Knowledge in the vicinity How social movements track social reality

Social phenomena often appear ambiguous. A comment at work may seem like harmless flirting when it is actually harassment; a police officer stopping a car may look like a routine procedure while functioning as racial profiling; a campaign to “end autism” may present itself as benefiting those affected by it, even though it reproduces ableist and eugenic narratives; and “flexible workhours” may, more accurately, signal overexploitation. How can we reliably know whether certain behaviors are recognizable patterns of discrimination, exploitation and domination rather than just random inconvenient incidents? This dissertation advances the idea that social movements are principal agents in discerning such patterns because they are experts in uncovering social injustice. It specifically argues that social movements provide the training grounds for such expertise. Their experimental, versatile, and dynamic nature, as expressed in the various organizational forms that social movements have inhabited throughout their history, has a distinctive epistemic dimension: it cultivates the epistemic virtues that sharpen the accuracy of the movement’s theoretical glasses. The dissertation makes use of contemporary tools of analytical metaphysics and epistemology to spell out a realist defense of social movements’ epistemic powers.