Comments on Miranda Fricker's Epistemic Injustice

Episteme 7 (2):138-150 (2010)
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Abstract

Miranda Fricker's Epistemic Injustice is a wide-ranging and important book on a much-neglected topic: the injustice involved in cases in which distrust arises out of prejudice. Fricker has some important things to say about this sort of injustice: its nature, how it arises, what sustains it, and the unhappy outcomes associated with it for the victim and the society in which it takes place. In the course of developing this account, Fricker also develops an account of the epistemology of testimony. Focusing my attention on that account, my central claims are two. First, at least some of Fricker's arguments against existing (inferentialist and non-inferentialist) views in the epistemology of testimony are less than fully persuasive, and the (non-inferentialist) view she ends up endorsing is not all that different from the views she criticizes. Second, her reasons for harboring doubts regarding the role of a principle of default entitlement within a non-inferentialist account are not persuasive. Neither of these claims affects the overall argument Fricker is trying to run. Rather, they suggest that Fricker may have picked more fights than she needed to in the epistemology of testimony. If so, we have reason to detach Fricker's important work on epistemic injustice from some of the details of the story she tells regarding the epistemology of testimony.

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Sanford Goldberg
Northwestern University

References found in this work

Content preservation.Tyler Burge - 1993 - Philosophical Review 102 (4):457-488.
The Place of Testimony in the Fabric of Knowledge and Justification.Robert Audi - 1997 - American Philosophical Quarterly 34 (4):405 - 422.
The social character of testimonial knowledge.Paul Faulkner - 2000 - Journal of Philosophy 97 (11):581-601.
Monitoring and Anti-Reductionism in the Epistemology of Testimony.Sanford Goldberg & David Henderson - 2006 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 72 (3):600 - 617.
Why believe what people say?Leslie Stevenson - 1993 - Synthese 94 (3):429 - 451.

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