Epistemic Injustice

In this paper, I present a puzzle for Rawlsians given an attractive way for them to approach defining an adult citizen.

The testimonies of celebrities affect the lives of their many followers who pay attention to what they say. This gives celebrities a high degree of epistemic power, which has come under close scrutiny during the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper investigates the duties that arise from this power. We argue that celebrities have a negative duty of testimonial justice not to undermine trust in authoritative sources by spreading misinformation or directing attention to untrustworthy sources. Moreover, celebrities have a general imperfect duty (...) to try to correct for an unjust distribution of attention by redirecting it to those who deserve it. During a pandemic this may become a perfect one, due to the harm that could be prevented if people follow the advice of experts. Relatedly, we argue that celebrities have an imperfect duty to promote behavior that will reduce the spread of a pandemic. We outline three ways they might do so: they might take on the position of a role model, they may act as a salience magnet or they can direct people’s attention towards others who have taken on these roles. (shrink)

To verify the occurrence of a singular instance of testimonial injustice three facts must be established. The first is whether the hearer in fact has an identity prejudice of which she may or may not be aware; the second is whether that prejudice was in fact the cause of the unjustified credibility deficit; and the third is whether there was in fact a credibility deficit in the testimonial exchange. These three elements constitute the facts of the matter of testimonial injustice. (...) In this essay we argue that none of these facts can be established with any degree of confidence, and therefore that testimonial injustice is an undetectable phenomenon in singular instances. Our intention is not to undermine the idea of testimonial injustice, but rather to set limits to what can be justifiably asserted about it. According to our argument, although there are insufficient reasons to identify individual acts of testimonial injustice, it is possible to recognize recurrent patterns of epistemic responses to speakers who belong to specific social groups. General testimonial injustice can thus be characterized as a behavioral tendency of a prejudiced hearer. (shrink)

In this article we develop a taxonomy of emotional injustice: what occurs when the treatment of emotions is unjust, or emotions are used to treat people unjustly. After providing an overview of previous work on this topic and drawing inspiration from the more developed area of epistemic injustice, we propose working definitions of ‘emotion’, ‘injustice’, and ‘emotional injustice’. We describe seven classes of emotional injustice: Emotion Misinterpretation, Discounting, Extraction, Policing, Exploitation, Inequality, and Weaponizing. We say why it is useful to (...) distinguish these and also to subsume them under a single concept. Our aims are both theoretical and practical: to provide a unified account of emotional injustice, while recognizing the diversity of this phenomenon; to facilitate further research on this topic; to recognize the political importance of emotions; and to outline some of the ways in which emotional injustice can be combated. (shrink)

Liberalism is often claimed to be at odds with feminism and critical race theory (CRT). This article argues, to the contrary, that Rawlsian liberalism supports the central commitments of both. Section 1 argues that Rawlsian liberalism supports intersectional feminism. Section 2 argues that the same is true of CRT. Section 3 then uses Young’s ‘Five Faces of Oppression’—a classic work widely utilized in feminism and CRT to understand and contest many varieties of oppression—to illustrate how Rawlsian liberalism supports diverse feminist (...) and CRT projects, and why it may be critical to achieve solidarity between feminism, CRT, and Rawlsian liberalism. Finally, Section 4 responds to five objections. (shrink)

Land is becoming increasingly scarce relative to the demands of the global economy; a problem significantly exacerbated by climate change. In response, some have suggested that land should be conceptualised as a global commons. This framing might seem like an appealing way to promote sustainable and equitable land use. However, it is a poor fit for the worldʼs land because global commons are generally understood as resources located beyond state borders. I argue that land can be seen to fit the (...) definition of a global commons, if viewed in a particular way; namely, as a biogeochemical resource system that sequesters carbon emissions. The question then arises whether land should be conceptualised as a global commons. I consider this question by reference to three contemporary problems of land justice (land grabbing, forced displacement, and unfairness in land-based climate mitigation); arguing that the global-commons framing will not be conducive to understanding or responding to these problems. I leave the question of how the global community should conceptualise land in the context of climate change open, claiming that any answer must include the voices and perspectives of those whose livelihoods and identities are closely connected to the land. (shrink)

This chapter examines some key developments in discussions of the social dimensions of knowing-how, focusing on work on the social function of the concept of knowing-how, testimony, demonstrating one's knowledge to other people, and epistemic injustice. I show how a conception of knowing-how as a form of 'downstream knowledge' can help to unify various phenomena discussed within this literature, and I also consider how these ideas might connect with issues concerning wisdom, moral knowledge, and moral testimony.

In this exploratory paper, I consider how intellectual humility and epistemic injustice might contribute to the failure of testimonial exchanges. In §1, I will briefly highlight four broad ways a testimonial exchange might fail. In §2, I will very briefly review the nature of epistemic injustice. In §3, I will explore how both epistemic injustice and intellectual humility can lead to failures in testimonial exchange, and I’ll conclude by suggesting how intellectual humility and epistemic injustice might be related.

