This essay argues that prediction markets, as one approach for aggregating dispersed private information, may not only be praised for their epistemic accuracy. They also feature characteristics that are morally desirable from the point of view of epistemic justice. Notably, they are a promising approach when we are trying to address testimonial injustice. The impersonality of market transactions effectively tackles the issue of identity prejudice, which underlies many forms of testimonial injustice. This is not to (...) say that prediction markets do not pose challenges for epistemic justice of their own like the risk of excluding knowers based on ability to pay. Or, in light of identity prejudice’s systematicity, the risk of discouraging some knowers because of differences in education or social background that lead to a certain unease when faced with prediction markets. The essay discusses these challenges, concedes limitations but also offers countermeasures to certain worries – e.g. hosting prediction markets on a play-money basis. Throughout, the essay addresses the question of the potential scope of using prediction markets for epistemic purposes, notably by means of the practical example of a prediction market for monetary policy. (shrink)

This chapter has two aims. First, I distinguish between two forms of testimonial injustice: identity-based testimonial injustice and content-based testimonial injustice. Second, I utilize this distinction to develop a partial explanation for the persistent lack of diverse practitioners in academic philosophy. Specifically, I argue that both identity-based and content-based testimonial injustice are prevalent in philosophical discourse and that this prevalence introduces barriers to participation for those targeted. (...) As I show, the dual and compounding effects of identity-based and content-based testimonial injustice in philosophy plausibly contribute to a lack of diversity in the social identities of practitioners and the discourses in which practitioners are engaged. (shrink)

Machine learning (ML) systems play an increasingly relevant role in medicine and healthcare. As their applications move ever closer to patient care and cure in clinical settings, ethical concerns about the responsibility of their use come to the fore. I analyse an aspect of responsible ML use that bears not only an ethical but also a significant epistemic dimension. I focus on ML systems’ role in mediating patient–physician relations. I thereby consider how ML systems may silence patients’ voices and relativise (...) the credibility of their opinions, which undermines their overall credibility status without valid moral and epistemic justification. More specifically, I argue that withholding credibilitydue tohow ML systems operate can be particularly harmful to patients and, apart from adverse outcomes, qualifies as a form of testimonial injustice. I make my case for testimonial injustice in medical ML by considering ML systems currently used in the USA to predict patients’ risk of misusing opioids (automated Prediction Drug Monitoring Programmes, PDMPs for short). I argue that the locus of testimonial injustice in ML-mediated medical encounters is found in the fact that these systems are treated asmarkers of trustworthinesson which patients’ credibility is assessed. I further show how ML-based PDMPs exacerbate and further propagate social inequalities at the expense of vulnerable social groups. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

Much of the recent work on the nature of testimonial injustice holds that a hearer who fails to accord sufficient credibility to a speaker’s testimony, owing to identity prejudice, can thereby wrong that speaker. What is it to wrong someone in this way? This paper offers an account of the wrong at the heart of testimonial injustice that locates it in a failure of interpersonal justifiability. On the account I develop, one that draws directly from (...) T. M. Scanlon’s moral contractualist framework, a hearer who fails to accord sufficient credibility to a speaker, owing to identity prejudice, cannot justify his response to that speaker, insofar as the speaker can reasonably reject principles that would permit the hearer to prejudicially discount the speaker’s testimony. I argue that my account can better illuminate the idea, shared among many philosophers, that testimonial injustice centrally involves some kind of failure, on the hearer’s part, to appropriately recognize the speaker. In contractualist terms, this consists in a failure of mutual recognition—a failure to acknowledge the speaker as having standing to co-determine the terms on which the hearer and speaker, as epistemic agents, are to engage with each other in testimonial exchanges. (shrink)

In the debate on epistemic injustice, it is generally assumed that testimonial injustice as one form of epistemic injustice cannot be committed (fully) deliberately or intentionally because it involves unconscious identity prejudices. Drawing on the case of sexual violence against refugees in European refugee camps, this paper argues that there is a form of testimonial injustice—willful testimonial injustice—that is deliberate. To do so, the paper argues (a) that the hearer intentionally utilizes (...) negative identity prejudices for a particular purpose and (b) that the hearer is aware of the fact that the intentionally used prejudices are in fact prejudices. Furthermore, the paper shows how testimonial injustice relates to recognition failures both in terms of a causal as well as a constitutive claim. In fact, introducing willful testimonial injustice can support the constitutive claim of such a relation that has so far received little attention. Besides arguing for a novel form of testimonial injustice and contributing to the recent debate on the relation between epistemic injustice and recognition failures, this paper is also motivated by the attempt to draw attention to the inhumane conditions for refugees at the border of Europe as well as elsewhere. (shrink)

Testimonial injustice occurs when bias against the credibility of certain social identities results in discounting of their contributions to deliberations. In this analysis, we describe testimonial injustice against women and how it figures in macroallocation procedure. We show how it harms women as deliberators, undermines the objective of inclusivity in macroallocation and affects the justice of resource distributions. We suggest that remedial action is warranted in order to limit the effects of testimonial injustice in (...) this context, especially on marginalised and disadvantaged groups, and propose three areas for action, whose implementation might feasibly be achieved by those immediately involved in macroallocation. (shrink)

