Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing

by Miranda Fricker

In this exploration of new territory between ethics and epistemology, Miranda Fricker argues that there is a distinctively epistemic type of injustice, in which someone is wronged specifically in their capacity as a knower. Justice is one of the oldest and most central themes in philosophy, but in order to reveal the ethical dimension of our epistemic practices the focus must shift to injustice. Fricker adjusts the philosophical lens so that we see through to the negative space that is epistemic injustice.

The book explores two different types of epistemic injustice, each driven by a form of prejudice, and from this exploration comes a positive account of two corrective ethical-intellectual virtues. The characterization of these phenomena casts light on many issues, such as social power, prejudice, virtue, and the genealogy of knowledge, and it proposes a virtue epistemological account of testimony. In this ground-breaking book, the entanglements of reason and social power are traced in a new way, to reveal the different forms of epistemic injustice and their place in the broad pattern of social injustice.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Feminism, Politics, Social Justice, Academic, Theory

198 pages, Hardcover

First published July 5, 2007

About the author

Miranda Fricker is an English philosopher who is currently Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York Graduate Center.

Reviews

[Don · Rating 5 out of 5]

In a recent survey of current trends or fads in academic philosophy, one of the top 5 was the evolving work in epistemic injustice. The genesis of this trend started in 2007 when Miranda Fricker, then a professor in the Philosophy Department at Birkbeck, University of London shook the philosophical world with this book. Centering on the ethics of knowledge, Fricker focuses on the ethical injustice done to any person in his or her capacity as a knower - particularly in two forms: testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice. But, what do these mean exactly?

Imagine you are listening to the testimony of an individual. Now imagine the same testimony from different individuals based on their age, sex, social status, race, command of the language, sexual preference, etc. Do you treat the same testimony with equal value? Do you give an inflated or deflated view of the individual's statement? Do your prejudices affect how much value you give the testimony of any individual? This is the essence of testimonial injustice - the hearer's credibility judgement is altered by both direct and residual prejudicial beliefs (think of Tom Robinson's testimony in To Kill a Mockingbird to the all-white jury - what is their perception of an African American in the deep south?). Additionally, you might be living in a society where a concept of sexual harassment, for example, has not been fully formed such that the ability to have testimonial statements by those suffering forms of sexual injustice do not have the necessary societal constructs to adequately understand or speak to it - this is a form of hermeneutical injustice.

As the book progresses Fricker continues to build the logical arguments not only for these forms of injustice but also for the virtuous solutions on what might be considered just, testimonial listeners as well as a listener's hermeneutical social awareness.

Unlike my review three books ago on the philosophical trend in speculative realism (not written by a philosopher), Fricker builds out her argument carefully and logically with discipline to serve as an excellent future foundation for feminist philosophers and philosophy in general. It is strikingly clear why she has created a trend in 21st century philosophy which may have paved a path to improved justice both for speakers and listeners in the world.

One should note that this book is not an easy read requiring some diligence to get through it. But, the effort is worth it. 5 stars!

[Bobby Fung · Rating 1 out of 5]

The two concepts could've been elaborated without using a multitude of philosophical and psychological jargon. While testimonial injustice takes up six chapters, you can almost know what the author intends to say upon reading the first chapter. In general, the author keeps repeating herself in the remaining five chapters, by means of introducing more and more sophisticated terms. In a sharp contrast, the second concept, namely hermeneutical injustice, only takes up one chapter. This imbalance of content may signify the indelicacy of author's theoretical framework.

[May · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 ★

A buddy read with Amr.

The extremely intriguing, highly relevant concept of epistemic injustice was introduced and thoroughly discussed. Consequently, I have come to realise that this is much more pervasive than I'd previously imagined, and I'm grateful to Fricker for putting into words some of the experiences I have personally faced in my life. This was truly enlightening. Highly recommended.

My only complaint is that the author has used a plethora of philosophical concepts with which I am not familiar enough and also incorporated some incredibly difficult jargon which has made this quite the challenging read.

Overall though, I believe this must be read by everyone.

