Contribution
The full argument for hermeneutical injustice, from the chapter of the book that defines it. The paper separates a hermeneutical disadvantage that is unjust from one that is bad luck. It gives a definition that grows from a systematic case to a generic one that also covers incidental cases. It sets out the wrong, both primary and secondary. The précis (NOTE-832) gave only the systematic definition.
Key insight
A gap in shared concepts disadvantages everyone formally, as a missing free dental service does. It becomes an injustice where it falls unevenly because some people were kept from helping to make the shared meanings. That exclusion, marginalisation, is what makes it unjust. It need not be a lifelong feature of a social group. One moment of powerlessness in one patch of experience is enough for the incidental kind.
Assumptions
- Social experience. The domain is “our understanding of our own social experiences” (p. 1). The definitions all concern “some significant area of one’s social experience”.
- Injustice needs a wrong as well as a harm. “For something to be an injustice it must be harmful but also wrongful, whether because discriminatory or otherwise unfair” (p. 3).
- Marginalisation is coerced. Opting out by choice does not count (p. 6).
Key results
- Bad luck against injustice (pp. 3–5). Harasser and harassee share the lacuna, but only she is disadvantaged by it. A person with a misunderstood medical condition suffers “a hermeneutical disadvantage that is, while collective, especially damaging to them in particular”, but “theirs is a poignant case of circumstantial epistemic bad luck”. What makes Wood’s case unjust is that “unequal relations of power prevented women from participating on equal terms with men in those practices by which collective social meanings are generated”.
- Hermeneutical marginalisation (p. 6). When “there is unequal hermeneutical participation with respect to some significant area(s) of social experience, members of the disadvantaged group are hermeneutically marginalized”. It may be “only fleetingly, and/or only in respect of a highly localized patch”. It “is always socially coerced” and “always a form of powerlessness, whether structural or one-off”. It afflicts people “qua one social type, but not another” (p. 7).
- The definitions (pp. 7–12).
- Systematic, first form: “the injustice of having some significant area of one’s social experience obscured from collective understanding owing to persistent and wide-ranging hermeneutical marginalization”.
- Systematic, second form: ”… owing to a structural prejudice in the collective hermeneutical resource”.
- Generic: “the injustice of having some significant area of one’s social experience obscured from collective understanding owing to hermeneutical marginalization”. It “covers both the systematic case and the incidental case”. “The systematic case is central”, but “Incidental hermeneutical injustices can be every bit as harmful as systematic ones.”
- The incidental case (pp. 9–11). Joe, in McEwan’s Enduring Love, is stalked. The police’s “interrogative flow chart” and Clarissa’s doubt trivialise it (“my grievance would have to be poured into the available bureaucratic mould”). “This has nothing to do with any general social powerlessness”, since “his social identity is that of the proverbial white, educated, straight man”. “Still he is none the less up against a one-off moment of hermeneutical marginalization.” Incidental cases “stem not from any structural inequality of power but rather from a more one-off moment of powerlessness”.
- No culprit (p. 13). “Whether the injustice is of the systematic or the incidental kind, it involves no perpetrator, no culprit.” It happens “when some actual attempt at intelligibility is handicapped by it”.
- The primary harm (pp. 13–14). “Hermeneutical lacunas are like holes in the ozone—it’s the people who live under them that get burned.” The primary harm is “a situated hermeneutical inequality: the concrete situation is such that the subject is rendered unable to make communicatively intelligible something which it is particularly in his or her interests to be able to render intelligible.”
- Secondary harms (pp. 15–17). Practical harms: Wood’s lost transfer, job and benefits. Epistemic harms: lost confidence, and so lost knowledge on any confidence-including account of knowledge, and stunted intellectual courage.
- Construction of identity (pp. 17–23). Through Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story: authoritative constructions can “constitutively” construct one’s social identity (what one counts as), and perhaps “causally” (what one becomes). Dissonance, which is possible because constructions hold unevenly, is “the starting point” of consciousness raising. Hermeneutical injustice “undermines the subject in his capacity as an interpreter of his own social experience”.
