Meaning Dominance – When Polysemy Creates Hermeneutical Injustice

Hermeneutical injustice is an epistemic injustice that happens when a person's experience cannot be well understood or articulated because of the problem with the collective hermeneutical resource -- a collection of concepts and words that we use to understand one's experience and to communicate with one another about it. Previously, Miranda Fricker and Rebecca Mason have suggested two types of hermeneutical injustice: Hermeneutical Gap and Hermeneutical Distortion. Fricker believes that hermeneutical injustice is a gap between hermeneutical resources, whereas Mason suggests the collective hermeneutical resource can also be distorted when the words and concepts that comprise it are inferentially related in ways that are invalid or inductively weak. However, in this paper, I identify a novel type of hermeneutical injustice that I call Hermeneutical Weakening. In a case of HW, hermeneutical injustice is neither caused by the collective hermeneutical resource being deficient nor it being distorted, but due to it being weakened. I define Hermeneutical Weakening as the loss of word significance when the lexical effect of the word is weakened due to overuse. I then differentiate hermeneutical weakening from both hermeneutical gap and distortion. In particular, I analyze the subtle differences between weakening and distortion and argue the lexical effect can also be weakened through non-literal uses of words when the literal standard meaning of words to which distortion tied is suspended. Finally, I explain the generation of hermeneutical weakening and how it is also a form of oppression of the marginalized group generated systematically under the social system.

In her book, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, Miranda Fricker describes hermeneutical injustice as “the injustice of having some significant area of one’s social experience obscured from collective understanding owing to a structural identity prejudice in the collective hermeneutical resource.” Hermeneutical injustices are part of the systemic patterns of structural injustices that members of particular social groups (for example, women, GLBTQ, people of color, and dis/ abled individuals) are susceptible to; they are, therefore, aspects of oppression. A hermeneutical injustice occurs when “a collective hermeneutical gap impinges so as to significantly disadvantage some group(s) and not others.” Those wronged in this way are excluded from participating in the spread of knowledge; a significant area of their social experience is not intelligible through collective understanding or dominant narratives because a gap in the collective hermeneutical resource renders them marginalized. Fricker offers the condition of women before the legal and social term “sexual harassment” existed to describe their inappropriate treatment by men in the workplace as an example of hermeneutical injustice. Owing to a lacuna in the collective hermeneutical resource, women were unable to fully express workplace experiences without the concept of sexual harassment and the legal and social assumption the concept now communicates (for example, “boys will be boys” does not justify inappropriate touching in the workplace). The lack of a shared concept, “sexual harassment,” harmed women in terms of physical and mental stress, but it also occasioned an “epistemic harm” because the experience of women was unintelligible to others.

Miranda Fricker (2007) explains that hermeneutical injustice occurs when an area of one’s social experience is obscured from collective understanding. However, Fricker focuses only on the injustice suffered by those who cannot render intelligible their own oppression. I argue that there is another side to hermeneutical injustice that is other-oriented; an injustice that occurs when one cannot understand, to a basic extent, the oppression of others. Specifically, I discuss the hermeneutical injustice suffered by nonhuman animals made possible by objectifying concepts available in the collective hermeneutical resource.

In this paper, we have two goals. First, we argue for a blueprint for hermeneutical injustice that allows us to schematize existing and discover new varieties of hermeneutical injustices. The underlying insight is that Fricker provides both a general concept of hermeneutical injustice and a specific conception thereof. By distinguishing between the general concept and its specific conceptions, we gain a fruitful tool to detect such injustices in our everyday lives. Second, we use this blueprint to provide a further example of hermeneutical injustice that draws our attention to yet another distinction: Some hermeneutical injustices result from a lack or distortion in the collective conceptual resource and some are due to problems in the application of existing concepts. We argue that to combat hermeneutical injustices, we have to make sure not only that individuals have accurate concepts at their disposal but that they have the capabilities to use these concepts adequately.

