Epistemic injustice is injustice related to knowledge. It includes exclusion and silencing; systematic distortion or misrepresentation of one's meanings or contributions; undervaluing of one's status or standing in communicative practices; unfair distinctions in authority; and unwarranted distrust. [1]
An influential theory of epistemic injustice is that of British philosopher Miranda Fricker, who coined the term in 1999. [2] According to Fricker, there are two kinds of epistemic injustice: testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice. [3]
Related concepts include epistemic oppression and epistemic violence.
Testimonial injustice is unfairness related to trusting someone's word. An injustice of this kind can occur when someone is ignored, or not believed, because of their sex, sexuality, gender presentation, race, disability, or, broadly, because of their identity. [3]
Miranda Fricker gives the example of Londoner Duwayne Brooks, who saw his friend Stephen Lawrence murdered. [4] The police officers who arrived at the scene regarded Brooks with suspicion. According to an official inquiry, "the officers failed to concentrate upon Mr. Brooks and to follow up energetically the information which he gave them. Nobody suggested that he should accompany them in searches of the area, although he knew where the assailants had last been seen. Nobody appears properly to have tried to calm him, or to accept that what he said was true." [5] That is, the police officers failed to view Brooks as a credible witness, presumably in part due to racial bias. This was, says Fricker, a case of testimonial injustice, which occurs when "prejudice causes a hearer to give a deflated level of credibility to a speaker's word." [6]
Hermeneutical injustice occurs when someone's experiences are not well understood — by themselves or by others — because these experiences do not fit any concepts known to them (or known to others), due to the historic exclusion of some groups of people from activities, such as scholarship and journalism, that shape the language people use to make sense of their experiences. [3]
For example, in the 1970s, the phrase sexual harassment was introduced to describe something that many people, especially women, [7] had long experienced. [8] Before this time, a woman experiencing sexual harassment may have had difficulty putting her experience into words. Fricker states that this difficulty is also not accidental, and was largely due to women's exclusion from shaping the English language and participating equally in journalism, publishing, academia, law, and the other institutions and industries that help people make sense of their lives. [9] [10] After the term sexual harassment was introduced, the same woman who experienced sexual harassment may have understood better what happened to her; however, she may have struggled to explain this experience to someone else, because the concept of sexual harassment was not yet well known. [8]
The term hermeneutical means "relating to interpretation"; hermeneutical injustice makes someone less able to interpret their own life.
Epistemological violence is distinct from epistemic injustice in that it usually occurs in the power structure of academic research, such as when interpreting empirical results in psychology. Epistemological violence is theoretical interpretations of empirical results that construct a targeted group as inferior, despite alternative and equally viable interpretations of the data. [11]
For example, the psychologist Monique Botha has argued that academic studies of Theory of Mind in autistic children constitutes epistemological violence, due to foundational studies explicitly or implicitly drawing universal conclusions about the entire group of autistic people. [12]
Though the term epistemic injustice was not coined until 1999, earlier thinkers have discussed similar ideas.