Based on Fricker’s conceptualization of epistemic injustice and moral justice forgiveness, I propose an analysis of the relationship between epistemic injustice and redundant blame. Situated in the Colombian post-conflict context, it is argued that the negative identity prejudices applied to former guerrilla members produce a kind of epis- temic injustice and redundant blame that yields structural violence. It is suggested that a proper understanding of JEP and the Truth Commission’s work, as well as the concept (...) of transitional justice, would work as interpretative resources to favour the ex-rebels testimonial credibility. I conclude that the exercise of power which manipulates the in- terpretative resources available for a collective understanding of practices of justice and forgiveness in the post-conflict, is the cause of the structural violence against ex-rebels. (shrink)

Harcourt argues that in clinical contexts, children and young people with mental health illness can experience epistemic, specifically testimonial, injustice when their perspectives are unjustifiably discounted by health service providers.1 Our goal in this commentary was to illustrate how caregivers, a critical component of CYP treatment triad, can also engage in testimonial injustice towards CYP patients. Testimonial injustice occurs when one suffers a credibility deficit and that credibility deficit is based on prejudice.2 Harcourt (...) expands Fricker’s account of testimonial injustice by arguing that for CYPs, the credibility deficits attributed to them by clinicians, for example, may result from epistemic arrogance in that CYPs are viewed as having unreliable knowledge about their condition. Harcourt writes: ‘Being a CYP is treated as a heuristic for epistemic unreliability across a wide range of domains’, including clinical settings. Harcourt’s expansion of Fricker’s account thus includes epistemic arrogance as an alternative necessary condition, in addition to prejudice, to apply the concept of testimonial injustice. We think Harcourt’s argument can also be extended to caregivers, who are central to the CYP treatment triad. We illustrate how this may be the case by drawing from research we conducted to understand the perspectives of clinicians and prospective families, both caregivers and paediatric patients with obsessive–compulsive disorder about the possibility of …. (shrink)

Resumen: Una de las formas más comunes y menos estudiadas de parcialidad judicial subjetiva es la disminución de la credibilidad otorgada a un testigo debido a un prejuicio identitario implícito del agente judicial. En la epistemología social, este fenómeno ha sido estudiado bajo la rúbrica de la injusticia testimonial. En este ensayo mostramos que para determinar la ocurrencia de un caso de injusticia testimonial en el derecho se deben cumplir tres condiciones que son imposibles de verificar empíricamente y (...) que están basadas en presupuestos psicológicos que han sido puestos en duda en años recientes. Sin la posibilidad de verificar estas condiciones, estamos frente a un tipo de parcialidad judicial indetectable. En su lugar, ofrecemos una nueva forma de entender la injusticia testimonial en el derecho como un fenómeno más general que describe una tendencia comportamental prejuiciosa recurrente por parte de un agente judicial. Entendida de este modo, la injusticia testimonial es completamente verificable. -/- Abstract: One of the most common and least studied forms of subjective judicial partiality is the credibility deficit suffered by a witness due to an implicit identity prejudice in a judicial agent. Social epistemologists have studied this form of partiality under the rubric, “testimonial injustice.” In this essay we argue that to verify the occurrence of a singular instance of testimonial injustice in law three facts must be established, none of which can be established with any degree of confidence. Furthermore, all of them are based on psychological suppositions that have been recently discredited. Without the possibility of establishing these facts, we end up with an undetectable form of subjective judicial partiality. In its place, we offer a new way of understanding testimonial injustice in law as a general phenomenon that describes a recurrent pattern of prejudiced behavior in a judicial agent. Under this characterization, testimonial injustice becomes empirically verifiable. (shrink)

This paper argues that epistemic errors rooted in group- or identity- based biases, especially those pertaining to disability, are undertheorized in the literature on medical error. After sketching dominant taxonomies of medical error, we turn to the field of social epistemology to understand the role that epistemic schemas play in contributing to medical errors that disproportionately affect patients from marginalized social groups. We examine the effects of this unequal distribution through a detailed case study of ableism. There are (...) four primary mechanisms through which the epistemic schema of ableism distorts communication between nondisabled physicians and disabled patients: testimonial injustice, epistemic overconfidence, epistemic erasure, and epistemic derailing. Measures against epistemic injustices in general and against schema-based medical errors in particular are ultimately issues of justice that must be better addressed at all levels of health care practice. (shrink)

In her 2007 book Epistemic Injustice Miranda Fricker identifies testimonial injustice as a case where a hearer assigns lower credibility to a speaker due to “identity prejudice.” Fricker considers testimonial injustice as a form of epistemic injustice since it wrongs the speaker “in her capacity as a knower.” Fricker recommends developing the virtue of “testimonial justice” to address testimonial injustice. She takes this virtue to involve training in a “distinctly reflexive (...) critical social awareness.” The main goal of this article is to argue that Fricker's proposed training falls short of the target and that a cultivation of the capacity of being present—the ability to be mindful—would be necessary to develop the critical social awareness that Fricker requires. I want to explore the impact of compassion and open‐mindedness—virtues cultivated in mindfulness training—on testimonial justice specifically and virtue epistemology generally. In attempting to develop an epistemic account informed by mindfulness—a mindful epistemology—my primary goal is to bring Buddhist insights on how to anchor the mind by training it to be fully present and attentive into the focus of mainstream Western philosophy. More specifically, I argue that doing so allows us to appreciate the crucial role that a prediscursive level of cultivation plays in the development of testimonial justice. (shrink)

