Addressing Testimonial Injustice: Being Ignored and Being Rejected

I examine a distinctive kind of injustice which arises when people are maltreated in their capacity as potential conveyors of knowledge. Extant discussions of testimonial injustice usually assume that the injustice occurs when an audience ignores the claims made by a testifier. This assumption obscures the fact that there are occasions where the best framework for thinking about testimonial injustice is that of inappropriately rejecting, not ignoring, those claims; the injustice differs in these two kinds of case. Light is thrown on the injustice involved in inappropriate rejection by examining the epistemic import of the distinctive second-person interrelations in play in such testimonial interactions