Hermeneutical injustice, as a species of epistemic injustice, is when members of marginalized groups are unable to make their experiences communicatively intelligible due to a deficiency in collective hermeneutical resources, where this deficiency is traditionally interpreted as a lack of concepts. Against this understanding, this article argues that even if adequate concepts that describe marginalized groups’ experiences are available within the collective hermeneutical resources, hermeneutical injustice can persist. This article offers an analysis of how this can happen by introducing the notion of hermeneutical excess: the introduction of additional concepts into collective hermeneutical resources that function to obscure agents’ understanding of the lived experiences of marginalized groups. The injustice of hermeneutical excesses happens not due to hermeneutical marginalization (the exclusion of members of marginalized groups from the construction of hermeneutical resources), but rather from hermeneutical domination: when members of dominant groups have been inappropriately included in the construction of hermeneutical resources. By taking as exemplary cases the concepts of “reverse racism” and “nonconsensual sex,” this article shows how such excesses are introduced as a kind of defensive strategy used by dominant ideologies precisely when progress with social justice is made.

Miranda Fricker claims that a “gap” in collective hermeneutical resources with respect to the social experiences of marginalized groups prevents members of those groups from understanding their own experiences (Fricker 2007). I argue that because Fricker misdescribes dominant hermeneutical resources as collective, she fails to locate the ethically bad epistemic practices that maintain gaps in dominant hermeneutical resources even while alternative interpretations are in fact offered by non-dominant discourses. Fricker's analysis of hermeneutical injustice does not account for the possibility that marginalized groups can be silenced relative to dominant discourses without being prevented from understanding or expressing their own social experiences. I suggest that a gap in dominant hermeneutical resources is ambiguous between two kinds of unknowing: hermeneutical injustice suffered by members of marginalized groups, and epistemically and ethically blameworthy ignorance perpetrated by members of dominant groups.

In 2024 University of Amsterdam’s launched a new research priority area, "Decolonial Futures," which centers on transforming archives, museums, and cultural institutions to address colonial legacies. This article focuses on colonial archives managed by archival institutions. The central question is what forms of injustice are embedded within these archives and how can archival institutions build better archival futures based on the recognition of those injustices. Colonial archives are inherently problematic as knowledge resources, as they primarily reflect the perspectives of colonial authorities, often distorting and silencing the voices of colonized populations. Drawing on Miranda Fricker's concept of epistemic injustice, two main forms of injustice can be identified: hermeneutical injustice and testimonial injustice. Testimonial injustice occurs according to Fricker when a hearer gives "a deflated level of credibility to a speaker’s word", often based on the speaker’s gender or race. Testimonial injustice frequently results from hermeneutical injustice, which involves structural identity prejudice. Fricker defines hermeneutical injustice as "the injustice of having (…) one’s social experience obscured from collective understanding owing to a structural identity prejudice in the collective hermeneutical resource". Using the lens of epistemic injustice offers valuable opportunities to better understand the problematic nature of colonial archives, while also providing archival institutions with guidance on how to avoid perpetuating injustices when creating digital archival spaces. This article shares experiences from a project initiated by the Dutch National Archives to map how representatives from affected communities, as well as those from the academic and heritage sectors, view the necessity and possibilities for archival institutions to engage with these archives in a different, decolonial way, with the aim of creating a more inclusive historical record and better serving communities marginalized by history.

“Conjoint Communicated Experience”: Art as an Instrument of Democracy

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According to Miranda Fricker, a hermeneutical injustice occurs when there is a deficit in our shared tools of social interpretation (the collective hermeneutical resource), such that marginalized social groups are at a disadvantage in making sense of their distinctive and important experiences. Critics have claimed that Fricker's account ignores or precludes a phenomenon I call hermeneutical dissent, where marginalized groups have produced their own interpretive tools for making sense of those experiences. I clarify the nature of hermeneutical injustice to make room for hermeneutical dissent, clearing up the structure of the collective hermeneutical resource and the fundamental harm of hermeneutical injustice. I then provide a more nuanced account of the hermeneutical resources in play in instances of hermeneutical injustice, enabling six species of the injustice to be distinguished. Finally, I reflect on the corrective virtue of hermeneutical justice in light of hermeneutical dissent.

