What, if anything, can we come to know about other people through virtual embodiment? Critics of virtual reality (VR) which virtually embodies users as marginalised persons argue such experiences inevitably misrepresent marginalised lives, encourage epistemic overconfidence in users, and reduce complex social identities to decontextualised simulations. While these concerns are valid, I argue that they do not exhaust the epistemic possibilities of VR. Drawing on empirical studies and philosophical analysis, I present a positive account of what we can come to know about others through VR-mediated perspective-taking.
Focusing on a subclass of prosocial behaviour-promoting virtual reality, I argue that certain VR experiences can confer propositional, practical, and what I call grounded inferential knowledge of marginalised experiences. Grounded inferential knowledge refers to a user's ability to learn about their own affective and bodily responses to virtual harms, and to correctly infer—on that basis—how those same harms might feel to others in real life. While VR cannot give us direct access to others’ experiences, it can function as a scaffold for more accurate, situated, and reflective understanding of shared human vulnerabilities. By reframing the epistemic stakes of virtual embodiment, this account offers a more nuanced framework for evaluating the promise and limits of VR as an ethical and educational tool.
Monday July 6, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST Steele-262
