Is Testimonial Injustice Epistemic? Let Me Count the Ways

Manuel Almagro Holgado,Llanos Navarro Laespada,Manuel De Pinedo García

doi:10.1017/hyp.2021.56

Abstract

AbstractMiranda Fricker distinguishes two senses in which testimonial injustice is epistemic. In theprimarysense, it is epistemic because it harms the victim as a giver of knowledge. In thesecondarysense, it is epistemic, more narrowly, because it harms the victim as a possessor of knowledge. Her characterization of testimonial injustice has raised the following objection: testimonial injustice is not always anepistemicinjustice, in the narrow, secondary sense, as it does not always entail that the victim is harmed as a knowledge-possessor. By adopting a perspective based on Robert Brandom's normative expressivism, we respond to this objection by arguing that there is a close connection, conceptual and constitutive rather than merely causal, between the primary and the secondary epistemic harms of testimonial injustice, such that testimonial injustice always involves both kinds of epistemic harm. We do so by exploring the logic and functioning of belief and knowledge ascriptions in order to highlight three ways in which the secondary epistemic harm caused by testimonial injustice crystallizes: it undermines the epistemic agency of the victim, the epistemic friction necessary for knowledge, and the possibility of occupying particular epistemic nodes.

Highlights

In Epistemic Injustice, Miranda Fricker characterizes testimonial injustice as an injustice of an epistemic kind
The objection claims that the more purely epistemic harm need not happen: inasmuch as someone who suffers from a one-off testimonial injustice retains her belief and her justification, or someone subjected to persistent testimonial injustice retains her intellectual self-confidence, she will be unjustly deprived of her epistemic rights as a provider of knowledge but not as a possessor of knowledge
We will argue that the cases of testimonial injustice where the victim is able to overcome the credibility deficit turn out to be marginal and, what is more important, derivative if we shift our focus toward the meaning and function of the verb “to know.”

Summary

Testimonial Injustice and the Epistemic Challenge

Let us start by recalling Fricker’s characterization of testimonial injustice. Testimonial injustice is a kind of epistemic injustice that occurs when identity prejudice causes a hearer to give a deflated level of credibility to a speaker’s word (Fricker 2007, 1). From Fricker’s view the response to this criticism is, in a sense, trivial: every case of testimonial injustice is epistemic, not necessarily in virtue of a loss of knowledge on the part of the victim, but in virtue of the victim being hindered as a giver of knowledge. The idea that the connection between the primary and the secondary harm is possible but not necessary suggests that testimonial injustice could harm its victims only in their capacity as givers of knowledge, without this affecting other aspects of their being subjects of knowledge, for instance, their being knowledge-possessors. From the perspective that we favor, it is conceptually impossible that the wrong done to someone in her capacity as a giver of knowledge does not affect her ability to evaluate, discard, and select beliefs, and, it is impossible that the primary harm does not wrong the victim as a subject of knowledge in the sense of the secondary harm. The idea is rather that testimonial injustice, because of its persistent and systematic nature, forces a holistic and diachronic perspective from which it is untenable that victims can be harmed as knowledge-givers without this harming their ability to sustain a stable system of knowledge by normal epistemic means

The Meta-Epistemological Turn

Counting the Ways in Which Testimonial Injustice May Be Epistemic

The Harm of Testimonial Injustice is always Epistemic