In her book Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing , Miranda Fricker introduces the helpful notion of “identity prejudice” as “a label for prejudices against people qua social type” . She focuses on race, class and gender, and Michael Hand in his article What Do Kids Know? A response to Karin Murris is indeed correct when he states that I have applied her arguments to age as a category of epistemic exclusion.I argue that among the usual contenders of (...) epistemic prejudices, we also need to be cognisant of adults’ implicit and explicit assumptions and prejudices about child and childhood. However, Hand incorrectly uses Fricker’s ideas to reject my proposal to include child as being on the receiving end of epistemic injustice. A close reading of some passages about stereotyping will show why this is the case and why his own claim that “children typically are immature, ill-informed and endearing” will turn out to .. (shrink)

Michael Burroughs and Deborah Tollefsen (2016) claim that children are subject to widespread testimonial injustice. They argue that empirical data shows that children are prejudicially accorded less epistemic credibility in forensic contexts, and that this in turn shows that the same is true in broader contexts. While I agree that there is indeed testimonial injustice against children, I argue that Burroughs and Tollefsen exaggerate its severity and extent, by exaggerating children’s testimonial reliability. Firstly, the empirical data do not quite support (...) their claim about children’s performance in forensic contexts. Secondly, while they advocate a relational conception of children’s agency which emphasizes the role of adults in realizing their testimonial abilities, Burroughs and Tollefsen miss the full implications of such a conception for our evaluation of children’s credibility, and for our behavior towards them in testimonial contexts. Thirdly, they underestimate the significance of children’s limited general knowledge. (shrink)

Several recent authors have argued that children are subject to testimonial injustice in the same way as are women, Blacks, and several other social identity groups. Testimonial injustice is standardly conceptualized, following Miranda Fricker’s seminal account, as a wrongful credibility deficit. I argue that this concept of testimonial injustice is too narrow to capture testimonial injustice against children. There is good reason to think that children are less reliable testifiers than adults, so it is not necessarily wrong to assign a (...) credibility deficit to a child speaker, in the way it is wrong in the case of a female or black speaker. However, I argue that children are nevertheless subjected to testimonial injustice. Testimonial injustice against children is constituted primarily by a failure to actively inquire into assertions by children — that is, by a failure to patiently and reflectively engage in discourse with the child to discover what they may know. (shrink)

In this paper I individuate and analyse a new type of epistemic injustice that can arise in education and depends on the so-called ‘backtracking fallacy’ in student assessment, which occurs when a teacher confuses (or does not distinguish between) the logical dimension of a framework of disciplinary concepts and its psychological dimension. I will also touch upon a different type of social injustice that might transpire in education. I suggest that familiarity with Paul Hirst's view of liberal education, which presupposes (...) a neat distinction between a public framework of knowledge and the psychological process of gradually learning it, can contribute to prevent or reduce both forms of injustice. (shrink)