Dr. Keith A. Markus, Ph.D., faculty member of the Quantitative Psychology subprogram, published an article titled “On epistemic violence in psychological science” in Theory & Psychology. In this article, he comments on Held (2020)’s “Epistemic violence in psychological science: Can knowledge of, from, and for the (othered) people solve the problem?”

 

Abstract:

Held (2020) questioned the support for rejecting all objective knowledge as a response to epistemological violence. However, the argument presented appears to understate the support for its conclusion due to its structure. Also, the scientist/folk dichotomy invites further attention from the perspective of Derridean deconstruction. The root of the epistemological violence problem seems to be the characterization of knowledge production as a solitary activity and Habermas’s discourse ethics offers a form of objective knowledge which avoids this characterization and can thus fend off epistemological violence without a wholesale rejection of objectivity.