Decolonial Epistemic Authority Reparations

Abstract According to a recent move in social epistemology, certain types of epistemic wrongs require distinctively epistemic reparations. For instance, if you have been wrongfully convicted of murder, you have not only the right to various kinds of economic and social reparations but also the ‘right to be known’ (Lackey 2022) – crudely, the right to tell the true story about yourself and be listened to. In this paper, I extend this framework to the context of epistemic decolonisation. I argue that the key decolonial epistemic reparations are reparations for the undermined epistemic authority of the colonised. I call these ‘decolonial epistemic authority reparations’ and develop five constraints on a plausible account of them. If the argument is compelling, it will advance both the epistemic reparations framework (which does not talk to the decolonisation literature at present) and the project of epistemic decolonisation (which does not yet canvass epistemic reparations).