This paper argues that the current discourse on epistemic injustice in social epistemology itself perpetuates epistemic injustice, namely hermeneutic injustice with regards to class and classism. The main reason is that debates on epistemic injustice have foremost focussed on issues related to gender, race, and disability while mostly ignoring class issues. I suggest that this is due to (largely unwarranted) fears about looming class reductionism. More importantly, this is omission is not innocuous, but (...) problematic insofar as it has an unlikely ally in neoliberal propaganda which features as one main goal stifling class consciousness. While this “allyship” is unwitting, this presents grounds for the discourse of epistemic injustice to consider re-centring class issues and classism. (shrink)

This paper argues that the current discourse on epistemic injustice in social epistemology itself perpetuates epistemic injustice, namely hermeneutic injustice with regards to class and classism. The main reason is that debates on epistemic injustice have foremost focussed on issues related to gender, race, and disability while mostly ignoring class issues. I suggest that this is due to (largely unwarranted) fears about looming class reductionism. More importantly, this is omission is not innocuous, but (...) problematic insofar as it has an unlikely ally in neoliberal propaganda which features as one main goal stifling class consciousness. While this “allyship” is unwitting, this presents grounds for the discourse of epistemic injustice to consider re-centring class issues and classism. (shrink)

In this article, I argue in favor of an intersectional account of religious identity to better make sense of how religious subjects can be treated with epistemic injustice. To do this, I posit two perspectives through which to view religious identity: as a social identity and as a worldview. I argue that these perspectives shed light on the unique ways in which religious subjects can be epistemically harmed. From the first perspective, religious subjects can be harmed when their (...) religion is racialized or when their gender and dress are mistakenly thought to be predictive of their beliefs and practices. As an instance of this, I focus on the epistemic harms facing Muslim women who practice veiling. From the worldview perspective, religious subjects can be harmed when we, by contrast, underestimate the force of the connections between religion, race, and gender. Such connections can give rise to intersectionally rich theologies that can in turn be marginalized and denied credibility. To illuminate the worldview perspective, I focus on Christian abolitionist and feminist Sojourner Truth. (shrink)

This paper argues that underlying social biases are able to affect the processes underlying linguistic interpretation. The result is a series of harms systematically inflicted on marginalised speakers. It is also argued that the role of biases and stereotypes in interpretation complicates Miranda Fricker's proposed solution to epistemic injustice.

Fricker shows that virtue epistemology provides a general epistemological idiom in which these issues can be forcefully discussed.

This article analyses the phenomenon of epistemic injustice within contemporary healthcare. We begin by detailing the persistent complaints patients make about their testimonial frustration and hermeneutical marginalization, and the negative impact this has on their care. We offer an epistemic analysis of this problem using Miranda Fricker's account of epistemic injustice. We detail two types of epistemic injustice, testimonial and hermeneutical, and identify the negative stereotypes and structural features of modern healthcare practices that (...) generate them. We claim that these stereotypes and structural features render ill persons especially vulnerable to these two types of epistemic injustice. We end by proposing five avenues for further work on epistemic injustice in healthcare. (shrink)

Epistemic injustices are wrongs that agents can suffer in their capacity as knowers. In this article, I offer a conceptualisation of a phenomenon I call anticipatory epistemic injustice, which I claim is a distinct and particularly pernicious type of epistemic injustice worthy of independent analysis. I take anticipatory epistemic injustice to consist in the wrongs that agents can suffer as a result of anticipated challenges in their process of taking up testimony-sharing opportunities. I (...) distinguish my account from paradigmatic cases of epistemic injustice, such as Miranda Fricker’s concepts of testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice; additionally, I differentiate my view from Kristie Dotson’s account of testimonial smothering. I argue, ultimately, that anticipatory epistemic injustice is a useful addition to our current taxonomy of epistemic injustices, as it has promising explanatory potential for a range of non-standard cases of epistemic injustice. (shrink)