...we picture social agents who have an interest in various goods, some of them epistemic, and question whether everyone is getting their fair share. When epistemic injustice takes this form, there is nothing very distinctively epistemic about it, for it seems largely incidental that the good in question can be characterized as an epistemic good. By contrast, the project of this book is to home in on two forms of epistemic injustice that are distinctively epistemic in kind, theorizing them as consisting, most fundamentally, in a wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower. I call them testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice . Testimonial injustice occurs when prejudice causes a hearer to give a deflated level of credibility to a speaker’s word; hermeneutical injustice occurs at a prior stage, when a gap in collective interpretive resources puts someone at an unfair disadvantage when it comes to making sense of their social experiences. An example of the first might be that the police do not believe you because you are black; an example of the second might be that you suffer sexual harassment in a culture that still lacks that critical concept. We might say that testimonial injustice is caused by prejudice in the economy of credibility; and that hermeneutical injustice is caused by structural prejudice in the economy of collective hermeneutical resources.

[Joeri · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book effectively shows the relation between epistemology and ethics. As such, it can be regarded as dealing with the issue of epistemic duties. What's original about the book, is that it revolves around the epistemic duties we have not concerning our own believes, or as holders or conveyers of knowledge, but as hearers. Miranda Fricker shows that when we wrongly attribute a low level of credibility to a speaker, due to social stereotypes, or for structural reasons like our social imaginary order, political structure and social, racial and sexist prejudices, we do an injustice to that speaker.

She calls us to behave in an epistemic more just manner, by correcting for these prejudices, but also hermeneutically, by stating that also interpreting justly is an ethical issue. She effectively shows that when we fail to do so, we harm others as possessors of knowledge, and thus dehumanize them, for to be a knower and be seen as such, is an important human value. And not only do we cause social harm then, but also epistemological harm: we might miss out on important knowledge by excluding people from contributing knowledge to our 'information/knowledge pool'.

As long as certain people are still not taken seriously just due to their social background, this book will remain important.

Neill DeGrasse Tyson once said: "To me, I am driven by two main philosophies: know more about the world than I knew yesterday and lessen the suffering of others. You'd be surpiresed how far that gets you."

Having read this book, I have come to realize that knowing more about the world helps lessen the suffering of others, and, vice versa, that taking others seriously, might contribute to getting to know more about the world.

[naomi]

Miranda Fricker gilt als eine der vielversprechendsten, feministischen Philosoph*innen der Gegenwart, nicht zuletzt aufgrund ihres Werkes "Epistemic Injustice", das nun endlich in deutscher Übersetzung vorliegt. Darin setzt sich die Philosophin mit dem Zusammenhang von Macht, Wissen und Sprache auseinander. Konkret führt sie zwei Formen von epistemischen, also wissensbezogenen, Unrecht an: Zeugnisungerechtigkeit und hermeneutische Ungerechtigkeit. Zeugnisungerechtigkeit betrifft den Fall, wenn Hörer*innen einer Aussage aufgrund von identitätsbedingten Vorurteilen wenig oder keine Glaubwürdigkeit beimessen. Fricker führt folgendes Beispiel an: Die Polizei glaubt einer Person nicht, weil sie BIPoC ist. Hermeneutische Ungerechtigkeit meint den Umstand, dass Personen ihre eigenen Erfahrungen nicht deuten können, weil das kollektive Verständnis dafür fehlt. Als Beispiel dient Fricker der Begriff der sexuellen Belästigung – vor Bestehen dieses Begriffs war es schwierig für Personen, die ihnen zugefügte Ungerechtigkeit als solche wahrzunehmen bzw. in Worte zu fassen. Etwas benennen zu können, stellt eine Form der Selbstermächtigung und Handlungsmacht dar: Personen mit ähnlichen Erfahrungen können sich zusammenschließen, die ihnen widerfahrene Diskriminierung kundtun und Konsequenzen bzw. Widergutmachung einfordern. Fricker weist eindringlich daraufhin, wie tiefgreifend durch sowohl Zeugnisungerechtigkeit als auch hermeneutische Ungerechtigkeit das Leben von Personen Schaden nehmen kann und wie allgegenwärtig und strukturell verankert diese beiden Formen der Diskriminierung sind. Gleichzeitig gibt uns dieses Buch ein wichtiges Werkzeug an die Hand: eine Form, um über die Dringlichkeit epistemischer Ungerechtigkeit nachdenken zu können und aktiv zu versuchen, dagegen anzukämpfen.
Frickers Argumentation gestaltet sich nachvollziehbar; als Leser*in meint man, teilzuhaben am Gedankengang der Autorin. Sie untermauert ihre Argumente mit anschaulichen Beispielen, entwickelt Definitionen und setzt sich mit Kritik und möglichen Einwänden auseinander. Als Lai*in auf dem Gebiet der Philosophie ist das Buch dennoch stellenweise herausfordernd zu lesen.