Human beings as objects, and we are objects inter alia, offer information, even knowledge. And yet, in a society marked by pervasive identity prejudice, even objects do not offer neutral facts. Here, I argue that the harms imposed on those who suffer testimonial injustices cannot be sufficiently understood through the ethical lens of objectification. Such persons are not simply objectified, not simply treated as mere sources of information rather than as informants. Even as objects (not mere objects), they (...) are often unable to testify on their own behalf or testify to true facts of the matter. Rather than follow Miranda Fricker’s argument that testimonial injustices are acts of objectification, I argue that they are better understood as acts of what Ann Cahill calls derivatization. A re-examination of Fricker’s account of the wrong of testimonial injustice as derivatizing rather than objectifying clarifies the wrong of epistemic injustice, reinforces the mutuality of testimonial exchanges where both the speaker and listener are actively engaged and obligated to participate well to succeed, and opens up a discussion of how even when being treated as a source of information, informants can be mistreated. (shrink)

Miranda Fricker distinguishes two senses in which testimonial injustice is epistemic. In the primary sense, it is epistemic because it harms the victim as a giver of knowledge. In the secondary sense, 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 an epistemic injustice, 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 order to highlight three ways in which the secondary epistemic harm caused by testimonial injustice crystallizes: it undermines the epistemic agency of the victim, the epistemic friction necessary for knowledge, and the possibility of occupying particular epistemic nodes. (shrink)

Several recent authors have argued that children are subject to testimonial injustice in the same way as are women, Blacks, and several other social identity groups. Testimonial injustice is standardly conceptualized, following Miranda Fricker’s seminal account, as a wrongful credibility deficit. I argue that this concept of testimonial injustice is too narrow to capture testimonial injustice against children. There is good reason to think that children are less reliable testifiers than adults, (...) so it is not necessarily wrong to assign a credibility deficit to a child speaker, in the way it is wrong in the case of a female or black speaker. However, I argue that children are nevertheless subjected to testimonial injustice. Testimonial injustice against children is constituted primarily by a failure to actively inquire into assertions by children — that is, by a failure to patiently and reflectively engage in discourse with the child to discover what they may know. (shrink)

The literature on epistemic injustice has thus far confined the concept of testimonial injustice to speech expressions such as inquiring, discussing, deliberating, and, above all, telling. I propose that it is time to broaden the horizons of testimonial injustice to include a wider range of expressions. Controversially, the form of communication I have in mind is non-verbal expression. Non-verbal expression is a vital, though often overlooked, form of communication, particularly for people who have certain neurocognitive (...) disorders. Dependency upon non-verbal expression is a common feature of some forms of neurocognitive disorders such as ‘intellectual disabilities’, autism and late-stage dementia. According to the narrow definition of testimonial injustice currently championed in the literature, people who express non-verbally are exempt from testimonial injustice. However, when we consider cases where meaningful communications from non-verbal people are dismissed or ignored in virtue of identity prejudice, there seems to be a distinct testimonial harm at play. Using late-stage dementia as a case study, I argue that the definition of testimonial injustice should be expanded to include all communicative practices, whether verbal or non-verbal, to encompass the epistemic harms inflicted upon some of the most marginalised in our society. (shrink)

In my paper entitled ‘Testimonial injustice in medical machine learning’,1 I argued that machine learning (ML)-based Prediction Drug Monitoring Programmes (PDMPs) could infringe on patients’ epistemic and moral standing inflicting a testimonial injustice.2 I am very grateful for all the comments the paper received, some of which expand on it while others take a more critical view. This response addresses two objections raised to my consideration of ML-induced testimonial injustice in order to clarify (...) the position taken in the paper. The first maintains that my critical stance toward ML-based PDMPs idealises standard medical practice. Moreover, it claims that the ML-induced testimonial injustice I discuss is not substantially different from situations in which it emerges in human–human interactions. The second claims that my analysis does not establish a link to issues of automation bias, even if these are to be considered the core of testimonial injustice in ML. In the following, I address each objection in turn. Gillett3 argues that my critical stance towards using risk prediction tools such as PDMPs implies the idealisation of standard (ie, non-ML-mediated) modes of clinical practice. Considering certain uses of ML in a different setting, that is, psychiatry, the author goes as far as claiming that ‘traditional models of clinical practice in psychiatry are far from a utopia, free from epistemic injustice, which Pozzi’s argument risks proposing’. Since this statement does not represent what I intend to suggest, I am glad to have the possibility to clarify …. (shrink)

A theme running through Katherine Hawley’s recent works on trust and trustworthiness is that thinking about the relations between these and Miranda Fricker’s notion of testimonial injustice offers a perspective from which we can see several limitations of Fricker’s own account of testimonial injustice. This paper clarifies the aspects of Fricker’s account that Hawley’s criticisms target, focusing on her objections to Fricker’s proposal that its primary harm involves a kind of epistemic objectification and her characterization of (...) testimonial injustice in terms of prejudicial credibility deficits. I also offer an assessment of the potency of Hawley’s objections, concluding that they do point to genuine limitations of Fricker’s account, but that we can appreciate Hawley’s points without adopting her trust-centric approach to testimonial injustice, or her specific commitment-based accounts of trust and trustworthiness. However, in the last section I examine the positive picture of testimonial injustice that emerges from Hawley’s discussion of unequally distributed obstacles to both being trustworthy and maintaining a reputation for trustworthy testimony in her recent book How To Be Trustworthy, considering how this picture contrasts with Fricker’s account and where it might have important affinities with other accounts in the literature. (shrink)

