Epistemic Injustice ( Power and the Ethics of Knowing )

Epistemic Injustice explores the idea that there is a distinctively epistemic kind of injustice—an injustice that occurs specifically in relation to someone's capacity as a knower. Miranda Fricker distinguishes two forms of epistemic injustice: testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice. Testimonial injustice occurs when prejudice leads a hearer to assign a lower level of credibility to a speaker's words, as seen in cases where the police do not believe someone because of their race. Hermeneutical injustice, on the other hand, occurs when a gap in collective interpretative resources puts someone at an unfair disadvantage in making sense of their social experiences. A central example of this type of injustice is a woman who experiences sexual harassment before the relevant critical concepts are available, preventing her from fully understanding her own experience or communicating it effectively to others. In relation to these forms of epistemic injustice, Fricker develops the idea that our testimonial sensibility should include a corrective anti-prejudicial virtue to promote a more accurate and democratic epistemic practice. Traditionally, epistemology has been limited by the absence of a theoretical framework that reveals the ethical and political dimensions of our epistemic conduct. Epistemic Injustice demonstrates that virtue epistemology offers a general epistemological framework in which these issues can be effectively discussed.