Testimonial injustice

In general, epistemic injustice occurs when “a wrong is done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower.” (Fricker 2007, p. 1).And this can occur in all sorts of ways.As Katherine Hawley notes, “[p]erhaps the most obvious type of epistemic injustice occurs when people are unfairly prevented from obtaining knowledge because of their lack of access to education, resources, or social networks.” (2011, p.

Hermeneutical injustice occurs when there exists a lack of collective interpretative resources required for a group to understand (and express) significant aspects of their social experience. Fricker offers the example of the situation of women who experi­enced episodes of what we now identify as sexual harassment, prior to it being named and recognized as such. Without the presence of a socially recognized concept of sexual harassment, women were ill-equipped to both understand and convey these significant experiences and their harms.

(2013, sec. 4.1)

While hermeneutical epistemic injustice is, no doubt, a useful and revealing concept—being incredibly useful in feminist approaches to epistemology, for example—the kind of epistemic injustice we're most interested in this chapter is testimonial injustice.

Testimonial injustice occurs when a person or group is not given the credibility that they deserve. Or, as Fricker puts it, testimonial injustice occurs when “someone is wronged in their capacity as a giver of knowledge” (Fricker 2007, p. 7, emphasis mine). In the typical case, this means giving a person or group less credibility than they deserve. For an example of this kind of epistemic injustice, think about Greenleaf's distrust of Marge's testimony in the case at the start of this paper. And some scholars simply define testimonial injustice merely along these lines.³ However, we might also think that an epistemic injustice occurs when a person or group is given more credibility than they deserve.⁴ Going back to the Greenleaf example, Greenleaf arguably trusts Ripley far more than he deserves simply because he's a man, which can be seen as a type of testimonial injustice as well. Is Ripley “wronged in his capacity as a knower” if he is given far more credibility than he deserves? Maybe. (Though our intuitions might be clouded in this case by the fact that Ripley is a murderer.) If so, then this is indeed another (perhaps surprising) example of testimonial injustice. But, even if Ripley isn't “wronged in his capacity as a knower” this is nevertheless something very closely related to testimonial injustice.

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