Testimonial injustice, in its most pernicious form, subjects a speaker to identity-prejudicial deficits in the credibility that is rightly due their testimony. This paper compares two prominent accounts of testimonial injustice to determine which achieves the best understanding of the phenomenon and how it can be combatted. Where Fricker’s focus is limited to strictly epistemic wrongs, Medina’s analysis extends to the pertinent non-epistemic elements central to the injustice. Thus, Medina’s methodology is better-suited to the (...) task of phenomenological analysis, and positions us to achieve a more complete understanding of what injustice has been perpetrated, and of how to resist it. (shrink)

Miranda Fricker maintains that testimonial injustice is a matter of credibility deficit, not excess. In this article, I argue that this restricted characterization of testimonial injustice is too narrow. I introduce a type of identity-prejudicial credibility excess that harms its targets qua knowers and transmitters of knowledge. I show how positive stereotyping and prejudicially inflated credibility assessments contribute to the continued epistemic oppression of marginalized knowers. In particular, I examine harms such as typecasting, compulsory representation, (...) and epistemic exploitation and consider what hearers are obligated to do in response to these injustices. I argue that because epistemic harms to marginalized knowers also arise from prejudicially inflated assessments of their credibility, the virtue of testimonial justice must be revised to remedy them. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to identify the wrong that is done in all cases of testimonial injustice, if there is one. Miranda Fricker (2007) proposes one account of this distinctive wrong, and Gaile Pohlhaus Jr. (2014) offers another. I think neither works. Nor does an account based on giving due respect to the testifier's epistemic competence. Nor does an account based on exposing the testifier to substantial risk of harm. Rachel Fraser (2023) describes a (...) further account, and the proposal I favour is a slight amendment of this. (shrink)

Writings on epistemic injustice have assessed how people can be harmed in their capacity as knowers when they are a racial minority, a woman, disabled and so on. But what about when they belong to the working class? This paper is an initial attempt to understand why class has so far received limited attention within writings on epistemic injustice and to respond to these reasons. It focuses on how testimonial and hermeneutic injustices specifically harm workers in ways (...) distinctive from the harm one might suffer due to other social identities. It does this by drawing attention to the special case of industrial strike action and the play of conceptual resources and credibility assessments that influence the action’s success. Additionally, it provides a first-time exposition for social epistemologists on what I term the ‘class compositional approach’, derived from 1960-70s Italian labour struggles. This approach, I argue, succeeds in evading the criticism of class reductionism while developing recent philosophical work on class-based injustice. (shrink)

Testimonial injustice occurs when hearers attribute speakers a credibility deficit because of an identity prejudice and consequently dismiss speakers’ testimonial assertions. Various philosophers explain testimonial injustice by appealing to interpersonal norms arising within testimonial exchanges. When conversational participants violate these interpersonal norms, they generate second-personal epistemic harms, harming speakers as epistemic agents. This focus on testimony, however, neglects how systematically misevaluating speakers’ knowledge affects conversational participants more generally. When hearers systematically misevaluate speakers’ conversational (...) competence because of entrenched assumptions about what speakers know, I call these conversational epistemic injustices. I argue the same epistemic harm in testimonial injustice arises for non-assertoric speech acts, generating conversational epistemic injustices. For across speech acts, deflated knowledge attributions create second-personal harms that prevent speakers from using their knowledge in linguistic exchanges, limiting their epistemic agency. These harms however are not reducible to linguistic harms, (e.g.,) silencing or discursive injustice. This article applies insight from how second-personal epistemic harm arises in testimonial exchanges to conversational exchanges more generally, demonstrating that epistemic injustices arise beyond testimonial exchanges and contexts of inquiry because deflated knowledge attributions undermine general conversational norms requiring participants assume each other’s conversational competence, generating conversational epistemic injustices. (shrink)

Rae Langton and Jennifer Hornsby provide accounts of how pornography silences women by appealing to J.L. Austin's account of speech-acts. Since their accounts focus only on instances of silencing where the hearer does not grasp the type of speech-act the speaker intends to perform, their accounts of silencing do not generalize to explain silencing that arises from what Miranda Fricker calls “testimonial injustice.” I argue that silencing arising from testimonial injustice can only be explained by what (...) we shall call the dialectical account of assertion, according to which assertion is the undertaking of a commitment in reasoned discourse. In doing so, I show that accounts of assertion based on speakers' intentions, proposals to common ground, and constitutive norms do not provide the necessary framework to explain silencing within the context of testimonial injustice. Having shown the strength of the dialectical account in explaining silencing, I conclude that the dialectical account also provides a way to remedy some instances of silencing arising from testimonial injustice providing further evidence that the dialectical account is the correct account of assertion. (shrink)

