“We Live in the Shadows”: The Epistemic Injustice of Imprisonment and the Denial of Financial Costs Imposed on Women

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.

In her groundbreaking text Epistemic Injustice, Miranda Fricker evaluates types of harms incurred by individuals undergoing unrecognized and inarticulable oppression. At issue in epistemic and hermeneutic injustice are prejudicial comportments to and evaluations of reality. In the following, I focus on hermeneutic and epistemic injustice in relation to the formation of intellectual and ethical virtues. When reading Fricker and Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics together, there is a clear pathway to improve ethical development. In particular, ethical development ought to cultivate the proper virtues that promote understanding. Gadamer’s emphasis on the qualities of a researcher and the epistemic virtues that Fricker highlights reveal an educative path for addressing injustice. In other words, cultivating these virtues counteracts injustice wherein recognition and articulation of reality is challenged or at issue.

The concept of epistemic injustice refers to the injustice that an individual suffers specifically in their capacity as a knower or epistemic agent – that is, as someone who produces, conveys, or uses knowledge. Epistemic injustice is problematic because it undermines individuals’ epistemic agency, or their capacity to produce, convey, or use knowledge. People exercise their epistemic agency every day when they engage in basic epistemic practices: for example, when they contribute to a conversation or when they employ concepts to interpret the social world or make sense of their experience. The literature typically distinguishes between two main types of epistemic injustice. First, when a person is not adequately believed or consulted by their interlocutors due to biases on the interlocutors’ part, the person suffers testimonial injustice. For example, if a woman’s contribution to a meeting is not taken seriously because she is a woman, she faces testimonial injustice because she receives less credibility than she should due to her interlocutors’ biases. Second, when a person or their experience is not adequately understood or represented due to biases in the society’s mainstream pool of interpretive resources (e.g. words, concepts, social representations, shared meanings, or collective understandings), the person suffers hermeneutical injustice. Because a society’s interpretive resources are mainly produced by dominant groups, they tend to neglect or stigmatise the experience of non-dominant groups. For example, prior to the coining of the term, women could not communicate as such their experience of sexual harassment. Their experience was instead inadequately characterised as harmless flirting and therefore remained collectively misunderstood. Women faced hermeneutical injustice because they received less intelligibility than they should have due to their society’s conceptual biases, which obscured and misrepresented the experience of sexual harassment. A person can thus face epistemic injustice in two main ways. With testimonial injustice, the person receives an unduly diminished level of credibility because they are not adequately believed or consulted. With hermeneutical injustice, the person receives an unduly diminished level of intelligibility because they or their experience are not adequately understood or represented. In both cases, the person faces these deficits of credibility or intelligibility because they belong to one or more non-dominant groups – for example, women, LGBTQIA2+, BIPOC folks, people of lower socio-economic status, disabled people, neurodivergent people, or psychiatrised individuals. To face epistemic injustice, then, is to be denied equal status as an epistemic agent because of biases – which may be individual or structural, and conscious or not – of a sexist, cisheteronormative, racist, Eurocentric, classist, ableist, neuronormative, or sanist nature, for example. The phrase ‘epistemic injustice’ was introduced by Miranda Fricker (Fricker 2007), who also introduced the two main categories of epistemic injustice, namely testimonial and hermeneutical injustice. It is important to underline, however, that the concept of epistemic injustice captures some of the epistemic imbalances that had previously been brought into sharp relief and powerfully critiqued – albeit not under the specific label of epistemic injustice – by feminist epistemologists (e.g. Alcoff 1991; Code 1991), including Black feminists and critical race theorists (e.g. Crenshaw 1991; Hill Collins 1990; Mills 1997) as well as standpoint theorists (e.g. Harding 1986; Hartsock 1983). Fricker’s original analysis of testimonial injustice focuses primarily on undue deficits of credibility taking place in an actual epistemic exchange between two or more interlocutors, where the bias at play is directed at the identity of the speaker (Fricker 2007:ch.1). Further developments of the concept by other scholars have shown that testimonial injustice can also be a matter of undue credibility excesses (Davis 2016; Medina 2011, 2013:ch.2) and of undue deficits of criticism (Hazlett 2020); that testimonial injustice can occur independently of an actual epistemic exchange, through silencing (Dotson 2011b; Fricker 2007:ch.6); that testimonial injustice can also be structural (Anderson 2012; Catala 2022); and that testimonial injustice can also stem from biases that concern the content of the speaker’s contribution, regardless of their identity (Davis 2021). Fricker’s original analysis of hermeneutical injustice has likewise been expanded by other scholars, from one that focused mainly on the lack of appropriate terms such as ‘sexual harassment’ (Fricker 2007: ch.7), to ones that focus on the lack of circulation or adoption of new terms coined at the margins such as ‘date rape’ or ‘cisheteropatriarchy’ (Dotson 2012; Mason 2011; Medina 2011, 2013: ch.1; Pohlhaus 2012, or the lack of adequate understanding of existing terms such as ‘racism’ (Catala 2015, 2019). Further developments in the literature on epistemic injustice and oppression have identified the phenomena of epistemic exploitation (Berenstain 2016), epistemic appropriation (Davis 2018), and non-propositional epistemic injustice (Catala 2020, 2025).

