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LIT-1049: Epistemic Justice and a Role for Virtue in the Politics of Knowing

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StatusActive — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-860) in full; worth reading as Fricker's first statement of testimonial injustice and of the virtue that corrects it: a hearer's credibility judgements come from a socially trained testimonial sensibility, which stereotypes properly inform and prejudice can corrupt, so that a speaker gets "the wrong degree of credibility" through "unintended prejudice". It argues the corrective virtue is reflexive, and that whether a hearer can have it depends on the critical concepts available in their time. Filed as an alternative reading for LIT-1004, whose book is Unavailable here.
Tagsepistemology, ethics, society-and-governance
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-860 — Fricker — Epistemic Injustice and a Role for Virtue in the Politics of Knowing
Cited as “source” byTHEORY-1173 — Testimonial injustice is an ingenuous misjudgement of a speaker's credibility caused by prejudice, not a deliberate manipulation of it, and it can be structural and pre-emptive, when a speaker's word is never sought because of a structural prejudice that is no one's fault, THEORY-327 — Fricker, in her 2003 paper and her 2017 retrospective, holds that testimonial injustice is an ingenuous misjudgement of a speaker's credibility caused by prejudice, and that deliberate manipulation of credibility is a related but distinct wrong; and she accepts Anderson's structural form, which is pre-emptive: a speaker's word is never sought because of a structural prejudice, such as an un-refreshed list, that is no one's fault

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Fricker, M. (2003). “Epistemic Justice and a Role for Virtue in the Politics of Knowing”. Metaphilosophy 34(1–2), 154–173. DOI 10.1111/1467-9973.00266. Author-posted manuscript, titled there “Epistemic Injustice and A Role for Virtue in the Politics of Knowing”.

Key takeaways

From the reading, NOTE-860.

  • Testimonial sensibility. A hearer gains knowledge from testimony neither by uncritical acceptance nor by inference, but through a sensibility “learned and internalised through a process of epistemic socialization” and corrected by experience, on the model of an ethical sensibility.
  • Stereotypes are needed, and prejudice rides on them. Credibility is judged through “common cultural stereotypes of intellectual authority”. Where they are empirically unfounded, the sensibility “will be both epistemically and ethically defective”.
  • Testimonial injustice. A speaker “receives the wrong degree of credibility from his hearer owing to a certain sort of unintended prejudice on the hearer’s part”. Prejudice may produce credibility excess or deficit. The paper treats deficit, which more often raises or lowers a degree of belief than flips belief into disbelief.
  • Two cases. Tom Robinson’s jury is culpable. Herbert Greenleaf, sidelining Marge as “female intuition”, is plausibly non-culpable, though Ripley has deliberately worked on his prejudice.
  • Reflexive critical openness. The corrective virtue adjusts for how “the inter-relation of the hearer’s social identity and the speaker’s social identity” affects the exchange.
  • Historicism. Where the critical concepts are not yet available, a hearer cannot have the virtue: he is at fault, but “not culpably at fault until they were in a position to know better”. Systematic testimonial injustice is “a distinctively epistemic kind of oppression”.

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-860. It is the earliest of Fricker’s three texts read here, and the one that argues testimonial injustice from the epistemology of testimony. THEORY-327 is filed from it with LIT-1048. It speaks of “prejudice” and of stereotypes of social types, and does not use the phrase “identity prejudice”.

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