Testimonial injustices occur when individuals from particular social groups are systematically and persistently given less credibility in their claims merely because of their group identity. Recent “pluralistic” approaches to folk psychology, by taking into account the role of stereotypes in how we understand others, have the power to explain how and why cases of testimonial injustice occur. If how we make sense of others’ behavior depends on assumptions about how individuals from certain groups think and act, (...) this can explain why speakers are given different degrees of credibility depending on their group identity. For example, if people assume that women are more emotional than men, they will systematically give less credibility to women’s claims. This explanation involves three empirical claims: people assume that women are more emotional than men, people assume that emotionality hinders credibility, and people give less credibility to women’s claims. While extant studies provide some support for and, no study to date has directly tested. In two different studies, we tested all these three claims. The results from both studies provide support for, as we found significant negative correlations between emotionality and credibility attributions. However, in contrast to what some accounts of folk psychology posit, we did not find any significant difference in people’s attributions of emotionality and credibility towards women versus men speakers. We hope that our studies here pave the way for further empirical studies testing the phenomenon of testimonial injustice in a context-sensitive way, in order to have a better understanding of the conditions in which testimonial injustices are likely to happen. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer an expansionist view of the Frickerian central case of testimonial injustice, citing examples from the South Asian context. To defend this expansionist position, I provide an argument in three parts. First, I argue that credibility deficit and credibility excess are entangled with each other in such a way that often, one produces the other. Secondly, I contend that we should not say that systematic testimonial injustice is a consequence of credibility deficit (...) only because of the entanglement between them. I also contend that for being the central case of testimonial injustice, identity prejudice should not be necessarily negative; it can be positive as well. Propounding a twofold condition of the status of a knower, the last part claims that testimonial injustice occurs when one of the two conditions remains unmet. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this paper I argue that there are possible cases in which the demands of justice and the norms of epistemology cannot be simultaneously satisfied. I will bring out these normative clashes in terms of the now-familiar phenomenon of testimonial injustice (Fricker 2007). While the resulting argument is very much in the spirit of two other sorts of argument that have received sustained attention recently – arguments alleging epistemic partiality in friendship, and arguments that motivate the hypothesis (...) of moral encroachment on the epistemic – I suggest how the argument from epistemic injustice differs from, and is stronger than, both of those arguments. The implications of the present argument are several: we must (i) reconceive the role of identity-prejudice in testimonial injustice, (ii) modify the way we think about how justice and epistemology bear on testimonial transactions, and (iii) understand the mutuality of speech exchanges in ways that do not privilege any particular participant’s epistemic perspective. (shrink)

Some claim slavery did not harm the descendants of slaves since, without slavery, its descendants would never have been born and a life worth living, even one including the subsequent harms of past slavery, is preferable to never having been born at all. This creates a classic puzzle known as the non-identity argument, applied to reject the validity of claims for historic justice based on harms to descendants of victims of historic wrongs: since descendants are never harmed by (...) historic wrongs, they have no right to rectification. This conclusion is unintuitive. This article explains the nature of harm involved in historic injustice, overcoming the hurdle the non-identity argument poses to historic justice claims. Historic injustice and the harms it generates are best understood as group harms. Claims for historic justice can be grounded in harms currently living individuals suffer as a function of the harms their group or community currently suffers as a consequence of historic wrongs. One form of harm, constitutive harm, differs from the aggregative account of harm assumed by the non-identity argument and is immune to it. It is the type of harm people suffer as members of certain historically wronged groups and communities. Therefore, the constitutive harm people suffer in cases of historic injustice may serve as a basis for justifying claims for historic justice. (shrink)

Genocide remembrance is a complex epistemological/ethical achievement, whereby survivors and descendants give meaning to the past in the quest for both personal-historical and social-historical truth. This paper offers an argument of epistemic injustice specifically as it occurs in relation to practices of (individual and collective) genocide remembrance. In particular, I argue that under conditions of genocide denialism, understood as collective genocide misremembrance and memory distortion, genocide survivors and descendants are confronted with hermeneutical oppression. Drawing on Sue Campbell’s relational, reconstructive (...) account of remembering, I argue that genocide denialism involves disrespectful challenges to memory, which systematically misrecognize rememberers. Adopting the case of Turkey’s denialism of the Armenian genocide, I discuss two interrelated mechanisms through which this can happen: i) through the systematic portrayal of survivors and descendants as vicious rememberers, and ii) through distortions of the very concept of ‘genocide’. Based on this, I show how hermeneutical and testimonial injustice are crucially interrelated when it comes to “contested” memories of historical injustice and the biographical testimony it gives rise to. (shrink)

One of the recent attempts to explore epistemic dimensions of forced displacement focuses on the institution of gender-based asylum and hopes to detect forms of epistemic injustice within assessments of gender related asylum applications. Following this attempt, I aim in this paper to demonstrate how the institution of gender-based asylum is structured to produce epistemic injustice at least in the forms of testimonial injustice and contributory injustice. This structural limit becomes visible when we (...) realize how the institution of asylum is formed to provide legitimacy to the institutional comfort the respective migration courts and boards enjoy. This institutional comfort afforded to migration boards and courts by the existing asylum regimes in the current order of nation-states leads to a systemic prioritization of state actors’ epistemic resources rather than that of applicants, which, in turn, results in epistemic injustice and impacts the determination of applicants’ refugee status. (shrink)

There is a growing awareness that there are many subtle forms of exclusion and partiality that affect the correct workings of a judicial system. The concept of epistemic injustice, introduced by the philosopher Miranda Fricker, is a useful conceptual tool to understand forms of judicial partiality that often go undetected. In this paper, we present Fricker’s original theory and some of the applications of the concept of epistemic injustice in legal processes. In particular, we want to show that (...) the seed planted by Fricker has flourished into a rich field of study in which the concept is used to analyze many different phenomena in law, not always following the original characterization provided by her. This has led to a distinction between what we will call the narrow version of the concept, which is closer to Fricker’s original account, and the wider version of epistemic injustice, which is a more controversial notion because it is always on the verge of morphing into other well-known concepts like sexism, racial discrimination, oppression, silencing, and gaslighting. We will show that the value of the narrow version is mostly theoretical, and that in order to use the concept of epistemic injustice one must adopt a more liberal understanding of it. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to adapt Miranda Fricker’s concept of testimonial injustice to cases of what I call “argumentative injustice”: those cases where an arguer’s social identity brings listeners to place too much or little credibility in an argument. My recommendation is to adopt a stance of “metadistrust”—we ought to distrust our inclinations to trust or distrust members of stereotyped groups.