Claims
| id | claim | strength | support |
|---|---|---|---|
| C1 | A collective hermeneutical gap is an injustice only where hermeneutical marginalisation lies behind it; otherwise it is bad luck | moderate | the harasser and medical-condition contrasts, pp. 3–6 |
| C2 | Hermeneutical injustice has a generic definition covering systematic and incidental cases | moderate | definitions built from Wood and Joe, pp. 7–12 |
| C3 | An incidental case needs no general social powerlessness; a socially powerful subject can suffer it | moderate | the Joe case, pp. 9–11 |
| C4 | Hermeneutical injustice has no perpetrator | moderate | argued from its structural character, p. 13 |
| C5 | Its primary harm is situated hermeneutical inequality | moderate | the dental-care analogy, pp. 13–14 |
| C6 | It can constitutively construct a person’s social identity | weak | one literary example, pp. 17–23 |
Concepts
- Hermeneutical lacuna. A gap in “collective hermeneutical resources” where the name of a social experience should be.
- Hermeneutical marginalisation. Coerced unequal participation in making social meanings for some area of experience. It is a form of powerlessness.
- Systematic and incidental. Marginalisation that pursues the subject through other dimensions of social life, against a one-off, localised moment.
- Hermeneutical hotspot. A place where “the powerful have no interest in achieving a proper interpretation”.
- Situated hermeneutical inequality. The primary harm: a gap that is formally general and falls on some in practice.
- Constitutive and causal construction. What one counts as, against what one is made into.
Connections
The examples come from Brownmiller’s memoir (Wood), McEwan (Joe) and Edmund White. The paper draws on Montmarquet for intellectual courage, on Lehrer for self-trust, and on Langton and Haslanger for social construction. Fricker’s later chapter (NOTE-853) restates the cause as “hermeneutical marginalisation in relation to some area of social experience” and adds that the injustice survives good-faith listening.
Bearing on the record
- THEORY-317 states the systematic case as if it were the whole. Its title and “What this does not say” make the gap’s being “owed to the relative powerlessness of a social group to which the subject belongs” necessary. It also says a gap owed to “an individual’s idiosyncrasy” or to a design choice “that falls on no group” does not meet the definition. This paper’s generic definition is wider. It needs only “hermeneutical marginalization”, which may be “one-off”, “fleeting” and “highly localized”, and its Joe case is a socially powerful man. Two parts of the précis-based account survive: a gap with no marginalisation behind it is still excluded, as bad luck, and the domain is still “social experience”. THEORY-317’s promote_when names this point (“admits local and institutional gaps”) as one that would refute it as a statement of Fricker’s account. This paper, drawn from the book’s final chapter, meets that refuting condition for the 2006 text. Whether the book keeps it is unread. THEORY-326 states the wider definition.
- QUESTION-072, part 2. Its present text follows the précis: the gap
“must be owed to the relative powerlessness of a social group”. On the
generic definition, the question becomes whether a contributor whose
move fits no scheme suffers even a one-off, localised marginalisation
in making the shared meanings, here the record’s grammar. Joe’s
grievance, “poured into the available bureaucratic mould”, is formally
close to a move that has to be filed in a closed grammar. Two
conditions remain:
- the obscured thing must be a significant area of the contributor’s social experience, not just any idea;
- the marginalisation must be “socially coerced”. A contributor who chooses not to file is a hermit, not marginalised.
- NOTE-098’s gloss of Leonelli (“marginalisation of ways of knowing”) is still wider than Fricker’s. Her domain is social experience, not ways of knowing in general.
- Nothing here is ML practice.
Limitations
- The incidental case rests on one literary example, and the paper calls the systematic case “central”.
- It is drawn from a chapter “forthcoming” in 2006. The published chapter may differ, and it was not read.
- “Significant area of social experience” and “socially coerced” are left without criteria.
Open questions
- Whether an institution’s own procedure (the police’s flow chart) is the marginalising agent in Joe’s case, or only its occasion. The paper says the injustice has “no perpetrator”, but the flow chart is someone’s design.
- What makes a patch of experience “significant” enough.