Source
- Fricker (2006), “Powerlessness and Social Interpretation”, Episteme 3(1–2), LIT-1046, read in full in NOTE-859, from the author-posted manuscript. Its first note says it “is drawn from the final chapter” of the book.
- Fricker (2017), “Evolving Concepts of Epistemic Injustice”, LIT-1048, read in full in NOTE-853.
The book (LIT-1004) was not read. Page references are to the manuscripts.
What was actually shown
Injustice, not bad luck (2006, pp. 3–6). A collective gap that disadvantages someone is not by that fact unjust. Someone with a misunderstood, undiagnosed condition suffers “circumstantial epistemic bad luck”. What makes Carmita 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”.
Marginalisation (p. 6). Members of a group are “hermeneutically marginalized” when there is “unequal hermeneutical participation with respect to some significant area(s) of social experience”. 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”.
The definitions (pp. 7–12). The systematic case, defined first, is “owing to persistent and wide-ranging hermeneutical marginalization”, or “owing to a structural prejudice in the collective hermeneutical resource”. The incidental case leads to a generic definition: “the injustice of having some significant area of one’s social experience obscured from collective understanding owing to hermeneutical marginalization”. This “simply omits what is special to the systematic case”.
The incidental case (pp. 9–11). Joe is stalked. The police’s “interrogative flow chart” leaves his grievance to be “poured into the available bureaucratic mould”, and he cannot make it intelligible. His “social identity is that of the proverbial white, educated, straight man”, and the injustice “has nothing to do with any general social powerlessness”. He suffers it “not because of but rather in spite of the hermeneutical ease he normally enjoys”. Incidental injustices “stem not from any structural inequality of power but rather from a more one-off moment of powerlessness”.
Structural and culprit-free. “Whether the injustice is of the systematic or the incidental kind, it involves no perpetrator, no culprit” (2006, p. 13). It persists “regardless of individual efforts”, because its cause is structural (2017, pp. 3–4).
What could have come out otherwise: Fricker could have kept the systematic definition as the definition, which is what her précis states. She widens it on the strength of one case, and keeps the systematic case “central”.
What this does not say
- Not that every conceptual gap is an injustice. It needs marginalisation behind it. Novelty alone, as with the undiagnosed condition, is bad luck.
- Not that any idea that fails to fit is covered. The obscured thing must be “some significant area of one’s social experience”, and “significant” is not defined.
- Not that choosing to opt out is marginalisation. It must be “socially coerced”. The hermit “could have opted in”.
- Not that incidental cases are as central. They are “every bit as harmful” but not central “from the point of view of an interest in how epistemic injustice is woven into the fabric of social injustice”.
- Not a claim about the published book. The paper is drawn from a chapter then “forthcoming”, and the published chapter was not read.
Connections
- THEORY-317 states, from the précis, that the lacuna must be
“owed to the relative powerlessness of a social group to which the
subject belongs”. Its “What this does not say” excludes a gap owed to
“an individual’s idiosyncrasy” or to “a design choice that falls on no
group”. On this account that is the systematic case only. The generic
definition admits one-off, local marginalisation without a powerless
group. THEORY-317’s own promote_when names this, “admits local and
institutional gaps”, as a point that would refute it as a statement of
Fricker’s account. No
rivals:is declared, because the précis account is right about the case Fricker calls central, and the book that would decide between them was not read. - QUESTION-072, part 2. On the précis, a contributor whose move fits
no scheme suffers hermeneutical injustice only if they belong to a
powerless social group, and the owner and the assistant are “not
obviously such groups”. On this account the condition is a one-off,
socially coerced marginalisation in making the shared meanings that
obscures a significant area of their social experience. Joe’s
grievance poured into a bureaucratic mould is the nearest case in
Fricker. The condition is still not met by any misfit: the obscured
thing must be social experience, not just any idea, and the
marginalisation must be coerced. No
answers:is declared, because whether any case in the record meets it is open. - NOTE-098 glosses hermeneutical injustice, after Leonelli, as marginalising ways of knowing. Fricker’s domain is narrower: social experience.