Miranda Fricker has introduced the insightful notion of epistemic injustice in the philosophical debate, thus bridging concerns of social epistemology with questions that arise in the area of social and cultural studies. I concentrate my analysis of her treatment of testimonial injustice. According to Fricker, the central cases of testimonial injustice are cases of identity injustice in which hearers rely on stereotypes to assess the credibility of their interlocutors. I try here to broaden (...) the analysis of that testimonial injustice by indicating other mechanisms that bias our credibility assessments. In my perspective, the use of identity stereotypes is just one case among many biases in our credibility judgments. (shrink)

C. Thi Nguyen's (2020) recent account of echo chambers as social epistemic structures that actively exclude outsiders’ voices has sparked debate on the connection between echo chambers and epistemic injustice (Santos 2021; Catala 2021; Elzinga 2021).In this paper I am mainly concerned with the connection between echo chambers and testimonial injustice, understood as an instance whereby a speaker receives less epistemic credibility than they deserve, due to a prejudice in the hearer (Fricker 2007). In her reconstruction of (...) the types of testimonial injustice, Catala implicitly equates incidental testimonial injustice as resulting from epistemic prejudice and systematic testimonial injustice as resulting from identity prejudice. As I will argue, there as certain cases that fall in between these interpretations, namely instances of incidental testimonial injustice, whereby the impact on the speaker is localized, but where the credibility deficit nevertheless results from identity prejudice. One example of how this can manifest is the structural distrust against health-care experts in anti-vaccination echo-chambers, wherein said experts’ testimony is dismissed due to unwarranted assumptions regarding their motives qua their social type. To understand the importance and severity of the testimonial injustices in echo chambers, we need to look beyond the specific harms that are done to the targeted speakers and the immediate loss of knowledge, but also take into account the consequences for fairness in public deliberation—the latter being a fundamental condition for procedural democratic legitimacy. (shrink)

This article introduces the concept of epistemic positioning to theorize the relationship between identity-based epistemic judgements and the reproduction of social inequalities, including those of gender and ethnicity/race, in the academia. Acts of epistemic positioning entail the evaluation of knowledge claims based on the speaker’s stated or inferred identity. These judgements serve to limit the scope of the knowledge claim, making it more likely speakers will be denied recognition or credit. The four types of epistemic positioning (...) – bounding (reducing a knowledge claim to elements of personal identity), domaining (reducing a knowledge claim to discipline or field associated with identity), non-attribution (using the claim without recognizing the author) and appropriation (presenting the claim as one’s own) – are mutually reinforcing. Given the growing importance of visibility and recognition in the context of increasing competition and insecurity in academic employment, these practices play a role in the ability of underrepresented groups to remain in the academic profession. (shrink)

Although research on epistemic injustice has focused on the effects of prejudice in epistemic exchanges, the account of prejudice that emerges in Fricker’s (2007) view is not completely clear. In particular, I claim that the epistemic role of prejudice in the structure of testimonial justification is still in need of a satisfactory explanation. What special epistemic power does prejudice exercise that prevents the speaker’s words from constituting evidence for the hearer’s belief? By clarifying this point, it will be (...) possible to address two more general issues concerning the nature of prejudice: its resistance to counterevidence and the steps involved in overcoming prejudice. I propose a hinge account of prejudice, based on the recent perspective of hinge epistemology, to help clarify these aspects. According to the hinge account, prejudices share a fundamental feature with hinges: they work as norms of evidential significance, and as such, they determine what can and cannot count as evidence for belief. (shrink)

In Epistemic Injustice Miranda Fricker argues that there is a distinctively epistemic type of injustice in which someone is wronged specifically in his or her capacity as a knower. Fricker's examples of identity-prejudicial credibility deficit primarily involve gender, race, and class, in which individuals are given less credibility due to prejudicial stereotypes. We argue that children, as a class, are also subject to testimonial injustice and receive less epistemic credibility than they deserve. To illustrate the (...) prevalence of testimonial injustice against children we document examples of negative prejudicial treatment in forensic contexts where children frequently act as testifiers. These examples, along with research on the child's competence and reliability as a testifier, reveal widespread epistemic prejudice against children. Given that subjection to prejudice can have a detrimental impact on children we discuss ways to ameliorate this form of testimonial injustice. We argue that, both in formal and natural contexts, the child's testimony should be evaluated alongside the relationships that support her development as a testifier. The adult can play a central role in creating successful testimonial interactions with children by acting as a. (shrink)

Lookism refers to discrimination based on physical attractiveness or the lack thereof. A whole host of empirical research suggests that lookism is a pervasive and systematic form of social discrimination. Yet, apart from some attention in ethics and political philosophy, lookism has been almost wholly overlooked in philosophy in general and epistemology in particular. This is particularly salient when compared to other forms of discrimination based on race or gender which have been at the forefront of epistemic (...) class='Hi'>injustice as a topic of research. This paper argues that lookism is associated with various forms of epistemic injustice. In the specific case of lookism, hermeneutic injustice takes the shape of the taboo of acknowledging that unattractive people are unattractive. This, on the one hand, results in a hampered understanding of one’s own situation insofar as one is deterred from seeing one’s looks as one major factor for one’s social position. On the other hand, this hermeneutic injustice serves as the backdrop of instances of a special kind testimonial injustice in which the ugly person’s burgeoning realization that their looks influence their social standing detrimentally is discounted due to the pejorative nature of ascribing someone the property of being unattractive or ugly. (shrink)

