A New Direction for Epistemic Injustice in Business

The notion of epistemic injustice has in recent years gained recognition within social and political philosophy. Epistemic injustice is the idea that someone can be unfairly discriminated against in our capacity as a knower and that unfair and unjust communicative structures, institutions, and practices have the potential to reproduce and further exacerbate existing socioeconomic inequalities and injustices. Yet, the literature on epistemic injustice has mainly focused on what makes an epistemic injustice epistemic – as opposed to distributive or socioeconomic – and little attention has been paid to what exactly makes it an injustice. This paper fills this lacuna by asking under what conditions epistemic discrimination suffered by a knower becomes an epistemic injustice and identifies five partial conditions that can be used to evaluate claims of epistemic injustice.

The idea of draws together three branches of philosophy - political philosophy, ethics, and epistemology - to consider how epistemic practices and institutions may be deployed and structured in ways that are simultaneously infelicitous toward certain epistemic values (such as truth, aptness, and understanding) and unjust with regard to particular knowers. This chapter seeks to convey knowledge concerning the varieties of epistemic injustice does, by definition, engage in epistemic activity. It provides some initial examples of epistemic injustices so that readers may begin to understand the grammar of the term 'epistemic injustice' for future and new uses. The chapter then presents four lenses with which to think about varieties of epistemic injustice. It also provides readers a sense of some ways epistemic injustices can take shape without foreclosing the possibility of thinking about epistemic injustices along other trajectories, and especially along trajectories that may be more readily noticed by those who are differently located than the author.

This article provides a framework for understanding social and cultural inequalities in education in the context of cultural processes and epistemic injustice. Insight into the cultural processes and the concept of epistemic injustice direct us to the conceptualization of agency of the actors within the educational domain and the institutionalized relations of domination and recognition. The article employs two cultural processes: identification (stigmatization and racialization) and rationalization (standardization and evaluation) and two epistemic injustice models: testimonial and hermeneutical injustice to understand the production of inequalities and relations of domination in a school setting (Lamont, Beljean and Clair, 2014; Fricker, 2017). This goal is animated by this research question: “How to understand the production of inequalities in a school setting through cultural processes and epistemic injustice?” Taking into account cultural processes and epistemic injustice, this article argues that the literature on education should include diverse epistemic approaches to problematize the ways of the transmission of structural inequalities in society to education and how these inequality forms are complementary to current practices. The result indicates that cultural processes and epistemic injustice forms should be taken into consideration in understanding the production and maintenance of inequalities in education.

There are gaps in understanding in and between those who design systems of AI/ ML, those who critique them, and those positioned between these discourses. This gap can be defined in multiple ways - e.g. methodological, epistemological, linguistic, or cultural. To bridge this gap requires a set of translations: the generation of a collaborative space and a new set of shared sensibilities that traverse disciplinary boundaries. This workshop aims to explore translations across multiple fields, and translations between theory and practice, as well as how interdisciplinary work could generate new operationalizable approaches.

Curated sites of learning—places that are created by people to promote formal and informal knowledge and knowledge production practices (such as schools and museums)—are deemed foundational by many societies in assisting children to become knowers. However, curated sites of learning can also uphold ways of knowing that can cause harm to people marginalized from knowledge production, which philosophers describe as epistemic injustice. By looking across fields of research (education and philosophy), I describe how epistemic injustice can be utilized in education research to provide a shared analytical lens for examining curated sites of learning. I name four levels of interaction in which epistemic injustice can occur given their purposeful design by people with power: moment-to-moment interactions, micro (within a site), meso (between local sites) and macro (between sites and national/international policies and rhetoric). I describe how educators and researchers might disrupt epistemic injustice through the examination of curated learning sites and their personal ideas about knowledge. I also highlight tensions and dilemmas that might arise for educators and researchers when engaged in such work.

