Much of feminist philosophy of language so far can be described as critical—critical either of language itself or of philosophy of language, and calling for change on the basis of these criticisms. Those making these criticisms suggest that the changes are needed for the sake of feminist goals — either to better allow for feminist work to be done or, more frequently, to bring an end to certain key ways that women are disadvantaged. In this entry, I examine these criticisms. (...) I also examine work by feminists that seems to suggest some of the criticisms are misplaced: that, for example, philosophy of language is better able to help in feminist projects than critics suppose. My focus in this entry will generally be on the analytic tradition. For continental approaches, see the entries on feminist approaches to the intersection of analytic and continental philosophy , feminist approaches to the intersection of pragmatism and continental philosophy. (shrink)

Our interpretive resources enable us to make sense of, navigate, and communicate about our shared world. These resources not only carve the world up into categories, but also guide how we, individually and collectively, are oriented towards it. In this thesis, I examine how these resources, and the dispositions they guide, may be harmful. A vital kind of interpretive resources are frames, which equip us with unified perspectives on the world. Perspectives are suites of open-ended interpretive (inquisitive, attentional, inferential, evaluative, (...) and affective) dispositions. Frames thereby guide how we interpret, respond to, and navigate the world. I show that these perspectives are epistemically powerful and indispensable. I argue that flawed perspectives, and the distorting frames that produce them, are deeply pernicious and I examine their relationship to oppression. (shrink)

Oppressive ideology regularly misrepresents features of structural injustice as normal or appropriate. Resisting such injustice therefore requires critical examination of the evaluative judgments encoded in shared concepts. In this paper, I diagnose a mechanism of ideological misevaluation, which I call "hermeneutical misfit." Hermeneutical misfit occurs when thick concepts, or concepts which both describe and evaluate, mobilize ideologically warped evaluative judgments which do not fit the facts (e.g. "slutty"). These ill-fitted thick concepts in turn are regularly deployed as if they merely (...) describe--a phenomenon I call "descriptive masquerade." I argue that, via descriptive masquerade, ill-fitted thick concepts smuggle in warped evaluative judgments alongside apparently value-neutral ‘mere facts’, a process which both reinforces those judgments and increases the difficulty of critique. I investigate the concept "obesity" as an example: scientists and medical practitioners will deploy this concept as if it "merely" describes, enabling the smuggling of a host of warped evaluative judgments. I suggest that, to resist this process, we should develop collective consciousness and articulate "meta-hermeneutical resources," or thick concepts which encode critique of other, ill-fitted concepts (e.g. "slut-shaming" or "fat-shaming"). (shrink)

ABSTRACT It is a common contention that education done uncritically and unreflectively may serve to sustain and justify the status quo, in terms of mechanisms of cultural or racial privileging and marginalization. This article explores an argument made from within anti-oppressive education theory and advocated by theorist Kevin Kumashiro, namely that transformative education must entail altering harmful citational practices. I see two shortcomings in relation to this argument: first, its focus on discursive practice entails a prerequisite of high discursive literacy. (...) Second, it may lead to a failure to give credit to people’s intentions, risking a conflation of honest mistakes and wilful ignorance, and depriving us of theoretical nuance. While a well-argued and important call, I argue in this article that both shortcomings lead to the risk of a polarized conversation. Focusing on cultural, ethnic, and racial categorization, and using social studies as an illustration, it is suggested that applying notions from the theoretical concept of epistemic injustice may open up a space for granting nuanced credit to people’s intentions, thereby mitigating the risk of polarization. Rather than viewing attention to outcome and attention to intention as oppositional to one another, it is argued that both theoretical perspectives may benefit from the insights of the other. By applying needed context-specificity and nuance to categorizations of dominance and marginalization in individual discursive exchange, this can be done without granting priority to the experience of dominantly situated knowers. (shrink)

This essay investigates an underappreciated way in which trust and testimonial injustice are closely connected. Credibility deficit and credibility excess cases both (in their own distinctive ways) contribute to a speaker’s being harmed in her capacity a knower. But moreover, as we will show—by using the tools of a performance-theoretic framework—both credibility deficit and credibility excess cases also feature incompetent trusting on the part of the hearer. That is, credibility deficit and excess cases are shown to manifest qualities of thinkers (...) that are inconducive to trust’s being reliably fulfilled. What this implies is an interesting result about testimonial injustice: to the extent that we want to mitigate against testimonial injustice—one promising way to do so will be to target incompetent trusting of the sort that underlies it. We conclude by outlining and defending what we take to be a promising substantive version of such a mitigation strategy, one which is centred around the cultivation of higher-order trusting competences. (shrink)

