Stories That Wrong and Stories That Repair

Jennifer Lackey (Northwestern University)

The Anna Tumarkin Lectures in Philosophy are a lecture series dedicated to presenting top women philosophers.

This is part 2 of a series of three lectures on The Right to Be Known. Epistemic Reparations and the Making of Rounder Stories

Abstract This lecture focuses on how stories themselves can wrong a person in ways that rise to the level of inflicting a gross violation or injustice. This is supported by the introduction of the concept of “misknowing,” which applies when only a narrow, one-dimensional set of facts is centered on a person or persons, often focusing on those that are most injurious. It is shown that misknowing is often fueled by “flat stories,” which are agentially closed and depict a person in static, one-dimensional, and psychologically simplistic terms. When such stories are grounded in or constitute gross violations or injustices, epistemic reparations require “rounder stories,” which are agentially open and portray a person in dynamic, multidimensional, and psychologically complex terms. In this way, while stories can epistemically wrong a person in life-altering ways, they can also be the source of the life-restoring epistemic reparations that are demanded in response.