"In chapter 2 the analysis expands to focus on stereotypes as themselves stereotypical vehicles of prejudice, in what Fricker calls "the credibility economy" (30 ff). Rather than viewing them as epistemically-morally-politically pernicious forms of hasty generalization by contrast, say, with Gadamerian pre-judgements or putatively more benign practices of categorization, Fricker argues plausibly for a "neutral" sense of stereotype which catches their frequent reliability as part of a "hearer's rational resources" in making credibility judgements. Yet she acknowledges a widespread human susceptibility to relying on negatively, harmfully prejudiced stereotypes, and shows how difficult it is unequivocally to attribute culpability to their users, given that stereotypes and images "can operate beneath the radar of our ordinary doxastic self-scrutiny, sometimes even despite beliefs to the contrary" (40). The analysis of multiple, often subtle, but sometimes cruder operations of prejudice, deftly exemplified in literary and "real life" instances, is one of the most impressive sections of the book. Within this rich store of examples, ever more intricate readings of Tom Robinson, the wrongfully accused black man in Harper Lee's novel, are particularly effective in exposing the effects of stereotypes in excluding members of certain social "kinds" from relations of trust, contributing to their degradation qua knowers, "undermining them in their very humanity" (44).
"Again, there is no algorithm for achieving such reflexivity or for showing whether or how it can unseat stereotypes embedded in the social imagination. Prejudice, as Fricker well knows, is "a powerful visceral force" (98) condoned, perpetuated, and insulated against condemnation in social-cultural situations where there are no obvious reasons, no pay-offs, no rewards for examining it or, a fortiori, for attempting to purge it. Indeed, acknowledging the unjust benefits gender or racial prejudice afford to people as members of the dominant sex or race exacts a price: it entails losses, not just of psychic or doxastic comfort, but of the privileges and self-certainties such prejudices confer. Why would a hearer, whose life and the lives of whose semblables have been constructed around the social meanings they install, consider relinquishing those privileges?"
Lorraine Code
"In turning to the bearing of these virtues on matters of epistemology, it is not hard to see the injustices that Fricker discusses as being caused by either injustice or intemperance, depending on the case. We may arrogantly discount the value of a witness’s testimony because we believe he or she is claiming an authority that we unfairly think is not theirs to claim. But we may also discount people’s testimony because we have a desire for their testimony to be false. When we allow our belief-forming mechanisms to be unduly influenced by our needs, desires, appetites, passions, or emotions, then the root cause of the injustice is, perhaps surprisingly, not epistemic injustice but epistemic intemperance. The familiar problem of ‘confirmation bias’, as well as many forms of prejudice, especially insofar these are defense mechanisms against psychological insecurity, are best explained as failures of temperance: we believe what makes us feel most comfortable. Thus, we may better understand many of the epistemic injustices we do to others through a better understanding of epistemic temperance."
Paul Bloomfield
"In Epistemic Injustice, Miranda Fricker introduces hermeneutical injustice, which ‘occurs when a gap in collective interpretive resources puts someone at an unfair disadvantage when it comes to making sense of their social experiences’. A hermeneutical gap is often owing to an absence of concepts or language which can help those marginalized to make sense of their experience, and, can result in their exclusion from the pooling and spread of knowledge. But, equally, and sometimes inseparably, a hermeneutical gap can be due to the style or form of expression in which knowledge is conveyed. In this paper we elaborate this latter type of hermeneutical injustice by concentrating on what we term ‘form of expression bias’. This occurs when a particular form or style of expression is intrinsically associated with negative epistemic qualities, and, consequently, is not heard as fully rational irrespective of its content with respect to knowledge".
Elianna Fetterolf
In this paper I want to conceive of epistemic injustice within the two-dimensional theory of justice proposed by Nancy Fraser. Epistemic injustice would then be a type of status subordination which (a) prevents those targeted from participatory parity in a domain or across various domains and (b) due to a lack of parity restricts the value of deliberative processes in which this subordination occurs (at the very least by preventing relevant information from being given adequate consideration). Status subordination in Fraser’s framework is always systematic injustice, due to institutional set-ups and practices. This focus on systematic, institutional injustice has implications for the way in which injustice can be combatted (i.e. the focus must be on particular steps taken to change institutional set-ups rather than changing attitudes of individuals directly).
Axel Gelfert
The Introduction offers a clear statement of the author's aim: to explore "the idea that there is a distinctively epistemic kind of injustice", of which she distinguishes two species, testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice, each of which consists "most fundamentally, in a wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower" (1). The analysis centers around a conception of social power which Fricker glosses as "a socially situated capacity to control others' actions" (4), and which manifests in patterns of incredulity, misinterpretation, silencing. Within this frame, her particular interest is in "identity power" and the harms it enacts through invoking identity prejudices under whose sway hearers deny or withhold credibility to/from speakers qua members of a certain "social type" (4). That a person's capacity to claim recognition as a conveyer of knowledge, a bona fide informant, is essential to her or his achieving human value in a first-, second- and third-personal sense is the deep thought that grounds the argument and carries it forward. Thus, with testimonial injustice, speakers are, variously, thwarted in their claims to acknowledgment as subjects of knowledge, and thereby harmed in their self-development. With hermeneutical injustice, speakers' knowledge claims fall into lacunae in the available conceptual resources, thus blocking their capacity to interpret, and thence to understand or claim a hearing for their experiences. When such harms go deep, Fricker suggests, people are "prevented from becoming who they are" (5). Even though they may be experienced and performed individually, these are not merely individual harms: testimonial and hermeneutical injustices come from and refer back to a social fabric within which the biases and prejudices that animate and sustain them are tightly entangled, and conceptual lacunae are more and other than places of unknowing, ready to be "filled in" by inserting the appropriate facts. Structurally, members of some social groups are ill-understood, marginalized, reduced to unintelligibility through patterns of testimonial and hermeneutic injustice that often seem to be everyone's and no one's responsibility. For Fricker, contesting such injustices and harms requires "collective social political change" -- and, in her view, contentiously I shall suggest, "the political depends upon the ethical" (8).
Lorraine Code
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