Is there good reason to worry about celebrity involvement in democratic politics? The rise of celebrity politicians such as Donald Trump and Vladimir Zelensky has led political theorists and commentators to worry that the role of expertise in democratic politics has been undermined. According to one recent critique, celebrities possess a significant degree of epistemic power that is unconnected to appropriate expertise. This presents a problem both for deliberative and epistemic theories of democratic legitimacy, which ignore this form of power, (...) and for real existing democracies attempting to meet the standards of legitimacy set out by these theories. But do these critiques apply to democratic elitism? In this paper, we argue that recognition of celebrity epistemic power in fact represents a valuable resource for supporting the legitimacy and practice of democratic elitism, though these benefits do come with certain risks to which elite theories are particularly vulnerable. (shrink)

This paper will focus on the ways in which white feminist academics commit epistemic injustice in their approach to the work of women of color. Drawing from feminist epistemology, particularly the works of Miranda Fricker, Gaile Pohlhaus, and Kristie Dotson, I aim to show that white feminist academics’ treatment of WOC’s work takes the form of willful hermeneutical ignorance that results in contributory injustice. Among the objections I address is the concern that attempts to solve the problem of contributory injustice (...) may lead to the epistemic exploitation of WOC, as well as the fact that WFAs themselves face a second-class status within academic philosophy. (shrink)

This article develops a new approach for theorizing about hermeneutical injustice. According to a dominant view, hermeneutical injustice results from a hermeneutical gap: one lacks the conceptual tools needed to make sense of, or to communicate, important social experience, where this lack is a result of an injustice in the background social methods used to determine hermeneutical resources. I argue that this approach is incomplete. It fails to capture an important species of hermeneutical injustice which doesn’t result from a lack (...) of hermeneutical resources, but from the overabundance of distorting and oppressive concepts which function to crowd-out, defeat, or preempt the application of a more accurate hermeneutical resource. I propose a broader analysis that better respects the dynamic relationship between hermeneutical resources and the social and political contexts in which they are implemented. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

The main aim of this paper is to investigate how sexist ideology distorts our conceptions of sexual violence and the hermeneutical gaps such an ideology yields. I propose that we can understand the problematic issue of hermeneutical gaps about sexual violence with the help of Fricker’s theory of hermeneutical injustice. By distinguishing between hermeneutical injustice and hermeneutical misfire, we can distinguish between the hermeneutical gap and its consequences for the victim of sexual violence and those of the perpetrator of such (...) violence. I then argue that perpetrators are both morally responsible and accountable for their acts, even if they are the result of a hermeneutical misfire. Ultimately, I show that with regard to sexual violence, we should opt for accountability to change the behaviour of the perpetrator and the social structure. Content warning: The paper discusses sexual violence and difficulties conceptualising experiences of such violence. (shrink)

The epistemic basic structure of a society consists of those institutions that have the greatest impact on individuals’ opportunity to obtain knowledge on questions they have an interest in as citizens, individuals, and public officials. It plays a central role in the production and dissemination of knowledge and in ensuring that people have the capability to assimilate this knowledge. It includes institutions of science and education, the media, search engines, libraries, museums, think tanks, and various government agencies. This article identifies (...) two demands of justice that apply specifically to the institutions that belong to it. First, the epistemic basic structure should serve all citizens fairly and reliably. It should provide them with the opportunity to acquire knowledge they need for their deliberations about the common good, their individual good, and how to pursue them. Second, the epistemic basic structure should produce and disseminate the knowledge that various experts and public officials need to successfully pursue justice and citizens need to effectively exercise their rights. After arguing for these duties, I discuss what policies follow from them and respond to the worry that these duties have illiberal implications. (shrink)

There's been a great deal of interest in epistemology regarding what it takes for a hearer to come to know on the basis of a speaker's say-so. That is, there's been much work on the epistemology of testimony. However, what about when hearers don't believe speakers when they should? In other words, what are we to make of when testimony goes wrong? A recent topic of interest in epistemology and feminist philosophy is how we sometimes fail to believe speakers due (...) to inappropriate prejudices – implicit or explicit. This is known as epistemic injustice. In this article, I discuss Miranda Fricker's groundbreaking work on epistemic injustice, as well as more recent developments that both offer critique and expansion on the nature and extent of epistemic injustice. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that ill persons are particularly vulnerable to epistemic injustice in the sense articulated by Fricker. Ill persons are vulnerable to testimonial injustice through the presumptive attribution of characteristics like cognitive unreliability and emotional instability that downgrade the credibility of their testimonies. Ill persons are also vulnerable to hermeneutical injustice because many aspects of the experience of illness are difficult to understand and communicate and this often owes to gaps in collective hermeneutical resources. We then argue (...) that epistemic injustice arises in part owing to the epistemic privilege enjoyed by the practitioners and institutions of contemporary healthcare services—the former owing to their training, expertise, and third-person psychology, and the latter owing to their implicit privileging of certain styles of articulating and evidencing testimonies in ways that marginalise ill persons. We suggest that a phenomenological toolkit may be part of an effort to ameliorate epistemic injustice. (shrink)

