Code (on Fricker)

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. 

Lorraine Code

The appeal must be to exemplary instances and events in which people have managed to move imaginatively beyond damaging practices and policies, have enlisted a critical mass of like-minded others to initiate the new meanings, the collective political change, the (nascent) just society, that is the moral-political goal of systematically countering epistemic injustice.

Germane to advancing this analysis of wrongs done to a speaker by acts of testimonial injustice is a distinction Edward Craig (1990, 35) draws "between a person's telling me something and my being able to tell something from observations of him": between being treated as an "informant" and as a "source of information", which Fricker mobilizes as crucial to "the politics of epistemic life" (130-1). When people are consulted, heard, accorded credibility as informants, their status as epistemic agents is acknowledged and preserved. When they are treated as sources of information, their conduct and attitudes are read from the surface, from a third-person quasi-touristic point of view (and often through "tracking" biases), by contrast with a second-person mode of address that asks and listens. Not being asked blocks possibilities of epistemic collaboration, contestation, negotiation; it silences the voices of the powerless, objectifies them epistemically, thereby again enacting patterns of dehumanizing testimonial injustice that the preempt the exchanges -- the team-work (in Craig's words) -- on which viable epistemic community depends.

Lorraine Code