is about concepts and how the concepts
we have or don't have are problematic for our epistemic lives.
So concepts are usually thought to be the building blocks of thoughts,
and this is important because we use concepts for categorisation,
inference, memory, learning and decision making.
So we use concepts to make sense of our experiences,
of the world around us, to make choices and so on.
And so many people, starting with Friker, have pointed out how they
play crucial roles in our epistemic lives and beyond, of course,
and how when they are problematic, then
we have problems in our epistemic lives.
So the idea that we find in the literature on
hermeneutical injustice is that our conceptual repertoires
or the conceptual resources that we have in our
societies can be dysfunctional or defective.
Friker introduced this idea that sometimes the problem with
the conceptual resources that we have in a given society
is that there should be some concepts,
but in fact these concepts are lacking.
And this is something that we'll explain more in detail later.
There is another kind of defect in the conceptual repertoire,
which would be that sometimes we do have
concepts, but they are difficult to apply.
And also we have cases where the concepts that
we have are defective, but in a wrongful way.
So it's not just that we don't have the means to create good concepts,
but rather that because we have prejudice and so on, we
end up going in concepts that are wrongfully defective.
And the problem is that whenever this
happens, our experiences can be obscured.
So instead of using these concepts to make sense, to make
intelligible, to understand our experiences, ourselves, other people,
in the end what we have is a situation where we
don't understand or everything is a bit obscured.
It's important to highlight here that for this literature what is important is that
this defectiveness can be related to the existence of some form of marginalization,
hermeneutical marginalization in particular,
and/or the presence of prejudiced stereotypes.
So we have these problems with the conceptual repertoires
because we have identity prejudices, for example,
or because we don't allow all groups in the society to contribute to
the creation of meanings, social meanings, or concepts more generally.
So all this discussion on hermeneutical
injustice started with Pricker's work,
and she introduced this idea that hermeneutical injustice occurs when subjects are
unable to make some significant experience intelligible to themselves and to others
because they are hermeneutically marginalized.
So she was interested in the situations
where we have an epistemic harm.
In particular, the harm is that there is a cognitive
deficiency and an intelligibility of a significant experience.
We have an experience we don't understand because there
is a lacuna in the collective hermeneutical resource.
And it's also a situation where there is some wrong.
So it's not just that there is no concept, it's
that there is no concept because some group,
so the group who is having this experience
is hermeneutically marginalized.
This means that the group is not being allowed
to participate in the creation of concepts.
In her framework, the epistemic harm tends to cause other
harms which can be also epistemic but also practical.
So she introduces two paradigmatic examples of this situation.
One is that of sexual harassment and the other is postpartum depression.
So imagine, she picks testimonies from this time.
So before the notion of sexual harassment was
introduced, there was of course sexual harassment.
So women were suffering sexual harassment.
However, what we find is that many women
didn't understand exactly what was going on.
Of course they had some idea but they didn't have a full developed
notion or a clear understanding of what they were going through.
So this kind of situation would constitute a hermeneutical
injustice because there was a significant experience
that they could not make intelligible or they couldn't make
sense of the experience precisely because there was no notion,
there was no concept that would describe appropriately the experience.
And the reason why there was no concept is that women
were not allowed to develop these legal notions.
They were not lawyers at that time and so on.
And more generally, their perspectives were not being taken into
account or they were not taken as seriously as men's perspective
who could describe the same situation in different
terms like "I was just flirting" or so on.
Another example would be postpartum depression which
before it was identified as such, many women suffered.
So there are testimonies of women feeling
that they were just bad mothers and so on.
But then now we have a notion that can explain or
make sense of the experiences that they were having.
So these are cases where there are some significant
experiences that would be in our interest to understand
but because of the social asymmetries in
our societies we have no concepts for.
In this sense, we can say that in these
situations of hermeneutical injustice,
the collective hermeneutical resources are dysfunctional because
there is a gap where there should be a concept or a word.