Wem wird geglaubt und wem nicht? Wessen Wissen wird weitergegeben und wessen nicht? Wer hat eine Stimme und wer nicht? Theorien der epistemischen Ungerechtigkeit befassen sich mit dem breiten Feld der ungerechten oder unfairen Behandlung, die mit Fragen des Wissens, Verstehens und Kommunizierens zusammenhängen, wie z.B. die Möglichkeit, vom Wissen oder von kommunikativen Praktiken ausgeschlossen zu werden oder zum Schweigen gebracht zu werden, aber auch Kontexte, in denen die Bedeutungen mancher systematisch verzerrt oder falsch gehört und falsch dargestellt werden, in (...) denen manchen misstraut wird oder es an epistemischer Handlungsfähigkeit mangelt. In diesem Buch wird eine Übersicht über die breite Debatte epistemischer Ungerechtigkeit, epistemischer Unterdrückung und epistemischer Gewalt gegeben, in dem unterschiedliche Theorien, die sich auf der Schnittstelle von Gerechtigkeitstheorie und epistemischen Fragen befinden, systematisch und kritisch diskutiert sowie theoretische Vorgänger dieser Theorien beleuchtet werden. (shrink)

This article proposes the comparison of two methods of analysis, semiotics, and hermeneutics, to address contemporary issues in ethical and political philosophy, through the study of the phenomenon of epistemic injustice. Conceptualized by Fricker (2007), epistemic injustice is synonymous with the denial of the value of knowledge that an individual possesses because of prejudices about the social group to which he or she belongs or is affiliated. When epistemic injustice is studied in the empirical world, it poses some crucial issues (...) in terms of interpreting the meaning that the individual gives to the experience of injustice that he or she experiences. Although the interpretation of injustice is central to the understanding of the phenomenon itself, little research in ethical and political philosophy addresses these aspects, because of the failure to sufficiently mobilize analytical methods such as semiotics and hermeneutics. However, these two methods, usually used in other fields to deal with these aspects, allow us to question the treatment and the interpretative scope of the epistemic injustice by the different interlocutors involved in the interaction in which it is reconducted. The comparison of these two methods in the analysis of epistemic injustice finally allows us to argue in favor of the hermeneutic method, as defined by Gadamer and rethought by Code (2003), to enhance Gadamer's legacy through the analysis of ethical and political issues in human sciences research. (shrink)

This paper aims to consider some semantic aspects of the phenomenon of hermeneutical injustice overlooked in recent literature. First, we examine different cases of hermeneutical injustices and we propose to classify them according to their semantic structure. The core of this classification lies in the distinction between cases related to problems of content and cases related to problems of circulation of social concepts. Second, we criticize a semantic conception, implicit in much of the literature concern- ing hermeneutical injustice, according to (...) which concepts are mere labels. We show that this conception cannot provide an adequate understanding of the different cases of hermeneutical injustice that we identify: first, because it fails to capture the dynamics of conceptual change or refinement that these cases involve and, second, because it leads to diagnosing them as mere problems of concept application. (shrink)

According to Miranda Fricker, being hindered from rendering something significant about oneself intelligible to someone constitutes a hermeneutical injustice only if it results from the hermeneutical marginalization of some group to which one belongs. A major problem for Fricker’s picture is that it cannot properly account for the paradigm case of hermeneutical injustice Fricker herself takes from Ian McEwan’s novel Enduring Love. In order to account properly for this case, I argue that being hindered from rendering something significant about oneself (...) intelligible to someone can constitute a hermeneutical injustice so long as it results from the hermeneutical marginalization of some group - whether or not one belongs to that group. One upshot is that Fricker’s distinction between systematic and incidental cases of hermeneutical injustice needs redrawing, and I show how this can be done. Another is that hermeneutical injustice is more widespread than Fricker recognizes. (shrink)

Reply to Hilkje Hänel, ‘Who’s to Blame? Hermeneutical Misfire, Forward-Looking Responsibility, and Collective Accountability’.

This paper begins with the idea that there are sometimes gaps in our shared linguistic/ conceptual resources that make it difficult for us to understand our own social experiences, and to make them intelligible to others. In this paper, I focus on three cases of this sort, some of which are drawn from the literature on hermeneutical injustice. I offer a diagnosis of what the gaps in these cases consist in, and what it takes to fill them. I argue that (...) these gaps are filled in, at least initially, by labels of a particular kind. Specifically, these are labels that allow us to see the experiences in question as novel instances of phenomena with which we are already normatively familiar. Further, I also show that these labels bring with them important downsides: they introduce distortions into our understandings of these experiences. Using a pair of case studies (‘statutory rape,’ ‘sexual harassment’), I illustrate these distortions. (shrink)