One Too Many: Hermeneutical Excess as Hermeneutical Injustice

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.

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.

Miranda Fricker (2008) identifies a wrong she calls ‘hermeneutical injustice’. A culture’s hermeneutical resources are the shared meanings its members use to understand their experience, and communicate this understanding to others. Cultures tend to be composed of different social groups that are organised hierarchically. As a consequence of these uneven power relations, the culture’s shared meanings often reflect the lives of its more powerful members, and fail to properly capture the experiences of the less powerful. This may result in members of less powerful groups being harmed. Such disadvantage constitutes, for Fricker, hermeneutical injustice. In this paper, I discuss a problem for Fricker, which arises when we consider what is required to remedy a hermeneutical wrong. Fricker characterizes hermeneutical injustice as involving a lack of concepts, on the part of the disadvantaged group, to capture some important aspect of their experience. But what has not been properly appreciated in the literature to date, is that it is really competing views of the world that are at stake. Moreover, Fricker’s account seemingly implies that the disadvantaged group’s understanding of the world (or at least that bit of it, where their understanding is contested by the dominant group, and where that difference in interpretation is harmful to the disadvantaged group – what I will call ‘the target of the injustice’) should be treated as authoritative, and taken up by the wider culture. The worry is that in some cases, the disadvantaged group’s view of the world is not one that we think should be accepted. Having presented this problem, I will then show that it bears some similarities to another debate: the dispute over feminist critiques of alien cultural practices. I will then argue that lessons drawn from the latter can help overcome the problem of authority in Fricker’s case.

This article develops a new approach for theorizing about hermeneutical injustice. According to a dominant view, hermeneutical injustice results from a hermeneutical gap: one lacks the conceptual tools needed to make sense of, or to communicate, important social experiences, where this lack is a result of an injustice in the background social methods used to determine hermeneutical resources. I argue that this approach is incomplete. It fails to capture an important species of hermeneutical injustice which doesn't result from a lack of hermeneutical resources, but from the overabundance of distorting and oppressive concepts which function to crowd-out, defeat, or pre-empt the application of a more accurate hermeneutical resource. I propose a broader analysis that better respects the dynamic relationship between hermeneutical resources and the social and political contexts in which they are implemented.

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.

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 study of hermeneutical injustice tends to restrict the category of “hermeneutical resources” to discursive resources: words, concepts, and expressive styles. This article foregrounds a diverse set of nondiscursive hermeneutical resources, including embodied skills, habits, comportments, and dispositions, and argues that such resources are vitally important for theorizing self-interpretative dysfunction. I reconstruct four accounts of gendered embodiment from Nancy Tuana, Bat-Ami Bar On, Iris Marion Young, and Simone de Beauvoir, and I argue that each implicitly treats embodied practices, comportments, and dispositions as hermeneutical resources. I also consider several implications of and objections to incorporating nondiscursive hermeneutical resources into the study of hermeneutical injustice, and argue that doing so complicates standard accounts of the relationship between hermeneutical injustice and epistemic injustice.

ABSTRACTIn Epistemic Injustice (2007), Miranda Fricker has insightfully introduced the notion of a hermeneutical injustice, where historic conditions of marginalisation serve to deprive individuals of the appropriate hermeneutical resources with which to render significant patches of their experience fully intelligible to themselves and others. In this paper I draw attention to a shortcoming in Fricker's account: that the only hermeneutical resource she acknowledges is a shared conceptual framework. Consequently, Fricker creates the impression that hermeneutical injustice manifests itself almost exclusively in the form of a conceptual lacuna. Considering the negative hermeneutical impact of certain societal taboos, however, suggests that there can be cases of hermeneutical injustice even when an agent's conceptual repertoire is perfectly adequate. I argue that this observation highlights the need to expand Fricker's account to accommodate a wider range of hermeneutical resources and, in turn, a broader taxonomy of hermeneutical injustice. Specifically, my central case of a societal taboo presses the need to recognize as a valuable hermeneutical resource an expressively free environment, in which individuals can put their conceptual-interpretative resources to good hermeneutical effect.

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.

What power dynamics are instantiated when a minority group member empathizes with a dominant group member during social interaction? How do these dynamics compare to those instantiated when the dominant group member instead does the empathizing? According to a general power script account, because empathy is generally directed “down” toward disadvantaged targets needing support, the empathizer should come out “on top” with respect to power-relevant outcomes no matter who it is. According to a meta-stereotype account, because adopting an empathic stance in intergroup contexts leads individuals to think about how their own group is viewed (including with respect to power-relevant characteristics), the dominant group member might come out on top no matter which person empathizes. Two studies involving face-to-face intergroup exchanges yielded results that overall were consistent with the meta-stereotype account: Regardless of who does it, empathy in intergroup contexts seems more apt to exacerbate than mitigate group-based status differences.

