Two key ideas which frame our thinking about autonomy are self-governance and self-reliance. The problem with using these arguably modern ideas to frame our thinking about autonomy is that it can easily make it look like autonomy and community are in tension; that securing one\u2019s autonomy means withdrawing from one\u2019s community.<\/p>\n
These modern ideas about autonomy also suggests a certain way of thinking about intellectual autonomy<\/strong>, one according to which the autonomous thinker regulates their own thinking (intellectual self-governance) and doesn’t rely on the epistemic efforts others (intellectual self-reliance).[1]<\/a><\/p>\n It\u2019s easy to see that this idea of intellectual autonomy is at odds with social epistemology<\/strong>. Social epistemology tells us that, just as we are reliant on others for our material well-being, so too we are reliant on others for our intellectual well-being. A lot of the knowledge and true belief that matters to us comes to us from others [see Emily Sullivan\u2019s Depending on Others for Knowledge<\/a>].[2]<\/a> Think, for example, of all the scientific, historical, and current event beliefs that you have. It’s hard to see how you might have gotten any of those beliefs\u2014let alone good reason to adopt them\u2014without trust and reliance on others.[3]<\/a> And this isn\u2019t simply some unideal fact of life. For it\u2019s hard to see how you could, even ideally, get such knowledge through your own intellectual efforts, without relying on the past or present intellectual labor of other people. (Intuitively, not everyone can jointly be an anthropologist, an historian, a mathematician, a psychologist, an investigative journalist, and so forth). So this way of conceptualizing the ideal of intellectual autonomy seems to be at odds with getting knowledge from others and, in this way, at odds with social epistemology. It is no wonder, then, that intellectual autonomy gets a bad wrap in contemporary epistemology where social concerns are increasingly (and rightly) taking center stage.<\/p>\n Rather than relegate intellectual autonomy to the dustbin of bad philosophical ideas, I think we should instead rethink what intellectual autonomy could be in an increasingly connected world. This task doesn\u2019t call for reengineering the concept as such but rather drawing upon ideas that, for the most post at least, have been neglected by contemporary epistemologists (at least in this context). These are ideas outside the liberal paradigm: ideas from feminist, critical and leftwing social theory.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s compare two broad ways of thinking about intellectual autonomy. The first way says that only the internal is what counts: that critical self-reflection and belief-management is what makes one\u2019s thinking or inquiry autonomous. It is to manage and rely upon that which is your own<\/strong>. What someone tells you, or the inquiry one recommends to you, stops with you<\/em>. You need to consider it, to reflect on it; not doing that is failing to be autonomous. Simply trusting another person is to flout one\u2019s autonomy.<\/p>\n Crucially, this idea doesn\u2019t take the social world to make any essential difference to one\u2019s intellectual autonomy. If the world doesn\u2019t give you labs or other people to talk to, this is not autonomy reducing because whether there are labs or people willing to inquiry with you is not (not normally) something within your internal, executive control. It is not something you can, as it were, impose on yourself in order to guide your thinking.<\/p>\n The second way says that what\u2019s external counts. There is a weaker and stronger version of this idea. The weaker one says that our capacity to be autonomous depends on being socialized and, crucially, how<\/em> we are socialized.\u00a0 For example, this is what lies behind that the thought that \u201cwhat actually enables people to be autonomous …. is not isolation, but relationships\u2014with parents, teachers, friends, loved ones\u201d (Nedelsky 1989, 12). So this thought takes social relationships to be important for intellectual autonomy by enabling it. A stronger version of the idea is that social relationship are not just enabling conditions for intellectual autonomy, but constitutive conditions<\/em>. That intellectual autonomy requires social relationships, and is not simply caused by it.<\/p>\n I think this idea is basically correct. To see why, consider an interesting case discussed by Marina Oshana:<\/p>\n Subservience: <\/strong>Harriet is a \u2018stay at home mom\u2019 in the 1950\u2019s, and she values her role as homemaker. She has a very traditional relationship with her husband, who expects Harriet to cook, clean, raise the children, and do other domestic activities, which is what is ordinarily expected of women in her society. Unlike most women, however, Harriet has a few other options available to her besides being a \u2018stay at home mom\u2019, but she has reflectively decided to lead her \u2018stay at home mom\u2019-life, having considered seriously the alternatives, each of which were open to her (Oshana 1998, 89).