Epistemic Justice for Animal Experience

Sor Juana critiqued how women's knowledge and experience were dismissed as inferior or irrelevant in male-dominated intellectual systems. Epistemic justice means recognizing whose knowledge counts. Animals experience the world through non-human sensory systems—echolocation, electromagnetic fields, ultraviolet vision, olfactory landscapes humans cannot access. Yet animal experience is routinely treated as unreliable or irrelevant in policy and ethics. A bat's world, a whale's acoustic environment, a dog's olfactory knowledge—these represent legitimate forms of knowing systematically excluded from human-centered frameworks. Sor Juana demanded that women's perspectives be heard; extending this principle means listening to what animal behavior, communication, and presence teach us. Their ways of knowing the world deserve credibility. This framework shifts animal ethics from charity toward animals into recognizing them as knowers whose perspectives illuminate reality differently than human rationalism alone.