There has been extensive discussion of testimonial epistemic injustice, the phenomenon whereby a speaker’s testimony is rejected due to prejudice regarding who they are. But people also have their testimony rejected or preempted due to prejudice regarding what they communicate. Here, the injustice is content focused. We describe several cases of content focused injustice, and we theoretically interrogate those cases by building up a general framework through which to understand them as a genuine form of epistemic injustice that stands in (...) intertwined relationships to other forms of epistemic injustice. (shrink)

Hermeneutical injustice, as a species of epistemic injustice, is when members of marginalized groups are unable to make their experiences communicatively intelligible due to a deficiency in collective hermeneutical resources, where this deficiency is traditionally interpreted as a lack of concepts. Against this understanding, this paper argues that even if adequate concepts that describe marginalized groups’ experiences are available within the collective hermeneutical resources, hermeneutical injustice can persist. This paper offers an analysis of how this can happen by introducing the (...) notion of hermeneutical excess: the introduction of additional concepts into collective hermeneutical resources that function to obscure agents’ understanding of the lived experiences of marginalized groups. The injustice of hermeneutical excesses happens not due to hermeneutical marginalization (the exclusion of members of marginalized groups from the construction of hermeneutical resources), but rather hermeneutical domination: when members of dominant groups have been inappropriately included in the construction of hermeneutical resources. By taking as exemplary cases the concepts of “reverse racism” and “non-consensual sex” this paper shows how such excesses are introduced as a kind of defensive strategy used by dominant ideologies precisely when progress with social justice is made. (shrink)

Miranda Fricker’s insightful work on epistemic injustice discusses two forms of epistemic injustice—testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice. Hermeneutical injustice occurs when the victim lacks the interpretative resources to make sense of her experience, and this lacuna can be traced down to a structural injustice. In this paper, I provide one model of how to fill the conceptual gap in hermeneutical injustice. First, I argue that the victims possess conceptual resources to make sense of their experiences, namely phenomenal concepts. Second, I (...) show how one might work the way up in a two-step process from a subjective, phenomenal concept to a novel, public concept. Finally, I discuss the conditions that have to be met for this process to be successful. The resulting model shows a way how the victims might alleviate hermeneutical injustice by developing novel concepts, given that the dominant group does not care about their predicament. (shrink)

I motivate three claims: Firstly, attentional traits can be cognitive virtues and vices. Secondly, groups and collectives can possess attentional virtues and vices. Thirdly, attention has epistemic, moral, social, and political importance. An epistemology of attention is needed to better understand our social-epistemic landscape, including media, social media, search engines, political polarisation, and the aims of protest. I apply attentional normativity to undermine recent arguments for moral encroachment and to illuminate a distinctive epistemic value of occupying particular social positions. A (...) recurring theme is that disproportionate attention can distort, mislead, and misrepresent even when all the relevant claims are true and well supported by evidence. In the informational cacophony of the internet age, epistemology must foreground the cognitive virtues of attunement. (shrink)

Ian James Kidd investigates how social forces shape epistemic character. I outline his proposed 'critical character epistemology' and I critically assess his discussion of the roles of salience in sustaining epistemic vice. -/- I emphasise how patterns of salience affect how social position—race, gender, class, and so on—shapes epistemic character. I dispute Kidd’s claim that all epistemic vices are salient. Instead, I argue, epistemic vice is camouflaged by ubiquity. Similarly, I dispute his claim that ‘normed-vices’ are particularly salient. -/- .

Fear generalisation is a psychological phenomenon that occurs when fear that is elicited in response to a frightening stimulus spreads to similar or related stimuli. The practical harms of pathological fear generalisation related to trauma are well-documented, but little or no attention has been given so far to its epistemic harms. This paper fills this gap in the literature. It shows how the psychological phenomenon, when it becomes pathological, substantially curbs the epistemic agency of those who experience the fear that (...) generalizes, limiting their ability to respond to evidence, and substantially limiting their epistemic horizons. It is argued that when these epistemic harms are caused by wrongful actions and decisions of individuals or institutions, because the fear is elicited in response to a traumatic experience inflicted by them, the harms should be considered epistemic wrongs. The epistemic wrongs are closely akin to agential epistemic injustice, a variety of distributive epistemic injustice, and sometimes also involve epistemic exclusion. The paper thereby identifies a previously underexplored psychological mechanism that can be a vehicle through which both individuals and institutions can epistemically wrong others. The argument has implications for how both epistemic wrongs and epistemic injustice should be conceived, suggesting that both can occur without being caused by primarily epistemic flaws or errors, or a bad epistemic character. Finally, it highlights the advantage of taking a victim-centred approach to understanding epistemic harm. (shrink)

