Epistemic Justice and Intellectual Authority

Sor Juana fought for recognition as an intellectual authority in her own right, against dismissal based on her gender and social status as a woman of mixed race in colonial Mexico. Epistemic justice—the right to credibility and to have one's knowledge claims taken seriously—is foundational to libertarian freedom. When institutions systematically discount certain people's knowledge or deny them platforms for their ideas, they violate property rights in one's intellectual output and reasoning. Sor Juana's insistence on being heard as a thinker establishes that justice requires systems recognizing competence regardless of demographic category. This concept applies to discrimination in academia, professional spheres, and public discourse where marginalized people's expertise is dismissed or appropriated. In libertarian frameworks, epistemic injustice represents a form of property theft: the seizure of one's ideas' value by denying one's authorship or authority. Sor Juana's model demands that freedom includes the right to be recognized as a legitimate knower whose conclusions deserve consideration on their intellectual merit, not filtered through prejudicial categories.