[Pavlogreen]

Estoy bastante enganchado ahora mismo al tema de la injusticia epistémica, uno de los que más recorrido tiene en el panorama filosófico contemporáneo, y si algo me llama la atención es que absolutamente TODOS los artículos que he leído al respecto mencionan al menos una vez a Miranda Fricker y en concreto este libro. No es para menos, pues fue tal el impacto que tuvo hace 14 años y es tanta la calidad de su contenido que marcó un antes y un después en la epistemología social. La autora plantea cómo también a través de del conocimiento podemos cometer injusticias que violenten la condición de agentes epistémicas de muchas personas, en especial aquellas afectadas por opresión y discriminación. A su vez, ofrece alternativas centradas y razonables que beben de manera brillante de la epistemología de virtudes y le permiten ser a un tiempo sólida en sus planteamientos y contundente en sus conclusiones políticas. Es un libro sin duda imprescindible para abrir los ojos en algunas cosas y motivarse a seguir investigando.

[Richard Newton · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book, and unlike many philosophy books - especially ones on the topic of epistemology, it is grounded in practical observations about the real world. It also made me reflect on my own behaviour and think on how I might improve on it in future. In my experience, that is saying a lot for a philosophy book, especially one about what might be considered a relatively niche topic.

That's not to say I have no criticism. Given that this book was written in 2007 and has been subject to a lot of analysis there are lots of valid enhancements and refinements to Fricker's original thought amongst philosophical papers. But then that's normal and how a body of knowledge grows in my view.

If you are interested in this sort of topic, and have read much philosophy before, Fricker is a relatively straightforward read. If you are not used to reading philosophy, then you may find this hard going, long winded and occasionally pedantic, but I think it is worth persevering. As philosophy books go this is at the clearer end and although Fricker does use much of the terminology of the domain which can be daunting if you are not used to it. A close reading will give much clarity.

I like cross disciplinary books, and this book is really a combination of philosophy with psychology and sociology. This is not unusual in philosophy (think of political philosophy or ethics which very much cross into these boundaries). Nevertheless, I am always a bit uncomfortable with philosophers straying too much into empirical subjects - not because its not a good idea, it is a good idea, but because I'm not always sure philosophers are best equipped to comment on them. I am not really qualified to comment on the psychological and sociological elements of Fricker's arguments, but I found nothing that jarred or seemed unreasonable. Generally, she argues her case clearly and in detail.

She breaks epistemic injustice down into testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice - with a much more detailed analysis of the former and a somewhat briefer study of the latter. To be honest it took me a few reads to get my head around hermeneutical injustice - but having done so, I found the thinking very insightful. I was left with a query as to whether there are or are not more forms of epistemic injustice and she has just happened to on these two, or if she is claiming that is the lot. She makes no claim or argument about whether these two areas exhaust epistemic injustice in this book.

My main occasional discomfort in reading came from the way Fricker builds her argument. There is at times, from the order of the argument, a slight sense that Fricker decided what claims she wanted to make and then built the argument to support it. I'm not saying she did this, but the structure of the book and the sequence of chapters can give this suspicion. I don't think she did and it strikes me as a solid bit of academic research with clear insights for everyday life.

Much to be recommended.

[saml · Rating 4 out of 5]

the undergrad gist i got of this book didn't do it justice. there's a reason it's a contemporary classic, and it's not just that it uses examples so effectively. although i don't really care for virtue epistemology, and indeed the broad analogy of responsiveness to noninferential testimony with moral sense, another main resource for thinking about epistemic injustice here was craig's state of nature story, about which i find it remarkable and exciting that promise can yet be wrung

[Ethan]

Suffers from a poor genealogy and early dismissal of Foucault, as such it does a typical Analytic move of separating power from knowledge fundamentally. The irony of this is that, in chapter 5, in a "state of nature" Fricker can't keep this distinction for long, and we soon find stereotypes are formed necessarily in recognitions of roles etc.

