Identity Prejudice Research Articles

Conversational Epistemic Injustice: Extending the Insight from Testimonial Injustice to Speech Acts beyond Assertion

ABSTRACT Testimonial injustice occurs when hearers attribute speakers a credibility deficit because of an identity prejudice and consequently dismiss speakers’ testimonial assertions. Various philosophers explain testimonial injustice by appealing to interpersonal norms arising within testimonial exchanges. When conversational participants violate these interpersonal norms, they generate second-personal epistemic harms, harming speakers as epistemic agents. This focus on testimony, however, neglects how systematically misevaluating speakers’ knowledge affects conversational participants more generally. When hearers systematically misevaluate speakers’ conversational competence because of entrenched assumptions about what speakers know, I call these conversational epistemic injustices. I argue the same epistemic harm in testimonial injustice arises for non-assertoric speech acts, generating conversational epistemic injustices. For across speech acts, deflated knowledge attributions create second-personal harms that prevent speakers from using their knowledge in linguistic exchanges, limiting their epistemic agency. These harms however are not reducible to linguistic harms, (e.g.,) silencing or discursive injustice. This article applies insight from how second-personal epistemic harm arises in testimonial exchanges to conversational exchanges more generally, demonstrating that epistemic injustices arise beyond testimonial exchanges and contexts of inquiry because deflated knowledge attributions undermine general conversational norms requiring participants assume each other’s conversational competence, generating conversational epistemic injustices.

Agency, Power, and Injustice in Metalinguistic Disagreement

Abstract In this paper, I explain the kinematics of non-ideal metalinguistic disagreement. This occurs when one speaker has greater control in the joint activity of pairing contents with words in a context. I argue that some forms of non-ideal metalinguistic disagreement are deeply worrying, namely those that involves certain power imbalances. In such cases, a speaker possesses illegitimate control in metalinguistic disagreement owing to the operation of identity prejudice. I call this metalinguistic injustice. The wrong involves restricting a speaker from participating in the processes that determine the epistemic/linguistic resources of a conversation, and/or undermining a speaker's ability to affect metalinguistic outcomes.

A Third Conception of Epistemic Injustice

Scholars of epistemology have identified two conceptions of epistemic injustice: discriminatory epistemic injustice and distributive epistemic injustice. The former refers to wrongs to one’s capacity as a knower that are the result of identity prejudice. The latter refers to violations of one’s right to know what one is entitled to know. This essay advances a third conception, formative epistemic injustice, which refers to wrongs to one’s capacity as a knower that are the result of or result in malformation—the undue restriction of one’s formative capacities. The author argues that formative epistemic injustice is a distinctly educational wrong and that it brings to light important epistemic injustices that standard accounts of epistemic injustice either downplay or are unable to capture. This third conception of epistemic injustice is an important analytic tool for theorizing both epistemic injustice and educational justice.

Picturing a Thousand Unspoken Words

I explore how empathetic visual argument may be the mode best suited for eliciting appropriate force to the reasons given by arguers who face systematic identity prejudices. In the verbal mode, this force is often skewed through epistemic injustice (Fricker 2007), argumentative injustice (Bondy 2010), and discursive injustice (Kukla 2010). Highlighting their reliance on the Aristotelian sense of enthymeme, I show how visual arguments are highly context specific. Using Ian Dove’s Visual Scheming (2016) and the theory of the Retort collective (2004) via case study, I demonstrate how the visual mode can leave the appropriate force in the arguer’s control.

Safe fieldwork strategies for at-risk individuals, their supervisors and institutions.

As a result of identity prejudice, certain individuals are more vulnerable to conflict and violence when they are in the field. It is paramount that all fieldworkers be informed of the risks some colleagues may face, so that they can define best practice together: here we recommend strategies to minimize risk for all individuals conducting fieldwork.

Anthropology from Dissonance to Ambiguity: Breaking the Deadlock

The circumstances in which Shostakovich’s 13th symphony was composed must be a wake-up call and a source of inspiration for anthropologists today, at a time when nationalism in various forms is reasserting itself: internationalism should remain our horizon. As neoliberalism is unfolding all its illiberal potential, the freedom to choose one’s research subjects and to carry out field surveys must be actively defended. Authoritarian populism has exacerbated all identity claims and spread turmoil within the academy itself. Fear now fuels identity prejudices, censorship and self-censorship. We must confront this new fear collectively, prevent people from becoming trapped in a narrow vision and thus promote dialogue and the open exchange of ideas. The rise of the question of identity as a threat is a serious challenge for anthropologists and we must all focus on our various minoritized experiences to address this issue and to strengthen democratic pluralism, because becoming minor(itarian) is the best way to defeat populism. Anthropologists must all assume their subjectivities and release their creative potential to produce critical estrangement and confront all forms of conformism here and elsewhere.

