Contribution
A retrospective by the concepts’ author. It does not define them anew. It says what they are for, draws a boundary she wants kept strict (non-deliberateness), names the pair “discriminatory epistemic injustice” to leave room for distributive kinds, and accepts one extension, structural testimonial injustice. It also says the concepts were built against Marxist standpoint theory and Foucauldian reductionism.
Key insight
Both concepts pick out wrongs done to someone as a knower without anyone meaning to. Testimonial injustice is a misjudgement, so it needs a hearer who really does see the speaker as lesser. Hermeneutical injustice needs no culprit at all, because its cause is a marginalisation in who gets to shape shared meanings. Deliberate discrediting, gaslighting and feigned incomprehension are real and related, but they are other wrongs.
Assumptions
- Meaning is use. “There is no point trying to put precise boundaries on the concept in advance” (p. 1). The strictness argued for is a recommendation about usefulness, not a definition.
- The generic definition stands. Someone “wronged in their capacity as an epistemic subject” (p. 1), as in the book (Fricker 2007).
- Interpersonal first. Theorising starts “from marginalized lives” and from the transactional level, and builds up to the structural (pp. 7–10).
Key results
- Discriminatory epistemic injustice (p. 1). Both kinds are
“fundamentally a form of (direct or indirect) discrimination”.
- Testimonial: “The cause of testimonial injustice is a prejudice through which the speaker is misjudged and perceived as epistemically lesser (a direct discrimination).”
- Hermeneutical: “The cause of a hermeneutical injustice is a background inequality of hermeneutical opportunity—specifically, hermeneutical marginalisation in relation to some area of social experience”, which puts them “at an unfair disadvantage in comprehending and/or getting others to comprehend an experience of that kind (a somewhat indirect discrimination)”.
- Distributive epistemic injustice, after Coady: “receiving less than their fair share of an epistemic good, such as education”. It fits the generic definition too. The distinction is not “deep and/or exclusive” (n. 1).
- Strictness about intention (pp. 1–3). “In testimonial injustice the absence of deliberate, conscious manipulation is definitive, at least in my conception.” Ripley “does not epistemically misjudge Marge at all”, so what he does (“wicked puppetry—a third-personal intentional gaslighting”) is not testimonial injustice. Greenleaf, whose prejudice Ripley works on, does Marge “a grave testimonial injustice”.
- Hermeneutical injustice is not prevented by good faith (pp. 3–4). The hearer “might be trying in earnest to understand”. “The cause of the injustice is structural”, so it “will tend to persist regardless of individual efforts”. Virtuous listening “will somewhat erode hermeneutical marginalisation”. Eradication needs “sufficient social equality in general”, since marginalisation “is a product of social powerlessness (and is a form of it)”.
- Non-deliberate is not non-culpable (p. 4). Prejudiced thinking is “almost always culpable in some degree—it’s just also very ordinary”. “If … a hearer really does straightforwardly dissemble, pretending not to understand … then that is a closely related but distinct injustice.”
- Structural testimonial injustice (pp. 8–9). Anderson’s case: a list of expert witnesses “that no one has refreshed for a good while”, so that “(through no one’s fault, let us add)” the same witnesses are drawn on, and those who would have been listed “are effectively silenced”. This is “pre-emptive testimonial injustice (Fricker 2007, ch. 6)”: “Their views are not sought, and this is owing to a structural prejudice (the un-refreshed list).” Such injustice “would have to be pre-emptive”. Once anyone speaks, it is “transactional as well as structural”. “The extension of the idea of testimonial injustice to structural forms is very helpful.”
- Applications (pp. 11–13). In healthcare, the testimonial injustice of patients’ expertise not being recognised (Carel and Kidd), and the over-generalised diagnosis of delusion (Kyratsous and Sanati). In hermeneutical terms, ill people’s non-expert terms “are not sufficiently shared across social space”.
Claims
| id | claim | strength | support |
|---|---|---|---|
| C1 | Testimonial and hermeneutical injustice are both forms of discrimination, direct and indirect | moderate | stated as the concepts’ purpose, p. 1 |
| C2 | Testimonial injustice requires an ingenuous misjudgement; deliberate manipulation of credibility is a different wrong | moderate | argued from the concept’s point, with the Ripley case, pp. 1–3 |
| C3 | Hermeneutical injustice persists despite hearers’ good faith, because its cause is structural | moderate | argued, pp. 3–4 |
| C4 | Testimonial injustice can be structural, and structural testimonial injustice is necessarily pre-emptive | moderate | Anderson’s list case, accepted and argued, pp. 8–9 |
| C5 | Distributive epistemic injustice also fits the generic definition | weak | stated, after Coady, p. 1 |
Concepts
- Discriminatory epistemic injustice. Her new label for testimonial and hermeneutical injustice together.
- Distributive epistemic injustice. An unfair share of an epistemic good.
- Hermeneutical marginalisation. Unequal hermeneutical opportunity in “some area of social experience”. It is a product and a form of social powerlessness.
- Pre-emptive testimonial injustice. A speaker’s word not sought at all, because of prejudice. In the book it is ch. 6.
- Transactional and structural (Anderson). An injustice in an exchange between parties, or one built into an institution’s arrangements.
Connections
Fricker cites her own 2007 book throughout, and her 2016 paper on Mills’s “white ignorance”, which she distinguishes from hermeneutical injustice. She follows Anderson (2012) on structural injustice and Coady (2010) on distributive injustice, and accepts Medina, Pohlhaus, Dotson and Mason on how hearers sustain these injustices. Her two earlier papers, read here in NOTE-860 (LIT-1049, 2003) and NOTE-859 (LIT-1046, 2006), are the first statements of the two concepts.
Bearing on the record
- THEORY-317 is confirmed on the generic wrong and the two causes, and two things are added. This chapter says “a prejudice”, not “identity prejudice”, like the précis. So the précis’s wording is the author’s settled usage in 2017, though the book’s own wording is still unread. It adds the non-deliberateness condition on testimonial injustice, which the précis implies (“prejudice on the hearer’s part”) but does not state. It also gives the cause of hermeneutical injustice as “hermeneutical marginalisation in relation to some area of social experience”, which is less tied to a social group than the précis’s “relative powerlessness of a social group”. NOTE-859 makes the difference explicit.
- QUESTION-072, part 1. Anderson’s un-refreshed list is close in form to the question’s case: a standing arrangement decides whose word is sought, through no one’s fault. On Fricker’s terms, a filing practice that never solicits some contributors’ moves could be structural, pre-emptive testimonial injustice. That holds only if the arrangement embodies a prejudice, a misjudgement of those contributors as epistemically lesser. A filing grammar that leaves out a kind of move regardless of who makes it is not such a prejudice. THEORY-327 states the condition.
- QUESTION-072, part 2. “Not deliberate” cuts both ways. The record’s grammar was chosen deliberately, but leaving out a contributor’s moves was not. On this chapter that does not take it out of hermeneutical injustice, whose cause is structural and survives good faith.
- Nothing here is ML practice.
Limitations
- A short handbook chapter. Its strictness about intention is advocacy for a usage, and it concedes the concepts’ use has “already evolved”.
- It restates the definitions rather than arguing for them. The arguments are in the book and in the two earlier papers.
- The structural case is Anderson’s, imagined. Fricker adds “through no one’s fault” to it herself.
Open questions
- Whether a structural testimonial injustice needs a prejudice located in someone’s judgement, or only in the arrangement. Here “the un-refreshed list” itself is called the prejudice, which stretches “misjudgement”.
- Where Ripley’s “intentional gaslighting” belongs, if not in either concept. She leaves it unnamed.