The blindsight of a kind of Foucauldian regime of truth, wherein the boundaries and communication of knowledge are effected by power, leads to an inability to recognise certain kinds of injustice. For instance, Testimonial Injustice, where a credibility deficit causes injustice due to a denial of "capacity as knower," is unjust precisely because of this epistemic denial. The issue is that, in certain cases of testimony, the speaker's stereotype is integral both to the knowledge communicated, and the injustice elsewhere. This cannot be characterised as credibility excess such as higher class-status, neutral accent, conventional power, which Fricker mentions as being bad but not unjust (as it does not deny capacity to know). Rather, because the knowledge communicated is necessarily speaker-related, there is no excess, no overcrediting. In The Bloody Chamber for instance, it is the Mother's position, with her "maternal telepathy" that allows her to recognise and convey the knowledge that her daughter was in danger, and to act upon it. But the very same stereotype of caring, intuitive mother, elsewhere reinforces a regime of gender. As opposed to excess, the knowledge of the daughter is suspended in this matrix of power.

Though there are these problems, I think the book is still quite good. A strong contribution to the study of, and formalisation of, a previously rather ignored issue. The central insight, that absence of certain concepts could unjustly bar their articulation, ironically allows the publication of this book to prove itself. Fricker, in formalising, articulating, these problems, already completely proves her thesis.

Overall good.

(This is a very disjointed review, I acknowledge.)

[JC]

I feel like the main argument in this book is a liberal intuition that most people I know practice or understand pragmatically, but Fricker here articulates it in a more rigorous fashion (at times a little pedantically in my view). Books like this are what I imagine, as a very ignorant person, what students of analytic philosophy are forced to read and write. I don’t really have any strong objections to this book, but I don’t think I particularly enjoyed reading it. Her theorization of social power appears to me like a reductive and more contemporary form of Foucault’s theorization on knowledge and power, at times explicitly drawing from Foucault. It is simply about how particular forms of social power attached to things like identity affect the levels of credibility knowledge, testimony, and interpretation are merited. I think this is by now a very widespread intuition. Rich white men have social power and are therefore taken more seriously and are more likely to be believed and trusted. As someone born in North America, I enunciate words differently than my family in Singapore. I have noticed people take my perspectives on issues as more insightful than others solely on the basis of how I enunciate words. As I was dealing with internalized white supremacy as a late teen, I noticed I held uninterrogated prejudices based on patterns of speech and enunciation, national identity, class and so on. The subsequent years I spent working out (through internal monologues of self-criticism) these issues practically in classrooms, in friend circles full of international students, at everyday sights of working class labour and monotony, and so on, felt like a good portion of what this text was doing.

I admittedly read this book very quickly for comps, so I likely missed out on the nuances of Fricker’s arguments, and the full gravity of why she thought virtue ethics was an important strategy for dealing with this epistemic justice issue. But I suspect the average person that would read a book like this, does not need convincing of most of the arguments this book bears.

[Maryam · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book has changed my life! It helped me to understand that Testimonial Injustice has not been only my personal experience, it is rather a systematic process in the epistemic life of many people.

[Jonas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ich weiß jetzt was präemptive Zeugnisungerechtigkeit und ein nicht-doxastisches Vorurteil sind. 👍

[Kenny · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots to disagree with in here, but it's clear reading through this book why it so quickly became a classic work of analytic epistemology. My leading concern throughout is whether the injustices Fricker identifies are even (primarily) epistemic in nature, and it times her suggestions on the significance of the epistemic aspects of putative harms seemed over-inflated. For instance, in calling objective unintelligibility the primary harm of hermeneutic injustice, the other, perhaps more primary (or at any rate, more drastic) harms of lacking some interpretive resource are occluded. With that said, those working in the aftermath of this book have been sensitive to worries like this, and it is important to bear in mind that this book is the beginning, and not the end, of an immense research project which has proliferated across social epistemology. Along those lines, Fricker has notably changed many of her views since 2007 when this book was written, and many other authors have picked up the slack left wherever her explanation here seemed thin or misdirected.