Genocide denialism is an understudied topic in the epistemic injustice scholarship; so are epistemic relations outside of the Euro-American context. This article proposes to bring the literature into contact with an underexplored topic in a ‘distant’ setting: Turkey. Here, I explore the ethical and epistemological implications of the Turkish denial of the Armenian genocide as a pervasive and systematic epistemic harm. Using an interdisciplinary methodology, I argue that a philosophical exploration of genocide denialism requires examining the (...) role of institutions and ideology in relation to the epistemic harm done by individual perpetrators. More specifically, I suggest that the individual, ideological, and institutional roots of genocide denialism constitute a regime of epistemic injustice in Turkey. (shrink)

This paper offers an overview of the philosophical work on epistemic injustices as it relates to psychiatry. After describing the development of epistemic injustice studies, we survey the existing literature on its application to psychiatry. We describe how the concept of epistemic injustice has been taken up into a range of debates in philosophy of psychiatry, including the nature of psychiatric conditions, psychiatric practices and research, and ameliorative projects. The final section of the paper indicates (...) future directions for philosophical research of epistemic injustices and psychiatry, concerning neurocognitive disorders, identity prejudices in psychiatric illness, concepts of epistemic privilege in psychiatry, and the prospects for combining phenomenological psychopathology and epistemic justice. We argue that much remains to be done in the conceptualization of these epistemic injustices and suggest that this future work should be multidisciplinary in character and sensitive to the phenomenology of psychiatric conditions. (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)

We survey several ways in which the structures and norms of medicine and healthcare can generate epistemic injustice.

We investigate how epistemic injustice can manifest itself in mathematical practices. We do this as both a social epistemological and virtue-theoretic investigation of mathematical practices. We delineate the concept both positively—we show that a certain type of folk theorem can be a source of epistemic injustice in mathematics—and negatively by exploring cases where the obstacles to participation in a mathematical practice do not amount to epistemic injustice. Having explored what epistemic injustice in (...) mathematics can amount to, we use the concept to highlight a potential danger of intellectual enculturation. (shrink)

Epistemic injustice is a harm done to a person in their capacity as an epistemic subject by undermining her capacity to engage in epistemic practices such as giving knowledge to others or making sense of one’s experiences. It has been argued that those who suffer from medical conditions are more vulnerable to epistemic injustice than the healthy. This paper claims that people with mental disorders are even more vulnerable to epistemic injustice than (...) those with somatic illnesses. Two kinds of contributory factors for epistemic injustice in psychiatric patients are outlined: global and specific. Some suggestions are made to counteract the effects of these contributory factors, for instance we suggest that physicians should participate in groups where the subjective experience of patients is explored, and learn to become more aware of their own unconscious prejudices towards psychiatric patients. (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)

The practice of Emergency Management in Michigan raises anew the question of whose knowledge matters to whom and for what reasons, against the background of what projects, challenges, and systemic imperatives. In this paper, I offer a historical overview of state intervention laws across the United States, focusing specifically on Michigan’s Emergency Manager laws. I draw on recent analyses of these laws to develop an account of a phenomenon that I call epistemic redlining, which, I suggest, is a form (...) of group-based credibility discounting not readily countenanced by existing, ‘culprit-based’ accounts of epistemic injustice. I argue that epistemic redlining plays a crucial role in ongoing projects of racialized subordination and dispossession in Michigan, and that such discounting tends to have structural causes that can be difficult to identify and uproot. Contrary to the general thrust of recent work on the topic, I argue that epistemic redlining ought to be understood as a form of epistemic injustice. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that ill persons are particularly vulnerable to epistemic injustice in the sense articulated by Fricker. Ill persons are vulnerable to testimonial injustice through the presumptive attribution of characteristics like cognitive unreliability and emotional instability that downgrade the credibility of their testimonies. Ill persons are also vulnerable to hermeneutical injustice because many aspects of the experience of illness are difficult to understand and communicate and this often owes to gaps in collective hermeneutical (...) resources. We then argue that epistemic injustice arises in part owing to the epistemic privilege enjoyed by the practitioners and institutions of contemporary healthcare services—the former owing to their training, expertise, and third-person psychology, and the latter owing to their implicit privileging of certain styles of articulating and evidencing testimonies in ways that marginalise ill persons. We suggest that a phenomenological toolkit may be part of an effort to ameliorate epistemic injustice. (shrink)

What makes an injustice epistemic rather than ethical or political? How does the former, more recent category relate to the latter, better-known forms of injustice? To address these questions, the papers of this Special Issue investigate epistemic injustice in close connection to different conceptions of agency, both epistemic and practical.

