We claim that venting can be epistemic work: if one vents to the right sort of person, knowledge can be gained about an oppressive social structure, one’s place in it, and how to repair the epistemic damage it creates

Venting as Epistemic Work. Juli Thorson & Christine Baker. Social Epistemology, https://doi.org/10.1080/02691728.2018.1561762 

ABSTRACT: We claim that venting can be epistemic work: if one vents to the right sort of person, knowledge can be gained about an oppressive social structure, one’s place in it, and how to repair the epistemic damage it creates. To justify this claim, we define both epistemic damage and venting, and contrast venting with related notions such as complaining and ranting. Using Code’s understanding of testimony, Dotson’s notion of a linguistic exchange, and Fricker’s distinction between testimonial and hermeneutical injustice, we describe when and how venting is epistemic work. We also discuss the way venting is distinct from consciousness raising. We conclude that although one goal of venting is to repair epistemic damage for individual women, venting’s positive epistemic impact prepares women to challenge hermeneutical injustice.

KEYWORDS: Venting, epistemic damage, epistemic personhood, testimony

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Introduction

Juli received the following email from a student we will call Audrey:

In one of my classes, the professor had a very typically masculine communication style, to the point where anyone who was uncomfortable interrupting, speaking over other classmates as well as the professor, or engaging in extremely aggressive and combative argument, was prevented from speaking. Speakers were interrupted mid-sentence, and every conversation was a battle. Ideas that were not completely formalized were made to sound silly. The result of the overall culture of this classroom was that only a few men spoke and participated in discussion, and women rarely said anything. I grew to hate this class. Realizing that others felt the same way I did only happened after a planned venting session between three of the women in the class. All of us are typically confident and hardworking; we are eager to learn and participate in classroom discussion. However, as we discovered when we vented, in that class we felt stupid and unwelcome. It wasn’t just doing the venting that made me feel better. Listening to someone else vent about the same situation was equally cathartic to me because it made very clear that the problems were not imagined, and that the situation was harmful on the whole. It helped make clear to me, and I think this also happened for my friends as well, that my judgment was trustworthy in this case. The venting did nothing to directly fix the classroom culture. The venting addressed our perceived isolation and failure to make accurate judgments. Providing a venting platform for the other women was a relief even before I spoke because I knew I was not the only one diagnosing the situation as problematic and stifling.

It seemed to us that this class was causing epistemic damage. It was undermining the epistemic personhood of these women. During this class, they began to think of themselves as less able to know; and consequently, they felt they were not fully a part of the epistemic community. Because all three of these women had taken a class in feminist ethics and epistemology, they had the tools to use venting to begin to repair this damage. Our goal is to justify the claim that venting can be epistemic work. When venting is successful, we can gain understanding about an oppressive social structure, our place in it, and how to repair the epistemic damage it creates.