The social dimensions of doubt and certainty

Our way of seeing the world is informed by a framework of assumptions, platitudes and unquestioned certainties that we normally take for granted. Some of these certainties are (we presume) universal; others depend on cultural contexts. It is absolutely obvious, for instance, that there are physical objects in the space around us, or that the earth has existed for a very long time, but also (for people belonging to our culture) that kings have crowns, and churches are sacred places. According to an image proposed by Ludwig Wittgenstein, these common sense certainties are like hinges around which our everyday practices rotate. Hinges define, mostly implicitly, the criteria for what is to be considered normal, natural, or given in a society. Yet, precisely because they define normality, hinges can hide or be themselves prejudices deeply rooted in a cultural context, so much so that they remain practically invisible. For example, until recently the rights of black people were not acknowledged, due to a hinge-prejudice such as Blacks are inferior to whites (or even Blacks are not people, a few centuries ago). How is it possible then, from within a given society, to realize that some apparently taken-for-granted certainties are actually prejudices? How do we detect hinge- prejudices? The project examines this problem by combining two recent perspectives in epistemology: hinge epistemology, that finds inspiration in the aforementioned reflections by the later Wittgenstein, and research in social epistemology focused on epistemic injustice, dealing in particular with how stereotypes and prejudices affects our perception of the credibility of others. More precisely, according to social epistemologists, people belonging to marginal social groups can suffer from a particular kind of injustice, that damages them as epistemic agents, that is, in their capacity as knowers. The hypothesis guiding the project is that by putting these two theoretical approaches in communication which has never been done hitherto in the literature it is possible to offer a convincing and useful account of what prejudices are and how they work. More generally, the hypothesis is that an integrated perspective is the best candidate for addressing questions such as the following: How is it possible to defend the idea that objectivity depends on social practices without thereby falling into a form of pure and simple anything goes relativism? How are we to distinguish between the healthy doubt of those who question preconceived certainties, and the unhealthy doubt of those who jeopardize our trust in science, experts, and ethical principles? The project intends to build an innovative answer to these questions, more relevant then ever in the contemporary world.