On the more theoretical side of this book lies Fricker's attempt to create a 'properly social' epistemology of testimony. I am also not sold in Fricker's non-inferentialist epistemology of testimony, partly because I don't agree with the charge of intellectualism levelled against inferentialists. Rather, it seems to me that we just need an expanded conception of the knowledge-granting inference. Could it be the case, for instance, that the language-interpretive networks in the brain are performing an inferential function when the hearer receives testimony? Fricker's criticism of inferentialism seems to be limited by thinking that the inference must be a conscious one, excluding the possibility that it could in fact be exercised by one of the non-conscious parts of the mind.

[Carter Fifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fricker gives a powerful and compelling argument for the idea of epistemic injustice. That our conduct as knowers and hearers can have certain ethical implications and the virtues that arise from the need to right these injustices. Certainly a very interesting and engaging look into the philosophical field of epistemology. I found this book very engaging and interesting although I did feel it dragged with repetition in a very few select areas. Further Fricker although clearly writing for academics implicitly assumes understanding in certain fields of epistemology and I would have liked to see these things explained even thought I read this for a class and the professor explained them. All in all this book widened my eyes to an idea I somewhat understand and gave a hermeneutical understanding of virtue epistemology that has been in talks in the modern day. It’s certainly formalized views that I already held and will probably reference this text in the future. Highly recommend if you are interested in how societal structures impact our testimonial interactions and how to act ethically within them.

[Lucas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tematizando dois fenômenos antigos que nunca foram propriamente nomeados e tratados, Fricker descreve a injustiça epistêmica a partir da injustiça testemunhal e da injustiça hermenêutica. A partir de preconceitos historicamente erigidos e comunitariamente mantidos, relações de poder são sistematicamente repetidas e operadas. No interior delas, alguns testemunhos podem ser ignorados ou subestimados, ou, pior ainda, podem não haver palavras ou uma semântica que torne possível o compartilhamento de certa experiência. O livro fala sobre essas formas de injustiça, ou seja, a falta de ressonância e de reconhecimento. Por fim, são oferecidas formas de justiça que enfrentem os horizontes injustos, míopes e surdos em que nos encontramos.

[Justus · Rating 1 out of 5]

This review is from the perspective of someone who is not deeply read in philosophy. Maybe someone who actually studied philosophy in university would come to a different conclusion.

I found it extremely challenging -- and usually quite frustrating and unsatisfying -- to force myself to read through this. It is only 188 pages but it doesn't exactly fly by. In part that is because this is full of philosophical jargon. The author has no problem dropping sentences like

It draws the subject away from assertoric caprice and towards doxastic stability.

But the larger problem I had is that I often struggled to see what the point was during long sections and (sometimes) entire chapters.

Fricker starts from an interesting position (which is what drew me to the book).

The exploration is orientated not to justice, but rather to injustice. As Judith Shklar points out, philosophy talks a lot about justice, and very little about injustice....The focus on justice creates an impression that justice is the norm and injustice the unfortunate aberration. But, obviously, this may be quite false. It also creates the impression that we should always understand injustice negatively by way of a prior grasp of justice....My interest here is in injustice specifically in the sphere of epistemic activity, and certainly in this sphere I believe that there are areas where injustice is normal, and that the only way to reveal what is involved in epistemic justice (indeed, even to see that there is such a thing as epistemic justice) is by looking at the negative space that is epistemic injustice.

Fricker focuses on a specific kind of injustice, "epistemic injustice", the key form of which is "testimonial injustice" and that important kind of that is "negative identity prejudice testimonial injustice". Which is to say, when someone discounts what someones says because of their group identity. When you ignore what Mary says because she's a woman and all women are hysterical and irrational. When you ignore what Tom says because he's black and black people are all thieves and liars.

It's a bit....underwhelming, somehow? Fricker lays a lot of groundwork (persistent versus non-persistent, systematic versus non-systematic, culpable versus non-culpable) to get this point and you're mostly left feeling what's the big deal...obviously those are bad things.