On the surface, developing a social psychology of science seems compelling as a way to understand how individual social cognition – in aggregate – contributes towards individual and group behavior within scientific communities (Kitcher, 2002). However, in cases where the functional input-output profile of psychological processes cannot be mapped directly onto the observed behavior of working scientists, it becomes clear that the relationship between psychological claims and normative philosophy of science should be refined. For example, a robust body of social (...) psychological research demonstrates implicit gender bias in the evaluation of others (e.g., Steinpreis, Anders, & Ritzke, 1999). Many expected implicit bias to be a major cause of women’s underrepresentation in math intensive fields of science; however, quantitative sociological research of hiring and manuscript and grant evaluation has discovered no gender disparity in outcomes (Ceci & Williams, 2011). Why might this be so? This paper will discuss methodological challenges that go beyond classic problems of external validity in extrapolating psychological effects and explanations to scientific communities. These problems include more complex external validity issues raised by the introduction of multi-process models of cognition (e.g., implicit versus explicit social cognition) as well as the reflexive role that folk and experimental theories of social psychology play in guiding the behavior of scientists at the individual and community level. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that nonhuman animals can be subject to epistemic injustice. I consider Miranda Fricker’s account of the harm of epistemic injustice and highlight that it requires a knower to be invested in being recognized as a knower. I argue that a turn away from a focus on testimony and concepts toward a consideration of the consequences of the distribution of epistemic resources can allow us to consider how epistemic injustice interacts with another form of knowledge: know-how. (...) Here, feminist philosophy and feminist naturalized epistemology can help us understand how social and material conditions can unjustly affect the distribution of these resources among communities of nonhuman animals. Despite not having an investment in being recognized as knowers, nonhuman animals can be subject to epistemic injustice when their acquisition of know-how is disrupted. I draw from work in animal ethology and movement ecology to argue that distributive epistemic injustice wrongs nonhuman animals by hindering their ability to acquire 'answers' to 'questions' they have an interest in answering, namely, acquiring true beliefs about conspecifics and their environment, behaviors and skills that enable everyday successful coping, and information for the distributed cognition involved in group decision-making. (shrink)

I argue that patients who suffer genital surgery to ‘disambiguate’ their sexual anatomy, a practice labelled ‘intersex genital mutilation’ by intersex advocates, can be understood as victims of hermeneutical injustice in the sense elaborated by Miranda Fricker. This claim is clarified and defended from two objections. I further argue that a particular subset of cases of IGM-based hermeneutical injustice instantiate a novel form of hermeneutical injustice, which I call deception-based hermeneutical injustice. I highlight how this differs from central types of (...) hermeneutical injustice in the literature and trace its harms. (shrink)

Epistemic injustice is a widely discussed phenomenon in many sub-disciplines (including epistemology, ethics, feminist philosophy, social and political philosophy). Yet, there is very little literature on its connection to the philosophy of sports. Here I explore the intersection between epistemic injustice and sports, focusing on testimonial injustice. I argue that there exist clear-cut cases of testimonial injustice in sport that arise when athletes attempt to communicate information. After highlighting the theoretical connections between various cases, I explore the more ambitious claim (...) that sport performances themselves carry linguistic content. This claim allows us to see the biased negative judgment of sport performances in a new light, as constituting a further and distinctive form of testimonial injustice. I show how the case of figure-skater Surya Bonaly can be understood as a real-life instantiation of this form of testimonial injustice. I conclude by explaining why it is philosophically fruitful to understand these wrongs through the lens of testimonial injustice. (shrink)

It has been over two decades since Miranda Fricker labeled epistemic injustice, in which an agent is wronged in their capacity as a knower. The philosophical literature has proliferated with variants and related concepts. By considering cases in popular music, we argue that it is worth distinguishing a parallel phenomenon of art-interpretive injustice, in which an agent is wronged in their creative capacity as a possible artist. In section 1, we consider the prosecutorial use of rap lyrics in court as (...) a central case of this injustice. In section 2, we distinguish art-interpretive injustice from other categories already discussed in recent literature. In section 3, we discuss the relationship between genre discourse and identity prejudice. The case for recognizing the category of art-interpretive injustice is that it allows one to recognize a class of harms as being importantly related in ways that one would otherwise overlook. (shrink)

Paul Ricœur says that our narrative identity depends on how others understand us. This claim, however, does not explicitly address the fact that not everyone receives the same recognition: it underexplains how certain groups are systemically not acknowledged, respected, or taken seriously. More recent work on narrative co-authoring starts to address this fact by examining how people’s vulnerability to co-authoring depends on the context in which they live. But I argue that this work should be extended to attend to the (...) kinds of vulnerabilities that result from what José Medina calls recognition deficiencies, which become more normalized due to structural oppression, specifically what Iris Marion Young calls cultural imperialism. I then illuminate the kinds of vulnerabilities that result from recognition deficiencies in cases of structural oppression by bringing in work in Black feminist thought and epistemic injustice, particularly that of Audre Lorde and Veronica Ivy, into conversation with narrative scholarship. (shrink)