This chapter charts various ways that religious persons and groups can be perpetrators and victims of epistemic injustice. The practices of testifying and interpreting experiences take a range of distinctive forms in religious life, for instance, if the testimonial practices require a special sort of religious accomplishment, such as enlightenment, or if proper understanding of religious experiences is only available to those with authentic faith. But it is also clear that religious communities and traditions have been sources of (...) epistemic injustice, for instance, by conjoining epistemic and spiritual credibility in ways disadvantageous to ‘deviant’ groups. I focus mainly on the major monotheistic religions, culturally dominant in the modern West. (shrink)

Epistemic injustice is a kind of injustice that arises when one’s capacity as an epistemic subject is wrongfully denied. In recent years it has been argued that psychiatric patients are often harmed in their capacity as knowers and suffer from various forms of epistemic injustice that they encounter in psychiatric services. Acknowledging that epistemic injustice is a multifaceted problem in psychiatry calls for an adequate response. In this paper I argue that, given (...) that psychiatric patients deserve epistemic respect and have a certain epistemic privilege, healthcare professionals have a pro tanto epistemic duty to attend to and/or solicit reports of patients’ first-person experiences in order to prevent epistemic losses. I discuss the nature and scope of this epistemic duty and point to one interesting consequence. In order to prevent epistemic losses, healthcare professionals may need to provide some patients with resources and tools for expressing their experiences and first-person knowledge, such as those that have been developed within the phenomenological approach. I discuss the risk of secondary testimonial and hermeneutical injustice that the practice of relying on such external tools might pose and survey some ways to mitigate it. (shrink)

I distinguish between two senses in which feminists have argued that the knower is social: 1. situated or socially positioned and 2. interdependent. I argue that these two aspects of the knower work in cooperation with each other in a way that can produce willful hermeneutical ignorance, a type of epistemic injustice absent from Miranda Fricker's Epistemic Injustice. Analyzing the limitations of Fricker's analysis of the trial of Tom Robinson in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird (...) with attention to the way in which situatedness and interdependence work in tandem, I develop an understanding of willful hermeneutical ignorance, which occurs when dominantly situated knowers refuse to acknowledge epistemic tools developed from the experienced world of those situated marginally. Such refusals allow dominantly situated knowers to misunderstand, misinterpret, and/or ignore whole parts of the world. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that certain theoretical conceptions of health, particularly those described as ‘biomedical’ or ‘naturalistic’, are viciously epistemically unjust. Drawing on some recent work in vice epistemology, we identity three ways that abstract objects (such as theoretical conceptions, doctrines, or stances) can be legitimately described as epistemically vicious. If this is right, then robust reform of individuals, social systems, and institutions would not be enough to secure epistemic justice: we must reform the deeper conceptions of health (...) that underlie them. (shrink)

Technologies that deploy data science methods are liable to result in epistemic harms involving the diminution of individuals with respect to their standing as knowers or their credibility as sources of testimony. Not all harms of this kind are unjust but when they are we ought to try to prevent or correct them. Epistemically unjust harms will typically intersect with other more familiar and well-studied kinds of harm that result from the design, development, and use of data science technologies. (...) However, we argue that epistemic injustices can be distinguished conceptually from more familiar kinds of harm. We argue that epistemic harms are morally relevant even in cases where those who suffer them are unharmed in other ways. Via a series of examples from the criminal justice system, workplace hierarchies, and educational contexts we explain the kinds of epistemic injustice that can result from common uses of data science technologies. (shrink)