But, in the strongest section of the book ("Prejudice in the Credibility Economy"), Fricker explains the practical and the epistemic harm of this, as well as why she thinks it is important to have a framework for talking about the problem explicitly. A practical harm would be something like "in meetings men don't listen to my ideas so my career has become stuck". An epistemic harm would be something like "in meetings men don't listen to my ideas, so now I've lost confidence in my own beliefs and general intelligence".

Set against this great section are the many less than great sections. The worst example is the entirety of chapter 3, where Fricker spends 20+ pages building a framework for how people actually receive testimony. If I tell you "the sky is blue" -- how exactly do you go about deciding that something like that is true or not? Do you actually apply fully logical thinking to every statement you hear? Do you just accept what everyone tells you uncritically?

It is a good and interesting question but what is ridiculous about this chapter is that this is an entirely empirical question. And Fricker spends 20 pages in purely philosophical arguments without mention of a single MRI test or scientific experiment. Contrast this chapter to Thinking, Fast and Slow. One is the work of science and one is not. They actually come to similar conclusions but Fricker's is a waste of time, nothing but intellectual theorizing and the reason why philosophers have a bad name.

Get out of your office and do some damn experiments!

What is the solution to "negative identity prejudice testimonial injustice"? Again, after spending dozens of pages building up dense theories of epistemical virtue...Fricker's answer is to (somehow) know that you are prejudiced in a certain area. And then once you know you are prejudiced, you should pause and evaluate whether you are letting your prejudices color your perception of testimony you receive.

As an example, imagine you grew up in a deeply patriarchal society but then study abroad in a more egalitarian society. When you return home after your studies you've realized you have lots of built-in biases about the testimony of women. So the next time a woman says something you should pause and think to yourself, "Am I discounting this simply because a woman is saying it, or are there actually solid, non-prejudiced reasons for discounting it?"

Again...it all feels a bit....underwhelming somehow? Leaving me feeling that this is a book better left to professional philosophers who care deeply about the tiny nuances and dense theorizing that Fricker is doing.

[Pol Viñas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Només faig aquesta review per dir que Miranda Fricker és la meva mare.

[scriptedknight · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rating: 4/5 stars
~
Though I had to read this for my Knowledge and Power Philosophy class, I really appreciated the ideas brought forth on topics that are normally seen as unconscious knowing. Fricker understood goal and what to explain, and I cannot wait to use these ideas in real life on how prevalent epistemic injustice is.

[Zahi Cantu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gran libro. Creo que todos deberíamos leerlo y la experiencia de la vida misma sería mucho mejor. También considero que deberíamos contar con las posibilidades educativas para comprender este tipo de textos, lo cual no es asi. Irónicamente de eso habla el libro. Recomiendo.

[Cassidy Brinn]

Testimonial justice is a basic ethical and epistemological virtue of truth. To have the virtue, we must try and succeed in adjusting our credibility assessments. The adjustment can be either naive, like Huckleberry Finn's, or corrective. If it's corrective, it can be either the result of active reflection or spontaneous. If it's spontaneous, it it was won either through personal familiarity with the informant or through experience. The virtue is probably best maintained through a combination of spontaneous and reflective adjustment.

There are two forms of credibility assessment: unreflective and reflective. Both can be critical. The reliability of unreflective assessments is particularly susceptible to the social imagination, which guides the subject as emotions and visceral images born of diachronic and synchronic social residue. Unreflective assessment is essential to our cognitive heuristics, including in cases of testimony. The social imagination is a good starting point, should you try to set out to make yourself or others more testimonially just. (For the same idea, but with 'belief' as social imagination and 'acceptance' as reflection, see: Jennifer Church, "Taking it to heart")

Testimonial justice is a third basic virtue of truth, next to Bernard Williams' Accuracy and Sincerity. She also uses the geneaological method influenced primarily by Craig's "Knowledge and the state of nature" to isolate those practices necessary to getting a pooling of information going in a state of nature.

I don't think it's so likely though, that Testimonial Justice has the same status as Accuracy and Sincerity. Not because it's a virtue of the hearer rather than the speaker, that's all well and good, but too many societies have met their cognitive needs through a concept of knowledge without at all drawing on the benefits of Testimonial Justice. The same could not be said for Accuracy and Sincerity.

