Contribution
The précis states the book’s two concepts and its virtue-theoretic answer to them. The generic wrong is being “wronged specifically in his capacity as a knower”. It takes two forms, one in testimony and one in the shared resources for making sense of social experience. Two corrective virtues of the hearer answer them. The précis also argues that both virtues are at once intellectual and ethical.
Key insight
A hearer’s prejudice that deflates a speaker’s credibility is not only an epistemic fault that blocks the flow of knowledge. It is also an ethical wrong to the speaker. And a person can suffer a wrong of the same kind with no prejudiced hearer present at all, when the concepts she would need to understand her own experience are missing because people like her had too little part in making them.
Assumptions
- Testimony is a main source of knowledge. “Few would deny that an enormous amount of what we know is, at root, testimonially acquired.”
- Prejudice is the cause. In testimonial injustice, credibility is deflated “owing to prejudice on the hearer’s part”. The précis says “prejudice”, not “identity prejudice”; whether the book restricts it to prejudice about social identity cannot be checked from the précis.
- Hermeneutical injustice is collective and social. It concerns making sense of “a social experience”, and the gap is “owing to the relative powerlessness of a social group to which the subject belongs”.
- A virtue is individuated by its immediate end, not by its ultimate end. The hybridity argument depends on this premise.
Key results
Skim: the précis, pp. 69–71, read in full. No chapter of the book was read.
- Generic definition (p. 69). “The speaker who receives a prejudicially deflated degree of credibility from a hearer is thereby wronged—he is wronged specifically in his capacity as a knower. This idea of being wronged in one’s capacity as a knower constitutes my generic characterization of epistemic injustice.”
- Testimonial injustice (p. 69). “A speaker receives a prejudicially deflated degree of credibility from a hearer.” It “wrongs the subject in his capacity as a giver of knowledge”. Example: “a jury does not believe someone simply because of the colour of his skin.”
- Hermeneutical injustice (pp. 69–70). It “occurs at a prior stage, when someone is trying to make sense of a social experience but is handicapped in this by a certain sort of gap in collective understanding—a hermeneutical lacuna whose existence is owing to the relative powerlessness of a social group to which the subject belongs. Such a lacuna renders the collective interpretive resources structurally prejudiced.” Example: making sense of homosexual desire where gay people “were prevented from making a full contribution to collective resources for social meaning”. The wrong is analysed as “situated hermeneutical inequality”: “being unfairly disadvantaged in rendering one’s social experiences intelligible, to others and possibly even to oneself”.
- Corrective virtues (p. 70).
- Testimonial justice: the hearer “corrects for any influence of prejudice by reinflating credibility to non-prejudiced levels”. It “pre-empts the testimonial injustice altogether”.
- Hermeneutical justice: the hearer adjusts credibility “appropriately to the hermeneutical handicap incurred by the speaker”. It comes “after the fact of the hermeneutical injustice itself, but it can ameliorate, even neutralize, the harms”. The hearer picks up “that the speaker’s lack of intelligibility is not her fault”.
- The précis twice writes “the virtue of testimonial injustice” and “the virtue of hermeneutical injustice” where the virtues of justice are meant, and once “of the hearer” where the speaker is meant. These are slips in the text, read here as intended.
- Testimony as perception (p. 70). Both virtues belong to the hearer’s “testimonial sensibility”. On this account “the virtuous hearer perceives her interlocutor in epistemic colour”. This is offered to cut between inferentialism and non-inferentialism about testimony.
- Hybridity (pp. 70–71). Considered as intellectual, testimonial justice aims ultimately at truth. Considered as ethical, it aims ultimately at justice. Under both descriptions its immediate end is “neutralizing prejudice in one’s credibility judgements”. “Same immediate end, so same virtue.” The same holds of hermeneutical justice, with understanding as its ultimate intellectual end. “Prejudice is at once an intellectual and ethical vice.”
