EPIC's Year in Review and Festive Greetings

Celebrating a Remarkable First Year

As we wrap up EPIC’s inaugural year, our project manager Charlotte Withers reflects on our journey and achievements. 

EPIC was established with a range of ambitious goals: fostering collaborations, appointing key personnel, building a vibrant community, and establishing a robust online presence. Thanks to the dedication and creativity of our team, we are proud to say we have accomplished these aims and set the stage for an exciting future.

Festive version of the EPIC logo

Fostering Collaborations

Collaboration is at the heart of EPIC’s mission. This year, we’ve developed a strong network of partnerships across institutions and countries. Our investigators at Birmingham, Nottingham, Swansea, and Bristol have made significant strides in building internal and cross-institutional connections.

• Institutional Efforts: the Nottingham team developed a research network, and the Birmingham team launched a reading group and this blog to connect scholars and ideas.

• International Partnerships: the Birmingham team are collaborating with the University of Ferrara on a case study addressing depression and demoralization in cancer patients and with the University of Bologna on dementia research.

These collaborations have created a foundation for innovative, interdisciplinary research in the years to come.

Ground-breaking Publications

EPIC’s inaugural year has also been a banner year for publications:

• Bortolotti edited an open-access collection entitled Epistemic Justice in Mental Healthcare (Palgrave), with a preface by Bortolotti and Broome.
• Articles have appeared in leading journals such as Kidd's article in Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, Degerman's article in Philosophical Psychology, Russell's article in Erkenntnis, and Kidd and Carel's article in Social Epistemology.
• Chapters have been prepared for inclusion in edited collections, such as a chapter co-authored by Broome, McGuinness and Kidd on ‘Epistemic injustice, informed consent, and shared decision-making in mental health care’ and a chapter co-authored by Bortolotti, Murphy-Hollies, and Byrne on 'Epistemic Injustice in Mental Health: new directions'.

Future publications include two anticipated monographs and proceedings from upcoming conferences in Leipzig and Nottingham. 

EPIC has also prioritized accessible outputs, publishing in venues such as Psychology Today and The Conversation and producing a number of podcasts and videos for the general public.

Building Community

Creating a thriving community has been central to EPIC’s success.

• Online Engagement: EPIC hosts monthly seminars, featuring renowned speakers such as Miranda Fricker, and offers a ‘Friends of EPIC’ sign-up on our website to keep stakeholders engaged.
• Social Media Presence: Our website, blog, and Facebook page share regular updates, alongside impactful campaigns like ‘Women in Philosophy’ and ‘World Mental Health Day.’

Presentations and Outreach

EPIC members have shared their work globally, presenting at prestigious venues, including International Society for Psychological and Social Approaches to Psychosis (ISPS-US), the Chilean Society for Neurology, Psychiatry and Neurosurgery (SONEPSYN), and seminars and conferences at the universities of Cambridge, Aarhus, Eindhoven, Tokyo, California Irvine, and Prague - to mention just a few.

Our outreach efforts have made epistemic injustice accessible to broader audiences, including the following:

• Workshops with the Voice Collective resulted in co-produced videos and open-access resources.
• Collaboration with the Patients Association and the WHO Behavioural and Cultural Insights Hub are producing impactful briefing papers.

Memorable Events

EPIC launched with an inspiring event in Bristol featuring a commissioned musical piece by Toby Young. We’ve since hosted workshops for early-career women in philosophy and epistemic injustice scholars, with more exciting events planned through 2025/26.

Looking Ahead

EPIC’s first year has been a resounding success. From fostering meaningful collaborations to publishing innovative research and building a vibrant community, we have laid a strong foundation for the future.

Here’s to an even more impactful year ahead!

Happy 2025 to the EPIC blog readers 

 

Testimonial Injustice: The Facts of the Matter

This post is by Migdalia Arcila-Valenzuela and Andrés Páez.

Listening to testimony

One of the central examples of Miranda Fricker’s seminal book, Epistemic Injustice, is the trial of Tom Robinson, the protagonist in Harper Lee’s novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. Unjustly accused of a crime, Tom and his lawyer, Atticus Finch, struggle to combat the racial stereotypes that, as a Black man, Tom triggers in the members of the jury. Despite the overwhelming evidence in his favor, he is not believed. In Fricker’s terminology, Tom is discredited as an epistemic subject. A testimonial injustice is being committed against him.

