Epistemic Justice and the Right to Be Believed

When Sor Juana spoke, she was heard as a woman first and a scholar second—her ideas discounted because of her gender and racial identity. Epistemic justice addresses this specific injustice: the denial of credibility to knowers based on prejudice rather than evidence. For libertarian property theory, this matters because it concerns who owns intellectual authority and recognition. If your claims are systematically dismissed due to identity rather than argument, you are being dispossessed of ownership over your own knowledge. Your intellectual property is stolen through a social practice of non-recognition. Justice requires that knowledge claims be evaluated on their merits, and that credibility not be allocated by demographic characteristics. Sor Juana's insistence on being heard as an intellectual equal asserts the right to epistemic property: ownership of one's own knowledge and the demand that others recognize it as legitimate and valuable.