And this is causing an epistemic harm that is an incapacity
to make sense or understand more generally an experience.
This is Fricker's original definition but in the last
20 years in the literature we find many other situations
that could be also classified as hermeneutical injustices and we
have also other cases that involve some form of conceptual harms.
And so our idea is that we need to go beyond Fricker's definition to
understand what is going on with this criticism in diagnostic categories.
And we need to go beyond Fricker's definition into directions.
First, there are other ways in which
hermeneutical resources can be dysfunctional.
And also there are other conceptual harms, so
conceptual harms as the harms caused by our concepts
that are not really restricted to our epistemic lives or
to this idea that we cannot make sense of an experience.
And what I'm going to do now is to present some ways in
which the hermeneutical repertoire can be dysfunctional
and also some other conceptual harms.
And then we will try to understand the criticisms to the diagnostic
categories that Laura presented using this conceptual framework.
So, beyond conceptual gaps we also have problems of application.
And here, for example, Falvo talks about what
she calls positive hermeneutical injustice,
which could be the kind of hermeneutical injustice that
results from the presence of oppressive and distorting concepts
which crowd out, defeat or preempt the application
of an available and more accurate concept.
And the point here is that sometimes the
problem is not that we don't have a concept,
but rather that we cannot apply the adequate concept to an experience.
Why? Because we have some other concept or some cultural
narrative that distorts or blocks the application.
Well, there are different examples here, but
there's, for example, Jenkins talks about rape myths.
So, if one endorses rape myths, then even though we
have a good notion of rape in some countries, let's say,
it can be the case that we are unable to apply the
notion of rape to an experience that we've had,
precisely because we believe the rape myths, and
that prevents us from applying the accurate concept.
Falvo speaks of hermeneutical clashes.
She has this idea that sometimes we can have concepts
that are associated with different stereotypes,
such that conceptualizing something as an example of this
stereotype prevents us from applying the other concept.
So, her example is, suppose we have the notion of a
golden boy, and this comes with a certain stereotype.
Well, we also have this notion of a rapist with
different stereotypes, like a stranger, a monster.
Her idea is that it can happen that when
we conceptualize someone as a golden boy,
that prevents us from conceptualizing that person as a rapist.
She's talking about a case about someone, I
don't remember whose name, but it was a young man
who was described by the press as a golden boy,
and nobody could believe that he had raped a girl.
And the problem, according to Falvo, was that
because you're talking about him as a golden boy,
then if you imagine that a rapist is a stranger, a
monster, and so on, then of course you cannot believe
that this person is a rapist, but the
problem is these stereotypes that you have.
So, then that's a problem of application.
We have good concepts, but we can't apply them.
Then there's also another way in which
our resources can be dysfunctional,
which is by the presence of defective concepts.
Here, the idea is that sometimes we have concepts
that seem to provide some intelligibility,
but actually they don't, because they are defective.
Here we have introduced this notion of
an imposter concept, which could be,
an imposter concept, as we understand it, would be a
concept that provides some form of intelligibility,
but it's delusive.
So, the experience actually remains obscured.
An imposter concept is a concept that
emerges from authority, as we understand it,
for example medical authority, and that is coined
in the context of a practice that is wrongful.
So, it's not a case of epistemic bad luck,
but rather the result of marginalization,
or the presence of prejudice stereotypes, biases, and so on.
Here, the example that I usually use is drapetomania.
Maybe you've heard, probably you've heard
about this because I always use this example.
So, drapetomania was supposed to be a
mania affecting slaves in the 19th century,
manifested by an uncontrollable impulse to
wander or run away from their white masters.
And this was coined by a doctor.
And the idea here is that, well, if you are
a slave and you have a desire to run away,
that must mean that you are crazy.
And this doctor coined this notion,
drapetomania, which was supposed to explain,
or make sense, or make intelligible certain
experiences, in this case, of a desire to run away.
This concept was not successful. It was not used on a general basis.
