ABSTRACT
Sarah Woolwine challenges critiques recent work on disability and epistemic justice for partitioning off mental disabilities as outside the analysis. She contends that Dewey’s model in inquiry can better incorporate disabled perspectives into questions of epistemology and epistemic justice because it rejects representationalism about knowledge. That is, it resists conceptions of knowledge as a more or less accurate mirror, or as a form of information that can be pooled, which are then used to measure knowers as well. Thus, the question is often whether disabled people are accurate (and reliable) informants about their own lives, whether they measure up to some epistemic standard, rather than starting with the Deweyan presumption of communal and democratic coinquirers.
