Testimonial Injustice But With Questions:  Steps Towards a Theory

As philosophers and teachers, we often have the great privilege and responsibility of choosing what questions we ask. And when other people (including our students) ask us questions, we often have the great privilege and responsibility of choosing how to respond. When should we respond by taking their questions up? When should we instead reject or resist their questions? What would it be to reject or resist a question? Might it sometimes be an epistemic injustice to reject or resist questions? If so, then when, and why?

These issues reside at the complex, contested intersection of ethics, epistemology, language, and pedagogy. An example from antiquity can help focus our thinking about them. In Aristophanes’ play Lysistrata, set and produced during the Peloponnesian War, the women hatch a plan to stop the fighting. The young women will withhold sex from the men. The old women, occupying the Acropolis, will withhold funds from the military. They implement the plan, and hilarity ensues. 

Like many comedies, Lysistrata uses the softening cushion of humor to deliver sharp moral criticism. Some of that criticism appears when, arguing with a magistrate, Lysistrata (the main character) says

All along we kept our silence,

            Acquiesced as nice wives should —

or else! — although we didn’t like it.

            You would escalate the war;

we would ask you so politely,

            even though it hurt inside,

‘Darling, what’s the latest war-news?

            What did all you men decree?

Anything about a treaty?’

            Then you’d say, ‘What’s that to you?

Shut up!’ And I’d shut up…

Then we’d hear some even worse news,

            so we’d say, ‘How stupid, dear!’

Then you’d give us dirty looks and

            say, ‘Go mend my cloak or else!

War is strictly for the menfolk.’

The Athenian husbands rejected their wives’ questions about the war, prejudicially construing women as unfit to inquire into the matter. An unlikely ally of Aristophanes is Harper Lee, whose novel To Kill a Mockingbird displays the trial of Tom Robinson, a Black man, for raping Maya Ewell, a White woman. Ewell was beaten in the attack. The assailant led with his left fist. Robinson, disabled, has no use of his left hand. This fact (along with others) demonstrates Robinson’s innocence. The all-White jury still convicts him, sincerely believing that he is guilty. They reject his assertion that he is innocent and many other assertions he makes, prejudicially refraining from believing them.

While Robinson’s assertions are rejected, the Athenian wives’ questions are rejected. Robinson is a victim of the widely studied phenomenon of testimonial injustice. In contrast, the Athenian wives are victims of “interrogative injustice”—the not-so-widely studied interrogative analogue of testimonial injustice.^[i]

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Testimonial injustice happens when assertions are rejected. This suggests that interrogative injustice happens when questions are rejected. In some sense, surely, questions do sometimes get rejected—and not only in ancient theatrical artworks. They get rejected in our day-to-day lives and also in our classrooms, by our students, and also by ourselves. 

How should we theorize this phenomenon? What, exactly, did the Athenian husbands do to their wives’ questions (which was analogous to what the jury did to Tom Robinson’s assertions)? What is it to “reject a question”?

A first (too simple) theory is that just rejecting an assertion amounts to refraining from believing it, and rejecting a question amounts to refraining from believing it. The problem with this theory is that questions, unlike assertions, aren’t the sort of things that can be believed in the first place. The theory makes a category mistake.

Now consider interrogative attitudes, mental states like curiosity and wonder. If you ask me whether it froze last night, and I refrain from adopting any interrogative attitudes about whether it froze last night, then what I do seems analogous to what the jurors do when they refrain from believing Tom Robinson’s assertions. Thus we have a second theory: rejecting a question is refraining from adopting interrogative attitudes towards its content.

This theory avoids making a category mistake, but it’s still problematic. If you asked me where I was born, then (since I know the answer) I’d straightaway tell you—refraining in the process from becoming curious about or wondering where I was born. On the current theory, this act of mine counts as rejecting your question, involving as it does my refraining from adopting interrogative attitudes concerning that question. This is a suboptimal result. 

Should we theorize that rejecting a question is refraining from answering it, or perhaps refraining from responding to it? Carnap seemed to think so:

…we put forward no philosophical theses whatsoever…we give no answer to philosophical questions and instead reject all philosophical questions…” (italics in the original).

But this too is suboptimal. If X, Y, and Z are conversing, and X asks a question which Y refrains from answering (or even responding to) so that Z can respond instead, then Y hasn’t rejected X’s question. 

Back to square one. On certain popular views in the philosophy of language, each conversation has an evolving common ground consisting of the propositions the speakers jointly accept, and also an evolving set of common goals they jointly accept. Stalnaker influentially viewed assertions as attempts to add propositions to the common ground. And he had a related view about assertion-rejection. On that view, rejecting an assertion amounts to blocking the addition of its content to the common ground. This view about assertion-rejection motivates a similar view about question-rejection.

To build that view, I’ll construe questions in a certain way that’s useful (despite also being, I think, incomplete). On this construal, each question is an attempt to add—to the conversation’s common goals—the goal of answering that question. For instance, suppose that I ask you why you drink so much coffee. This question would be an attempt to add (to our common goals) the goal of answering itself: that is to say, the goal of answering my question of why you drink so much coffee. You might respond by blocking the addition of this goal to the common goals.