But it would be the kind of thing that we have
in mind when we talk about imposter concepts.
There's an authority, in this case medical
authority, introducing or coining a concept.
The concept is biased. It's the result of prejudice.
And it's supposed to make intelligible an
experience, but actually it's obscuring
some reality, in this case, slavery.
We introduced, so this is a paper I have with Laura Delgado,
and we introduced imposter concepts as concepts
that take the place of more adequate concepts.
And we were using it for cases where there
was a genuine experience to be described.
So in the case of drapetomania, slaves had
this desire to run away, we can suppose.
However, we could have these more extreme
cases where there is not even an experience
to make sense of or to make intelligible.
Still, we coined some concepts for strategic purposes, for example.
That would be the case of an empty imposter concept.
And we can think here of sluggish schizophrenia.
I don't know how to say this in English.
I don't know if you've heard about this. I don't know much.
Maybe Laura knows better.
But apparently in the Soviet Union they had this diagnostic category.
And it was used for people who were
expressing opposition to the communist regime.
But the thing is that it was supposed to be a kind of schizophrenia
that in the beginning was associated with no
symptom, but that would develop at some point.
So people were being diagnosed with no clear clinical criteria.
And so the idea here is that we can, in the most extreme case,
have concepts that don't even refer or try to capture an experience.
But anyway, this is a way in which the
concept of resources can be dysfunctional.
Then we can have cases of misuses and abuses of adequate concepts.
And here we also introduced this idea of imposter uses.
So sometimes the problem is not so much that the concept is defective,
but rather that we are using it in a wrongful way.
And here we can think of these cases where
men describe sexual harassment as flirting.
The concept of flirting is okay. There's nothing wrong with it.
The problem is that it's being misapplied.
So some people, as Drozbic, I never
know how to read his name, Drozbic, JP?
Okay, thank you.
Okay.
The times you need.
So they also speak of rigid uses of
diagnostic categories in psychotherapy
that will also be a misuse or an abuse,
but I'm not going to enter into this here.
So these are all the ways in which our
concept of resources can be dysfunctional.
So that goes beyond Pricker's original definition.
But we also think that there are harms beyond the epistemic.
So we start with the epistemic harm.
And this is the idea Pricker has that some
situations are harming us as epistemic agents.
And in the hermeneutical case, the problem
is that we don't have the means to understand
or to make sense of some significant experience.
So the problem here could be understanding.
We can't understand our experiences.
We can't understand ourselves, oneself.
Or we can't think about our identity in the correct way.
And this would create some situation of cognitive
hermeneutical injustice, as some people call it.
But of course, there are other harms.
For example, communicative harms.
This is something that Medina and other people have highlighted.
Sometimes we, disadvantaged groups,
do have adequate conceptual resources.
But the problem is that these resources are not shared.
So that even though they understand their experiences,
they are unable to communicate them to others.
And this would constitute what some people
call a communicative hermeneutical injustice.
But this is communicative in nature, not really epistemic.
I think we could also speak of ethical harms.
I'm not sure ethical is the right word here.
Christian mentioned that we have problems with values.
Well, I have problems with how to call these kind
of things that refer to interpersonal relations.
So the idea here is that it's...
So, suppose we are in this situation where we understand
an experience that we have, we understand our identity.
But there are other people in our society, or most people in our
society, don't have the concept that we have because it's not shared.
Well, in that situation, there is a communicative harm.
Because if we try to communicate how we feel to
others, there will be a communicative disruption.
We will not be successful.
But I think there is also a harm in not being understood by others
more generally, even if we don't try to communicate to them.
I mean, I think it can be a harm in being conceptualized
in the wrong way by other people in our society.
And think, for example, of a very sexist society where people think
that women are only happy when they are married and have children.
And they have this woman who is single
and is perfectly fine and feels happy.
But putting aside the communicative problems that the situation would create, I think there is also
something wrong in this society which is unable to understand the identity of this woman and her experiences.