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Harriet\u2019s non-autonomy is inexplicable in individualist terms because \u201cshe has the \u201cright\u201d psychology\u201d (Oshana 1998, 89). After all, the way that the world is and the way that she wants the world to be are congruent. No one in fact interferes with the way she wants to live her life. She lives the life the way she wants to live it, unimpeded by other people making her live that way. We might even say: it is her choice<\/em>. But she still lacks autonomy: \u201cnot because she wants to be subservient, but because she is subservient. Her lack of autonomy is due to her personal relations with others and to the social institutions of her society\u201d (ibid). On this picture, then, certain external, structural features of Harriet\u2019s relationship to her husband and her relationships within a broader patriarchal society is what makes it unsuitable for the promotion of her autonomy. Her autonomy requires different<\/em> relationships\u2014and thereby different social arrangements\u2014rather than having the sort of psychological states which harmonize with her situation.[4]<\/a><\/p>\n This goes some distancing to showing that autonomy is essentially relational in character. But how does it translate over to intellectual autonomy?\u00a0 To show this, I think we need to distinguish between two key ways of thinking about the realization of autonomy. One way says that autonomy requires a certain kind of freedom, the freedom not to be interfered with by others. This is the kind of freedom that Harriet had. In the epistemic domain, we can translate this idea as follows: intellectual autonomy requires a certain kind of intellectual freedom, namely, the freedom to explore your own thoughts or inquiries without outside interference. Call this the non-inference requirement<\/strong> for intellectual autonomy. In Harriet\u2019s case, she could openly explore her ideas with her husband, her friends, and so forth. For society is patriarchal, but luckily for Harriet she has the right friends and family who don\u2019t actively repress her thinking.<\/p>\n A second way of thinking about autonomy requires not simply not being interfered with, but to be in a condition in which no one has the arbitrary ability to interfere with you; otherwise, you are dominated. In the epistemic domain, we can translate this idea as follows: intellectual autonomy requires a certain kind of intellectual freedom, namely, the freedom to think and inquire outside of the arbitrary interests or decisions of others who could impose on you. Call this the non-domination requirement<\/strong>.[5]<\/a> To this idea in action, imagine a researcher who wants to pursue some project\u2014perhaps it\u2019s something we\u2019d regard as fairly innocuous\u2014but the government has the ability to change or even halt their project at a whim. More specifically, they even have the power to skew the research to fit their ideas. Maybe the government never does this, but they can<\/em> do it and there is no serious recourse to an appeal\u2014for they\u2019d just defeat it. In this situation, our researcher is not truly intellectually autonomous. This is because their inquiry is dominated. For someone has the arbitrary power to dictate what they should be researching (or how they do it).<\/p>\n This is also true of Harriet\u2019s situation. For her husband could, if he wanted, make her do more chores, see her friends less, and so on. It is ultimately up to his whims. Of course, he might never do this. He might be a beneficent husband, so to speak, and so Harriet would satisfy the non-interference requirement but not the non-domination requirement. Intuitively, we should say: she isn\u2019t free. If we turn our attention to Harriet\u2019s discussions, or her personal educational projects and ideas\u2014perhaps the books she reads or the lectures she attends at a nearby college\u2014her husband could bring that all to an end. Her husband could easily dismiss her questions or tell her how she should be thinking. In such a case, while Harriet might still have the ability to think the way she wants internally, her inability to do so openly would be intellectually dominating. This is because she\u2019s in a society which doesn\u2019t take women seriously as thinkers.<\/p>\n Intellectual domination can also function less directly through ideology. People might not only internalize ideas which dominate their and other people\u2019s behavior but systems of thinking which promote such domination (cf. Mary Douglas 1986, 18). For example, consider the following example discussed by Sharon Krause:<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong>Ladylike:<\/strong> According to her mother, Sharon walks \u2018like a boy\u2019. It\u2019s Sharon\u2019s typically way of walking, but her mother insists that she take smaller, more \u2018ladylike\u2019 steps (Krause 2013, 114)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \u00a0<\/strong>Krause takes the Ladylike case to reveal the limitations of non-domination requirements on autonomy but I think they help us to see that domination can be at play in intellectually as well as physically coercive cases. It is ideas or ways of thinking which dominate her, not someone\u2019s threat. An ideology dominates by guiding thoughts and patterns of thinking that are socially enforced and obeyed.[6]<\/a> They have an almost unlimited ability to interfere with the way we think. It is because of the widespread internalization of these ways of thinking that someone could easily say to Harriet that her preoccupation with mathematical physics is \u2018weird\u2019, and no one would think anything of it.