Honoring multiple ways of knowing and understanding the world, validating animal perception and knowledge systems as legitimate forms of intelligence.
Sor Juana's intellectual legacy includes challenging what counts as legitimate knowledge in her era; she argued that women's experience and reasoning deserved recognition alongside male-dominated institutions. Epistemological justice extends this to animals: their ways of knowing—through scent, echolocation, instinct, social learning, migration—are valid intelligences, not inferior alternatives to human rationality. An animal's knowledge of its territory, its species' survival strategies, its social hierarchies represents genuine understanding earned through evolutionary and individual experience. In animal rights contexts, this means respecting animals as knowers of their own needs, ecosystems, and experiences rather than passive objects for human study and control. This framework opposes the epistemic injustice of treating animals as mere subjects to observe or use, instead recognizing them as beings with legitimate claims to understanding their own existence and flourishing.
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