Epistemic injustice and epistemic community: VCE Philosophy
“The concepts of epistemic justice, epistemic injustice and epistemic community, as developed in the set texts”
Epistemic injustice is a wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower. Miranda Fricker distinguishes testimonial injustice, where prejudice causes a hearer to give a speaker's word less credibility than it deserves, from hermeneutical injustice, where a gap in shared interpretive resources leaves someone unable to understand or communicate an important part of their social experience. Her remedy for the first is the virtue of testimonial justice, a trained sensitivity to prejudice in one's own credibility judgements. An epistemic community is a group that shares and tests beliefs, and its structures can include or exclude voices.
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What this dot point is asking
Epistemic justice and injustice, and epistemic community, are named concepts in the study design. You need to explain them, connect them to the other concepts, and use them to analyse cases. Most of the material comes from Miranda Fricker.
Testimonial injustice
Fricker's central case is a prejudicial credibility deficit. A speaker offers testimony, and the hearer gives it less weight because of an identity prejudice about the speaker, such as a stereotype about their race, gender or class. The wrong is twofold:
- Ethical: the speaker is wronged in their capacity as a knower, treated as less than a full giver of knowledge. Fricker says this can also undermine a person's confidence in their own abilities.
- Epistemic: knowledge may be lost to the hearer and the wider community.
Her literary examples include Tom Robinson in To Kill a Mockingbird, whose account is dismissed by a jury because of racial prejudice. Fricker also discusses the character of Marge in The Talented Mr Ripley, whose suspicions are brushed aside by a man who thinks 'women's intuition' is unreliable.
Hermeneutical injustice
Fricker develops this in a later part of her book than your prescribed extracts, which concentrate on testimonial injustice and the virtue of testimonial justice, so check how much your teacher expects. It is injustice at an earlier stage. Society's shared concepts are shaped unevenly by the experiences of the powerful. A person may have a social experience that they cannot name or make intelligible, because the collective vocabulary does not include it. An often-cited example is someone suffering sexual harassment before the term existed. They cannot get others to understand what is happening, and may not fully understand it themselves. The wrong is a gap in collective resources that puts a group at a disadvantage.
The virtue of testimonial justice
Fricker proposes that hearers can acquire a virtue: reflective awareness that identity prejudice may be distorting their credibility judgement, and a habit of correcting for it, which may mean giving more credence than the hearer's gut inclines. Her extract discusses the virtue and the fact that prejudice is present in any human society, so the correction is an ongoing effort.
Epistemic community
An epistemic community is any group of people who share, test and pass on beliefs: a scientific field, a school, a newsroom, a family or an online forum. Healthy communities spread good beliefs and correct errors. Epistemic injustice shows how a community can fail: it can exclude some from being heard, which also deprives the whole community of what they know. Nguyen's echo chambers are a different failure: a community that insulates its members from outside correction. Mill's discussion of liberty of opinion gives an ideal: a community where views are openly exposed to challenge.
Objections and replies
- Is it a distinct injustice? Critics might say it is just ordinary injustice or prejudice. Fricker's reply is that it harms people in their status as knowers, which is a distinct kind of damage.
- Overcorrection: if hearers are told to be suspicious of their own distrust, they might over-credit speakers, which could harm accuracy. Fricker's virtue aims at proportionate credibility, not the highest.
- Hard to detect: because prejudice often works unconsciously, one's sense of fairness may not detect it. A reply is the importance of institutional checks as well as personal virtue.
- Structural scope: hermeneutical injustice seems to need change in the community, not just individuals, which raises a question about who is responsible.
Question: A student's report of bullying is dismissed by staff who think the student 'always exaggerates'. Is this epistemic injustice?
Test: Is the dismissal based on a prejudicial stereotype about the speaker's identity or group? If the staff have actual evidence of unreliability in this case, it may not be. If the judgement stems from a stereotype about, say, teenagers or a particular group, it is a credibility deficit of the testimonial type. Harm: the student's report is lost, and the student may feel less able to speak. Remedy: staff should check for prejudice in their judgement, look for independent evidence and treat the report as credible until shown otherwise.
Practice questions
Distinguish testimonial from hermeneutical injustice.
Model answer: In testimonial injustice a hearer gives a speaker less credibility than they deserve because of prejudice. In hermeneutical injustice the problem is a gap in shared interpretive resources, so a person cannot make sense of or communicate their experience.
What is the virtue of testimonial justice?
Model answer: A trained, reflective sensitivity in a hearer to the ways prejudice may affect their credibility judgements, together with a habit of correcting for it so that a speaker is given the credibility their evidence deserves.
Do not use epistemic injustice to mean that anyone who is disbelieved is wronged. The concept requires that the lack of credibility be caused by prejudice about the speaker, not by good reasons for doubt.