In this article, we consider a recent philosophical attempt to narrate transgender experiences in response to what Miranda Fricker has termed ‘epistemic injustice’, against the background of highly polarized debates concerning trans identities in both academic philosophy and popular culture. We bring out some of the difficulties and challenges involved in doing epistemic justice to trans testimonies via an analysis and critique of Daniele Moyal-Sharrock and Constantine Sandis’ philosophical paper ‘Bedrock Gender’. We consider how the paper raises distinct issues related to testimonial and hermeneutical injustice in its emphasis on trans testimonies of gender certainty. In response, we consider what is at stake in understanding and using the testimony of gendered experiences for furthering a philosophical account of gender. In scrutinizing the epistemology of trans in the paper, we argue that combatting epistemic injustices related to gender requires self-reflexivity and an understanding of the complexity of gendered realities as well as the moral-existential aspects of testimonies of gender. We suggest that rather than speaking of gender in terms of ‘bedrock’ and ‘certainty’, thinking philosophically about gender must involve a critical investigation and ongoing conversation of how gender identification can both confirm and contest our sense of who we are.

This paper explores Indigenous knowledge suppression as a form of epistemic violence and injustice. Through examination of the residential schooling system, I demonstrate how forced assimilation practices, such as language suppression and erasure, severed important epistemic ties for Indigenous children. Drawing on Gayatri Spivak’s account of epistemic violence and Miranda Fricker’s literature on epistemic injustice, I argue that colonial boarding schools incited epistemic violence which gave rise to testimonial and hermeneutical injustices. Furthermore, I critically analyze modern forms of reconciliation, declaring that such efforts fail to adequately address ongoing harms faced by Indigenous peoples. Instead, they perpetuate systemic oppression and epistemic injustice, thereby diminishing Indigenous testimonies in the modern era. Finally, I engage with José Medina’s recognition philosophy to assert the need for a radical shift in the process of recognition as a step towards sufficiently managing epistemic harms.

