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Record W4414331524 · doi:10.1111/japp.70050

The Epistemic Harms of Botched Apologies for Past Wrongs

2025· article· en· W4414331524 on OpenAlex
Abraham Tobi

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of Applied Philosophy · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicEpistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics
Canadian institutionsCentre for Interdisciplinary Research in RehabilitationPublic Health Agency of Canada
Fundersnot available
KeywordsTestimonialSilenceReciprocalExploitPerspective (graphical)

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

ABSTRACT Apologies often create expectations of meaningful change and repair. Yet when institutions or states deliver apologies for past wrongs that lack substantive reparative action, they risk deepening, rather than redressing, the harms they acknowledge. In this article, I examine what I call ‘botched apologies’ that can be performative, temporally disconnected from the ongoing effects of harm, and ultimately serve the interests of perpetrators. I argue that these botched apologies inflict distinct epistemic harms: they gaslight the victims, silence them, appropriate their hermeneutical resources, and exploit them. Using an epistemic reparations framework, I propose four non‐exhaustive conditions for epistemically responsible apology: truthfulness, testimonial uptake, hermeneutical openness, and reciprocal epistemic labour.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.912
Threshold uncertainty score0.357

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.050
GPT teacher head0.282
Teacher spread0.232 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it