Miranda Fricker has influentially discussed testimonial injustice: the injustice done to a speaker S by a hearer H when H gives S less-than-merited credibility. Here, I explore the prospects for a novel form of testimonial injustice, where H affords S due credibility, that is, the amount of credibility S deserves. I present two kinds of cases intended to illustrate this category, and argue that there is presumptive reason to think that testimonial injustice with due credibility exists. I show that if (...) it is denied that ultimately these cases exemplify testimonial injustice without credibility deficit, then either they must be taken to exemplify a novel kind of epistemic, non-testimonial injustice, or they bring to light a significant exegetical result. (shrink)

Miranda Fricker maintains that testimonial injustice is a matter of credibility deficit, not excess. In this article, I argue that this restricted characterization of testimonial injustice is too narrow. I introduce a type of identity-prejudicial credibility excess that harms its targets qua knowers and transmitters of knowledge. I show how positive stereotyping and prejudicially inflated credibility assessments contribute to the continued epistemic oppression of marginalized knowers. In particular, I examine harms such as typecasting, compulsory representation, and epistemic exploitation and consider (...) what hearers are obligated to do in response to these injustices. I argue that because epistemic harms to marginalized knowers also arise from prejudicially inflated assessments of their credibility, the virtue of testimonial justice must be revised to remedy them. (shrink)

I distinguish between two senses in which feminists have argued that the knower is social: 1. situated or socially positioned and 2. interdependent. I argue that these two aspects of the knower work in cooperation with each other in a way that can produce willful hermeneutical ignorance, a type of epistemic injustice absent from Miranda Fricker's Epistemic Injustice. Analyzing the limitations of Fricker's analysis of the trial of Tom Robinson in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird with attention to the (...) way in which situatedness and interdependence work in tandem, I develop an understanding of willful hermeneutical ignorance, which occurs when dominantly situated knowers refuse to acknowledge epistemic tools developed from the experienced world of those situated marginally. Such refusals allow dominantly situated knowers to misunderstand, misinterpret, and/or ignore whole parts of the world. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop two criticisms of Miranda Fricker’s attempt to offer an interpretation of MacKinnon’s claim that pornography silences women that conceives of the silencing in question as an extreme form of testimonial injustice. The intended contrast is with the speech act theoretical model of silencing familiar from Rae Langton and Jennifer Hornsby, who appeal to MacKinnon’s claim to argue against the standard liberal line on pornography, which takes a permissive stance to be demanded by a right to (...) freedom of speech. Fricker’s alternative suggestion is that women are the victims of ‘an especially acute form of testimonial injustice’, due to the kind of dehumanizing bad sexual ideology peddled in much pornography. Fricker suggests that both notions of silencing are coherent possibilities, but that ‘the epistemic model describes the more empirically likely possibility, simply because it requires less erosion of women’s human status before the silencing effect kicks in’. I question the truth of this advertised advantage of Fricker’s epistemic account of silencing, but also its relevance to philosophical debates about pornography and silencing. Second, I raise a concern about theorizing about sexual refusal as a kind of testimony, as Fricker does. (shrink)

While in agreement with Miranda Fricker’s context-sensitive approach to hermeneutical injustice, this paper argues that this contextualist approach has to be pluralized and rendered relational in more complex ways. In the first place, I argue that the normative assessment of social silences and the epistemic harms they generate cannot be properly carried out without a pluralistic analysis of the different interpretative communities and expressive practices that coexist in the social context in question. Social silences and hermeneutical gaps are misrepresented if (...) they are uniformly predicated of an entire social context, instead of being predicated of particular ways of inhabiting that context by particular people in relation to particular others. I contend that a more nuanced—polyphonic—contextualization offers a more adequate picture of what it means to break social silences and to repair the hermeneutical injustices associated with them. In the second place, I argue that the particular obligations with respect to hermeneutical justice that differently situated subjects and groups have are interactive and need to be determined relationally. That is, whether individuals and groups live up to their hermeneutical responsibilities has to be assessed by taking into account the forms of mutual positionality, relationality, and responsivity (or lack thereof) that these subjects and groups display with respect to one another. The central argument is developed through an examination of what in race theory and in contemporary epistemologies of ignorance has been termed “white ignorance”; that is, the kind of hermeneutical inability of privileged white subjects to recognize and make sense of their racial identities, experiences, and social positionality. (shrink)