So this could be similar to a hermeneutical injustice, but
not really the canonical case that Fricker has in mind.
And then some people talk about existential
harms or epistemic existential injustice.
And here there is Ayala's work on how insufficient conceptual resources can prevent
us from having certain experiences and building our identities in certain ways.
And so she has this idea that not having certain concepts like non-binary gender or
lesbian can prevent us from conceptualizing our effects in this case in some way,
but also in developing certain identities,
so we don't, and developing certain desires.
So it goes beyond understanding. It's related to understanding, but it's not only that we don't understand our
experiences, it's also that because we don't have those concepts, we don't build our identities in certain ways.
So our idea here is that if we really want to understand
what's wrong with the diagnostic categories we started with,
we can use tools from hermeneutical injustice,
but in the end we need a broader framework.
And this is what we are trying to do here very
briefly because this is very work in progress.
So we think that we need this broader notion of conceptual harm that captures different
ways in which the hermeneutical resources can be dysfunctional and different harms.
And our proposal is to understand this as an impairment suffered
by an individual in some significant dimension of her identity,
such as self-understanding or understanding some significant experiences being
understood by other members of one's community or building one's identity.
Were this discussed by the state of the collective
conceptual repertoire in her community or how it is used?
As always in this debate, this can be a harm, but this can also constitute
an injustice when it's related to marginalization or prejudice stereotypes.
And so what I've tried to present in this discussion about different types of hermeneutical injustice is
the different harms that we can have and the different ways in which the conceptual tools can be defective.
We have epistemic, communicative, ethical and existential harms and
we have these defects in concepts when there is a lack of concept,
but also when there is a distortion or a hermeneutical clash,
when the concepts are defective and when they are wrongly used.
And now Laura is going to apply this framework to psychiatry.
So, we think that criticism on diagnostic categories presented in section 1, as well as the problem
detected by Zalman and Karev, can be understood more precisely with the terminology introduced.
With this framework we can understand what kind of defect the category has,
for instance if it's being misapplied or if it's being used in a wrong way.
Or if it is defective and the harms it may
cause to the individual to whom it's applied.
So in the example of autism and fluorescent life, Zalman and Karev argue
that this case of hermeneutical injustice arises from a conceptual lacuna,
but probably the kind of hermeneutical injustice here can be better explained
as a hermeneutical clash between the concept of autism and the fluorescent life.
There is an association between conflicting stereotypes which result in conceptualizing someone
as autistic, preventing him from also being conceptualized as someone who has a fluorescent life.
These conflicting stereotypes operate as follows.
If autism and other cognitive disabilities in general are considered objectively bad and something to be
pitied, a personal tragedy for both the individual and her family, regardless of levels of subjective happiness,
this negative stereotyped concept of autism conflicts with the neurotypical concept of fluorescent life,
preventing autistic people from being conceptualized as being capable of having a fluorescent life,
but also the neurotypical idea of fluorescent life
excludes alternative or neurodivergent ways of fluorescent.
The harms this hermeneutical clash may cause, as presented in this taxonomy by Claudia,
are epistemic harms in the sense that individuals who think of themselves as autistic,
not applying to themselves properties as fluorescent or having a good life, communicative, because
individuals who think of themselves as autistic, not being able to communicate to others how they feel.
There is an ethical or interpersonal harm, by which
neurotypical having a distorted understanding of neurodivergent.
There is also an existential harm in the sense that
there are restrictions in how to build one's identity.
Regarding ODD, we can understand the critics presented as suggesting that ODD is an
imposter concept, because it provides a distorted understanding of certain behaviors.
From these critics, it may be considered an imposter concept because it emerges from an authority, medical or
psychiatric, it provides a delusive intelligibility, experiences and behaviors are understood as a mental disorder,
but the target experience remains obscure, the understandable and adaptive
reactions to racism, marginalization, or other debased forms of oppression.