يُعد "الظلم المعرفي Epistemic Injustice" أحد المفاهيم الجديدة في الفلسفة، والذي يصف بشكل واسع، نوعًا من الظلم الذي يحدث عند تلاقي العالم الاجتماعي والمعرفي. ولقد طُرح هذا المفهوم لأول مرة في التسعينيات، إلا أن أهم ما نُشر حوله هو كتاب ميراندا فريكر (Miranda Fricker1966-)، الظلم المعرفي: القوة وأخلاقيات المعرفة، والذي نُشر عام2007. ومنذ ذلك الحين، انبثق العديد من الدراسات حول هذا الموضوع. في هذا العمل الرائد، تصف فريكرFricker الظلم المعرفي، وتميز بين شكلين مركزيين منه: ظلم الشهادة، والظلم التأويلي. بالتوافق مع شكلي الظلم المعرفي، حددت فضيلتين يمكن أن تمنع أو تخفف من آثار هذه المظالم، على التوالي: عدالة الشهادة والعدالة التأويلية. قدمت فريكرFricker ما يعتبر التفسير الوحيد للظلم المعرفي، وهو ما بنى الغالبية العظمى من المؤلفين الذين كتبوا عن الظلم المعرفي- إن لم يكن جميعهم- فهمهم للظلم المعرفي، على أساسه. لذلك، من المؤسف أن يكون تفسير فريكر غامض وغير مكتمل. تهدف هذه الدراسة إلى تحليل نقدي لتصور فريكر الفلسفي حول الظلم المعرفي، وأشكاله الفرعية من ظلم الشهادة والظلم التأويلي. ومقترحاتها لفضيلة العدالة المعرفية، وكيف يمكن تفعيل هذه الفضيلة. بالإضافة إلى التطورات الحديثة في دراسات الظلم المعرفي، التي حاولت التعامل مع هذا الغموض وعدم الاكتمال، من خلال النقد أو التوسع في طبيعة ومدى الظلم المعرفي. وسوف يستعين الباحث بالمنهج التحليلي النقدي في دراسته. "Epistemic injustice" is a fairly new concept in philosophy, which, loosely speaking describes a kind of injustice that occurs at the intersection of structures of the social world and knowledge. While the concept was first put forward in the 1990’s, the most significant publication on the topic is Miranda Fricker’s book Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, which was published in 2007. Since then, there has been something of an explosion of literature on the topic of epistemic injustice. In Fricker's work, describes epistemic injustice, distinguishing two central forms of it: testimontical injustice, and hermeneutical injustice. Consistent with the two forms of epistemic injustice, she identified two virtues that can prevent or mitigate these injustices respectively: testimontical and hermeneutical Justice. Fricker provides what is essentially the only account of epistemic injustice—while various authors have argued for localized changes to the Frickerian account, there is no actual alternative account—and it is what a vast majority, if not all, of the authors who have written on epistemic injustice since its publication base their understanding of Epistemic injustice on. It is therefore, unfortunate, that the Fricker account is ambiguous and incomplete. This study aims at a critical analysis of Fricker's philosophical perception about epistemic injustice, its sub-forms of testimony injustice and hermeneutical injustice. And her proposals for the virtue of epistemic justice, and how this virtue can be activated. In addition to recent developments in epistemic injustice studies, which have tried to deal with this ambiguity and incompleteness, by criticizing or expanding on the nature and extent of epistemic injustice. The researcher will use the critical analytical method in his study.

Scholars usually distinguish between testimonial and hermeneutical epistemic injustice in healthcare. The former arises from negative stereotyping and stigmatization, while the latter occurs when the hermeneutical resources of the dominant community are inadequate for articulating the experience of one's illness. However, the heuristics provided by these two types of epistemic predicaments tend to overlook salient forms of epistemic injustice. In this paper, we prove this argument on the example of the temporality of patients with drug dependence. We identify three temporal dimensions of epistemic injustice affecting drug-dependent patients: the temporal features of their cognitive processes, their individual temporal experience, and the mismatch of social temporality. Notably, the last aspect, which highlights the disparity between the availability of care and its accessibility, does not fit neatly into the categories of testimonial or hermeneutical injustice. (We should note that the International Network of People Who Use Drugs (INPUD) and The Asian Network of People who use Drugs (ANPUD) consider the term "drug addiction" to be associated with disempowerment and negative stereotyping. Instead, they suggest the expression "drug dependence" (INPUD 2020). However, the concept of "drug addiction" is still being used in the current public health, philosophy, and sociology debates that concern the specific field of addiction studies. Replacing the notion of drug addiction with "drug dependence" would not eliminate existing epistemic injustices or allow us to avoid creating new ones, such as those related to ignoring pain claims (O'Brien 2011). Still, for the sake of clarity we will use the notion "drug dependence" when speaking of people while retaining the term "drug addiction" for labelling healthcare practices and the topic for philosophy of healthcare.).

This paper explores how University as social entity has great potential to confront epistemic injustices by expanding epistemic capabilities. To do this, we primarily follow the contributions of scholars such as Miranda Fricker and José Medina. The epistemic capabilities and epistemic injustice nexus will be explored via two empirical cases: the first one is an experience developed in Lagos (Nigeria) using participatory video; the second is a service learning pedagogical strategy for final year undergraduate students conducted at Universidad de Ibagué (in Colombia). The Lagos experience shows how participatory action-research methodologies could promote epistemic capabilities and functioning, making it possible for the participants to generate interpretive materials to speak of their own realities. However, this experience is too limited to address testimonial and hermeneutical injustice. The Colombian experience is a remarkable experience that is building epistemic capabilities among students and other local participants. However, there is a hermeneutical and structural injustice that tends to give more value to disciplinary and codified knowledge at the expense of experiential and tacit knowledge.