In this essay, Tim Black and Danielle Spratt share experience drawn from their team-taught course on Austen, specifically focusing on the results they have achieved from pairing an Austen novel with relevant readings from moral and epistemological philosophy. The essay explores in particular a specific concept (‘testimonial injustice’) that provided a welcome and liberating key to considering the nuances of Austen’s writing about systemic oppression and was drawn from Miranda Fricker’s work on ‘epistemic injustice’, or the idea that people can be wronged ‘specifically in their capacity as a knower’. They argue that teachers of Austen can productively pair Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park alongside Fricker’s category of testimonial injustice to provide a useful pedagogical framework that both historicises sociopolitical issues of the early nineteenth century and contextualises them as of a piece with ongoing matters of racism, sexism, ableism, and heteronormativity that seek to repress or silence voices from marginalised groups in our own twenty-first century moment.

I argue that epistemic injustice manifests not only in the content of our concepts, but in the spaces between them. Others have shown that epistemic injustice arises in the form of “testimonial injustice,” where an agent is harmed because her credibility is undervalued, and “hermeneutical injustice,” where an agent is harmed because some community lacks the conceptual resources that would allow her to render her experience intelligible. I think that epistemic injustice also arises as a result of prejudiced and harmful defects in the inferential architecture of both scientific practice and everyday thinking. Drawing on lessons from the philosophy of science, I argue that the inferential architecture of our epistemic practices can be prejudiced and wrongful, leading to a variety of epistemic injustice that I am calling “inferential injustice.” This type of injustice is fully structural; it inheres in our epistemic practices themselves rather than as a direct result of an individual's action. For this reason, cases of inferential injustice are importantly different from extant cases of epistemic injustice and are especially hard to track. We need a better understanding of inferential injustice so that we can avoid and ameliorate cases such as the ones I present here.

In this paper, I take up the question of how epistemic injustices can be resisted. Miranda Fricker (2007), who introduced the term to describe situations in which subjects are wronged as knowers, has initially advocated an individualist, virtue-based account to counteract epistemic injustices. Epistemic injustices, however, do not merely operate at an individual level but are rooted in social practices and structures. Arguably therefore, individually virtuous epistemic conduct is not enough to uproot patterns of epistemic injustice. Institutional change and collective actions are needed. Recently, Elizabeth Anderson (2012) has proposed such a structural remedy. Diagnosing patterns of social segregation that track existing inequalities to be the principal structural cause of epistemic injustices, Anderson suggests that integration is required to achieve epistemic justice. Pace Anderson, I argue that certain segregated spaces —namely spaces provided by subaltern counter-publics— can function and, in fact, have historically functioned as important sites of epistemic resistance. In particular, I argue that even if integration is sharply distinguished from assimilation, Anderson’s proposal insufficiently acknowledges the subversive potential of those spaces, in which shielded from the gaze of the oppressors, marginally situated subjects can assemble and question hegemonic epistemic practices

In her groundbreaking book, Epistemic Injustice, renowned moral philosopher and social epistemologist Miranda Fricker coined the term epistemic injustice to draw attention to the pervasive impact of epistemic oppression on marginalized social groups. Fricker’s account spurred a flurry of scholarship regarding the discriminatory impact of epistemic injustice and gave birth to a domain of philosophical inquiry that has extended far beyond the disciplinary boundaries of philosophy. In this interview, Fricker responds to questions posed by A. C. Nikolaidis and Winston C. Thompson that address the ways in which epistemic injustice intersects with education as a human endeavour and social institution. In doing so, Fricker reflects on her motivations in writing her book more than fifteen years ago and explicitly addresses some of the most significant contributions of the concept of epistemic injustice as a tool for analysing issues in education. She also offers insights on the purpose of education, outlines educational manifestations of epistemic injustice, and discusses the virtues that educators must exhibit and inculcate in their students in order for epistemic justice to obtain.

Socially extended knowledge has recently received much attention in mainstream epistemology. Knowledge here is not to be understood as wholly realised within a single individual who manipulates artefacts or tools but as collaboratively realised across plural agents. Because of its focus on the interpersonal dimension, socially extended epistemology appears to be a promising approach for investigating the deeply social nature of epistemic practices. I believe, however, that this line of inquiry could be made more fruitful if it is connected with the critical notion of epistemic responsibility, as developed in feminist responsibilism. According to feminist responsibilists, at the core of epistemic responsibility is a critical disposition toward correcting epistemic injustice. This epistemic idea is highly relevant to the epistemological context of illness, where patient testimony is often disregarded. Hence, though restricted to the epistemological context of the experience of illness, this chapter delves into epistemic injustice and its robust mechanisms. I thus explore what responsible epistemic practices should involve in order to redress that injustice and how epistemic responsibility should be socially extended. The discussion proceeds as follows. First, by relying on Arthur Frank’s innovative work on illness narratives, I focus on chaotic bodily messages from patients overwhelmed by suffering and then explain why these messages should count as genuine narratives or testimonies despite their inarticulateness. Second, I elaborate on how epistemic injustice concerning such narratives (i.e., chaos narratives) is produced or reproduced, in particular how both a dominant sociocultural norm and our inherent vulnerability can contribute to their production or reproduction. Finally, I propose an extended form of epistemic responsibility that ameliorates this aspect. Laying particular emphasis on the epistemic role of mature empathy, I characterise the extended epistemic responsibility in terms of extended empathic knowledge.

