Jennifer Lackey

Jennifer Lackey is an American philosopher and Professor of Philosophy and Law at Northwestern University. Her principal area of specialisation is epistemology, particularly social, legal, and applied epistemology. Her research addresses testimony, disagreement, collective knowledge, epistemic injustice, and the role of social institutions in the formation and transmission of knowledge.

Lackey received her BA in Philosophy from Saint Mary’s College in 1994, her MA in Philosophy from the University of Chicago in 1995, and her PhD in Philosophy from Brown University in 2000 under the supervision of Ernest Sosa. At Northwestern University, she is the Wayne and Elizabeth Jones Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Law (courtesy), and she founded the Northwestern Prison Education Program.

One of Lackey’s most important works is Learning from Words: Testimony as a Source of Knowledge, in which she defends testimony as an independent and fundamental source of knowledge and explains how the words of others can generate knowledge for a hearer. She also co-edited The Epistemology of Testimony with Ernest Sosa and The Epistemology of Disagreement with David Christensen.

In The Epistemology of Groups, Lackey extends her research from relations between individuals to the knowledge of groups and institutions, examining whether groups can possess beliefs and knowledge in an independent sense. This direction forms part of her broader project of understanding the social dimensions of knowledge and people’s epistemic dependence on one another.

In her recent work, especially Criminal Testimonial Injustice, Lackey connects epistemology with problems in the criminal legal system. She shows how interrogation practices, the extraction of confessions, and the assessment of testimony can undermine individuals’ epistemic agency and result in testimonial injustice. Her work is a prominent example of the connection between analytic epistemology and contemporary social and institutional issues.