58³Ô¹Ï

Delineating Epistemic Injustice

The notion of epistemic injustice wasn’t originally intended to be a catch-all term for harms generated by or within our epistemic practices (such as our practice of testimony). Fricker’s project was one of delineation; she wanted to ‘delineate a distinctive class of wrongs, namely those in which someone is ingenuously downgraded and/or disadvantaged in respect of their status as an epistemic subject’ (2017: 53). She was, she wrote in Epistemic Injustice, trying to renegotiate ‘a stretch of the border’ between ethics and epistemology (2007: 2): not offer a comprehensive framework for understanding the interactions and the traffic across the full length of that border. I suggest we take the idea that the philosophical project concerning epistemic injustice to be one of delineation rather than epistemic empire-building more seriously than the recent literature has tended to. I’ll say something about what’s in danger of getting lost in the constant pressure to expand the scope of the concept, drawing an analogy to concepts such as gaslighting (as understood in Kate Abramson’s work) and coersive control, and I’ll re-examine some of the criticisms of Fricker’s approach, such as Kristie Dotson’s charge that she problematically offers a ‘closed conceptual structure’ (2012). If there’s time, I’ll also broach the question whether we should subsume epistemic injustice under some other general theory of epistemic harms.