Fricker, M. (2017). “Evolving Concepts of Epistemic Injustice”. In I. J. Kidd, J. Medina and G. Pohlhaus Jr (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice, pp. 53–60. Routledge. DOI 10.4324/9781315212043-5. Author-posted manuscript.
Key takeaways
From the reading, NOTE-853.
- Two kinds of epistemic injustice. Testimonial and hermeneutical injustice are “discriminatory”: someone is “ingenuously downgraded and/or disadvantaged in respect of their status as an epistemic subject”. She leaves room for a distributive kind, a fair share of an epistemic good such as education withheld, which also fits the generic definition.
- Testimonial injustice is not deliberate. Its cause is “a prejudice through which the speaker is misjudged and perceived as epistemically lesser”. Ripley, who manipulates Greenleaf’s sexist prejudice to discredit Marge, does not misjudge her and so does not do her testimonial injustice. Greenleaf does.
- Hermeneutical injustice is structural. Its cause is “a background inequality of hermeneutical opportunity—specifically, hermeneutical marginalisation in relation to some area of social experience”. It persists “regardless of individual efforts”, so good faith in every hearer does not prevent it.
- Non-deliberate is not non-culpable. Prejudiced thinking is “almost always culpable in some degree”. A hearer who only pretends not to understand commits a related but distinct wrong.
- Structural, pre-emptive testimonial injustice. Following Anderson, an un-refreshed list of expert witnesses means some people’s views are never sought, “owing to a structural prejudice”. Such injustice is necessarily pre-emptive. Once someone speaks it is transactional as well.
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-14 at the owner’s request as an alternative reading for LIT-1004, whose book is Unavailable here, and read the same day in NOTE-853. It is the author’s own statement of both concepts, ten years on, and it is read here for QUESTION-072. Two accounts are filed from it with LIT-1046 and LIT-1049: THEORY-327 (testimonial injustice is ingenuous and may be structural and pre-emptive) and THEORY-326 (the generic definition of hermeneutical injustice). The chapter says “prejudice”, not “identity prejudice”, like the précis read for LIT-1004, so the book’s wording on that point is still unchecked.