We expand on Della Croce’s ambition to interpret “epistemic injustice” as a specification of non-maleficence in the use of the influential four-principle framework. This is an alluring line of thought for conceptual, moral, and heuristic reasons. Although it is commendable, Della Croce’s attempt remains tentative. So does our critique of it. Yet, we take on the challenge to critically address two interrelated points. First, we broaden the analysis to include deliberations about hermeneutical injustice. We argue that, if (...) due consideration of epistemic injustice is to require more than negative ethical obligations in medicine, dimensions of hermeneutical injustice should be explored as an avenue to arrive at such positive duties. Second, and relatedly, we argue that this may encompass moral responsibilities beyond the individual level, that is: positive obligations to take action on a structural level. Building on Dotson’s concept of “contributory injustice” and Scheman’s concept of “perceptual autonomy,” we suggest that the virtues of testimonial and hermeneutical justice may provide additional content not only to negative prohibitions of action (i.e. non-maleficence) but also to positive requirements of action, like respecting patient autonomy. (shrink)

In this paper, I present an analysis of the “windows into reality” that are used in theories of global justice with a focus on issues of epistemic injustice and the powerlessness of the global poor. I argue that we should aim for a better understanding of global poverty through acknowledging people living in poverty as epistemic subjects. To achieve this, we need to deepen and broaden the knowledge base of theories of global justice and approach the subject (...) through methodologies of “thinking small” and “thick descriptions”, which are ways to give people living in poverty sufficient room to express themselves and have their voices heard, leading to “small” and “thick” knowledge claims. (shrink)

There's been a great deal of interest in epistemology regarding what it takes for a hearer to come to know on the basis of a speaker's say-so. That is, there's been much work on the epistemology of testimony. However, what about when hearers don't believe speakers when they should? In other words, what are we to make of when testimony goes wrong? A recent topic of interest in epistemology and feminist philosophy is how we sometimes fail to believe speakers due (...) to inappropriate prejudices – implicit or explicit. This is known as epistemic injustice. In this article, I discuss Miranda Fricker's groundbreaking work on epistemic injustice, as well as more recent developments that both offer critique and expansion on the nature and extent of epistemic injustice. (shrink)

Epistemic injustices are wrongs done concerning a person’s capacity as a knower. These actions are usually caused by prejudice and involve the distortion and neglect of certain marginalized groups’ opinions and ways of knowing. A type of epistemic injustice is hermeneutical injustice, which occurs when a person cannot effectively communicate or understand their experience, since it is excluded in scholarship, journalism, and discourse within their community. Indigenous Peoples (IPs) are especially vulnerable to hermeneutical injustice because (...) their way of life is unfamiliar or inaccessible to others. This leads to the exclusion of their ideas from public discourse, especially those important for human and societal development. This phenomenon is particularly evident in instances related to IP education. José Medina claims that there are cases of hermeneutical injustice which hinders the ability of people to share and make meaning, or simply, hermeneutical death. Ben Kotzee, on the other hand, identifies the specific educational dimension of epistemic injustice. Using both of these frameworks and citing the results of local studies on indigenous education as illustrative points, we attempt to show instances and scope of hermeneutical injustice in the education of IPs in the Philippines. (shrink)

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)

In this introduction to the special issue ‘Epistemic Injustice and Collective Wrongdoing,’ we show how the eight contributions examine the collective dimensions of epistemic injustice. First, we contextualize the articles within theories of epistemic injustice. Second, we provide an overview of the eight articles by highlighting three central topics addressed by them: i) the effects of epistemic injustice and collective wrongdoing, ii) the underlying epistemic structures in collective wrongdoing, unjust relations and (...) unjust societies, and iii) the remedies and strategies of resistance to epistemic injustice. We close by pointing to connections and issues that may motivate further research. (shrink)