Vivian May has argued that civil rights activist Anna Julia Cooper in the 1890s anticipated the concept in claiming that Black women are denied full and equal recognition as knowers. [13]
Gaile Pohlhaus Jr. points to Gayatri Chakrovorty Spivak's 1988 essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?" as another anticipation. In that essay, Spivak describes what she calls epistemic violence occurring when subaltern persons are prevented from speaking for themselves about their own interests because of others claiming to know what those interests are. [14]
Other scholars since Fricker have adapted the concept of epistemic injustice and/or expanded what the term includes. These contributions have included naming and narrowing down forms of epistemic injustice, such as epistemic oppression, [15] epistemicide, [16] epistemic exploitation, [17] silencing as testimonial quieting and as testimonial smothering, [18] contributory injustice, [19] distributive epistemic injustice, [20] epistemic trust injustice, [21] and expressive hermeneutical injustice. [22]
José Medina has advocated for an account of epistemic injustice that incorporates more voices and pays attention to context and the relationships at play. [23] Elizabeth S. Anderson has argued that attention should be given to the structural causes and structural remedies of epistemic injustice. [24] A closely related literature on epistemologies of ignorance has also been developing, which has included the identification of overlapping concepts such as white ignorance [25] [26] and willful hermeneutical ignorance. [27]
American philosopher Kristie Dotson has warned that some definitions could leave out important contributions to the ongoing discussion around epistemic injustice. [19] Gaile Pohlhaus Jr. has replied that the concept should therefore be considered an open one, and many different approaches to the concept should be considered. [2]
The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice (2017) addressed both the theory of epistemic injustice and its application to practical case studies. [28] The Indian political theorist Rajeev Bhargava has used the term epistemic injustice to describe how colonized groups were wronged when colonizing powers replaced, or negatively impacted, the concepts and categories that colonized groups used to understand themselves and the world. [29] More recently, Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni has used the terms epistemicide and cognitive empire to describe discrimination against scholars and intellectuals from the Global South. [30]
More recently there has been proliferation of literature of epistemic injustice in the field of health and medicine, linking it with decolonisaation efforts - most prominent academics being Himani Bhakuni, Seye Abimbola and Soumyadeep Bhaumik . [31] [32] [33] [34] [35] [36] [37] The nature and structure of epistemic injustice in the neglected tropical disease community has been described and calls for structural reforms, meta-research and health policy has been made. [36] Robert Chapman, among others, has discussed the relationship between epistemic injustice and neurodiversity. [38]
Genocide denial has been considered an example of epistemic injustice. [39] [40] [41]
Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that examines the nature, origin, and limits of knowledge. Also called theory of knowledge, it explores different types of knowledge, such as propositional knowledge about facts, practical knowledge in the form of skills, and knowledge by acquaintance as a familiarity through experience. Epistemologists study the concepts of belief, truth, and justification to understand the nature of knowledge. To discover how knowledge arises, they investigate sources of justification, such as perception, introspection, memory, reason, and testimony.
Social epistemology refers to a broad set of approaches that can be taken in epistemology that construes human knowledge as a collective achievement. Another way of characterizing social epistemology is as the evaluation of the social dimensions of knowledge or information.
An epistemic community is a network of professionals with recognized knowledge and skill in a particular issue-area. They share a set of beliefs, which provide a value-based foundation for the actions of members. Members of an epistemic community also share causal beliefs, which result from their analysis of practices that contribute to set of problems in their issue-area that then allow them to see the multiple links between policy and outcomes. Third, they share notions of validity, or internationally defined criteria for validating knowledge in their area of know-how. However, the members are from all different professions. Epistemic communities also have a common set of practices associated with a set of problems towards which their professional knowledge is directed, because of the belief that human welfare will benefit as a result. Communities evolve independently and without influence of authority or government. They do not have to be large; some are made up of only a few members. Even non-members can have an influence on epistemic communities. However, if the community loses consensus, then its authority decreases.
Virtue epistemology is a current philosophical approach to epistemology that stresses the importance of intellectual and specifically epistemic virtues. Virtue epistemology evaluates knowledge according to the properties of the persons who hold beliefs in addition to or instead of the properties of the propositions and beliefs. Some advocates of virtue epistemology also adhere to theories of virtue ethics, while others see only loose analogy between virtue in ethics and virtue in epistemology.
The philosophy of testimony considers the nature of language and knowledge's confluence, which occurs when beliefs are transferred between speakers and hearers through testimony. Testimony constitutes words, gestures, or utterances that convey beliefs. This definition may be distinguished from the legal notion of testimony in that the speaker does not have to make a declaration of the truth of the facts.
Metaepistemology is the branch of epistemology and metaphilosophy that studies the underlying assumptions made in debates in epistemology, including those concerning the existence and authority of epistemic facts and reasons, the nature and aim of epistemology, and the methodology of epistemology.
Rhetoric of science is a body of scholarly literature exploring the notion that the practice of science is a rhetorical activity. It emerged after a number of similarly oriented topics of research and discussion during the late 20th century, including the sociology of scientific knowledge, history of science, and philosophy of science, but it is practiced most typically by rhetoricians in academic departments of English, speech, and communication.
Feminist epistemology is an examination of epistemology from a feminist standpoint.
Miranda Fricker, FBA FAAS is a British philosopher who is Professor of Philosophy at New York University, co-director of the New York Institute of Philosophy, and honorary professor at the University of Sheffield. Fricker coined the term epistemic injustice.
