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.