The papers collected in this book share a common motivation: All respond to certain kinds of injustice that unfairly and unreasonably prevent the insights and intellectual abilities of vulnerable and stigmatized groups from being given their due recognition. Most people are opposed to injustice in principle, and do not want to have mistaken views about others. But research in the social sciences reveals a disturbing truth: Even people who intend to be fair-minded and unprejudiced are influenced by unconscious (...) biases and stereotypes, as well as social structures and institutions that lead to unjust judgments. We may sincerely want to be epistemically just, but we frequently fail, and simply thinking harder about it will not fix the problem. -/- This volume collects 17 new essays that draw from cutting-edge social science research, to suggest how we can better manage our own unjust reactions, as well as resist patterns of epistemic injustice that we may face. The volume concludes with an afterward by Miranda Fricker, reflecting on these new lines of research and potential future directions to explore. (shrink)

My aim in this article is to propose that an insightful way of articulating the feminist concept of epistemic injustice can be provided by paying significant attention to recognition theory. The article intends to provide an account for diagnosing epistemic injustice as a social pathology and also attempts to paint a picture of some social cure of structural forms of epistemic injustice. While there are many virtues to the literature on epistemic injustice, (...) epistemic exclusion and silencing, current discourse on diagnosing as well as explicating and overcoming these social pathologies can be improved and enriched by bringing recognition theory into the conversation: under recognition theory, social normative standards are constructed out of the moral grammar of recognition attributions. I shall argue that the failure to properly recognize and afford somebody or a social group the epistemic respect they merit is an act of injustice in the sense of depriving individuals of a progressive social environment i... (shrink)

This paper examines an application of epistemic injustice not fully explored in the literature. How does epistemic injustice function in broader contexts of relationships within countries between colonizers and colonized? More specifically, what can be learned about the ongoing structural aspects of hermeneutical injustice in Canada’s settler history of the forced assimilation of Indigenous peoples and the resultant erasing and marginalizing of Indigenous histories, languages, laws, traditions, and practices? In this paper, I use insights from (...) Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission report to challenge dominant understandings of reconciliation, reciprocity, respect for agency, and the rule of law in settler nations. In its retrieval of the richness and diversity of Indigenous collective interpretive resources, both past and present, Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission draws on a broad and full account of relationships that have shaped Indigenous lives and communities, non-Indigenous lives and communities, the interactions of Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples and communities, and the relationships of all of these to and through the state. (shrink)

Epistemic injustice has undergone a steady growth in the medical ethics literature throughout the last decade as many ethicists have found it to be a powerful tool for describing and assessing morally problematic situations in healthcare. However, surprisingly scarce attention has been devoted to how epistemic injustice relates to physicians’ professional duties on a conceptual level. I argue that epistemic injustice, specifically testimonial, collides with physicians’ duty of nonmaleficence and should thus be actively fought (...) against in healthcare encounters on the ground of professional conduct. I do so by fleshing out how Fricker’s conception of testimonial injustice conflicts with the duty of nonmaleficence as defined in Beauchamp and Childress on theoretical grounds. From there, I argue that testimonial injustice produces two distinct types of harm, epistemic and non-epistemic. Epistemic harms are harms inflicted by the physician to the patient qua knower, whereas non-epistemic harms are inflicted to the patient qua patient. This latter case holds serious clinical implications and represent a failure of the process of due care on the part of the physician. I illustrate this through examples taken from the literature on fibromyalgia syndrome and show how testimonial injustice causes wrongful harm to patients, making it maleficent practice. Finally, I conclude on why nonmaleficence as a principle will not be normatively enough to fully address the problem of epistemic injustice in healthcare but nevertheless may serve as a good starting point in attempting to do so. (shrink)

The dual aim of this article is to reveal and explain a certain phenomenon of epistemic injustice as manifested in testimonial practice, and to arrive at a characterisation of the anti–prejudicial intellectual virtue that is such as to counteract it. This sort of injustice occurs when prejudice on the part of the hearer leads to the speaker receiving less credibility than he or she deserves. It is suggested that where this phenomenon is systematic it constitutes an important (...) form of oppression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]. (shrink)

