Slide 1
People can be treated unfairly as sources of knowledge
Epistemic injustice concerns unfair treatment connected with a person's capacity to know or communicate knowledge. The harm is more specific than ordinary disagreement.
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Miranda Fricker's influential distinction separates credibility harms from gaps in shared interpretive resources. It directs attention both to individual encounters and to the social conditions under which experiences become intelligible.
Slide 2
Prejudice can make a listener discount a speaker
Testimonial injustice occurs when prejudice makes a speaker seem less credible than they deserve. The listener discounts what is said because of social identity.
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Imagine a meeting where the same technical observation is dismissed from one participant and accepted from another because of a stereotype. The problem is not that every speaker must always be believed equally.
Slide 3
Exclusion can leave people without shared ways to describe experience
Hermeneutical injustice occurs when exclusion leaves people unfairly disadvantaged by gaps in shared ways to understand and describe experience.
The problem is not simply that an experience is unfamiliar.
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An unfamiliar experience is not automatically an injustice. The analysis asks whose participation in developing public concepts has been restricted and how that exclusion impairs the ability to communicate or understand a significant experience.
Slide 4
Better listening may also require broader participation
Listening carefully can address some credibility failures. Shared conceptual gaps may also require changes in who contributes to inquiry and public discussion.
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Giving someone uninterrupted speaking time will not alone solve a lack of recognized categories for describing what happened. Different mechanisms of exclusion call for different responses, even when both appear in one conversation.
Slide 5
Fair credibility judgments still examine evidence
Taking speakers seriously remains compatible with examining evidence. The task is to make credibility judgments responsive to relevant reasons instead of prejudice.
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In the meeting example, comparing the actual technical evidence is better than reversing the stereotype and treating one identity as automatically correct. Fair inquiry requires participation and standards of assessment together.
Sources
- Feminist Social Epistemology
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Epistemic Injustice
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy