Self-Fulfilling Epistemic Injustice

Abstract

The concept of testimonial injustice, due to Miranda Fricker, captures cases where structural prejudices about a person’s social identity lead people to assign lower credibility to her utterances. On Fricker’s account, these prejudices have to be false. This paper considers testimonial injustice arising out of true prejudices: self-fulfilling identity prejudices that stem from identity threats (or stereotype threats). An example is the presence of sexist male behaviour negatively influencing mathematical performance in women. For a particular group to suffer self-fulfilling testimonial injustice there has to be a negative structural identity prejudice against the group which, in the presence of corresponding identity threats, members of the group adopt in ways that bypass autonomous belief formation, and to which they respond non-autonomously in ways making the prejudice self-fulfillingly true. I argue that the wrongs self-fulfilling testimonial injustice leads to are that it decreases epistemic freedom, epistemic self-trust and epistemic self-esteem, three concepts I briefly develop in this paper. Finally, I show that the concept of self-fulfilling testimonial injustice helps diagnosing cases of potential injustice the view of which is obscured by the received approach to discrimination in law and economics that is insensitive to self-fulfilling identity prejudices.