Claims
| id | claim | strength | support |
|---|---|---|---|
| C1 | A prejudicially deflated credibility judgement wrongs the speaker as a knower, not only epistemically | weak here | asserted in the précis; the book’s argument not read |
| C2 | A gap in collective interpretive resources owed to a group’s powerlessness wrongs its members, with no prejudiced hearer needed | weak here | definition and one example, pp. 69–70 |
| C3 | Testimonial and hermeneutical justice are each at once intellectual and ethical virtues | moderate | the immediate-ends argument, given whole, pp. 70–71 |
| C4 | Hermeneutical justice can only ameliorate after the fact; testimonial justice pre-empts | weak here | stated, p. 70 |
Concepts
- Epistemic injustice. Being “wronged in one’s capacity as a knower”.
- Testimonial injustice. A prejudicially deflated credibility judgement by a hearer, wronging the speaker “as a giver of knowledge”.
- Hermeneutical injustice. Being handicapped in making sense of a social experience by a lacuna in collective understanding that is owed to the relative powerlessness of one’s social group.
- Structurally prejudiced resources. Collective interpretive resources with such a lacuna. The prejudice is in the resource, not in any person’s judgement.
- Situated hermeneutical inequality. The lived experience of being unfairly disadvantaged in making one’s social experiences intelligible.
- Testimonial sensibility. The hearer’s “trained sensitivity to the multifarious signs of a speaker’s degree of epistemic trustworthiness”.
Connections
The précis places the account in virtue epistemology and in an Aristotelian ethical cognitivism, where the virtuous subject perceives “the world in moral colour”. It denies the Aristotelian separation of intellectual from ethical virtue. Other works are not named. NOTE-098’s reading of Leonelli was until now the record’s only route to Fricker.
Bearing on the record
- QUESTION-072 was filed ahead of this reading. Its definitions
hold against the précis, with three refinements:
- “Identity prejudice.” QUESTION-072 defines testimonial injustice as a deficit “caused by identity prejudice”. The précis says “prejudice” and gives skin colour as its example. The word “identity” may be the book’s, but it is not in the précis.
- The second position is narrower than the question states it. QUESTION-072 says a contributor “whose kind of move fits no scheme is in the second position: the move is not disbelieved but cannot be expressed”. In the précis, hermeneutical injustice concerns making sense of “a social experience”, and the gap must be owed to “the relative powerlessness of a social group to which the subject belongs”. A move that fits no scheme meets the definition only if the misfit traces to a group’s exclusion from making the scheme. A lone contributor’s misfit, or one owed to an assistant’s role, does not meet it on the précis’s terms. That settles QUESTION-072’s “whether the gap tracks who the contributor is” in one direction: it must track group membership and powerlessness, not just who the contributor is.
- Part 1 is closer to testimonial than to hermeneutical injustice. If whether a move is filed depends on who made it once content is held fixed, that is a deficit in uptake from a “hearer”, the filer. Fricker’s term for it is testimonial injustice, but only if the cause is prejudice.
- THEORY-317 is filed from this reading and answers part 2 of QUESTION-072 in definitional terms. Whether any case in the record meets the definition is still open, and so is part 1.
- LIT-129, filed unread, was the record’s earlier mention of the topic. Nothing here changes its standing.
- No instruction for machine-learning practice; nothing for the anthology.
Limitations
- The précis states the book’s conclusions and gives only the hybridity argument whole. The cases the book is known for, and its treatment of credibility excess, are not in it.
- The definitions come from a summary written for a symposium. The book’s own wording may differ, for example on “identity prejudice”.
- The précis says nothing on how to tell a group’s “relative powerlessness” from other reasons a concept is missing.
Open questions
- Does the book require identity prejudice for testimonial injustice, or any prejudice?
- Can hermeneutical injustice befall an individual whose group is not powerless, when the lacuna is local, for instance in a single institution’s vocabulary? The précis’s definition says no. Whether the book allows local or institutional versions would decide whether QUESTION-072’s case can meet it.
- What are the commentators’ objections, and Fricker’s replies (Theoria 23(1), pp. 81–86)? They were not fetched.