More work is needed to understand the underlying motivations that encourage members of dominant social groups to consider challenging systems of inequality that protect their group as well as how their privilege affects their own sense of well-being. This symposium brings together new scholarship that explores the ways in which people with membership in dominant social groups manage, construct, enact, and make sense of their identities within and across organizations as well as society more generally. Through this discussion we want to raise new questions that explore how and when members of dominant social groups might engage in identity work that either maintains or challenges the status quo and how this identity work affects their sense of well-being.

Hermeneutical injustice means being unjustly prevented from making sense of one’s experiences, identity or circumstances and/or communicating about them. The literature focusses almost exclusively on whether people have access to adequate conceptual resources. In this paper, we discuss a different kind of hermeneutical struggle caused by stigma. We argue that in some cases of hermeneutic injustice people have access to hermeneutical resources apt to understand their identity but reject employing these due to the stigma attached to the identity. We begin with a reinterpretation of one of the cases discussed in the literature, Edmund White’s novel A Boy’s Own Story. We argue that in this case hermeneutic resources are available but are rejected due to the stigma attached to homosexuality. We then present two analogous kinds of cases: alcohol addiction and being the victim of intimate partner violence. Here, too, hermeneutic injustice occurs because of the stigma attached to an identity rather due to unavailability of resources. We close by suggesting that these cases may, additionally, involve the wrong of ‘Tightlacing’: by meddling with their self-conception, stigma can manipulate individuals into a view of themselves that licenses inappropriate demands on them and makes them complicit in the erasure of their identities.

This paper theorizes and defends a process I term “hermeneutical bastardization.” This concept tracks the way in which some hermeneutical injustices arise not from a gap in a shared pool of hermeneutical resources, but from the decontextualization of an advantageous hermeneutical resource into another (typically dominant) hermeneutical domain. This decontextualization bastardizes hermeneutical resources by severing the concept from its original meaning and significance. I focus on the term “trans woman” and examine the way in which dominant epistemic agents rewrite and redefine the concept according to prominent and prevalent pernicious representations. Specifically, once decontextualized, the term “trans woman” denotes an individual who is thoroughly erotic and sexual in nature. Hermeneutical bastardization can illuminate how hermeneutically marginalized groups are reconstructed by other dominant epistemic agents according to these pernicious representations and can be silenced whilst their concepts, or rather their terms, are being utilized in sets of dominant hermeneutical resources in ways that severely diverge from their original intra-communal conceptualization. This type of hermeneutical injustice does not arise from a lacuna in our set of resources, but instead depends on the uptake of a concept's term and its subsequent decontextualization.

The importance of social connection to well-being is underscored by individuals’ reactivity to events highlighting the potential for rejection and exclusion, which extends even to observing the social exclusion of others (“vicarious ostracism”). Because responses to vicarious ostracism depend at least in part on empathy with the target, and individuals tend to empathize less readily with outgroup than ingroup members, the question arises as to whether there is a boundary condition on vicarious ostracism effects whereby individuals are relatively immune to observing ingroup-on-outgroup ostracism. Of particular interest is the case where members of a dominant ethnic group observe fellow ingroup members ostracize a member of a disadvantaged ethnic minority group, as here there is a compelling potential alternative: Perceived violation of contemporary social norms condemning prejudice and discrimination might instead lead dominant group members to be especially upset by “dominant-on-disadvantaged” ostracism. Accordingly, the present research examines, across four studies and 4413 participants, individuals’ affective reactions to observing dominant-on-disadvantaged versus dominant-on-dominant ostracism. In each study, dominant group members (White/Europeans) observed dominant group members include or ostracize a fellow dominant group member or a disadvantaged ethnic minority group member (a Black individual) in an online Cyberball game. Results revealed that dominant group members felt more guilt, anger, and sadness after observing severe ostracism of a disadvantaged as opposed to dominant group member. Although no direct effects emerged on behavioral outcomes, exploratory analyses suggested that observing ostracism of a disadvantaged (versus dominant) group member had indirect effects on behavior via increased feelings of anger. These results suggest that observing ostracism may be a sufficiently potent and relatable experience that when it occurs across group boundaries it awakens individuals’ sensitivity to injustice and discrimination.

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.