The concept of epistemic injustice is the latest philosophical tool with which to try to theorise what goes wrong when mental health service users are not listened to by clinicians, and what goes right when they are. Is the tool adequate to the task? It is argued that, to be applicable at all, the concept needs some adjustment so that being disbelieved as a result of prejudice is one of a family of alternative necessary conditions for its application, (...) rather than a necessary condition all on its own. It is then argued that even once adjusted in this way, the concept does not fit well in the area where the biggest efforts have been made to apply it so far, namely the highly sensitive case of adult patients suffering from delusions. Indeed it does not serve the interests of service users struggling for recognition to try to apply it in this context, because there is so much more to being listened to than simply being believed. However, the concept is found to apply smoothly in many cases where the service users are children, for example, in relation to children’s testimony on the efficacy of treatment. It is suggested that further research would demonstrate the usefulness of the concept in adult cases of a similar kind. There are no data in this work. (shrink)

Chronic fatigue syndrome or myalgic encephalomyelitis remains a controversial illness category. This paper surveys the state of knowledge and attitudes about this illness and proposes that epistemic concerns about the testimonial credibility of patients can be articulated using Miranda Fricker’s concept of epistemic injustice. While there is consensus within mainstream medical guidelines that there is no known cause of CFS/ME, there is continued debate about how best to conceive of CFS/ME, including disagreement about how to interpret clinical (...) studies of treatments. Against this background, robust qualitative and quantitative research from a range of countries has found that many doctors display uncertainty about whether CFS/ME is real, which may result in delays in diagnosis and treatment for patients. Strikingly, qualitative research evinces that patients with CFS/ME often experience suspicion by health professionals, and many patients vocally oppose the effectiveness, and the conceptualization, of their illness as psychologically treatable. We address the intersection of these issues and healthcare ethics, and claim that this state of affairs can be explained as a case of epistemic injustice. We find evidence that healthcare consultations are fora where patients with CFS/ME may be particularly vulnerable to epistemic injustice. We argue that the marginalization of many patients is a professional failure that may lead to further ethical and practical consequences both for progressive research into CFS/ME, and for ethical care and delivery of current treatments among individuals suffering from this debilitating illness. (shrink)

What it means to be a knower together with the social practices through which we come to know are irreducibly complex ethical concepts (Congdon, 2018). Extant analyses of epistemic injustice typica...

This paper explores the issue of epistemic injustice in research evaluation. Through an analysis of the disciplinary cultures of physics and humanities, we attempt to identify some aims and values specific to the disciplinary areas. We suggest that credibility is at stake when the cultural values and goals of a discipline contradict those presupposed by official evaluation standards. Disciplines that are better aligned with the epistemic assumptions of evaluation standards appear to produce more "scientific" findings. To restore (...) epistemic justice in research evaluation, we argue that the specificity of a discipline's epistemic aims, values, and cultural identities must be taken into account. (shrink)

In recent years, a significant body of literature has emerged on the subject of epistemic injustice: wrongful harms done to people in their capacities as knowers. Up to now this literature has ignored the role that attention has to play in epistemic injustice. This paper makes a first step towards addressing this gap. We argue that giving someone less attention than they are due, which we call an epistemic attention deficit, is a distinct form of (...) epistemic injustice. We begin by outlining what we mean by epistemic attention deficits, which we understand as a failure to pay someone the attention they are due in their role as an epistemic agent. We argue that these deficits constitute epistemic injustices for two reasons. First, they affect someone’s ability to influence what others believe. Second, they affect one’s ability to influence the shared common ground in which testimonial exchanges take place. We then outline the various ways in which epistemic attention deficits harm those who are subject to them. We argue that epistemic attention deficits are harms in and of themselves because they deprive people of an essential component of epistemic agency. Moreover, epistemic attention deficits reduce an agent’s ability to participate in valuable epistemic practices. These two forms of harm have important impacts on educational performance and the distribution of resources. Finally, we argue that epistemic attention deficits both hinder and shape the development of epistemic agency. We finish by exploring some practical implications arising from our discussion. (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)