The harms that an imposter concept may cause are epistemic harms, as Claudia presents,
it provides a delusive understanding of significant experiences and one's identity.
There is an ethical or interpersonal harm, because
others also misunderstand one's experiences and identity.
There is an existential harm in the sense that there
is also a restriction in how to build one's identity.
In this case, there are not communicative harms in the sense that a person diagnosed with ODD
can share this with others, but as I said, this concept provides a delusive understanding.
According to anti-racist approaches, ODD
diagnosis should be revised and changed.
By creating an alternative nomenclature and replacing terms such as "defiant" and "opposite", and the inclusion of a trauma
specifier for this diagnosis and other factors such as poverty, difficult health environments and systemic racist structures.
So from these critics, there is a problem with the
term and also with the content in this diagnosis.
In relation to BPD, some feminist critics argue in favor of maintaining this diagnostic level,
because sometimes it is helpful for understanding and making intelligible some experiences,
but sometimes they focus on behaviors that do not fulfill social
expectations about women, take precedence over the trauma experiences.
So these behaviors are viewed as a consequence of disturbed
or pathological personality rather than responses to trauma.
In this sense, we can understand the feminist criticisms as suggesting that there are imposter uses
of BPD that mask the traumatic experiences by focusing on the unexpected or unwanted woman's behavior.
The imposter use of BPD may provide a delusive description of the situation, in the sense that the situation and the
behaviors are seen as a personality disorder, an individual problem, rather than a consequence of trauma or sexual abuse.
In these cases, post-traumatic stress disorder may be a better description, but this relation between some women behaviors like anger
or impulsivity and BPD tends to pathologize women for these behaviors rather than view them as understandable reactions to trauma.
The harms that imposter uses may cause are similar to the imposter concept, in the sense that there
is an epistemic harm, this delusive understanding of significant experience and one's identity,
an interpersonal or ethical harm that others also
misunderstanding one's experience as an identity,
an existential harm by this restriction in how to build one's identity,
and the concept may be shared as well as the imposter concept.
So, in summary, our conclusions. We have argued that some diagnostic
categories have been criticized for contributing to sexism, racism and ableism.
They might obscure rather than illuminate social and individual realities, blocking
understanding and promoting a distorted image of those to whom they are applied.
We have presented different ways in which diagnostic categories can be defective, and expanded
this notion of hermeneutical injustice to capture one conceptual harm and other conceptual harms.
We hope that the framework of conceptual harms we have introduced is useful to identify
and understand defects in psychiatric levels, as well as the harms they may cause.
Thank you.
[Moderator] Thank you so much, Laura and Claudia.
We have 15 minutes for a Q&A.
If there is someone in the room who would like to ask something, of
course you can use the language you want to do it, Spanish or English.
Victor.
Thank you very much for the talk. I really liked it. Thanks for the detailed work on this type of
hermeneutical injustice, because it will also help me a lot to make sense of what I am going to present later.
There is one thing that does connect with my talk later,
and I was thinking that the question of the epistemic field.
When I discussed the idea that there could be an existential harm, I am not sure in
what sense that type of existential harm, if one connects it with the idea of identity,
and with some of the ideas that we have seen these days, that idea of understanding as a kind of exploration
of how we use certain concepts to identify or recognize our own identity, or to explore our own identity,
there is no sense in the fact that they are strongly epistemic. That on the one hand, and on the
other hand, if one has a conception of the mental, in terms of mindshaping or Bernard Williams,
as Virginia had mentioned before, where the very attribution or self-attribution of mental
states and the type of regulatory commitments that one acquires when one attributes them,
play an important role in that type of concepts, which can be impostors or not, there
is no sense in which they also play a precisely epistemic function of knowing oneself
when one is using it in the sense of configuring one's own mind.
And I don't know if that makes sense to make that kind of difference,
depending on what type of ontological commitment one has with
respect to the mental. I don't know if that makes any sense.