Testimony is of epistemic and practical significance. It is of epistemic significance because majority of what we know and believe comes from being told. It is of practical significance because our agency can be undermined, bypassed, or overridden owing to systemic prejudices sustained by oppressive social or cultural practices and subsequently our routes to knowledge are either hindered or distorted. Things get more complicated when we introduce and examine how groups and other collectives testify and are recipients of testimony. For (...) instance, group speakers are typically said to represent and reflect the view of the group they are speaking on behalf of. But sometimes because of these oppressive practices, a group speaker’s assertion may deprive or impair its members’ ability to perform certain actions through speech. This dissertation examines the intersection between testimony, collective phenomena, and epistemic harms. One aim is to argue for a view on the nature of testimony that can accommodate various ways collectives testify and are recipients of testimony. In particular, I argue and present a view of testimony as a norm-governed joint activity involving individual or collective participants that commit themselves to a common aim of collaboration. Another aim is to present an epistemology of testimony that tracks our ordinary testimonial practices. In this regard, I argue for a norm view where we have reason to believe what we’re told because of the rules or norms that govern our communicative exchanges. A final aim is to explore the mechanism by which collective speech ensues in an epistemic harm driven by social identity prejudices. I argue for a form of silencing that is distinctive of groups insofar as the silencing occurs because of group dynamics. I call the mechanism underlying this form of silencing “representational impairment”. This dissertation, I hope, will motivate and inspire others to pursue philosophical projects at these intersections and in this spirit, I end by offering suggestions on areas of further development and future direction. (shrink)

Sometimes ordinary disagreements become deep as a result of epistemic injustice. The paper explores a hitherto unnoticed connection between two phenomena that have received ample attention in recent social epistemology: deep disagreement and epistemic injustice. When epistemic injustice comes into play in a regular disagreement, this can lead to higher-order disagreement about what counts as evidence concerning the original disagreement, which deepens the disagreement. After considering a common definition of deep disagreement, it is proposed that the depth (...) of disagreements is best understood as a matter of degree. Then, a case study of real-life disagreement is introduced: the disagreement about whether racism is a significant issue in the Netherlands, illustrated by the tradition of ‘Black Pete’. It is argued that there is disagreement about what counts as evidence in the case study because of two forms of epistemic injustice: testimonial and hermeneutical injustice. Specifically, there is disagreement about epistemic principles concerning whether private first-personal experience of racism is a weighty source of evidence in this domain, whether victims of racism count as important testifiers in this domain, and how to assess testimony that is not intelligible to you because it employs concepts and terminology you are unfamiliar with. By dismissing the relevant testimony and epistemic resources, the disagreement boils down to disagreement on the level of epistemic principles concerning,, and. Introducinginjustice-based deep disagreementhighlights moral and political aspects of disagreements that might seem factual. (shrink)

Although research on epistemic injustice has focused on the effects of prejudice in epistemic exchanges, the account of prejudice that emerges in Fricker's (2007) view is not completely clear. In particular, I claim that the epistemic role of prejudice in the structure of testimonial justification is still in need of a satisfactory explanation. What special epistemic power does prejudice exercise that prevents the speaker's words from constituting evidence for the hearer's belief? By clarifying this point, it will be (...) possible to address two more general issues concerning the nature of prejudice: its resistance to counterevidence and the steps involved in overcoming prejudice. I propose a hinge account of prejudice, based on the recent perspective of hinge epistemology, to help clarify these aspects. According to the hinge account, prejudices share a fundamental feature with hinges: they work as norms of evidential significance, and as such, they determine what can and cannot count as evidence for belief. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss rape myths and mythologies, their negative effects on rape and sexual assault complainants, and how they prejudicially construct women qua women. The backdrop for the analysis is the Belfast Rugby Rape Trial, which took place in 2018. Four men, two of whom were well-known rugby players, were acquitted of rape and sexual assault in a nine-week criminal trial that dominated local, national and international attention. The acquittal resulted in ‘I Believe Her’ rallies and protests across (...) Northern Ireland. Of concern were the deeply sexist and misogynistic text exchanges among the acquitted about the complainant and women more generally. One month after the trial, the Criminal Justice Board of Northern Ireland commissioned an independent review of the arrangements to deliver justice in cases of serious sexual offences. The Gillen Review proposed 16 key recommendations, among them measures to dispel rape myths and the role that Relationship and Sex Education in schools could play in combatting these myths. I will explore these issues using Miranda Fricker's construction of epistemic injustice. I argue that there is little appreciation of the profound impact that routine testimonial injustice—where the credibility of a speaker is deflated or undermined on account of her social identity—can have on the wellbeing of speakers and how it ramifies with other forms of injustice. To illustrate, I draw on neurological explanations to show why attributions of sexual consent are unjustly sustained in cases of rape and sexual assault. (shrink)