This chapter canvases a number of ways that issues surrounding disability intersect with social epistemology. We begin with a discussion of how social epistemology as a field and debates concerning epistemic injustice in particular would benefit from further (a) engaging the fields of disability studies and philosophy of disability and (b) more directly addressing the problem of ableism. In section two, we turn to issues of testimony, “intuitive horribleness,” and their relationship to debates concerning disability and well-being. We address how (...) the regular lack of uptake of disabled people’s testimony can lead to a number of structural rather than merely individual epistemic injustices, and we also consider how the very nature of some disabilities make testimonial issues more complicated. We conclude by discussing various norms of social interaction and how they can systematically disadvantage Autistic people in particular with respect to all the issues discussed herein. (shrink)

Mentalizing is our ability to infer agents’ mental states. Attributing beliefs, knowledge, desires, and intentions are frequently discussed forms of mentalizing. Attributing mentalistically loaded stereotypes, personality traits, and evaluating others’ rationality are forms of mentalizing, as well. This broad conception of mentalizing has interesting and important implications for social epistemology. Several topics in social epistemology involve judgments about others’ knowledge, rationality, and competence, e.g., peer disagreement, epistemic injustice, and identifying experts. Mentalizing is at the core of each of these debates. (...) In this chapter, I describe the broad conception of mentalizing and show how it is central to how we judge others’ knowledge, competence, and rationality. I will apply this perspective on mentalizing to two debates: the epistemology of peer disagreement and interventions on testimonial injustice. I argue that understanding how mentalizing works can help us see these debates in a different light. Such reframing can help us make progress on these challenging debates. (shrink)

Various philosophers discuss perlocutionary silencing, but none defend an account of perlocutionary silencing. This gap may exist because perlocutionary success depends on extralinguistic effects, whereas silencing interrupts speech, leaving theorists to rely on extemporary accounts when they discuss perlocutionary silencing. Consequently, scholars assume perlocutionary silencing occurs but neglect to explain how perlocutionary silencing harms speakers as speakers. In relation to that shortcoming, I defend a novel account of perlocutionary silencing. I argue that speakers experience perlocutionary silencing when they are illegitimately (...) deprived of perlocutionary influence on a conversation in which they are active participants, where perlocutionary influence on the conversation relates to speech-related perlocutionary goals meant to influence the conversation or conversational direction. Thus, this account grounds perlocutionary silencing in linguistic phenomena and characterizes perlocutionary silencing in a way that explains why those who experience perlocutionary silencing are harmed as speakers. Moreover, this account explains how perlocutionary silencing harms speakers as conversational participants in a way that cannot be captured by illocutionary or locutionary silencing, for a speaker may be perlocutionarily silenced despite illocutionary success. Consequently, the account explains why “All Lives Matter” silences Black Lives Matter and “Not All Men” silences women sharing experiences of sexual harassment. (shrink)

Audre Lorde’s account of the erotic is one of her most widely celebrated contributions to political theory and feminist activism, but her explanation of the term in her brief essay “Uses of the Erotic” is famously oblique and ambiguous. This article develops a detailed, textually grounded interpretation of Lorde’s erotic, based on an analysis of how Lorde’s essay brings together commitments expressed across her work. I describe four integral elements of Lorde’s erotic: feeling, knowledge, power, and concerted action. The erotic (...) is a way of feeling in the work a person does, which makes possible new knowledge about the self and the social environment— particularly to counteract epistemic oppression imposed by an unjust society. The erotic is a source of power by providing vision and energy for actions integrating a person’s multiple commitments and political interests. It facilitates concerted action and coalition by enhancing a person’s appreciation of their interests and values, while fostering embodied, personal connections that build trust on the basis of shared vulnerability. Thus, the erotic helps build coalitions where genuine differences of perspective and experience can be examined, in resistance against an oppressive society’s epistemic distortions. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Rima Basu and I have offered separate accounts of wokeness as an anti-racist ethical concept. Our accounts endorse controversial doctrines in epistemology: doxastic wronging, doxastic voluntarism, and moral encroachment. Many philosophers deny these three views, favoring instead some ordinary standards for epistemic justification. I call this denial the standard view. In this paper, I offer an account of wokeness that is consistent with the standard view. I argue that wokeness is best understood as ‘group epistemic partiality’. The woke person (...) does extra epistemic work before forming a negative belief about a member of an oppressed social group. Just as we do extra epistemic work when forming belief about our friends, so the woke person does for members of oppressed social groups. I first outline the account. I then raise questions about the scope of wokeness and belief formation. After this, I demonstrate that the group partiality view is consistent with the standard view in epistemology. The partiality view, therefore, should appeal to epistemologists who have adopted the standard view because it is consistent with ordinary standards of justification. I conclude that wokeness as a concept in epistemology should not be controversial for those who endorse the standard view. (shrink)

