Epistemic Justice in Interspecies Relations

Sor Juana emphasized that systematic silencing of a group's voice constitutes injustice. Animals cannot testify in human language, yet they communicate constantly—through behavior, physiology, and social interaction. Epistemic justice demands we develop literacy in these languages rather than dismissing them as non-knowledge. When we ignore signs of animal suffering, fear, or preference because they don't match human expression, we commit the same epistemic violence Sor Juana experienced when her intellectual contributions were dismissed for her gender. This framework requires genuine effort to understand animal consciousness on its own terms: studying ethology seriously, observing animal behavior without human projection, and recognizing that different forms of knowing are valid. Sor Juana's tradition teaches that moral progress begins when we cease treating other beings' experiences as unknowable or irrelevant, instead treating their lived reality as worthy of serious epistemological attention.