This article supports calls for an increased integration of patients into taxonomic decision making in psychiatry by arguing that their exclusion constitutes a special kind of epistemic injustice: preemptive testimonial injustice, which precludes the opportunity for testimony due to a wrongly presumed irrelevance or lack of expertise. Here, this presumption is misguided for two reasons: the role of values in psychiatric classification and the potential function of first-person knowledge as a corrective means against implicitly value-laden, inaccurate, or (...) incomplete diagnostic criteria sets. This kind of epistemic injustice leads to preventable epistemic losses in psychiatric classification, diagnosis, and treatment. (shrink)

In this paper, I make explicit some implicit commitments to realism and conceptualism in recent work in social epistemology exemplified by Miranda Fricker and Charles Mills. I offer a survey of recent writings at the intersection of social epistemology, feminism, and critical race theory, showing that commitments to realism and conceptualism are at once implied yet undertheorized in the existing literature. I go on to offer an explicit defense of these commitments by drawing from the epistemological framework of John McDowell, (...) demonstrating the relevance of the metaphor of the “space of reasons” for theorizing and criticizing instances of epistemic injustice. I then point out how McDowell’s own view requires expansion and revision in light of Mills' concept of 'epistemologies of ignorance'. I conclude that, when their strengths are used to make up for each others' weaknesses, Mills and McDowell’s positions mutually reinforce one another, producing a powerful model for theorizing instances of systematic ignorance and false belief. (shrink)

With her conception of epistemic injustice, Miranda Fricker has opened up new normative dimensions for epistemology; that is, the injustice of denying one?s status as a knower. While her analysis of the remedies for such injustices focuses on the epistemic virtues of agents, I argue for the normative superiority of adapting a broadly republican conception of epistemic injustice. This argument for a republican epistemology has three steps. First, I focus on methodological and explanatory issues (...) of identifying epistemic injustice and argue, against Fricker, that identity prejudice fails to provide a sufficient explanatory basis for the spread and maintenance of such systematic epistemic injustice. Second, this systemic basis can be found not so much in the psychological attitudes of individual knowers, but in the relations of domination among groups and individuals in a society. Third, if such a presence of domination plays a primary explanatory role in all forms of epistemic injustice, it is likely that those who suffer from epistemic injustice will also suffer other forms of injustice and loss of status via the exercise of other forms of power and exclusion. (shrink)

Democratic legitimacy is often grounded in proceduralist terms, referring to the ideal of political equality that should be mirrored by fair procedures of decision-making. The paper argues (§1) that the normative commitments embedded in a non-minimalist account of procedural legitimacy are well expressed by the ideal of co-authorship. Against this background, the main goal of the paper is to argue that structural forms of epistemic injustice are detrimental to the overall legitimacy of democratic systems. In §2 I analyse (...) Young’s notion of political powerlessness and claim that in structurally unjust social contexts members of powerless groups often are not properly acknowledged as functioning members of the polity, hence being jeopardized in their ability to develop part of their personal identity. In §III, I define gerrymandering as an example of political disempowerment that involves an epistemic harm for oppressed citizens, namely, to be prejudicially excluded from the community of epistemic trust. My thesis is that being epistemically disempowered has a negative impact on the way in which citizens understand themselves as political actors, since they suffer a lack of social recognition that may impede a proper development of their reflexive agency. In §IV, I discuss the proposal of granting epistemic privilege to members of oppressed groups, given their specific experience of social injustices. I introduce two concerns about this proposal, one morally grounded and one pragmatically oriented. Finally, in §V, I briefly sketch some institutional remedies that can be employed in order to politically fight systemic forms of epistemic injustice. (shrink)