Epistemic injustices are wrongs done concerning a person’s capacity as a knower. These actions are usually caused by prejudice and involve the distortion and neglect of certain marginalized groups’ opinions and ways of knowing. A type of epistemic injustice is hermeneutical injustice, which occurs when a person cannot effectively communicate or understand their experience, since it is excluded in scholarship, journalism, and discourse within their community. Indigenous Peoples (IPs) are especially vulnerable to hermeneutical injustice because their way of life is (...) unfamiliar or inaccessible to others. This leads to the exclusion of their ideas from public discourse, especially those important for human and societal development. This phenomenon is particularly evident in instances related to IP education. José Medina claims that there are cases of hermeneutical injustice which hinders the ability of people to share and make meaning, or simply, hermeneutical death. Ben Kotzee, on the other hand, identifies the specific educational dimension of epistemic injustice. Using both of these frameworks and citing the results of local studies on indigenous education as illustrative points, we attempt to show instances and scope of hermeneutical injustice in the education of IPs in the Philippines. (shrink)

The central focus of this paper is to motivate and explore the question, when is it permissible to endorse a psychologizing explanation of a sincere interlocutor? I am interested in the moral question of when (if ever) we may permissibly dismiss the sincere reasons given to us by others, and instead endorse an alternative explanation of their beliefs and actions. I argue that there is a significant risk of wronging the other person, and so we should only psychologize when we (...) are in a position to know that they are in bad faith. (shrink)

From social media to search engines to Wikipedia, the internet is thoroughly embedded in how we produce, locate, and share knowledge around the world. Who Should We Be Online? provides an account of online knowledge that takes seriously the role of sexist, racist, transphobic, colonial, and capitalist forms of oppression. Frost-Arnold argues against analyzing internet users as a collection of identical generic people with smartphones. The novel epistemology developed in this book recognizes that we are differently embodied beings interacting within (...) systems of dominance. Our social identities and global inequalities shape who we are, who we can be online, and what we know. -/- Tackling problems of online content moderation, fake news, and hoaxes, Frost-Arnold shows that oppressive online structures and practices help fuel ignorance. But she also reveals how the internet provides opportunities for marginalized people and activists to share knowledge online. Drawing on feminist accounts of objectivity, veritistic social epistemology, epistemologies of ignorance, virtue epistemology, and the epistemic injustice literature, this book argues for a social epistemology that values truth and objectivity, while recognizing that inequalities shape our collective ability to attain these goals. Timely and interdisciplinary, Who Should We Be Online? weaves together internet studies scholarship from across the humanities, social sciences, and computer science. Presenting case studies of moderators, imposters, tricksters, fakers, and lurkers, this book both explains the problems with our current internet ecosystem and imagines liberatory online futures. (shrink)

Should the state provide religious education in public schools; if yes, what form should it take? I argue that alertness to epistemic injustices that religious persons can suffer can help us answer those questions and can provide grounds for fostering religious literacy. I argue that, if religious persons can suffer testimonial injustice, we should reject inadequate religious education and that, if religious persons can suffer hermeneutical injustice, we should also reject an absence of religious education. That leaves us with the (...) remaining option to have a proper form of religious education which I suggest religious literacy can provide. (shrink)

In analytic philosophy, appropriate sources of knowledge do not include affective experience. In this thesis, I oppose this commonly accepted view and argue in favour of valuing the contribution of affective experience to knowledge. My argument unfolds in two parts. In the first part of the thesis, I propose a positive argument favouring the inclusion of affective experience in our sources of knowledge. My main contribution is the Reflective Model, a novel account of affective experience as a source which responds (...) to the common objections towards the epistemic value of affective experience. This new model is built on the idea that affective experience is a reason- tracking ability, which incorporates a reflective element through internal and social calibration. I illustrate this phenomenon by discussing how members from marginalised groups identify microaggressions through their emotions. In the second part of the thesis, I offer a negative argument: given the negative ethical and practical consequences of excluding affective experience, we should include it in our sources of knowledge. I conceptualise a new form of epistemic injustice, source based epistemic injustice, which highlights unfairness towards knowers who utilise unapproved sources of knowledge like affective experience. In addition, I discuss two applied cases where testimony based on affective experience is unfairly downgraded: testimony about lesser-known illnesses and testimony about everyday racism. I argue that the first case leads to the epistemic exploitation of patients, whilst the second gives rise to dialectical white scepticism, a pernicious form of white scepticism which has not been previously theorised. Altogether, I argue that legitimising affective experience as a source of knowledge would enable us to incorporate a greater number of epistemic contributions in our epistemological system, thus reducing instances of injustice and silencing experienced by members of marginalised groups. (shrink)

In this paper I individuate and analyse a new type of epistemic injustice that can arise in education and depends on the so-called ‘backtracking fallacy’ in student assessment, which occurs when a teacher confuses (or does not distinguish between) the logical dimension of a framework of disciplinary concepts and its psychological dimension. I will also touch upon a different type of social injustice that might transpire in education. I suggest that familiarity with Paul Hirst's view of liberal education, which presupposes (...) a neat distinction between a public framework of knowledge and the psychological process of gradually learning it, can contribute to prevent or reduce both forms of injustice. (shrink)

Current discussions of hermeneutical injustice, I argue, poorly characterise the cognitive state of victims by failing to account for the communicative success that victims have when they describe their experience to other similarly situated persons. I argue that victims, especially when they suffer moral wrongs that are yet unnamed, are able (1) to grasp certain salient aspects of the wrong they experience and (2) to cultivate the ability to identify instances of the wrong in virtue of moral emotions. By moral (...) emotions I mean emotions like indignation that reflect an agent’s ethical commitments and bear on her ethical assessments. Further, I argue that victims can impart their partial understanding of the wrong they suffer to others who are not similarly situated by eliciting moral emotions such as pity that are tied to broad notions of justice and fairness. (shrink)

Autism is a psychopathological condition around which there is still much prejudice and stigma. The discrepancy between third-person and first-person accounts of autistic behavior creates a chasm between autistic and neurotypical (non-autistic) people. Epistemic injustice suffered by these individuals is great, and a fruitful strategy out of this predicament is much needed. I will propose that through the appropriation and implementation of methods and concepts from phenomenology and ecological-enactive cognitive science, we can acquire powerful tools to work towards greater epistemic (...) justice for autistic individuals. I will use the resources found in the skilled intentionality framework, integrated with various phenomenological theories. From these approaches, we can view autistic impairments and disability relationally and how epistemic enablement and disablement form. Phenomenology and its methods help us learn more about the perceptual and social experiences of autistic individuals. The voices of the autistics themselves will be of the greatest importance here. I will show that, through restructuring our landscape of affordances and with a greater phenomenological understanding of the autistic inner world, we can devise new strategies that afford greater epistemic enablement and epistemic justice. (shrink)

Fricker‘s Epistemic Injustice discusses the idea of testimonial injustice, specifically, being harmed in one‘s capacity as a knower. Fricker‘s own theory of testimonial injustice emphasizes the role of prejudice. She argues that prejudice is necessary for testimonial injustice and that when hearers use a prejudice to give a deficit to the credibility of speakers hearers intrinsically harm speakers in their capacity as a knower. This paper rethinks the connections between prejudice and testimonial injustice. I argue that many cases of prejudicial (...) credibility deficits do not intrinsically harm speakers. Further, I suggest that prejudice is not necessary for harming speakers. I provide my own proposal on which testimonial injustice occurs when speaker‘s capacity as a giver of knowledge is interfered with in important ways. My proposal does not give prejudice any essential role. (shrink)

Die Begriffe "kollektive Amnesie" und "organisiertes Vergessen" werden oft verwendet, um Fälle zu beschreiben, in denen historisches Wissen, das im gesellschaftlichen, kollektiven Gedächtnis verfügbar sein sollte – weil es sich beispielsweise um gerechtigkeitsrelevantes Wissen handelt – aus unterschiedlichen, meist politisch problematischen Gründen nicht verfügbar ist. Beispielsweise, weil es gegebene Herrschaftsverhältnisse bedrohen würde. In diesem Beitrag soll gezeigt werden, weshalb diese Begriffe gerade in solchen Fällen irreführend sind. Insbesondere nationale Erinnerungspolitik kann oftmals aus Erkenntnispraktiken bestehen oder befördern, die nicht primär Vergessen (...) herbeiführen, sondern in der Gesellschaft verfügbares Wissen über bestimmte Themen verschleiern, verzerren und dadurch die gesellschaftliche Verständigung darüber erschweren oder sogar riskant macht; was vor allem in Fällen offensichtlich wird, in denen koloniale und genozidale Vergangenheiten systematisch geleugnet werden. So kann staatlich geförderte, systematische Genozidleugnung zwar durchaus selektiv zu „vergessen“ oder Wissensverlust führen. Doch viel problematischer aus ethischer und epistemischer Sicht ist, dass dadurch existierendes Wissen und Erinnerungen an die Verbrechen fortlaufend diskreditiert und unterdrückt werden. Genauer werden durch institutionelle und soziale Prozesse und Praktiken historische Fakten und andere Beweise, auf denen Erinnerung basiert, nicht nur ignoriert oder vernachlässigt, sondern vorsätzlich verschleiert, verzerrt und fehlinterpretiert. Es wird dadurch schädliches Unwissen und Unverständnis über die historischen Tatsachen und deren normative Bewertung generiert. Dadurch schafft Genozidleugnung nicht nur Wissenssubjekte, die nichts über den Genozid wissen – denn ein bloßer Wissensmangel könnte durch Bereitstellung des nötigen Wissens behoben werden – sondern das Thema verkennen, aktiv Tatsachen leugnen und dadurch die gesellschaftliche Verständigung über das Thema erschweren oder verunmöglichen. Um also besser zu verstehen, welche ethischen und epistemischen Konsequenzen systematische Genozidleugnung für Überlebende und Nachfahren, wie auch die Gesellschaft insgesamt mit sich bringt, schlage ich vor, systematische Genozidleugnung vielmehr als substanzielle Erkenntnispraxis und somit als Fall vorsätzlichen Unwissens zu verstehen. Wie ich am Beispiel der türkischen Leugnung des Genozids an den Armenier:innen illustrieren werde, wird der Genozid nicht vergessen, sondern erinnert und zugleich verkannt, mit der Absicht, Herrschaftsverhältnisse zu konsolidieren. Dadurch wird epistemische Ungerechtigkeit gefördert und aufrechterhalten. (shrink)