<\/p>\n Thinking about ideology and how it can have a dominating impact on the way we think can also help us to see the limitations of individualist conceptions of autonomy. Recall that individualist conceptions take it that your thoughts are autonomous insofar as they are self-directed, something you can<\/em> change or evaluate. More specifically, you are intellectually autonomous only if your thinking is not interfered with by anyone else\u2014at least, not in a way that that doesn\u2019t align with what you actually want for yourself. That fact that you<\/em> are apt to interfere with your own thinking\u2014rather than other people\u2014is a mark of autonomy. For the critically minded, belief \u2018manager\u2019 is apt to do exactly that. But this overlooks the reality that one\u2019s own thought can dominate as well. Imagine a person who\u2019s thinking is littered with ideology. They are unable to grasp ideas or understand arguments without seeing them in the light of their ideology. Even when they think critically, they always surreptitiously shelve their ideological commitments, making it seem to them that they are open-minded people. Their ideology dominates them.<\/p>\n Lao Tzu said the \u201cthe mark of a moderate person is freedom from their own ideas\u201d. This reveals what I think is autonomy reducing in the case of ideology: it binds you to certain ways of thinking that aren\u2019t easily constrained. It can also overly influence the way you conduct your inquiries. Imagine a person who is so caught up in being intellectually \u2018self-made\u2019 that only their answers to their questions matter to them. They want their epistemic successes to be attributable only to their own intellectual efforts. Determined, as they are, to learn everything for themselves will easily lead them to an impoverished state. After all, by taking it for granted the technology they use to learn what they do \u2014 from algebra, history books, or the periodic table of elements, to microscopes, computers, and Python \u2014 they forget that they are<\/em> relying on others epistemically. It is our accumulative epistemic inheritance, the result of humanity\u2019s intellectual efforts.[7]<\/a> We are all \u2018shareholders\u2019 of this epistemic inheritance. When such a person takes it that they learned what they did \u2018all on their own\u2019 without \u2018anyone else\u2019s help\u2019, they not only think something which is false but disrespectful, for it fails to credit those who are long since passed for their intellectual efforts.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Bibliography<\/strong><\/p>\n Elizabeth Fricker (2006). \u201cTestimony and epistemic autonomy\u201d, in Jennifer Lackey & Ernest Sosa (eds.), The Epistemology of Testimony<\/em>. Oxford University Press. pp. 225-253.<\/p>\n Alvin Goldman and Cailin O\u2019Connor, \u201cSocial Epistemology\u201d, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy <\/em>(Fall 2019 Edition), Edward N. Zalta\u00a0(ed.), URL = <https:\/\/plato.stanford.edu\/archives\/fall2019\/entries\/epistemology-social\/>.<\/p>\n Sharon R. Krause (2013). \u201cBeyond Non-domination: Agency, inequality, and the meaning of freedom\u201d, Philosophy and Social Criticism<\/em>, vol. 39, 2.<\/p>\n Peter Kropotkin (1902). The Conquest of Bread<\/em>. London: Chapman and Hall, LTD.<\/p>\n Jennifer Lackey (2006). \u201cKnowing from Testimony\u201d, Philosophy Compass, vol. 1, issue 5: 43-448.<\/p>\n Frank Lovett (2016). \u201cNon-domination\u201d, Oxford Handbook of Freedom<\/em>, (eds.) David Schmidtz and Carmen E. Pavel. Oxford University Press.<\/p>\n Jennifer Nedelsky (1989). \u201cReconceiving Autonomy: Sources, Thoughts and Possibilities,\u201d Yale Journal of Law and <\/em>Feminism<\/em>, 1: 7-36.<\/p>\n Charles Mills (2017). \u201cIdeology\u201d, In The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice<\/em>, (eds.) Ian James Kidd, Jos\u00e9 Medina, and Gaile Pohlhaus, Jr. Routledge: pp. 100-111.<\/p>\n Marina A. L. Oshana (1998). \u201cPersonal Autonomy in Society<\/em>\u201d, Journal of Social Philosophy<\/em>, vol. 29, No. 1, Spring 1998: 81-102.<\/p>\n Linda Zagzebski (2013). \u201cIntellectual autonomy\u201d, Philosophical Issues<\/em> 23 (1):244-261.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n NOTES<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n [1]<\/a> These two key ideas about autonomy are found in the work of Immanuel Kant and Ralph Waldo Emerson, respectively. For their expression in epistemology, see Linda Zagzebski (2013) and Elizabeth Fricker (2006).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n [2]<\/a> See, for example, Goldman and O\u2019 Conner (2019).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n [3]<\/a> See Lackey (2006). She writes: \u201cWere we to refrain from accepting the testimony of others, our lives would be impoverished in startling and debilitating ways\u201d (pg. 432).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n [4]<\/a> It\u2019s important to note that autonomy is not an all-or-nothing feature. One can be more or less autonomous. It is gradient feature. Certain situations might reduce your autonomy without removing it.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n [5]<\/a> See Lovett (2016) for an extensive overview and defense.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n [6]<\/a> See, for example, Mills (2017) pp. 102-103.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n [7]<\/a> This type of argument is inspired by one that Kropotkin (1902) makes for collective ownership. See Chapter 1, \u00a72 and Chapter 13, \u00a74.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Picture by Aar\u00f3n Blanco Tejedor <\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0on unsplash<\/a><\/p>\n\n
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