The contrast between third- and first-personal accounts of the experiences of autistic persons has much to teach us about epistemic injustice and epistemic agency. This paper argues that bringing about greater epistemic justice for autistic people requires developing a relational account of epistemic agency. We begin by systematically identifying the many types of epistemic injustice autistic people face, specifically with regard to general assumptions regarding autistic people’s sociability or lack thereof, and by locating (...) the source of these epistemic injustices in neuronormativity and neurotypical ignorance. We then argue that this systematic identification pushes us to construe epistemic agency as resulting from a fundamentally relational and dynamic process between an individual, others around them, and their social, cultural, or institutional environment, rather than as a fixed and inherent property of individuals. Finally, we show how our relational account of epistemic agency allows us to introduce the novel concepts of epistemic disablement and epistemic enablement. We argue that these two concepts allow us to more accurately track the mechanisms that undermine or facilitate epistemic agency, and thereby to better understand how epistemic injustice arises and to design more effective interventions to foster greater epistemic justice for autistic people. (shrink)

This Viewpoint calls attention to the pervasive wrongs related to knowledge production, use, and circulation in global health, many of which are taken for granted. We argue that common practices in academic global health (eg, authorship practices, research partnerships, academic writing, editorial practices, sensemaking practices, and the choice of audience or research framing, questions, and methods) are peppered with epistemic wrongs that lead to or exacerbate epistemic injustice. We describe two forms of epistemic wrongs, credibility deficit (...) and interpretive marginalisation, which stem from structural exclusion of marginalised producers and recipients of knowledge. We then illustrate these forms of epistemic wrongs using examples of common practices in academic global health, and show how these wrongs are linked to the pose (or positionality) and the gaze (or audience) of producers of knowledge. The epistemic injustice framework shown in this Viewpoint can help to surface, detect, communicate, make sense of, avoid, and potentially undo unfair knowledge practices in global health that are inflicted upon people in their capacity as knowers, and as producers and recipients of knowledge, owing to structural prejudices in the processes involved in knowledge production, use, and circulation in global health. (shrink)

The notion of epistemic injustice was first applied to cases of discrimination against women and people of color but has since come to refer to wider issues related to social justice. This paper applies the concept of epistemic injustice to problems in the therapeutic relationship between psychiatrists and psychiatric patients. To this end, it is necessary to acknowledge psychiatrists as professionals with expertise in treating mental disorders, which impair the patient’s rationality, sometimes leading to false beliefs, (...) such as delusions. This paper classifies the characteristic features of the therapeutic relationship in psychiatry into three stages: those of a professional–client relationship, those of a doctor–patient relationship, and those of a psychiatrist–psychiatric patient relationship. Epistemic injustice is prevalent in psychiatric care owing to prejudice against patients with mental disorders. However, it is also predisposed by the roles that psychiatrists play in relation to psychiatric patients. This paper suggests some ameliorative measures based on the analysis. (shrink)

Suppose a jury rejects a Black defendant’s testimony because they believe that Black people are often untrustworthy. Or suppose the male members of a board reject a female colleague’s suggestions because they believe that women are too often irrational. Imagine also a woman whose postpartum depression is dismissed by her doctor as mere ‘baby blues.’ All these three people suffer what contemporary English philosopher Miranda Fricker calls epistemic injustice. Epistemic injustice refers to a wrong done to (...) someone as a knower or transmitter of knowledge: due to unjustified prejudice, someone is unfairly judged to not have the knowledge or reasonable beliefs that they actually have. Fricker identifies two forms of epistemic injustice: testimonial and hermeneutical. This essay explains these forms of epistemic injustice and surveys some suggestions for how to prevent them. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that recent discussions of culprit-based epistemic injustices can be framed around the intellectual character virtue of open-mindedness. In particular, these injustices occur because the people who commit them are closed-minded in some respect; the injustices can therefore be remedied through the cultivation of the virtue of open-mindedness. Describing epistemic injustices this way has two explanatory benefits: it yields a more parsimonious account of the phenomenon of epistemic injustice and it provides the (...) underpinning of a virtue-theoretical structure by which to explain what it is that perpetrators are culpable for and how virtues can have normative explanatory power. (shrink)

Breast Cancer (BC) is a debilitating disease with the global mortality rate of 13.0 per 100,000 of population (Globocan, 2018). BC affects the physical, mental, and emotional well-being and quality...