The second form of epistemic injustice is hermeneutical injustice - the inability to explain oneself due to social hermeneutical marginalization. Like a credibility deficit, marginalization can be incidental or systematic, and can be a case of epistemic bad luck or an injustice. Example of overcoming hermeneutical marginilization: the speak outs organized by women during the second feminist movement. Finding words for sexual harassment and post-partum depression, for example, gave them the ability to act as reliable informants about these issues, and the power to insist on their positive credibility. I say, websites like www.dooce.com and http://jezebel.com/ and whatever the future internet world will bring are dynamiting those hermeneutical barriers to dust.

These virtues and vices have political implications, but Fricker sticks with the epistemic and the moral evaluations.

[Clark Nichols · Rating 5 out of 5]

This fundamentally changed how I approached academic work in my field (musicology). This is probably the most important work of moral philosophy musicologists interested in the social ethics of music making can read.

[Ike Sharpless · Rating 4 out of 5]

needed more on hermeneutic injustice (I agree with the one star reviewer but think it was otherwise an important examination of testimonial injustice).

[Ben · Rating 1 out of 5]

Another example of where philosophy went wrong. The book is talking about pretty important ideas related to people understanding their own experience, and injustices that occur do to stereotypes of minorities, people not listening, etc. However, it's talked about in a pretty incomprehensible manner. The author postulates psychological mechanisms where she could have looked them up. You can get a much better understanding of stereotypes and how they work by reading a book on social cognition.

[Dario Vaccaro · Rating 5 out of 5]

Miranda Fricker’s magnum opus is an incredible achievement at the intersection of epistemology and ethics. It is incredible for at least two reasons. First, Fricker managed to discover and formalize an area of inquiry that intersects two of the most common and fundamental areas of discussion in philosophy, and yet no-one ever framed it in this way. Second, one would expect epistemic injustice, roughly the epistemic and moral wrong of treating someone as less than a knower due to a structural social disadvantage the knower suffers, to be a concept born out of a continental philosopher’s mind of postmodern inclinations. Instead, Fricker formulates an incredibly clean, detailed and complete theory that rarely, if ever, lapses into moral rhetoric and answers most potential objections I came up with while reading.
On top of this, I find it exceptional that Fricker develops not one, but two theoretically interesting and structurally different cases of epistemic injustice, AND offers a sophisticated analysis of their similarities and differences. She probably made more theoretical progress by herself than most commentators of her work would have been able to produce in the years to come.

Finally, while maybe not fully relevant to the value of the book itself, I want to stress the unbelievable level of self-awareness the author showed at the time of this publication. Epistemology saw a radical change of direction after Fricker showed us that epistemological and ethical questions are not just inevitably entangled, but might sometimes be one and the same thing from different perspectives: encroachment theories of justification are a prominent example of further advancements along this new path. Fricker seems amazingly aware this was likely to happen, as she herself makes a powerful analogy (in the Preface) between her work and the work of neo-Aristotelians like Anscombe and Foot in the ‘50s in the context of normative ethics.

A must-read for anyone interested in epistemology, especially if social, and in the subtle ways structural social injustices can shape our interactions with different “others”.

[Jonathon Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

Epistemic Injustice can be divided into two parts: Testimonial, and Hermeneutical. The first has to do with a listener giving a speaker less credibility than she deserves, especially when the reduced credibility has to do with a prejudice about the speaker (for example, that women are merely intuitive rather than rational and therefore less likely to know what they're talking about). The second has to do with the kinds of experience that can be understood in a culture - a person is at a disadvantage when the kinds of experience they are having are not easily categorized or understood by themselves and others. For example, without the concepts of sexual harassment, or postpartum depression, these things are harder to deal with, to explain, and to get help with. When the missing concepts are those that would be useful for an already disadvantaged group, that's where the injustice comes in.

The author spends the vast majority of time on the first of these, exploring in detail how testimony in general is supposed to work and how it features in the epistemic life of listeners and speakers. Hermeneutical Injustice has only a single chapter at the end, and feels much less well developed. Which is unfortunate, because to me it is the more difficult to understand and also more interesting of the two. I wonder whether the book would have been better if it had stuck strictly to testimonial injustice, or instead split the book more evenly between the two concepts - as it was, I was disappointed in the short-shrift given to the latter.

