Reservations about Epistemic Injustice

The concept of epistemic injustice undoubtedly applies in mental healthcare contexts, because people get ignored in these contexts as sources of knowledge when they shouldn’t be. As a result, the concept is frequently invoked, especially perhaps in the overlap between academia and service-user advocacy. Still, I want to express two reservations about it.

Identity prejudice

The first is about the connection between epistemic – specifically, testimonial - injustice and ‘identity prejudice’, which occurs when someone’s testimony is discounted because of a prejudice against a group they belong to. Fricker made this connection in her book, which of course launched the concept: epistemic injustice occurs when a ‘negative identity-prejudicial stereotype’ (p. 35) undermines credibility.

But does it only occur then? Suppose my teacher dismisses my contributions to class, whether they are knowledgeable or not, while other students’ similar contributions get a fair hearing. That sounds like injustice, and presumably if it’s injustice of any sort, it’s epistemic. But surely the teacher may just dislike me personally, not because of any group I belong to. Fricker acknowledged this objection in a follow-up piece, while maintaining that negative stereotyping is the core case. But is it? Who knows if negative stereotype-based epistemic injustices are more common than ‘merely personal’ ones? There are, after all, a lot of people. 

Personal and identity prejudice

Negative stereotype-based epistemic injustice is morally especially troubling. But is it thereby the core of the phenomenon? Consider the notion of a racially aggravated offence. Here, group-based hostility compounds an independently specifiable offence such as assault. Applying the analogy, the ‘merely personal’ case looks epistemically just like the negative stereotype-based case, i.e. I am undeservedly discounted as a source of knowledge because the teacher’s evaluation of my epistemic standing tracks a feature (her dislike of me) that is epistemically irrelevant. 

So the negative stereotype-based case comes out as racially (or whatever) aggravated form of a core epistemic phenomenon that’s independent of stereotyping. It’s probably a verbal choice whether we relax the link between epistemic injustice and prejudice or (my preference) relax the link between prejudice and group membership. The point is that the same injustice occurs whether negative stereotyping is present or not.

Borrowing authority

My second reservation is based only on a personal impression, that some campaigning literature is seeking to borrow authority from philosophy – whatever authority it really has to offer - by affixing the word ‘epistemic’ to the word ‘injustice’. But even where mental health professionals fail to listen to service users when they should, it’s not always a case of epistemic (testimonial) injustice: that concept only applies when utterance aims to secure belief, and service users say things to mental health professionals for expressive reasons, or because they need the experience of being listened to. 

Moreover mental healthcare is arguably a context for multiple injustices unrelated either to knowledge or to listening (or failing to listen) - e.g. involuntary detention in hospital. My worry is that the uncritical overuse of an (in its place) useful concept may distract us from thinking carefully about potential non-epistemic injustices.

Edward Harcourt

Edward Harcourt is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford. 

His research interests include child development, ethical dimensions of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, and the philosophy of mental health and mental illness. 

Some of the ideas in this post are discussed in his article in the Journal of Medical Ethics.