Epistemic Justice and Whose Knowledge Counts

Sor Juana's central struggle was epistemic: she was told her knowledge didn't count because she was a woman, that her reasoning was suspect, that her intellectual contributions should be invisible or credited to men. This epistemic injustice—the systematic dismissal of certain people's knowledge, experience, and judgment—is itself a corruption of truth and a mechanism enabling other corruptions. In anti-corruption contexts, epistemic justice means: taking seriously the testimony of those affected by corruption (the poor, workers, the marginalized), valuing indigenous knowledge and community expertise, and resisting the authority's dismissal of inconvenient witnesses. Corrupt systems maintain power partly by delegitimizing the knowledge of those harmed by corruption—claiming victims are unreliable, biased, or unqualified to judge. Sor Juana's epistemology insists: all human beings capable of reason have legitimate intellectual standing. Anti-corruption work must restore epistemic justice by centering affected communities' knowledge, protecting dissenting experts, and rebuilding institutions that validate diverse sources of truth.