Thank you very much. These are things that we have turned to, but we
don't have a clear understanding of how to define and how to define.
I don't know if I understood your first question correctly, which is about this idea of
existential damage and whether it can be considered epistemic or to what extent it is epistemic.
I think that here, in the end, we can see everything from an epistemic framework,
which would be that of Friker. Friker says that primary damage is epistemic,
and then we have secondary damage, which can be epistemic of another type.
The way in which Sarah and Ayala present it, this idea of existential damage,
is partially epistemic. I think that here we could understand that
primary damage is epistemic, which is that you don't understand yourself,
and from there, because you don't understand yourself, you have
secondary damage, which would be that you can't build your identity,
you don't have certain experiences, which would be as a derivative.
I don't have a very strong argument against this model.
What I think is that, in the end, it seems like we're saying that the
most central thing is epistemic damage, and my impression here is that
there are times when you don't have to understand yourself, this
construction of identity, which can be directly having different concepts,
and there's something more active, like, well, I'm going to build myself this way, or develop
myself this way, without necessarily going through self-understanding or something like that.
So, I think it's not necessarily epistemic,
but it's related, and I don't have a...
And then, the second question, I think, I mean, I understand how
the question of how far concepts don't have a productive function,
which is not only describing, but producing experiences.
I'm of the opinion that they do have a productive function,
and I think this is related to existential
damage, which is the concepts you have.
If you have an impostor concept, you can produce your identity,
even without having previous experiences that make sense,
but you can directly build, you can start having
certain experiences, but you've taken them away again,
precisely because you have the concept.
But I don't know how to give it shape, but I think it goes that way.
And that's why I also wanted to introduce this idea of empty
impostor concepts, which is something we've been discussing,
because that would be cases... I think there are cases
where you don't even have an experience to conceptualize,
but it's like they give you a concept and you start using it to understand
yourself, but you don't start from an experience that needs to be understood.
So, I think that's where the productive function...
But we have to think about this better, I think,
because at this point we don't really know how to define each thing.
But thank you, because these are important things.
Actually, it's a question about... I really liked
the talk, I thought it was very interesting.
Oh, I've got it. Sorry. Well, the question is about...
It's possible that the question is partly
because I've left something that you've
said, and it's related to what Víctor has
just said, but from another perspective.
I had got a little bit hooked on ethical damages.
Oh, well, I've started speaking in Spanish,
you don't speak Spanish either, do you?
So, in the case of ethical damages, for
example, it was very evocative for me,
the women who had an experience as unhappy
wives, and people didn't understand them.
I usually see it as a Hackeen term, and
it has to do with the last thing you said,
and that's why it somehow links. He uses this idea
that we can only act intentionally under a description,
inheriting this from Anscombe. So, what I was thinking here was,
in reality, these women who think this, if this
ethical damage is truly attributed to them,
in the description you've made, you attribute
it to the vision of others, not to your own,
then there's the feeling that, as I say, from a Hackeen perspective,
they would also have agency to resist that label, to form another one.
So, since it's an example that has nothing to do with medicine,
at this point, I thought that if there wasn't
an authority from which the label came from,
the damage… I was almost told that the damage was very small,
or that it depended on the fact that
they were women who, in terms of women,
had a subordinate position, but if they don't have it…
I mean, I get the impression that, although
you've announced it at the beginning,
that in reality all these damages depend on
being marginalized, if not, they don't occur.
But in some of your examples, I get
the feeling that this isn't so clear,
or in the final examples you give, I also found it
interesting that there are groups that are going to argue.
There are going to be feminist women who think that it's useful for them.
So, I'd like to hear your comment on how these struggles are produced,
about these labels of these agents who are not passive to the label,
or who sometimes don't have problems to self-describe,
but will resist as others describe them.
But, well, it's a very general question, and I'm
sorry to hear you say more things about this.
It's not a protest, let's say, against your framework.
Yes, I'll answer.
Yes, I'll answer for the example we've given.