Mapping identity prejudice: locations of epistemic injustice in philosophy for/with children

This article aims to map the locations of identity prejudice that occurs in the context of a Community of Inquiry. My claim is that epistemic injustice, which usually originates from seemingly ‘minor’ cases of identity prejudice, can potentially leak into the actual practice of P4wC. Drawing from Fricker, the various forms of epistemic injustice are made explicit when epistemic practices are framed within concrete social circumstances where power, privilege and authority intersect, which is observable in school settings. In connection, despite the pedagogical improvements P4wC offers, some forms of identity prejudice prevalent in traditional classrooms may persist, affecting children who are identified with negatively stereotyped social groups. It is, therefore, important to pay attention to the reality of epistemic injustice and the possible locations where it may potentially surface in the COI. Drawing from my P4wC experience, I show that identity prejudice stems from the intersections of the roles and positionalities of the participants in a philosophical dialogue. These intersections point towards the epistemic relationships of the P4wC teacher, the students, and the P4wC program itself. I conclude that identity prejudice arises circumstantially and/or substantively in P4wC scholarship and practice.

Testimonial Injustice and a Case for Mindful Epistemology

AbstractIn her 2007 book Epistemic Injustice Miranda Fricker identifies testimonial injustice as a case where a hearer assigns lower credibility to a speaker due to “identity prejudice.” Fricker considers testimonial injustice as a form of epistemic injustice since it wrongs the speaker “in her capacity as a knower.” Fricker recommends developing the virtue of “testimonial justice” to address testimonial injustice. She takes this virtue to involve training in a “distinctly reflexive critical social awareness.” The main goal of this article is to argue that Fricker's proposed training falls short of the target and that a cultivation of the capacity of being present—the ability to be mindful—would be necessary to develop the critical social awareness that Fricker requires. I want to explore the impact of compassion and open‐mindedness—virtues cultivated in mindfulness training—on testimonial justice specifically and virtue epistemology generally. In attempting to develop an epistemic account informed by mindfulness—a mindful epistemology—my primary goal is to bring Buddhist insights on how to anchor the mind by training it to be fully present and attentive into the focus of mainstream Western philosophy. More specifically, I argue that doing so allows us to appreciate the crucial role that a prediscursive level of cultivation plays in the development of testimonial justice.

Distorting Concepts, Obscured Experiences: Hermeneutical Injustice in Religious Trauma and Spiritual Violence

AbstractThis article explores the relationship between hermeneutical injustice in religious settings and religious trauma (RT) and spiritual violence (SV). In it I characterize a form of hermeneutical injustice (HI) that arises when experiences are obscured from collective understanding by normatively laden concepts, and I argue that this form of HI often plays a central role in cases of religious trauma and spiritual violence, even those involving children. In section I, I introduce the reader to the phenomena of religious trauma and spiritual violence. In section II, I describe the role normatively laden concepts play in shaping our social experience. I then elucidate how they can contribute to HI. In section III, I provide a brief overview of the history of some significant identity prejudices in the history of Christianity and argue that children can properly be understood as victims of HI within some religious communities. I then return in section IV to the examples of religious trauma and spiritual violence offered throughout the article and demonstrate that HI plays an important causal role in each of them. HIs sometimes constitute spiritual and religious harms; at other times they create an epistemic environment conducive to spiritual abuse.

They can't be believed: children, intersectionality, and epistemic injustice

ABSTRACTChildren are often perceived to be less credible testifiers than adults. Their inexperience and affinity for play can provide reason to question their credibility and sincerity as truth tellers. The discrediting of children's testimonial claims can, however, result in an injustice when it stems from an uncritical age-related identity prejudice. This injustice can lead to several consequences varying in severity, with the worst cases leading to their deaths. More commonly, and especially when this injustice is considered in combination with other intersectional identities, it has the potential to render these children invisible. In this paper, we discuss common domains within which children can face epistemic injustice when testifying about their experiences. The heart of the paper explores the most severe instances of epistemic injustices by reviewing three cases where children with intersectional identities died after their testimony was not believed. The paper concludes by emphasizing some of the important considerations that a recognition of intersectionality brings to the current discussion.

