Justice as Epistemic Rights

Sor Juana's defense of women's right to education was simultaneously a justice claim and an epistemological claim: women's exclusion from learning was both immoral and a loss to knowledge itself. Epistemic rights recognize that justice includes access to education, the freedom to inquire, the right to have one's questions taken seriously, and the authority to contribute to collective knowledge. For Authenticity across traditions, this concept reveals how tradition becomes oppressive when it denies people the tools to understand, question, and reinterpret it. Sor Juana insisted that learning itself is a form of prayer and self-knowledge; denying it to anyone—especially women—is denying them full humanity. In modern application, epistemic justice means examining which voices are heard in interfaith dialogue, whose interpretations of tradition are privileged, and how power shapes knowledge production. It requires actively creating spaces where people from marginalized traditions can think aloud, propose reinterpretations, and claim authority over their own meaning-making within inherited frameworks.