Sure, the example Claudia has given for this ethical
damage is the case of women who are not married,
but who are described as happy, who are not
considered happy because the idea is that,
for a woman to be happy, she has to be married,
blah, blah, in that traditional society.
This has led to the case of autism,
of course there is a protest for that.
The point is that what we're trying to pick up is
that damage, that ethical damage that is produced
by those stereotypes, seeing autism as a personal tragedy.
When that is resisted, when from autism they are telling you,
"No, look, you can be happy, you can have a good life,
but you have to open the framework to understand that not
only the neurotypical idea of a good life is a good life,
but that framework is being challenged.
" Of course, I think there is resistance in
that sense to that type of ethical damage,
but what we're trying to do here is to pick up the damage,
to try to see how these damages are produced
in these labels, even if they can be resisted.
In the case of women, it's the same, a traditional
society in which it is understood that,
for a woman to be happy, she has to be
married, that has obviously been resisted,
and that is no longer conceptualized, nor would that damage exist.
Even so, I think the problem comes from the fact
that when you don't accept what is being told to you,
from the other side, when you resist accepting that
someone with autism is happy, there is a damage.
What happens is that we have to refine more what damage that is,
when you tell an autistic person "I'm happy" and you say "no",
because you don't understand what it is to be truly happy.
That's the problem with this situation, that you can't
access, even if you subjectively believe you're happy,
you're not because you can't access what is
understood as happiness in the neurotypical
sense, but of course there is resistance.
What happens is that we have to refine a little more.
I get the impression that in some cases, and
this is just a clarification to the question,
that it is an obsession that I have with social categories in general.
Many are not so crystallized and in that
sense there are parts of this framework,
which are categories that are negotiated all the time.
I don't know if that contradicts… I mean,
it's a bit tense to talk about damage as…
damage is from already crystallized categories, but what
we see is categories that are continuously renegotiated.
So, maybe they are not damages, they
are struggles, which is not the same.
That's what… maybe it gives me the feeling that your
focus overlaps a little with that part, perhaps.
Yes, I can add something very quickly.
I will ask you for the reference to Hacking, because that
can come in handy here to give some sense to some parts.
And all this about struggles, which in the end… I mean, I think
that here we can have different types of situations, of course.
And this is something that has been discussed a lot.
You have the case that would be more simplified, but which is also real.
There are some categories that have been
nested by the dominant groups, let's say,
and they are not discussed much, and everyone uses them.
And if you try to get out of them, they marginalize
you, they don't understand you, and so on.
That would be a very extreme situation,
but not… that's why it's less real.
What happens is that maybe it's not the one that is most common.
And then we have many other situations that
are… that lead to other types of damage,
which are those in which there are
negotiations or different categories.
So, you have, let's say, the most used category is this
one, but then you have groups that have other categories.
And there you have other types of problems.
For example, there are very interesting communication problems.
So, there, the categories are being negotiated.
Yes, but only to a certain extent, because all this also
happens in a framework in which there are different positions,
there are epistemic authorities that are legitimate, there
are other types of authorities that are not legitimate.
So, in reality, there are very complex dynamics, but in order
to be able to analyze the type of damage and situations,
it is true that we need to simplify and identify, perhaps,
various types of situations and how they would work.
So, I would say that one would be that case
in which there is no negotiation or answer,
and then we would have another in which
there is an answer that is ignored,
and then, as the case we are going towards
the good case, there would be negotiation.
But in many of the historical cases or historical
examples that we use, there was no negotiation.
But thank you, because this is a point that we have to refine a little.
I'm going to abuse my role as moderator, totally,
and then I'll give way to the rest of the questions.
It's because it has to do with this, otherwise I won't take the floor.
I really liked the talk, I'm a big fan of your work, I love it.
I'll tell you, in case you don't know, there were many things
that were thin and sharp, but that's another Laura Delgado.
Because Laura Delgado is a false concept.