A Cautionary Tale:On Limiting Epistemic Oppression Kristie Dotson (bio) I cannot recall the words of my first poembut I remember a promiseI made my pennever to leave itlyingin somebody else's blood. Audre Lorde, "To the Poet Who Happens to Be Black and the Black Poet Who Happens to Be a Woman"1 Introduction In this paper, first and foremost, I aim to issue a caution. Specifically, I caution that when addressing and identifying forms of epistemic oppression one needs to endeavor not to perpetuate epistemic oppression. Epistemic oppression, here, refers to epistemic exclusions afforded positions and communities that produce deficiencies in social knowledge. An epistemic exclusion, in this analysis, is an infringement on the epistemic agency of knowers that reduces her or his ability to participate in a given epistemic community.2 Epistemic agency will concern the ability to utilize persuasively shared epistemic resources within a given epistemic community in order to participate in knowledge production and, if required, the revision of those same resources.3 A compromise to epistemic agency, when unwarranted, damages not only individual knowers but also the state of social knowledge and shared epistemic resources. Unfortunately, avoiding unwarranted epistemic exclusions is an exceedingly difficult task. It may well be impossible. For example, we simply do not have the capacity to track all the implications of our positions on any given [End Page 24] issue, which would, arguably, be necessary to avoid epistemic oppression entirely. This realization relegates efforts to be conscious of and minimize epistemic oppression to a kind of naïveté characteristic of utopian dreamers who advocate pie-in-the-sky goals achievable only in theory. Like many forms of pessimism, pessimism about epistemic fairness assumes an all-or-nothing stance. Either we can eliminate epistemic oppression entirely, or we can do nothing about epistemic oppression at all. This position is an obvious over-simplification of the many options available. One can advocate for better, more responsible epistemic conduct capable of reducing epistemic oppression, without also harboring unrealistic expectations for superior epistemic conduct and abilities necessary for eliminating epistemic oppression entirely. In this vein here I issue a caution and a proposal for minimizing epistemic oppression. To issue this caution, I take Miranda Fricker's book Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing as a paradigmatic case of the challenges that arise when attempting to avoid epistemic oppression, even while drawing attention to epistemic forms of oppression.4 By bringing attention to specifically epistemic forms of injustice, Fricker's work offers a strong and valuable contribution to a tradition of feminist thought that aims to highlight the observation that "when it comes to knowledge, women get hurt."5 However, her framing of epistemic bad luck as an antithesis to epistemic injustice conceptually forecloses the possibility of other forms of epistemic injustice and hence can be used to demonstrate the pervasiveness of epistemic oppression. Fricker, I claim, inadvertently perpetrates epistemic oppression by utilizing a closed conceptual structure to identify epistemic injustice. This limitation of Fricker's view illustrates the difficulty of avoiding epistemic oppression and demonstrates an avenue for reducing it in one's own analyses. This paper will proceed in two parts. First, I introduce Fricker's two forms of epistemic injustice, testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice, and a third form of epistemic injustice, contributory injustice. I will also briefly gesture to the pervasive nature of epistemic oppression. Second, I use Fricker's concept of epistemic bad luck as a contemporary example of how easy it is to perpetrate epistemic oppression, even while working to address epistemic oppression. Specifically, I show how Fricker's account deploys a closed conceptual structure that prematurely forecloses the possibility of alternative forms of epistemic injustice, like contributory injustice, and thereby perpetuates epistemic oppression. Ultimately, the strengths and limitations of Fricker's efforts to outline epistemic injustice highlight a need to move toward open conceptual structures that signify without absolute foreclosure so as to reduce the continued propagation of epistemic oppression. [End Page 25] Three Forms of Epistemic Injustice In this section I introduce three forms of epistemic injustice. They are: (1) testimonial injustice, (2) hermeneutical injustice, and (3) contributory injustice. For...