Epistemic injustice is defined by Miranda Fricker as injustice done to people specifically in their capacities as knowers. Fricker argues that this injustice can be either testimonial or hermeneutical in character. A hearer commits testimonial injustice against a speaker by assigning unfairly little credibility to the speaker’s testimony. Hermeneutical injustice exists in a society when the society lacks the concepts necessary for members of a group to understand their social experiences. We argue that (...) epistemic injustice is necessary to permit the functioning of race-based chattel slavery and that this necessity is illustrated in slave narratives. The testimonies of slave narratives like those of Frederick Douglass, Olaudah Equiano, Harriet Jacobs, and Mary Prince identify and transform a culture of race-based epistemic hermeneutic and testimonial injustice. Through telling their stories, these agents establish their capacity as knowers and thus resist the epistemic injustice that undergirds the oppressive system of race-based chattel slavery. The authors of slave narratives not only identify race-based epistemic injustice, but actively fight against it. (shrink)

Epistemic injustice is defined by Miranda Fricker as injustice done to people specifically in their capacities as knowers. Fricker argues that this injustice can be either testimonial or hermeneutical in character. A hearer commits testimonial injustice against a speaker by assigning unfairly little credibility to the speaker’s testimony. Hermeneutical injustice exists in a society when the society lacks the concepts necessary for members of a group to understand their social experiences. We argue that (...) epistemic injustice is necessary to permit the functioning of race-based chattel slavery and that this necessity is illustrated in slave narratives. The testimonies of slave narratives like those of Frederick Douglass, Olaudah Equiano, Harriet Jacobs, and Mary Prince identify and transform a culture of race-based epistemic hermeneutic and testimonial injustice. Through telling their stories, these agents establish their capacity as knowers and thus resist the epistemic injustice that undergirds the oppressive system of race-based chattel slavery. The authors of slave narratives not only identify race-based epistemic injustice, but actively fight against it. (shrink)

In this paper, we explore some links between deliberative democracy, natural testimony, and epistemic injustice. We hope to highlight the exclusionary effects of some cases of testimony-related epistemic injustice within the deliberative democratic framework and, in particular, two subtle ways of epistemic injustice that are not often highlighted in the political domain. In other words, we hope to highlight two specific mechanisms of epistemic exclusion within the democratic deliberative process that are not explicitly noticed in the relevant (...) literature. In section 1, we present the deliberative model of democracy and the deliberative process. We then introduce the notion of epistemic (dis)enfranchisement, which we distinguish from formal enfranchisement, and explain the role that natural testimony plays in establishing citizens‘ epistemic enfranchisement. In section 2, we introduce Fricker‘s notion of testimonial injustice and two further testimony-related forms of epistemic injustice which seem to have been largely neglected in the debate so far, namely, discursive injustice and testimonial void. We also point out negative epistemic consequences of positive identity-prejudicial stereotypes. In section 3, we argue that these testimony-related forms of epistemic injustice can lead to epistemic disenfranchisement, which, we note, is an obstacle to deliberative democracy that warrants serious consideration. (shrink)

Since its 2007 publication, Miranda Fricker’s Epistemic Injustice has sparked a vigorous conversation in analytic philosophy about how social power corrodes individual’s epistemic capacities and distorts collective meaning-making in unjust ways. Yet for all its normative insights into social silencing, I argue that Fricker’s theorization of epistemic dysfunction remains too individualized, cognitivist, and dematerialized to account for racialized imaginaries. Rather than view racisms as normal and normative in racist cultures, Fricker frames identity-driven prejudice as a troubling aberration from (...) otherwise unblemished epistemic and moral norms. This leads her into adopting an overly voluntarist and idealist theory of social change that centres training better knowers rather than unmaking racialized worlds. Ultimately, I contend that we should return to a materialist theory of ideology, following the work of Stuart Hall. Doing so jettisons the narrow focus on individual epistemic failures and instead problematizes how certain social ideas consolidate and reproduce racial hierarchies. (shrink)

In this paper, we discuss specific epistemic injustices suffered by gender minorities in the Philippines. We also show that societal changes have been evident throughout the years. We review some progressive Philippine Catholic communities' sustainable development efforts toward gender equality or toward the eradication of discrimination, marginalisation, and violence based on a person's sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression (SOGIE). Despite these epistemic injustices, we reveal that there are ways by which gender disorientations may be disrupted by (...) progressive Philippine Catholic groups and communities in the era of contemporary Christianities. (shrink)

The central goal of this paper is to investigate the injustices that can occur with the use of new technologies, especially Artificial Intelligence (AI), focusing on the issues concerning respect to human rights and the protection of victims and the most vulnerable. We aim to study the impacts of AI in daily life and the possible threats to human dignity imposed by it, such as discrimination based on prejudices, identity-oriented stereotypes, and unequal access to health services. We characterize (...) such cases as algorithmic injustices. In the final part of the text, we propose some strategies to confront this specific type of injustice. (shrink)

People partaking in a conversation can add to the common ground of said conversation by performing different speech acts. That is, they can influence which propositions are presumed to be shared among them. In this paper, I am going to apply the common ground framework to the phenomenon of epistemic injustice. In doing so, I am going to focus on two kindsof speech acts: making assertions and asking certain kinds of questions. And I am going to look at three (...) varieties of epistemic injustice: testimonial injustice, inquiring injus-tice and interpretative injustice.I am going to argue that what all these varieties of epistemic injustice have in common is that they unfairly inhibit the speaker’s ability to add to the common ground in the way intended by her. This in turn negatively affects which con-versational roles a speaker can play in a given conversation. Based on these results, I am going to end by looking at some of the harms that epistemic injustice inflicts upon its victims. (shrink)