Testifying Bodies: Testimonial Injustice as Derivatization

ABSTRACTHuman beings as objects, and we are objects inter alia, offer information, even knowledge. And yet, in a society marked by pervasive identity prejudice, even objects do not offer neutral facts. Here, I argue that the harms imposed on those who suffer testimonial injustices cannot be sufficiently understood through the ethical lens of objectification. Such persons are not simply objectified, not simply treated as mere sources of information rather than as informants. Even as objects (not mere objects), they are often unable to testify on their own behalf or testify to true facts of the matter. Rather than follow Miranda Fricker’s argument that testimonial injustices are acts of objectification, I argue that they are better understood as acts of what Ann Cahill calls derivatization. A re-examination of Fricker’s account of the wrong of testimonial injustice as derivatizing rather than objectifying clarifies the wrong of epistemic injustice, reinforces the mutuality of testimonial exchanges where both the speaker and listener are actively engaged and obligated to participate well to succeed, and opens up a discussion of how even when being treated as a source of information, informants can be mistreated.

The Expansionist View of Systematic Testimonial Injustice

In this paper, I offer an expansionist view of the Frickerian central case of testimonial injustice, citing examples from the South Asian context. To defend this expansionist position, I provide an argument in three parts. First, I argue that credibility deficit and credibility excess are entangled with each other in such a way that often, one produces the other. Secondly, I contend that we should not say that systematic testimonial injustice is a consequence of credibility deficit only because of the entanglement between them. I also contend that for being the central case of testimonial injustice, identity prejudice should not be necessarily negative; it can be positive as well. Propounding a twofold condition of the status of a knower, the last part claims that testimonial injustice occurs when one of the two conditions remains unmet.

Theater against Borders: ‘Miunikh–Damaskus’—A Case Study in Solidarity

In 2017, the City Theater of Munich engaged with a policy of diversity, and decided to include Syrian artists and create the Open Border Ensemble. A German and Syrian refugee and non-refugee cast produced the first performance, “Miunikh–Damaskus: Stories of one city” (May 2018). This mobile play aimed at minimizing stereotypes and deconstructing essentialist cultural identity prejudices. The paper examines how, in this case study, multilayered artistic strategies and relational dynamics came together to implement a ‘third space’. It addresses the challenges and implications of such theater endeavors regarding solidarity and the representation of the figure of the artists within the realm of the migration and refugee discourse.

Interventions to Reduce Blatant and Subtle Sexual Orientation‐ and Gender Identity Prejudice (SOGIP): Current Knowledge and Future Directions

AbstractGiven its prevalence and impact, it is important that prejudice against sexual‐and gender identity minorities is reduced and that negative behaviors against these minorities are prevented. We introduce and provide a definition of the term Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Prejudice (SOGIP), and discuss its determinants and configurations as well as ways to measure it. Furthermore, we review the recent social psychological literature on SOGIP‐reducing interventions, identify scientific knowledge gaps regarding these interventions, and offer recommendations on how to apply the available knowledge to real‐life situations. We conclude that there are many interventions currently being employed to target SOGIP with some seeming more effective than others. Particularly promising interventions are those aimed at evoking empathy and perspective taking and those aimed at developing alliances between minority and majority members. However, there is still room for improvement. Overall, little empirical evidence speaks to the robustness of intervention effects, its underlying mechanisms, duration, and boundary conditions. Researchers should focus on all aspects of SOGIP (i.e., sexual orientation prejudice as well as gender identity prejudice); different expressions of prejudice (i.e., blatant and subtle), actual behavior towards minorities, and on both perpetrators and targets of prejudice. By joining forces, researchers and practitioners should aim to overcome practical and theoretical obstacles in evaluating the effectiveness of interventions. Policy makers should support initiatives that test, improve, implement and distribute intervention programs, and can help bring together researchers and practitioners.

Trust, Agency and Discrimination

This paper attempts to clarify the relations between trust, agency and latent forms of discrimination. Its main argument is in social philosophy, and it articulates considerations from moral psychology and the philosophy of language. The aim is to provide a better insight into the deflated level of trustworthiness that members of stigmatized categories are credited with. Identity prejudice determining low levels of credibility for its victims has received substantial philosophical attention in the wake of the epistemic injustice literature. Instead of the standard cognitive concept of trust usually brought in, I apply a moral (or agential) account of trust (drawing on Domenicucci and Holton 2017) to discriminatory issues. We can fail to trust the trustworthy (Jones 2013) in a variety of ways. When it comes to the members of discriminated categories, I argue in the first part, this happens because they are refused a necessary condition of trust: a presumption of agency. This presumption of agency, prima facie attributed to human adults, is precisely what goes wrong for the members of stigmatized groups. Not recognised as individual agents, but as mere quasi-agents, the discriminatees cannot be trusted: their trustworthiness actually becomes unthinkable. The very possibility to give reasons for or against out-group members’ trustworthiness is thus dismissed. Articulating documentality and feminist philosophy of language, the second part shows that members of stigmatized categories have their conduct described and recorded through a non-agential grammar. Once widespread and socially dominant, non-agential descriptions of their action give the discriminatees a peculiar moral status that jeopardizes the very possibility of their being recognised as trustworthy.

