Miranda Fricker’s theory of epistemic injustice connects epistemology and ethics, shedding light on how power disparities distort our processes of knowing and understanding. This article introduces the concept of digital hermeneutical injustice to examine a unique form of epistemic harm that arises in data-driven societies. As data becomes increasingly integrated into institutional decision-making infrastructures, it profoundly influences how social experiences are classified, evaluated, and understood. With its assumed objectivity and technical stability, data gains an authoritative role in determining recognition and eligibility. However, structural inequalities in data representation create hermeneutical blind spots, marginalizing groups whose experiences are either underrepresented or misrepresented within data systems. Digital hermeneutical injustice highlights a structural form of epistemic harm that emerges when data-centric systems alter interpretative conditions and restrict whose experiences are valued in institutional decision-making.
This paper examines the relationship between the reductionist ideal in philosophy of science and explanatory practice in chemistry. While chemical phenomena are physically realized, their core explanations exemplified by functional group concepts in organic chemistry achieve predictive success, counterfactual support, and guidance for experimental intervention independently of microphysical derivation. Through a detailed case study of how functional groups explain reactivity, and a critical engagement with the causal exclusion argument, the paper argues for an epistemic conception of explanatory autonomy: chemical explanations are successful on their own terms, by criteria internal to chemical inquiry, without this success requiring reduction to physics. This does not challenge physicalism, nor does it claim that reduction is impossible in principle. Rather, it shows that the reductionist ideal, understood as a necessary condition for explanatory adequacy, arguably insufficient capture the practice of successful science. The paper concludes by defending a modest explanatory pluralism, where different sciences legitimately employ level-specific concepts suited to their distinctive aims.
In a recent essay, Alfred Mele floats a libertarian view of free will which he thinks is preferable to Robert Kane’s old and new views of free will. In this paper, I explain Kane’s old and new views, making clear the motivations for Kane’s new view. I also explain Mele’s floated alternative view and argue that there are good reasons to think it is not preferable to Kane’s views.
This essay reads migration, mobility, and borders through Uchenna Okeja’s broader philosophical project and his account of deliberative agency as the core of political life. I argue that migration concerns not only territorial borders but the borders of humanity: the unequal conditions under which some persons move as fully recognized subjects while others move under suspicion. I develop the idea of subjective mobility to name this inequality and argue that decolonizing migration requires dismantling the political grammar that makes human worth border-dependent.
