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.