Abstract

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.