Literature on epistemic injustice has grown tremendously as an increasingly rich and diverse body of work in recent years. From the point of view of intercultural and anticolonial discussions, contemporary contributions have also helped to illuminate how epistemic injustice and other forms of cultural domination might be related to essential processes within the structures of colonial and racial supremacy. -/- This proposal aims to contribute to such relevant and illuminating discussions by focusing on the role that language and culture might (...) have in phenomena of epistemic injustice, particularly, hermeneutical injustice. Despite the central role played by semantics in epistemic injustice studies, the question about whether certain languages could also themselves be the recipients of epistemic injustice has been rather undertheorized. Simultaneously, recent movements to advocate for minority language rights, such as the Linguistic Human Rights Movement (LHR), raise important questions in this connection. -/- In the present paper, I argue that attending to the intercultural context reveals a new sort of hermeneutical injustice, one that, surprisingly, has never been articulated before. In particular, I am referring to a kind of HI that is essentially “linguistic” and “culture-specific”. I will be presenting two different subtypes for this kind of hermeneutical injustice: The first concerns the possibility of considering certain languages themselves as genuine objects of hermeneutical injustice,while the second has to do with certain specific culturally-established expressions or forms of talking. (shrink)

Literature on epistemic injustice has grown tremendously as an increasingly rich and diverse body of work in recent years. From the point of view of intercultural and anticolonial discussions, contemporary contributions have also helped to illuminate how epistemic injustice and other forms of cultural domination might be related to essential processes within the structures of colonial and racial supremacy. -/- This proposal aims to contribute to such relevant and illuminating discussions by focusing on the role that language and culture might (...) have in phenomena of epistemic injustice, particularly, hermeneutical injustice. Despite the central role played by semantics in epistemic injustice studies, the question about whether certain languages could also themselves be the recipients of epistemic injustice has been rather undertheorized. Simultaneously, recent movements to advocate for minority language rights, such as the Linguistic Human Rights Movement (LHR), raise important questions in this connection. -/- In the present paper, I argue that attending to the intercultural context reveals a new sort of hermeneutical injustice, one that, surprisingly, has never been articulated before. In particular, I am referring to a kind of HI that is essentially “linguistic” and “culture-specific”. I will be presenting two different subtypes for this kind of hermeneutical injustice: The first concerns the possibility of considering certain languages themselves as genuine objects of hermeneutical injustice, while the second has to do with certain specific culturally-established expressions or forms of talking. (shrink)

What is the relation between ignorance and epistemic injustice, i.e. that body of work in philosophical social epistemology that is said to identify cases where people are harmed in virtue of their status as knowers? That there is some relation between these two concepts and the phenomena they pick out has been affirmed from the perspective of epistemic injustice (Fricker 2016; Fricker and Jenkins 2017). I offer an alternative account of this relation which begins from the perspective of what philosophers (...) and sociologists term ‘the epistemology of ignorance’. I make a preliminary case against the de facto subsumption of ignorance within the frame and terms of epistemic injustice risked by ‘epistemic injustice-first’ analyses, while defending the claim that ‘ignorance-first’ analysis is better able to track phenomena salient to any analysis of the epistemology of domination, oppression, and injustice. (shrink)

Several recent authors have argued that children are subject to testimonial injustice in the same way as are women, Blacks, and several other social identity groups. Testimonial injustice is standardly conceptualized, following Miranda Fricker’s seminal account, as a wrongful credibility deficit. I argue that this concept of testimonial injustice is too narrow to capture testimonial injustice against children. There is good reason to think that children are less reliable testifiers than adults, so it is not necessarily wrong to assign a (...) credibility deficit to a child speaker, in the way it is wrong in the case of a female or black speaker. However, I argue that children are nevertheless subjected to testimonial injustice. Testimonial injustice against children is constituted primarily by a failure to actively inquire into assertions by children — that is, by a failure to patiently and reflectively engage in discourse with the child to discover what they may know. (shrink)

