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Understanding Epistemic Injustice

18/6/2025

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2 Comments

JoeM

5/7/2025 09:10:45 pm

I am an old-fashioned epistemologist. There is a distinctive /epistemic/ aim, relative to each individual—to believe truth and avoid falsity (variously prioritized, according to William James)—and other things are properly called epistemic only in virtue of some relation to this aim. Thus, knowledge is an /epistemic/ good because it involves true belief, and evidence-based inquiry is an /epistemic/ virtue because such belief-forming processes promote this aim. Epistemology is about the individual's search for truth, nothing more and nothing less.

Newer-fashioned epistemologists seem to challenge this view.

Some challenge its sole focus on /individuals/. Bemoaning the historical focus on the individual knower in isolation, these people argue that "knowledge is /social/. No knower is an island: we depend on social structures and other people for the acquisition, creation, and dissemination of knowledge" (McKinnon, p. 438).

This doesn't really trouble me. Distinguish between epistemic aims and means. It is perfectly acceptable for our epistemic /aims/ to be individual—ie, for me to aim that I believe truth and avoid falsity, and for you to do the same for yourself. (Indeed, it is unwise for our epistemic aims to be social, since, while I /could/ aim that /we/ believe truth, that aim will be realized only if we all agree, and that is a very unlikely prospect.) But it is unwise for our epistemic /means/ to be individual—since a very good way for me to acquire true beliefs, like most other goods, is to rely on other people. (Still, I think there is something attractive about trying to figure out things for oneself rather than taking them for granted, so one cheer for the argument-providing flat-earthers, then.) In short, individual knowers need not be isolated knowers.

Others challenge its narrow focus on /truth/. Miranda Fricker claims that there are distinctly epistemic /injustices/, in which a speaker is harmed "in her capacity as a knower" (McKinnon, p. 438). There are two types, but I shall focus only on one. Testimonial injustice occurs "when a speaker suffers a credibility deficit [ie, others attribute less credibility to them than they deserve] due to an identity prejudice (perhaps arising from an identity stereotype) on the hearer's part" (p. 438)—eg, a women's testimony on some matter is not believed due to the prejudice that women are emotional.

But is this both injustice and epistemic? For example, a man disbelieves a woman's credible testimony that p because he is prejudiced against women. This is an injustice, obviously against the woman—my preferred (Kantian) explanation of this is that it expresses disrespect for her as a rational being, and this holds whether or not she is offended or insulted by being ignored, and whether or not it has any detrimental psychological effects on her. It is also an epistemic harm, but arguably /to the man/—after the interaction, she knows that p but he does not, so his prejudice has led him to miss out on a true belief, and so he has harmed /himself/ epistemically. Fricker will insist that the woman has also been harmed, "in her capacity as a knower". In one sense, this is right: she has been /disrespected as a knower/, which is unjust since it involves her being disrespected, and epistemic since it relates to her as a knower. But not in the sense that matters to the epistemologist. For recall that the distinctive /epistemic/ aim is to believe truth and avoid falsity, and other things are properly called epistemic only in virtue of some relation to this aim. That prejudice will me lead to false beliefs is clearly relevant to this aim, but that it will also lead me to disrespect others (whether as knowers, or in some other capacity, it doesn't matter) is not.

So it seems there can be no such thing as /epistemic/ injustice, since episteme concerns how I form beliefs, while injustice concerns how I treat others. To repeat, epistemology is about the individual's search for truth, not their treating others justly, which is the province of ethics.

Russell Blackford

8/7/2025 05:49:06 pm

My concerns are a bit different, Joe, though there's overlap. Let's assume for the sake of argument that the woman has been harmed as a result of prejudice, and that this is unfair. If we think the combination of the seriousness of the harm and the egregious of the unfairness reaches some difficult-to-define threshold, we might then be justified in using the expression "injustice". Fine. I might have reservations in various real or hypothetical cases, but it seems reasonable to me to use the word "injustice" in Fricker's two paradigmatic cases (To Kill a Mockingbird and the screenplay of The Talented Mr Ripley).

Okay, so in at least these kinds of serious cases it seems (to me) that the heavy-duty word "injustice" is not out of place.

As you say, these cases relate in some way to the person as a knower, so perhaps it's also okay to say that this is an injustice of a loosely "epistemic" kind. Words can be used stipulatively, so I think it's also kind of, sort of, okay to stipulate that from now on these are the sorts of cases that will be referenced by the expression "epistemic injustice". It's more or less intuitive because (at least in our paradigmatic cases) there seems to be some sort of injustice going on, and the cases at least have *something* to do with knowing.

I agree, though, that's it's a bit misleading, since the injustice does not take the form of being unfairly being denied access to knowledge or truth.

I'm not keen on talk of "being harmed in her capacity as a knower" - if she suffers harm, it's not in her ability to know stuff; it's in her ability to get other people to take her seriously in certain respects. Whether she's actually harmed merely by being judged in a certain way that is disrespectful, she will also suffer consequential harm if this keeps happening to her, or if it happens to her in a situation where there's a lot at stake, because she'll be hindered in her ability to function in society.

So, I don't have a terribly strong objection to the term simply as a term of art - perhaps useful within moral, political, and social philosophy - with a stipulated definition. However, it's a term that belongs in those areas of philosophy, not in epistemology - or at least not in epistemology as it's traditionally understood.

I think Fricker's book (which is actually very good in my opinion; there's a lot of interesting stuff in it) should be thought of as primarily a contribution to political philosophy - it's mainly about trying to get an additional understanding of the nature of the marginalisation of people from historically marginalised demographic groups.

All that said, I find the practice of slapping the term "epistemic" before words like "injustice", "violence", and "oppression" a bit gimmicky. It's one thing to have one of these terms that might seem reasonably apt if you squint at it. But when this kind of loose talk keeps getting used for various social phenomena, it starts to look as if people are trying to sound properly "philosophical" and rigorous, or something of the kind that I don't necessarily quite understand. My impression is that the first of these terms to appear was actually "epistemic violence", but I haven't checked so I might be wrong about that.

Viewed in isolation, "epistemic injustice" at least involves something that looks kind of "unjust" in the literal sense of that troublesome word (at least it has that appearance in our serious paradigmatic cases). By contrast, the concept of epistemic violence is much more like a metaphor. There might well be literal violence going on when so-called epistemic violence takes place, but this "epistemic violence" we hear about is not in itself an act of literal violence.

So, there's a certain amount of looseness going on here in the way that you suggest Joe, but there's also a certain amount of what strikes me as a gimmick, and at least in the case of "epistemic violence" a certain use of political rhetoric relying on an extended or metaphorical concept of violence that not only lacks analytical rigour but is also (I think - for reasons that I can't go into here) somewhat dangerous.

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Understanding Epistemic Injustice

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