question: Philosophy! Epistemology and epistemological violence! Why care about philosophy and theory? Lots to work with here, just try to tie your response back to the overarching disucssion of the week and the course. If this is your first time, review the “tips” for writing great responses.
Student example1 :
I think it’s very important to care about philosophy as it’s critical when it comes to questioning psychology and fully understanding and placing psychological aspects in the real world. Philosophy is the nature of knowledge and through knowledge comes theories. This stems from the need to understand problems as they tend to demand it in real-world settings. What comes to follow tends to be praxis which can be an intellectual reflection that forms from the theory and then becomes an action or vice versa. This is what epistemology incorporates as it is the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope. It is what distinguishes justified belief from opinion so naturally, this can be controversial as certain justified beliefs can be oppressing or negative. Epistemological violence is when this interpretation of data leads to statements that make groups of people inferior and expoling that inferiority to problematize the other group/person. As the professor stated, psychology has a long history of invalid
interpretations of group differences so it’s important to acknowledge why it can happen in the first place. Critical psychologists are always thinking abstarctly as they challenege what psychology presents to them. I think it regrads to creating new theories based off these thoughts, understanding epistemology comes hand in hand.
student example 2:
The section in the ECP for “Epistemological Violence” I think relates a lot to the way that psychology as we know it today came to be, meaning the studies that were done in the 19th and 20th centuries that are either in clear violation of modern ethical standards or have produced data that was interpreted in a “violent” or harmful way (by today’s standards). It makes me think of phrenology and other “race sciences”, where researchers imbued their own meaning and interpretations into “data” that didn’t really have much meaning, or any meaning at all. This, in combination with how Chapter 3 in “Critical Psychology: An Introduction” explores psychology’s emergence and the debate over its classification as a “natural” science, has me rethinking basically everything about how I’ve been taught psychology, in that everything has been presented as scientific fact devoid of things like human interpretation or other influences. A lot of what is said in the “Ontological Concerns and Psychology’s Subject Matter” section of chapter 3, specifically when talking about the “mechanistic model”, talks about how rigid mainstream psychology is with its definitions and understandings– the way mainstream psychology presents itself doesn’t really leave room for human subjectivity or for really accounting for the complexities of human life. This really clicked for me when they used memory to explain how the scientific method used in mainstream psychology doesn’t factor in unique life experiences. It’s imposing an objective reality onto subjective realities– everything that results is just speculative interpretation. Knowledge, or in this case “fact”, is both data and interpretation together, because to understand data you have to assign meaning to the data, wherein lies one of the biggest problems of mainstream psychology. This is how epistemological violence occurs, in the interpretation (and also usage) of data. How can we say things “natural” or “human nature” or “objective” when we are not actually accounting for the subjectivity of human life? So much of the time in mainstream psychological research context is divorced from subjects/objects, when really that context is genuinely necessary. This also ties into the feminist perspective on personal epistemology mentioned in the “Epistemology” section of the ECP, in that social contexts and how people are socialized (to think about/act upon things like gender, race, class, etc) aren’t often included in the processes and epistemology of mainstream psychology.
All of this reminds me of how we all experience our own realities based on our life context(s), but we still talk about an objective reality/realities and agree on them. An example that gets used a lot is how do we know we are all calling colors the same thing? Meaning, how do we know that when asked to think of the color blue, we all think of the same color? Someone could be calling a color blue that someone else would say is pink– how would we ever know? This shows us the importance of keeping context, interpretation, and subjectivity in mind when looking at psychology epistemology, because human experiences don’t always align with what has been empirically asserted to be “natural” human experiences– gleaning objectivity from subjectivity, like putting circle blocks in square slots.