Thus we arrive at another theory of question-rejection: to reject a question is to block the addition of its answering to the common goals of one’s conversation, ensuring that this goal does not join the common ones. There are many ways to do this. You might redirect the conversation from my query about your coffee habits (“Well, I gotta say, the news this morning was alarming….”). Alternatively, you might criticize my question, construing it as in-some-sense bad (“Oh, my coffee habits are boring.”). Two real-life cases: the politicians Sarah Palin and Joe Biden have both criticized questions from the press by calling those questions “stupid.” 

Palin and Biden are unusually direct. It’s more common to indirectly criticize. When Pope Francis was asked whether the Church should change its position on condoms in order to limit the spread of HIV, he responded with “I don’t like getting into questions or reflections that are so technical when people die because they don’t have water or food or housing.” In and of itself, this is simply a statement about his own mental states. But of course, by explicitly asserting what he did about his mental states, Francis indirectly conveyed the thought that the question at issue was in some sense bad.

Criticism is often more subtle, targeting not the question per se but the person for asking it. In the classic Coen Brothers’ screenplay The Big Lebowski, Walter criticizes Donny for asking certain questions about a story: “You have no frame of reference here, Donny. You’re like a child who wanders into the middle of a movie and wants to know…”. So too, Aristophanes’ Athenian husbands criticize their wives for asking questions about the war: “War is strictly for the menfolk.” The blocking-theoretic account of question-rejection illuminatingly subsumes these cases, construing them as featuring question-rejections that proceed via criticism. 

Still, it has its limitations. Suppose that you ask a question, and that I acquiesce in letting its answering join our common goals—while also making sure that goal is at the bottom of our to-do list. Here, I don’t block your question; I deprioritize it. Alternatively, suppose that I wholeheartedly pursue your question, but only because it is part of a larger inquiry initiated by someone else—while, if you were to ask a question of your own, I’d be far less receptive. Here again, I don’t block your question. Instead, I subordinate it, accepting it as part of a larger agenda but not as your own. Alternatively again, suppose that you are teaching Kant. A student asks whether he was racist; another student says that’s irrelevant; you say it is relevant, and you discuss it. Since (thanks to you) the answering of the question did join the common goals, the second student did not block it: they merely tried to. 

All these kinds of cases might feature interrogative injustice. Yet they don’t feature question-blocking. Nor do they feature anything else we might identify with question-rejection. What they feature, instead, is resistance: deprioritization, subordination, and attempting-to-block are ways to resist questions—as is blocking itself. Interrogative injustice, it turns out, is a matter not just of rejecting questions but more broadly of resisting them. Or so I’d like to conclude.

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Of course, it is often appropriate to resist questions. Maybe a question has a pernicious presupposition. Maybe it distracts from another agenda that really should, in the context, be pursued instead. Maybe it would lead us down a path of all heat and no light. If questions really do have these sorts of features, and because of that we resist them, then this is no injustice. It’s what we should do. And we, as trained philosophers, are especially well-suited to do it. In a study by Bloch-Schulman, subjects—some of them undergraduates and some of them philosophy professors—were given a vignette that involved a story, a moral question about that story, and an argument about how that question should be answered. When asked to think aloud about that vignette, the professors resisted its question much more than the students did. They explored whether it was the best question to ask and considered alternatives to it. 

We should help our students cultivate the ability to do the same. After all, critical thinking is (as many theorists have pointed out) at least as much about questions as it is about answers. We might help students cultivate their abilities to resist questions by teaching philosophical writings that engage in that practice—for instance, Anscombe’s paper that virtue-theoretically resists the question of what we ought to do. Alternatively, we might ourselves model question-resisting behavior in the classroom, for instance, by exploring whether we should replace Descartes’ questions about whether he can have (what is often translated as) certainty with similar questions about mere knowledge or mere justified belief or mere rational credence. Alternatively again, we might explicitly train students in methods of question-resistance, for instance the method of searching out and interrogating existence and uniqueness presuppositions induced by definite articles. At my own school, an MA-granting comprehensive regional state university with a heterogeneous student body, I have tried all of these things with some success.

But question resistance is also fraught with peril. We might end up doing it unjustly, or even facilitating scenarios whereby our students do it unjustly. There are no algorithms to follow here, no rules that would guarantee that we act rightly. Here, as elsewhere, there is no substitute for good judgment. Still, perhaps there are a few helpful rules of thumb. For instance, we would do well to attend to the social identities of those whose questions we might resist, taking special care to remove bias from the process. So too would we do well to attend to our own identities, monitoring how they might (for better or worse) lead us to resist some questions and not others. No doubt, there are more things we should do too. 

In order to zero in on those things, it would be helpful to develop a theory of interrogative injustice. So far, I’ve argued this much: the things that are interrogative injustices—the “interrogative injustice bearers,” so to speak—are acts of question-resistance. I’ve not made any arguments about “interrogative injustice makers”—that is, the properties which render acts of question resistance interrogatively unjust. While I have some thoughts about that matter, I won’t share them here. 

Rather, I’ll pose some questions to you. What features do you think would render an act an interrogative injustice? What can we do, as teachers, to avoid asking those kinds of questions—and to replace them with better ones? And what can we do to help our students do the same?

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[i] Many theorists have discussed interrogative analogues of epistemic injustice, including Christopher Hookway, Miranda Fricker, Jose Medina, David Spewak Jr., Emily McWilliams, and Fintan Mallory.