Teaching & Learning Guide for Business Ethics: An Overview

The increasing popularity of the term ‘person‐centred’ in the healthcare literature and a wide range of ideals and practices it implies point to the need for a more inclusive and holistic healthcare provision. A framework developed in a Swedish context suggested narrative elicitation as a key practice in transition to person‐centred care. Initiating clinical communication by inviting people to tell their stories makes persistent yet often subtle problems in clinical communication visible. By drawing upon an observational study on narrative elicitation and vignette‐based focus group interviews with nurses, our aim is to trace ‘credibility deficits’ (Fricker 2007. Epistemic Injustice. Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press) and ‘credibility excesses’ (Medina 2011, Social Epistemology, 25, 1, 15–35, 2013, The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and the Social Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press) in narrative elicitation. We argue that narrative elicitation may be one way to tackle epistemic injustices by giving voice to previously silenced groups, yet it is not enough to erase the effects of ‘credibility deficits’ in clinical communication. Rather than judging individual professionals’ success or failure in eliciting narratives, we underline some extrinsic problems of narrative elicitation, namely structural and positional inequalities reflecting on narrative elicitation and the credibility of patients. ‘Credibility excesses’ can be useful and indicative to better understand where they are missing.

This paper uses the concept of epistemic injustice to shed light on the discriminatory treatment of experts in and by development aid. While the literature on epistemic justice is largely based on philosophical reasoning, I provide an empirical case study which substantiates theoretical claims with findings from social science research. Drawing on expert interviews conducted in South Africa and Tanzania, I reveal how epistemic injustice is experienced, practiced and institutionalised in a field which claims to work towards global justice. Focusing on aid-related advisory processes, the paper highlights how epistemic authority therein is tied to identity-based prejudice. The systematic credibility deficit policy experts from aid-receiving countries suffer is closely interrelated with the credibility excess so-called ‘international’ experts profit from. Their privilege is backed by an imaginary that maintains the idea of Northern epistemic superiority and sustained by prevailing employment and procurement practices of donor organisations. The paper suggests that the concurrence of testimonial and hermeneutical injustice prevents experts from the Global South from taking the lead in interpreting their own societies’ realities. This, I argue, is not only detrimental to the countries whose knowers are marginalised but also a root cause of persisting global inequality.

Do business ethics really matter?

In recent years, a significant body of literature has emerged on the subject of epistemic injustice: wrongful harms done to people in their capacities as knowers (Fricker 2007). Up to now this literature has ignored the role that attention has to play in epistemic injustice. This paper makes a first step towards addressing this gap. We argue that giving someone less attention than they are due, which we call an epistemic attention deficit, is a distinct form of epistemic injustice. We begin by outlining what we mean by epistemic attention deficits, which we understand as a failure to pay someone the attention they are due in their role as an epistemic agent. We argue that these deficits constitute epistemic injustices for two reasons. First, they affect someone’s ability to influence what others believe. Second, they affect one’s ability to influence the shared common ground in which testimonial exchanges take place. We then outline the various ways in which epistemic attention deficits harm those who are subject to them. We argue that epistemic attention deficits are harms in and of themselves because they deprive people of an essential component of epistemic agency. Moreover, epistemic attention deficits reduce an agent’s ability to participate in valuable epistemic practices. These two forms of harm have important impacts on educational performance and the distribution of resources. Finally, we argue that epistemic attention deficits both hinder and shape the development of epistemic agency. We finish by exploring some practical implications arising from our discussion.