Despite describing a type of injustice, it was not entirely clear to readers of the book how this example illustrated a novel philosophical idea. After all, racial discrimination is a well-documented and widely studied phenomenon. In her more recent work, in particular in her paper “Evolving concepts of epistemic injustice” (2017), Fricker narrows the definition of “testimonial injustice” to cases that, in her words, are “easy to miss” (p. 54) because they are not perpetrated by overtly racist or sexist individuals. Instead, the speaker is discredited as a knower because of an implicit identity prejudice in the hearer. Under this more restricted definition, Tom’s case would not qualify as a testimonial injustice, but a host of other more subtle cases come into focus.

This redefinition of the concept of testimonial injustice is the focus of our paper, “Testimonial injustice: The facts of the matter,” published in Review of Philosophy and Psychology. In the paper we argue that, following Fricker’s restricted definition of testimonial injustice, three facts must be established to verify the occurrence of a singular instance of this kind of injustice. 

The first is whether the hearer in fact has an implicit identity prejudice that may not align with her explicit beliefs. The second is whether the hearer’s implicit prejudice was in fact the cause of the unjustified credibility deficit. And the third is whether there was in fact a credibility deficit in the testimonial exchange to begin with. 

These three elements constitute the facts of the matter regarding testimonial injustice. In the paper we argue that, given our current psychological understanding, none of these facts can be established with any degree of confidence, rendering testimonial injustice, under this new definition, an undetectable phenomenon in singular instances. 

Our intention is not to undermine the idea of testimonial injustice, but rather to set limits to what can be justifiably asserted about it. According to our argument, although there are insufficient grounds to identify individual acts of testimonial injustice, it is possible to recognize in an individual recurrent patterns of epistemic responses to speakers from specific social groups. General testimonial injustice can thus be characterized as a behavioral tendency exhibited by prejudiced hearers.

Migdalia
Arcila-Valenzuela

Migdalia Arcila-Valenzuela is a PhD candidate in philosophy at Cornell University. Her research interests are moral psychology, Latin American philosophy, and feminist epistemology. 

She is currently working on a project on the role of positive reactive attitudes in the constitution of social movements in Latin America.

Andrés Páez

Andrés Páez is Professor of Philosophy and Researcher at the Center for Research and Formation in Artificial Intelligence (CinfonIA) at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. 

He works in the philosophy of AI, and in social and legal epistemology. 

A Feedback Loop between Testimonial and Hermeneutical Injustice

‘Epistemic injustice’ picks out a distinctive kind of harm inflicted upon somebody in their capacity as a knower. Miranda Fricker (2007) famously distinguished two subtypes of epistemic injustice, i.e. testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice. 

Testimonial injustice is primarily a matter of credibility deficit. Paradigmatically, a speaker incurs testimonial injustice when they are given less credibility than they deserve due to identity prejudice in the hearer. Hermeneutical injustice is, by contrast, a matter of unintelligibility. 

A speaker incurs hermeneutical injustice when, owing to the substantive exclusion of one’s reference social group from the production of collective hermeneutical resources, there are no shared concepts they can make use of to understand their own experiences and/or make those experiences intelligible to others. 

Harassment

In an article published in Rivista di filosofia, we provide an opinionated survey of the major debates surrounding epistemic injustice, and argue that testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice reinforce each other in a feedback loop that hasn’t been fully unpacked so far -- but see Medina (2012), McKinnon (2017), and Lagewaard (2020). Here we offer a glimpse of this loop, starting from how testimonial injustice may feed off hermeneutical injustice.

As already mentioned, hermeneutical injustice typically stems from what Fricker (2007: 152) calls hermeneutical marginalization, i.e. (i) the systematic exclusion of certain groups from, or (ii) their merely formal inclusion in, meaning-making practices. Oppressed groups have historically been denied equal hermeneutical participation in both senses (i) and (ii), and this can be partly (although not exclusively) explained by appealing to the operations of testimonial injustice. When a group is negatively stereotyped in certain domains, it is no wonder that its members tend not to be asked to participate in communicative practices and hermeneutical activities related to those domains. This tendency gives rise to preemptive testimonial injustice (Fricker 2007: 130). 

We claim that preemptive testimonial injustice may fuel hermeneutical marginalization in sense (i): the long exclusion of women from institutional sources of collective meanings such as higher education and academia may be partly explained in this way. More standard forms of testimonial injustice, where a speaker’s testimony is heard but not given due weight, may contribute to hermeneutical marginalization in sense (ii).

As we all well know, women had to fight an unfinished battle after getting access to academia in order for their voices to be given equal hearing and weight – owing, in part, to the persistence of biases affecting women’s epistemic standing.