Still, I couldn't ask for anything more regarding testimonial injustice - it's really very carefully thought-through here. And each of these concepts has given me better language to understand some of the political dynamics happening in the world currently, so I am very appreciative of that!

[Nicole Kruse · Rating 4 out of 5]

I finally finished this book, (!) which was absolutely CRITICAL for my research.

Miranda Fricker’s Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing is one of the most intellectually impactful books I’ve read. It helped me put words to something I had sensed but could never fully explain: the way people are discredited not because of what they say, but because of who they are perceived to be. This book has shaped my academic research on migration and education, where the question of whose knowledge is recognized is constantly at stake.

Fricker outlines two central concepts:

- Testimonial injustice happens when someone’s word is dismissed because of bias, for instance, when a student from a marginalized background is not believed or taken seriously.

- Hermeneutical injustice occurs when people lack the social or conceptual resources to make sense of their experiences. This often happens when dominant institutions fail to recognize the frameworks necessary to understand the lives of those on the margins.

The ideas are incredibly sharp and relevant, especially to my work, but let me tell you that the language is dense; this requires you to be fully alert and engaged. I had to re-read a lot and sometimes felt like I was crawling through the text. Still, it was more rewarding than much of the other academic literature I’ve encountered. Fricker’s arguments are rigorous, and even when the prose slows you down, the insights stay with you.

If you care about knowledge, justice, and the ethical responsibilities of understanding others, this book is worth the time. It changed how I read, think, and listen :)

[Nelson · Rating 4 out of 5]

First-rate. Fricker's volume attends to forms of injustice that stem from pre-existing forms of prejudice. Because of extant views about various forms of identity, some hearers refuse to ascribe full credibility to certain speakers. The result, often, is a form of injustice. Fricker teases out how this form of injustice can be both testimonial and heuristic. The former type of injustice refers to the way that certain types of testimony are discounted simply because of the subject position of the speaker. The latter type has to do with extant social structures that make it difficult for certain parties to make sense of their experience. While there is a some in the weeds philosophical discourse at many points in the text, Fricker in general uses apt analogies culled from film, literature and history to illustrate her concepts. Despite these illustrative moments, I suspect this volume remains best appreciated by specialists with some background in philosophy rather than general readers. That's a shame, since many of Fricker's insights have obvious applications in the world today. While intersectionality never appears in the text, it is an idea that seems everywhere implicit in Fricker's careful analysis of how some identities aren't fully seen or heard. An important and valuable work.

[Brandon Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reaction: fascinating take on the issue of justice being defined along a continuum of testimonial “other” and hermeneutical “me” justices that create a lot of gray area in actions
Writing Style: deeply philosophical read with some commonly known cited stories
Argumentation: our knowledge of justice ought to be modified to adapt to our views and others’ views relative to their own, and ours. This way, we can make better justification for actions that are in the right for us, despite the competing axes of power
Commendation: drawing upon a wealth of cited articles, novels, and book theses to build an argument surrounding such a well-debated topic
Critique: how one puts epistemic justice in either subcategories seems almost impossible since there would be always exceptions, need to create a unifying concept for both types

[Hanna O'Connor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Otroligt bra och upplysande bok om de utmaningar som finns i form av vem vi anser vara trovärdig och besitta kunskap. Något svår att komma in i då den är väldigt akademisk men om en tar sig över den barriären så är det en otrolig källa till förståelse för hur marginaliserade människors kunskap blir utdriven ur den kollektiva vetskapen. Bakom de svårare termerna finns alltså något som en verkligen har känt av och kanske upplevt själv utan att förstå de bakomliggande mekanismerna.

[KeyForLocked · Rating 4 out of 5]

Learened a lot. It can't count as eyes-catching ouevure, But it found a new field step by step. If we grasp this pair of concepts--testimonial injustice and hermeutical injustce--we will be more sensitive to injustice.
The most intresting part is how injustice derived from natural state of epistemology, it's caused by our disbelief to other group. Rather say, the most intresting is natural state of epistemology!