In her book Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, Miranda Fricker argues that there is a distinctly epistemic kind of injustice, which she calls testimonial injustice, resulting from identity-prejudicial credibility deficit - identity prejudice causing a hearer to give a deflated level of credibility to a speaker's word. She argues that testimonial injustice is correctable through hearers developing a capacity for self-correcting for it within a virtue-epistemological framework. In this essay I examine Fricker's argument, and conclude that her exposition of identity-prejudicial credibility deficit is sound but that she has not demonstrated either that testimonial injustice is a distinctly testimonial phenomenon, or that identity-prejudicial credibility deficit is a distinctly epistemic phenomenon, or how a virtue-epistemological framework might be successfully employed as a corrective methodology. I further suggest that her conception of testimony as distinctly evidential is too narrow to be applied to everyday instances of identity-prejudicial credibility deficit, and should be reconfigured in a broader framework.

Miranda Fricker distinguishes two senses in which testimonial injustice is epistemic. In theprimarysense, it is epistemic because it harms the victim as a giver of knowledge. In thesecondarysense, it is epistemic, more narrowly, because it harms the victim as a possessor of knowledge. Her characterization of testimonial injustice has raised the following objection: testimonial injustice is not always anepistemicinjustice, in the narrow, secondary sense, as it does not always entail that the victim is harmed as a knowledge-possessor. By adopting a perspective based on Robert Brandom's normative expressivism, we respond to this objection by arguing that there is a close connection, conceptual and constitutive rather than merely causal, between the primary and the secondary epistemic harms of testimonial injustice, such that testimonial injustice always involves both kinds of epistemic harm. We do so by exploring the logic and functioning of belief and knowledge ascriptions in orde...

The concept of testimonial injustice (TI) has been expanded considerably since Fricker's groundbreaking original formulation. Testimonial void (TV), as well as other kinds of TI identified in the last decade, encourage the idea that the virtue of testimonial justice (TJ) is not the appropriate remedy to battle against injustice in our testimonial exchanges. This paper contributes to the existing literature on the limitations of TJ as the remedy for TI by drawing attention to its shortcomings in the context of other kinds of TI. By contrast, I propose further engaging epistemically with the other (EE) as a corrective to injustice in our testimonial exchanges. I understand EE as a practice in which information regarding epistemic injustice, strategies to fight it and skills training play the leading roles. If the problem lies in lack of appropriate epistemic interaction between knowers, we need to train ourselves to do what we fail to do. Given that we are in the domain of testimony, EE essentially amounts to engaging further with the other in conversation. In the process, EE sheds light on the need for second-order change to fight TI, as enacting EE would require the transformation of our concepts of testimony and credibility.

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.