Dehumanization: its operations and its origins

Murrow and Murrow offer a novel account of dehumanization, by synthesizing data which suggest that where subject S has a dehumanized view of group G, S's neural mechanisms of empathy show a dampened response to the suffering of members of G, and S's judgments about the humanity of members of G are largely non-conscious. Here I examine Murrow and Murrow's suggestions about how identity-based hate speech bears responsibility for dehumanization in the first place. I identify a distinction between (i) accounts of the nature of the harm effected by identity prejudice, and (ii) accounts of how hate speech contributes to the harms of identity prejudice. I then explain why Murrow and Murrow's proposal is more aptly construed as an account of type (i), and explain why accounts of this type, even if they're plausible and evidentially well-supported, have limited implications in relation to justifications for anti-hate speech law.

Self-Fulfilling Epistemic Injustice

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.

Argumentum ad Verecundiam: New Gender-based Criteria for Appeals to Authority

In his influential work on critical argumentation, Douglas Walton explains how to judge whether an argumentum ad verecundiam (appeal to authority) is fallacious or legitimate. He provides six critical questions and a number of ancillary sub-questions to guide the identification of reasonable appeals to authority. While it is common for informal logicians to acknowledge the role of bias in sampling procedures (which are supposed to select statistically random samples) and hypothesis confirmation (which tends to be self-serving), there is a conspicuous lack of discourse on the effect of identity prejudice on judgments of authority, even though this is a well-documented factor in attributing credibility, expertise, trustworthiness, and professional competence to oppressed groups. This could result in faulty judgments of ad verecundiam fallacy. Focusing on gender bias, I review recent works in feminist epistemology—particularly those of Miranda Fricker (2007) and Helen Longino (2002)—to develop three gender-based critical questions to supplement Walton’s original list of six. This addition will help us to identify erroneous dismissals of appeals to authority based on epistemic injustice and epistemic irresponsibility on the part of the speaker or knowledge community. This project promotes the overlapping aims of feminist epistemology and informal logic.

Discerning the Primary Epistemic Harm in Cases of Testimonial Injustice

This article examines the primary epistemic harm of testimonial injustice, or, as defined by Miranda Fricker, the injustice of perceiving another epistemic agent as less credible due to an identity prejudice. I first analyze Fricker’s account of the harm, which she posits in terms of a subject/object relation as “epistemic objectification.” My analysis, however, shows that (1) testimonial injustice does not render its victim to an object-like status and (2) testimonial injustice necessarily treats its victim as a subject, albeit a truncated subject. Drawing on the work of Ann Cahill and Simone de Beauvoir, I demonstrate that the primary harm of testimonial injustice is more aptly described in terms of a subject/other relation, or a relation that circumscribes the subjectivity of its victim within the confines of the perpetrator’s subjectivity. Using these conceptual resources to examine the primary epistemic harm of testimonial injustice not only avoids the problems I raise with the notion of epistemic objectification, but also greatly enhances our understanding of testimonial injustice, and consequently of what more epistemically just relations look like.

Domination, Epistemic Injustice and Republican Epistemology

With her conception of epistemic injustice, Miranda Fricker has opened up new normative dimensions for epistemology; that is, the injustice of denying one’s status as a knower. While her analysis of the remedies for such injustices focuses on the epistemic virtues of agents, I argue for the normative superiority of adapting a broadly republican conception of epistemic injustice. This argument for a republican epistemology has three steps. First, I focus on methodological and explanatory issues of identifying epistemic injustice and argue, against Fricker, that identity prejudice fails to provide a sufficient explanatory basis for the spread and maintenance of such systematic epistemic injustice. Second, this systemic basis can be found not so much in the psychological attitudes of individual knowers, but in the relations of domination among groups and individuals in a society. Third, if such a presence of domination plays a primary explanatory role in all forms of epistemic injustice, it is likely that those who suffer from epistemic injustice will also suffer other forms of injustice and loss of status via the exercise of other forms of power and exclusion.