I am in almost complete agreement with Arlene Lo (2022). Child abuse victims surely suffer hermeneutical injustice if they are denied the concepts necessary to understand their experience, and that injustice is immensely harmful. In this reply, I offer an amendment to Lo’s use of Sally Haslanger’s distinction between manifest and operative concepts. I then raise some wider questions about the hermeneutical marginalization of children. The work that has so far been done on epistemic injustice against children has focused mostly (...) on testimonial injustice. It is time to give more attention to hermeneutical injustice. (shrink)

Miranda Fricker's original presentation of Hermeneutical Injustice left open theoretical choice points leading to criticisms and subsequent clarifications with the resulting dialectic appearing largely verbal. The absence of perspicuous exposition of hallmarks of Hermeneutical Injustice might suggest scenarios exhibiting some – but not all – such hallmarks are within its purview when they are not. The lack of clear hallmarks of Hermeneutical Injustice, moreover, obscures both the extent to which Fricker's proposed remedy Hermeneutical Justice – roughly, virtuous communicative practices – (...) adequately addresses the injustice, and the accuracy of criticisms suggesting that Hermeneutical Justice is insufficient to the task. In what follows, after briefly defending necessary and sufficient conditions for what I take to be the best candidate interpretation of Hermeneutical Injustice, I build on recent work on moral responsibility to construct and defend a rigorous explication of Hermeneutical Justice. (shrink)

In this paper, we discuss specific epistemic injustices suffered by gender minorities in the Philippines. We also show that societal changes have been evident throughout the years. We review some progressive Philippine Catholic communities' sustainable development efforts toward gender equality or toward the eradication of discrimination, marginalisation, and violence based on a person's sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression (SOGIE). Despite these epistemic injustices, we reveal that there are ways by which gender disorientations may be disrupted by progressive Philippine (...) Catholic groups and communities in the era of contemporary Christianities. (shrink)

This paper examines the philosophy of Jean-Francois Lyotard in relation to the analytic philosophy of deep disagreement. It argues not just that his work has relevance for this debate, but that it offers a challenge to the ‘epistemic paradigm’ present in its academic literature, represented by the two most prominent sets of theories within it – the ‘fundamental epistemic principle’ and ‘hinge epistemology’ views, arguably most strongly represented by Michael Lynch and Duncan Pritchard, respectively. Focussing on Lyotard’s text ‘The Differend’, (...) I show how its conceptual framework and philosophy of language locates the cause of deep disagreement not in the epistemic realm, but in things which do not fully submit to epistemic evaluation: the radically incomplete and open nature of language, and our increasingly politically pluralistic world full of incommensurable differences that do not always admit of rational resolution. Lyotard’s work calls for us to conceptualize deep disagreements as problems of politics, not epistemology, and to find new ways of dealing with disagreements that do not force a solution on them (which often comes at the cost of one party being wronged, or worse) and to create new ways of speaking so that our collective conceptual resources can be increased to better deal with specific cases of dispute. Lyotard’s relevance for the philosophy of deep disagreement is also further discussed with references to Miranda Fricker’s work on ‘epistemic injustice’, which Lyotard, in a different vocabulary, is also concerned with and analyses in ‘The Differend’. (shrink)

This article develops a new approach for theorizing about hermeneutical injustice. According to a dominant view, hermeneutical injustice results from a hermeneutical gap: one lacks the conceptual tools needed to make sense of, or to communicate, important social experience, where this lack is a result of an injustice in the background social methods used to determine hermeneutical resources. I argue that this approach is incomplete. It fails to capture an important species of hermeneutical injustice which doesn’t result from a lack (...) of hermeneutical resources, but from the overabundance of distorting and oppressive concepts which function to crowd-out, defeat, or preempt the application of a more accurate hermeneutical resource. I propose a broader analysis that better respects the dynamic relationship between hermeneutical resources and the social and political contexts in which they are implemented. (shrink)

Cultural code-switching concerns how we adjust our overall behaviours, manners of speaking, and appearance in response to a perceived change in our social environment. We defend the need to investigate cultural code-switching capacities in artificial intelligence systems. We explore a series of ethical and epistemic issues that arise when bringing cultural code-switching to bear on artificial intelligence. Building upon Dotson’s (2014) analysis of testimonial smothering, we discuss how emerging technologies in AI can give rise to epistemic oppression, and specifically, a (...) form of self-silencing that we call “cultural smothering.” By leaving the sociodynamic features of cultural code-switching unaddressed, AI systems risk negatively impacting already-marginalised social groups by widening opportunity gaps and further entrenching social inequalities. (shrink)

I argue that according to Kristie Dotson, non-epistemic motives such as social, ethical and material harm can motivate a speaker to smother her testimony. I present this exegesis of Dotson's view of testimonial smothering in response to J. L. Lee's and Trystan Goetze's reply to my commentary of Lee's view that anticipatory epistemic injustice is distinct from testimonial smothering.