Epistemic Injustice and Contact Experiencers
Kimberly S. Engels, Elliott Hauser
Summary
Applies Miranda Fricker's epistemic injustice framework to UAP contact experiencers, arguing they face systematic testimonial injustice - a specific form of epistemic harm in which a speaker's credibility is deflated due to identity prejudice. Provides a philosophical grounding for the ethical treatment of experiencer testimony, directly relevant to DECUR's coverage of experiencer organizations and research.
Abstract
This paper argues that contact experiencers, or those who report experiences with advanced intelligences they suspect or believe are non-human, should be taken seriously as victims of epistemic injustice. Through comparison with other groups of knowers who report a constitutive experience, we surface situations in which speakers are doubted on the grounds that the constitutive experience is argued not to be possible, in part because it poses an ontological threat to hearers' conceptions of identity or reality. Experiences may threaten hearers' existing ontological categories, introduce ontological ambiguity, or suggest a need for new ontological categories. We show that contact experiencer claims represent threats in all three of these ways, as well as threats to anthropocentric norms and the perceived human knowability of the world. To begin to redress these harms, we suggest a radical phenomenology coupled with ontological openness as a starting point for restorative hearing.
Citation
Kimberly S. Engels, Elliott Hauser