Analytical feminism is a line of philosophy that applies analytic concepts and methods to feminist issues and applies feminist concepts and insights to issues that have traditionally been of interest to analytic philosophers. Like all feminists, analytical feminists insist on recognizing and contesting sexism and androcentrism.
Jennifer Lackey is an American academic; she is the Wayne and Elizabeth Jones Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University. Lackey is known for her research in epistemology, especially on testimony, disagreement, memory, the norms of assertion, and virtue epistemology. She is the author of Learning from Words: Testimony as a Source of Knowledge and of numerous articles and book chapters. She is also co-editor of The Epistemology of Testimony and The Epistemology of Disagreement: New Essays.
José Medina is Walter Hill Scott professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University. He is a member of the American Philosophical Association, the British Wittgenstein Society, the North American Wittgenstein Society, the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP), the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology, and the Tennessee Philosophical Association.
Cynthia R. Nielsen is an American philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Dallas. She is known for her expertise in the field of hermeneutics, the philosophy of music, aesthetics, ethics, and social philosophy. Since 2015 she has taught at the University of Dallas. Prior to her appointment at the University of Dallas, she taught at Villanova University as a Catherine of Sienna Fellow in the Ethics ProgramArchived 2018-12-19 at the Wayback Machine. Nielsen serves on the executive committee of the North American Society for Philosophical Hermeneutics.
Feminist philosophy of science is a branch of feminist philosophy that seeks to understand how the acquirement of knowledge through scientific means has been influenced by notions of gender identity and gender roles in society. Feminist philosophers of science question how scientific research and scientific knowledge itself may be influenced and possibly compromised by the social and professional framework within which that research and knowledge is established and exists. The intersection of gender and science allows feminist philosophers to reexamine fundamental questions and truths in the field of science to reveal how gender biases may influence scientific outcomes. The feminist philosophy of science has been described as being located "at the intersections of the philosophy of science and feminist science scholarship" and has attracted considerable attention since the 1980s.
Havi Hannah Carel is a professor of philosophy at the University of Bristol.
Bisexual theory is a field of critical theory, inspired by queer theory and bisexual politics, that foregrounds bisexuality as both a theoretical focus and as an epistemology. Bisexual theory emerged most prominently in the 1990s, in response to the burgeoning field of queer theory, and queer studies more broadly, frequently employing similar post-structuralist approaches but redressing queer theory's tendency towards bisexual erasure.
Decolonization of knowledge is a concept advanced in decolonial scholarship that critiques the perceived hegemony of Western knowledge systems. It seeks to construct and legitimize other knowledge systems by exploring alternative epistemologies, ontologies and methodologies. It is also an intellectual project that aims to "disinfect" academic activities that are believed to have little connection with the objective pursuit of knowledge and truth. The presumption is that if curricula, theories, and knowledge are colonized, it means they have been partly influenced by political, economic, social and cultural considerations. The decolonial knowledge perspective covers a wide variety of subjects including philosophy, science, history of science, and other fundamental categories in social science.
Applied epistemology refers to the study that determines whether the systems of investigation that seek the truth lead to true beliefs about the world. A specific conceptualization cites that it attempts to reveal whether these systems contribute to epistemic aims. It is applied in practices outside of philosophy like science and mathematics.
Coloniality of knowledge is a concept that Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano developed and adapted to contemporary decolonial thinking. The concept critiques what proponents call the Eurocentric system of knowledge, arguing the legacy of colonialism survives within the domains of knowledge. For decolonial scholars, the coloniality of knowledge is central to the functioning of the coloniality of power and is responsible for turning colonial subjects into victims of the coloniality of being, a term that refers to the lived experiences of colonized peoples.
Data universalism is an epistemological framework that assumes a single universal narrative of any dataset without any consideration of geographical borders and social contexts. This assumption is enabled by a generalized approach in data collection. Data are used in universal endeavours across social, political, and physical sciences unrestricted from their local source and people. Data are gathered and transformed into a mutual understanding of knowing the world which forms theories of knowledge. One of many fields of critical data studies explores the geologies and histories of data by investigating data assemblages and tracing data lineage which unfolds data histories and geographies (p.35). This reveals intersections of data politics, praxes, and powers at play which challenges data universalism as a misguided concept.