The Faces of Intellectual Disability: Philosophical Reflections

4 The Face of Authority

The Face of Authority Feminist and other liberatory epistemologies . . . cannot only be correctives to standard epistemologies, but must also at times separate or withdraw from dominant ways of making sense of the world. If current standards of epistemic credibility are embedded in systems of oppression, then epistemic responsibility requires that we remove ourselves from those practices. —Nancy Tuana Genealogy is, then, a sort of attempt to desubjugate historical knowledges, to set them free, or in other words, to enable them to oppose and struggle against the coersion of a unitary, formal, and scientific theoretical discourse. The project of these disorderly and tattered genealogies is to reactivate local knowledges . . . against the scientific hierarchalization of knowledge and its intrinsic power-effects. To put it in a nutshell : Archaeology is the method specific to the analysis of local discursivities, and genealogy is the tactic which, once it has described these local discursivities, brings into play the desubjugated knowledges that have been released from them. —Michel Foucault Institutions for the feebleminded and the rise of mental testing demarcated two fields in which knowledge claims about intellectual disability could be made. Physicians, psychologists, and legislators had a profound impact on how intellectual disability was defined and managed, and both the external and internal 4 106 the philosophical world of intellectual disability heterogeneity of this category speaks to the difficulty of isolating a single object of knowledge amid competing and changing conceptions. The glimpse at the complicated story of disabled and non-disabled women reveals that in addition to the physicians, psychiatrists, and psychologists involved in defining, detecting , and diagnosing idiocy and feeblemindedness, there were other experts who gained prominence and wielded a significant amount of power and authority: women field-workers, feminist activists, and reformists. Thus we can affirm that idiocy and feeblemindedness were interactive kinds in Hacking’s sense of the term: they were classifications that were part of interesting looping effects, with permeable and amorphous boundaries that shifted with the professional, social, and political tides of the day. If we map this constellation of experts from the mid-nineteenth century (when idiocy emerged as a distinct object of knowledge) to the present day, even more groups emerge from their respective disciplinary corners to lay claim to knowledge about this group. And as Foucault and Hacking both remind us—the former with his notion of resistance and the latter in his idea of classified subjects transforming the very meaning of categories—there can be significant power coming “from below.”1 Though I haven’t focused on this dimension of the institutional world, there is evidence of significant moments when classified individuals and their allies challenged the institutional structure and practice.2 As the twentieth century progressed, advocacy groups and self-advocates made an indelible mark on the understanding of intellectual disability and its treatment by medical and institutional experts . Where, then, do we find philosophers? How and when do they enter the scene, and as they do make their appearance, what authority do they claim in speaking about this topic? On the surface, the question of intellectual disability has been relatively neglected by philosophers. A brief survey of the history of philosophy turns up a few examples: references to “defective” babies in Plato and Aristotle, a reference to “madmen” in Descartes’s first meditation,3 a discussion of the distinction between madness and idiocy in Locke, Rousseau’s Emile, and Adam Smith’s discussion of “wretched” creatures who lack reason.4 There is no sense in which intellectual disability is a canonical area of inquiry in philosophy; it does not seem to be of great importance to many philosophers.5 One possible approach, then, would be to map the exclusion of intellectual disability from the philosophical scene.6 While this would be a worthy project, I choose to focus on more recent philosophers who have spoken about this topic. If we move from the institutional world at the turn of the twentieth century to the contemporary world of philosophy, we see that in the past half century The Face of Authority 107 philosophers have said quite a bit about intellectual disability. In what follows, I will critically examine epistemic authority and privilege in relation to the philosopher and intellectual disability. While I do not offer a comprehensive review of all that philosophers have said about the subject, I map out certain broad features of traditional philosophical discourse about intellectual disability and point...