So we’re all familiar with the talk of injustice.
What is epistemic injustice?
Well, each of us at times have knowledge, understanding, rational beliefs.
We can give and receive knowledge but we depend on others to treat us fairly in this process.
Knowledge giving and receipt is a social process.
Cases of epistemic injustice are cases where we’re treated unfairly or unjustly in this
process of giving or receiving knowledge.
One way this is put in the philosophy literature is that we’re wronged in our capacity as
knowers.
One type of epistemic injustice has been identified by Miranda Fricker and labelled ‘testimonial
injustice’.
Testimonial injustice occurs when the testimony of a person is given less credibility than
it deserves, due to a stereotype about the person’s group.
For example, the stereotype that women depend on intuition or black people are athletic,
not intelligent, or the stereotype that people with mental health issues are just crazy.
Fricker gives an example of Marge from the Talented Mr Ripley.
Her husband has gone missing and she has suspicions about Mr Ripley’s involvement in this event.
She tries to express the suspicion and she’s dismissed on the basis that she’s just making
the judgement on mere women’s intuition.
So here you’ve got a stereotype that’s applied and a person’s testimony isn’t
given the credibility that it deserves because, you know, she is in a good position to know
about her husband and his situation and his going missing.
So stereotypes often favour people in positions of power, leading to the maintenance of existing
social structures.
IT’s worth nothing though that Marge is in a privileged position.
So the example that Fricker uses is this one of this privileged person but some women are
put in social positions in which they’re not given the opportunity to voice their opinions
about various issues.
So one example that’s given by Patricia Hill-Collins is black women who are placed
in the positions as domestic services, denied educational opportunities.
They’re put in a social situation in which they’re really deprived in terms of the
opportunity to give and receive knowledge and to be the credibility that they deserve
in that process.
It’s worth nothing as well, and this is another thing that Hill-Collins has noted,
that those people who occupy positions that are less privileged often get various insights
as a result.
So for example, the domestic servant living in the house of a white family who are landowners
might get an insight into the inconsistencies and oppositions found in the ideologies of
those individuals.
She might see that women in the household are treated as if they can’t do certain
work and yet she as a woman, because she’s black, is treated as if she can do that work.
So it’s possible to get insights through being a part of this group that’s less privileged,
that members of the more privileged group can’t have.
But as a result of the lack of credibility given to the less privileged people, there
can be a general ignorance about these insights that they gave because they’re not listened
to and they’re not given the credibility that they deserve.
OK, so that’s one of the difficult concepts that’s been introduced by Fricker.
Another one is hermeneutical injustice.
She points out that members of stigmatised and marginalised groups can be denied access
to resources that they need to understand their own experiences.
For example, they can lack conceptual resources.
This is as a result of the way that society is structured.
So Fricker talks about sexual harassment.
Obviously there’s been a lot of talk in the news recently about sexual harassment
but she discusses a time when this concept wasn’t even heard of and she discusses how
people have experiences in the workplace that they were aware of but they couldn’t articulate
to other people because there were not the conceptual resources out there to talk about
sexual harassment.
Another example would be postnatal depression.
People who don’t have this concept will not be able to understand and articulate their
experiences.
So they will be put in a less privileged position as a result of the lack of conceptual resources
available within their society.
Fricker argues that this can cause confusion and isolation and a loss of confidence of
a person in their ability to articulate their experiences.
It’s important to distinguish two things here though.
It’s important to distinguish a lack of conceptual resources within the person who
has the experience and a lack of conceptual resources within other people.
So it’s been argued recently in response to Fricker that members of stigmatised and
marginalised groups often have good understanding of their own experiences and the problems
that they face are in articulating those experiences to other people who lack the conceptual resources
because they haven’t had this shared experience.
So it’s possible for members of groups to have their own understanding but not be able
to explain those experiences to other people due to the way society is structured and the
way that those other people therefore lack conceptual resources.
OK, so then another type of epistemic injustice is testimonial silencing and this is something
that’s been discussed by Kristie Dotson.
So this can come in two forms.
Testimonial quieting happens when ‘an audience fails to identify the speaker as a knower’.
So once again she talks about black women because this is her area of research and she
focuses on how black women are often identified as not being knowers because of the stereotypes
associated with them.
And then, as a result of this, when they try to speak and articulate their experiences
or other information, other people can fail to take in their testimony and respond appropriately
to it and this can be, again, as a result of a false stereotype – the false stereotype
that black women are not knowers.
This can damage the intellectual courage of individuals who are systematically silenced
and where all of the members of a certain group are silenced in this way, it can be
that their knowledge that they have within that group, they’ve developed within that
group, for example within their intellectual traditions, is lost.
It’s lost to other people because they’re not able to articulate it and have that information
received by other people.
OK, so that’s testimonial quieting but there’s another form of testimonial silencing that
Dotson discusses and this is testimonial smothering.
So this is where a speaker self-silences because she believes that her testimony will be misinterpreted.
So in any individual case it might not be that someone else has acted in a way that
suggests that they’re not going to be listened to, but they can assume based on their past
experiences that the other person isn’t going to take up their testimony in the way
they should.
So a person can avoid being misinterpreted in a situation by just staying silent.
Dotson talks about black domestic violence victims in the United States who might be
reluctant to speak up because they don’t want to, by explaining their experiences,
seem to provide support for the stereotype that black men are violent.
In this situation they’re denied the opportunity to explain their experience due to other people’s
lack of willingness or ability to properly understand their experience and put it in
context.
Right, so, those are some ways that epistemic injustice can manifest but it’s worth noticing
that this can be wilful or unintentional.
So epistemic injustice can wilful and intentionally chosen, or unintentional.
So at the one extreme you might have a sexual harasser who intentionally undermines the
person that they’ve harassed, explicitly using stereotypes about them in order to undermine
them and undermine the claims that they make.
Given the recent news it’s easy to imagine examples like this, so someone might be labelled
a slut, they might be stereotyped in such a way that their previous sexual history seems
to be relevant to an event where it isn’t, and this can be done in order to undermine
their claims of sexual harassment against someone else.
So this could be a case where someone intentionally and consciously chooses to engage in epistemic
injustice to undermine someone in their capacity as a knower and someone who can give and receive
knowledge.
But the other extreme a person might just display subtle behaviours, for example avoiding
eye contact, suggesting that they don’t trust someone else due to the operation of
complicit bias and this could lead to testimonial smothering.
So there are empirical findings suggesting that implicit bias can lead people to do things
like avoid eye contact with members of certain groups and that sort of behaviour can suggest
to the person whose eye contact has been avoided that they’re not going to be trusted or
listened to and as a result of that, they could end up choosing not to speak because
they might judge that their audience is not receptive.
So then you could have something like an implicit bias that is unintentional, not chosen, leading
to a form of epistemic injustice and testimonial smothering.
OK, that’s all I wanted to say.