And the thing that caught my attention, because it has a lot
to do with the question of how categories are negotiated,
and I think that can be answered very quickly,
precisely the case of autism that you just talked about,
the interpretation that you have made of it,
because one thing that I think is your position is that you can
take it further and make it more relevant in questions of ethics,
for example, what seems very evident to me in the case of
the "Flourishing Life" of autists or neurotypical people,
is not that there is a hermeneutical clash, as you say, between the idea
that it is an autistic person and the idea that it is a flourished person.
The very idea of flourishing is that it is totally defective.
Apart from that, it's a mess, let's say.
I don't dare to say if it's impostor or not,
surely the people who defend the rights of neurodivergent
people are going to say that it is impostor,
because it is an idea that is formed within a capacitist paradigm.
A very good thing about your approach is that it will allow,
as many categories and many concepts that are used
in medicine, in clinical ethics, in psychiatry,
above all, it has a very strong evaluative
load, to show that they are failing.
I think that I will almost envision that, that
is, that it will allow you to go much further,
and if you can get rid of this flourishing,
I think it will be an advance for everyone.
And then I answered, but then Jorge will answer.
And sorry, Jorge, thank you.
In the case of autism and flourishing life, what we are
collecting is the criticism that Chapman and Carell make,
in particular, that is, we did not get
into autism in general, because of course,
much more could be said and much more criticism could be collected
that has been made since the movement for neurodiversity.
What we take is that specific approach that understands
autism as a personal tragedy and flourished life,
as in the neurotypical sense, understood neurotypically,
but of course it can be extended much more.
What happens is that for this in particular,
we wanted to detect what is happening in that,
as it is analyzed in that paper in particular,
which maybe I could have explained a little more,
how it is understood in that paper, but yes, of
course, it can be extended to many more things.
I mean, I don't think that in many cases autism
is understood, well, maybe yes, but I hope not,
as a personal tragedy whose person cannot access a good life.
I mean, and I understand that there is still, but we collect that
criticism they make and try to give it another interpretation,
because what they accuse is that there is a conceptual lagoon there.
What we see is that there is that clash between
stereotypes associated with both autism and good life.
But yes, we could extend it to autism in a stronger sense.
I think it is more how good life is conceptualized than autism.
Thank you for your talk and in fact, thank you for your
research, because not only do I think it is necessary,
but this is flourishing, not like the other.
My question is, and I will try to be very quick, when
you were characterizing the whole part of injustice,
which you characterized as epistemic, but then
you added things or characterized it in a way…
It was sounding to me, it was reminding me of the ontological
injustices of other authors who have been working on this.
Which was to go beyond and start from the basis of "you
are denying me of the same ontological class as you".
I am not a person, I am a woman and that is why I have these
diseases so curiously funny and adapted to your worldview.
Or the same with the case of slaves.
So, the whole time it seemed to me that you were alluding to
ontological or ontological injustices without mentioning them.
It was just that.
Thank you, Jorge, for this reference.
It is true, epistemic injustices are
there, I think everyone recognizes them,
they are the ones that have to do with whether you
understand an experience, whether you can explain it,
whether you can acquire knowledge of that experience and how it
affects in general everything that has to do with epistemology.
And then it is true that there are the ontological
injustices, I don't remember how people say it.
They were ontological and with ontological they usually
say "ontological oppression", "ontological repression".
And this, we haven't gone into it, and this is
more because this is really work in progress
and we haven't gone into analyzing exactly
all the types of damage that may be there.
But of course, this should be included, it is work to do.
It is not that we have put them aside because
we think they are not there or anything,
it is because we have started here, we have been taking
into account others that are not properly epistemic
and the framework is not yet fully developed,
but I think they can also fit into this taxonomy.
In fact, just because you are doing a taxonomy,
a taxonomy can be understood as an ontology,
from there we can go metaphysically
speaking to the ontological injustice.
Well, yes, thank you.
Thank you.
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