To close the loop, hermeneutical injustice must feed off testimonial injustice. We maintain that this is perfectly plausible. Consider Carmita Wood’s case (Fricker 2007: 149-50). Living in a time when the concept of sexual harassment had not yet been crafted, Wood was unable to fully make sense of what she was going through, and a fortiori to communicate it clearly to others. Wood was a victim of hermeneutical injustice. But this is not it. We argue that, because of this, she was also very likely a victim of testimonial injustices. 

After all, there is a strong chance that some hearers assigned a credibility deficit to her due to the inevitably unfit concepts she made use of (e.g. flirting) when telling them about her experience and state of anxiety. If this in fact happened, what would otherwise have been received as testimony against discriminatory treatment, ended up sounding, at least to some hearers, as a confused outburst. 

The hermeneutical injustice perpetrated against Wood ‘spilled over’, making her testimony not only scarcely intelligible but also less credible than it would otherwise have been. Importantly, these instances of testimonial injustice may not have had their roots in prejudice against (people like) Carmita but may be entirely explained by the hermeneutical injustice women were suffering at the time.

Laura Caponetto (University of Milan, Cambridge University) is a philosopher specialising in philosophy of language, feminist philosophy, and social philosophy. Laura is the author of "Undoing things with words", published in Synthese in 2020. 

Tommaso Piazza (University of Pavia) is a philosopher specialising in epistemology and the philosophy of language. Tommaso is the author of "The Value of Truth and the Normativity of Evidence", published in Synthese in 2021.

Epistemic Injustice in Diagnosis

In this post Lisa Bortolotti interviews Anke Bueter (principal investigator) and Thor Hennelund Nielsen (post-doctoral researcher) on their exciting project, “Epistemic Injustice in Diagnosis” (January 2024 – December 2025) funded by a Starting Grant of the Aarhus University Research Foundation. 

Aarhus University, credit Lars Kruse / AU Foto

Lisa: How did you become interested in this project?

Anke: This project brings together my research interests in feminist epistemology and the philosophy of medicine and psychiatry.  It focuses specifically on diagnosis, as diagnosis is both a prerequisite of successful medical treatments and susceptible to pathocentric epistemic injustices. I wanted to further explore this area after working on the phenomenon of diagnostic overshadowing, in which a previous psychiatric diagnosis leads to diagnostic delays or missed diagnoses regarding somatic diseases (Bueter 2023).

Thor: Diagnostic practices in both somatic medicine and psychiatry – their internal reasonings and capacities to change peoples’ lives for better or worse – have always interested me academically and personally. I’ve been very fortunate that this project allows me to fulfil this interest through investigating the topic of overdiagnosis.

Lisa: What are your objectives and why do you think it is important to achieve them?

Anke: My primary interest lies in avoidable diagnostic errors, which are estimated to affect 10-20% of all medical cases. The project seeks to rethink diagnosis as an (ideally) collaborative epistemic process and to explore how epistemic injustices can hinder this process. For example, I am currently examining gender biases in psychiatric diagnostic criteria, as well as the important role of trust between patients and clinicians.

Thor: Studies within the field have tended to focus on either epistemic injustices of/leading to under- or misdiagnosis but haven’t paid particularly close attention to overdiagnosis, though the epistemic harms of the latter may be equally serious. I want to show that overdiagnosis is not just a problem in terms of iatrogenic harms or lost opportunity costs but also because it fundamentally affects the overdiagnosed patient’s ability to understand themselves and be understood by others.

Lisa: Does your project involve interdisciplinary or crossdisciplinary work? If so, what disciplines are involved?

Thor: The issue of overdiagnosis is crossdisciplinary at heart. The problem itself derives from medicine but is often studied through sociological methods and additionally calls for philosophical scrutiny to elucidate the concepts themselves and the injustices they may create.

Lisa: What do you expect will be the impact of your project, within philosophy and beyond it?

Anke: A better understanding of how epistemic injustice affects diagnosis, and of the mechanisms behind these issues, is a crucial first step toward mitigation. Beyond contributing to the philosophical discussion, we aim to raise awareness among the public and medical professionals about the need for epistemic justice in health care.

Thor: The ambition is to put overdiagnosis on the map within the epistemic injustice in healthcare discussion, and, conversely, open the concept of epistemic injustice to the medical debate on overdiagnosis. Hopefully this contributes to reducing the epistemic harms of overdiagnosis in the “real world” in the long run.

Anke Bueter is Associate Professor of Philosophy in the School of Culture and Society, Aarhus University. Anke is the author of Feminist Philosophy of Science (Cambridge University Press, 2024).

Thor Hennelund Nielsen is postdoctoral researcher in the School of Culture and Society, Aarhus University. Thor is the author of "The Dynamics of Disease: Toward a Processual Theory of Health", an article published in the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy in 2024.