Blue Justice emerges as a counternarrative to the promise and commitment to Blue Economy and Blue Growth by shifting imperatives for growth and innovation to the central role played by small-scale fisheries and social justice in sustainable ocean development. To instrument Blue Justice, it is important to understand injustices experienced by small-scale fisheries people which can range from accusations of disregard for the environment to equating their fishing practices as illegal, or even the sudden usurpation of their customary fishing grounds and means of livelihoods. Drawing on Fricker’s concept of epistemic injustice, we examine how discrimination and lack of interpretative concepts to communicate unjust experiences wrongs small-scale fisheries people in their capacity as knowledge holders and subjects them to testimonial and hermeneutical injustice. We examine 20 testimonies of injustices experienced by small-scale fisheries people collected by the Global Research Network “Too Big To Ignore” (TBTI) and suggest a glossary of new concepts that can be used to interpret these experiences. Our results exemplify the presence of epistemic injustice, emphasizing the need to associate injustices in small-scale fisheries with non-conventional terms or concepts. We discuss the contribution of transdisciplinary research for providing such concepts and the potential role of social scientists and action researchers to enhance collective hermeneutical resources and thereby advance the goal of Blue Justice for small-scale fisheries.

The rise of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) brings optimism for productivity, economic, and social progress, but also raises concerns about algorithmic bias and discrimination. Regulators and theorists face the urgent task of identifying potential harms and mitigating risks. This article applies Miranda Fricker’s concepts of testimonial and hermeneutical injustice to explore how GenAI exacerbates or creates epistemic injustice from a feminist, epistemic perspective.Through three case studies, we reveal how gender-biased GenAI responses in leadership and workplace contexts reinforce stereotypes, leading to offline injustices. Moreover, we highlight how gender data gaps within the GenAI ecosystem contribute to hermeneutical injustice, marginalizing women’s experiences within collective knowledge resources. These findings demonstrate how GenAI technologies perpetuate both testimonial and hermeneutical injustices.By integrating existing work on epistemology, AI ethics, and feminist theory, we propose a novel framework for understanding the risks and harms of GenAI. We argue that meta-blindness further obscures these gendered issues and their potential solutions. Our analysis not only sheds light on these critical challenges but also offers a pathway toward achieving gender equity within the GenAI landscape.

This empirical study examines the impact of epistemic injustice on child soldiers while exploring the potential of the Baraza structure – a local jurisprudence in the Democratic Republic of Congo – to pursue the “the best interests of the child” principle, particularly in the process of holding young soldiers accountable. Epistemic injustice, conceptually developed by Miranda Fricker, consists of “testimonial injustice”, when the hearer gives a deflated level of credibility to a speaker’s word due to prejudice; “hermeneutical injustice”, which takes place when a structural breach in collective interpretive imagination resources unfairly disadvantages a person or social group when trying to render intelligible their social experiences; and “distributive epistemic injustice”, which happens when “epistemic goods” (education and information) are inequitably distributed. The research outcomes suggest that Baraza jurisprudence has the potential to avert epistemic injustice, and to promote a non-discriminatory treatment of accused former child and adolescent soldiers.

Social epistemologists use the term hermeneutical injustice to refer to a form of epistemic injustice in which a structural prejudice in the economy of collective interpretive resources results in a person’s inability to understand his/her/their own social experience. This essay argues that the phenomenon of unacknowledged date rapes, that is, when a person experiences sexual assault yet does not conceptualize him/her/their self as a rape victim, should be regarded as a form of hermeneutical injustice. The fact that the concept of date rape has been widely used for at least three decades indicates the intractability of hermeneutical injustices of this sort and the challenges with its overcoming.