Epistemic injustice is, broadly speaking, about ways that members of marginalized groups may be wronged in their capacity as knowers, due to prejudicial stereotypes. Members of marginalized groups are also the main subjects of concern in discussions of implicit bias and stereotype threat. A key concern in discussions of both implicit bias and stereotype threat has been the effects of the phenomena on academic endeavours. It may seem clear, then, what the relationship is between epistemic injustice, implicit bias, and stereotype threat: at first glance, it would appear that implicit bias and stereotype threat are simply varieties of epistemic injustice. This chapter focuses on at Miranda Fricker's two main categories - testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice - exploring how each relates to implicit bias and stereotype threat. It considers the ways that implicit bias and stereotype threat may cause hermeneutical injustice.

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...

This chapter examines the ways in which disabled people are subject to epistemic injustice. It starts by introducing how social epistemology models the creation of shared knowledge and then uses feminist epistemology to highlight the role of social and political power in producing epistemic privilege, exclusion, and oppression. The well-known concepts of testimonial and hermeneutic epistemic injustice are discussed in relation to disability, showing how these forms of injustice are frequently experienced within the lives of disabled people. In particular, disabled experience has features that distinguish it from the experiences of sexism and racism most commonly used as illustrations of epistemic injustice. The chapter ends by arguing that the potential for epistemic injustice poses unprecedented risks for disabled people in the current context, which could be minimized by recognizing that ignorance about disabled lives is not inevitable, but something that can and should be challenged.

Miranda Fricker’s insightful work on epistemic injustice discusses two forms of epistemic injustice—testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice. Hermeneutical injustice occurs when the victim lacks the interpretative resources to make sense of her experience, and this lacuna can be traced down to a structural injustice. In this paper, I provide one model of how to fill the conceptual gap in hermeneutical injustice. First, I argue that the victims possess conceptual resources to make sense of their experiences, namely phenomenal concepts. Second, I show how one might work the way up in a two-step process from a subjective, phenomenal concept to a novel, public concept. Finally, I discuss the conditions that have to be met for this process to be successful. The resulting model shows a way how the victims might alleviate hermeneutical injustice by developing novel concepts, given that the dominant group does not care about their predicament.

I shall first briefly revisit the broad idea of ‘epistemic injustice’, explaining how it can take either distributive or discriminatory form, in order to put the concepts of ‘testimonial injustice’ and ‘hermeneutical injustice’ in place. In previous work I have explored how the wrong of both kinds of epistemic injustice has both an ethical and an epistemic significance—someone is wronged in their capacity as a knower. But my present aim is to show that this wrong can also have a political significance in relation to non-domination, and so to freedom. While it is only the republican conception of political freedom that presents nondomination as constitutive of freedom, I shall argue that non-domination is best understood as a thoroughly generic liberal ideal of freedom to which even negative libertarians are implicitly committed, for non-domination is negative liberty as of right—secured non-interference. Crucially on this conception, non-domination requires that the citizen can contest interferences. Pettit specifies three conditions of contestation, each of which protects against a salient risk of the would-be contester not getting a ‘proper hearing’. But I shall argue that missing from this list is anything to protect against a fourth salient threat: the threat that either kind of epistemic injustice might disable contestation by way of an unjust deflation of either credibility or intelligibility. Thus we see that both testimonial and hermeneutical injustice can render a would-be contester dominated. Epistemic justice is thereby revealed as a constitutive condition of non-domination, and thus of a central liberal political ideal of freedom.

This paper identifies and analyses a novel species of hermeneutical epistemic injustice (HI). Fricker’s traditional account analyses HI in terms of a collective conceptual gap. (Epistemic injustice: power and the ethics of knowing, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007). Building on this, Simion’s analysis (in: Bondy P, Carter JA (eds) Well-founded belief: new essays on the epistemic basing relation. Routledge, New York, 2019) suggests the phenomenon is broader, and thus more ubiquitous: specifically, that agents who have been hermeneutically marginalised can be susceptible to HI through failing to ground their social experience in conceptual resources that are already available. This paper advances the literature further and presents a novel strand of the phenomena, where agents both have, and base, their experience on available concepts but are still subject to HI. I argue that this is an important species of HI that should be investigated and accounted for, and I suggest that in virtue of being hermeneutically marginalised, often agents only have available to them defective or oppressive concepts. I further provide a case study of what this can look like online and new concerns social media presents for this kind of HI. CW: Mentions of transphobia, racism, sexism, rape.

Epistemic injustice in healthcare professional practice: A scoping review.