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. 

Hysteria, Hermeneutical Injustice and Conceptual Engineering

In "Hysteria, Hermeneutical Injustice, and Conceptual Engineering", I look at what Miranda Fricker, in her Epistemic Injustice. Power and the Ethics of Knowing (2007) calls “hermeneutical injustice”, as it arises in the medical context. By drawing on the complex history of hysteria, I argue that the very concept HYSTERIA was used for diagnostic purposes for millennia, before its dismissal with the DSM-III in 1980, due to power structures affected by negative prejudice against women. 

Stereotypical representation of hysteria

I then argue that HYSTERIA fits the central conditions of the concept HERMENEUTICAL INJUSTICE. Yet, reflection on the case of HYSTERIA also signals the need for widening the understanding of the concept HERMENEUTICAL INJUSTICE itself. This is methodologically important for two reasons. First, because instead of considering the medical field merely as an area of application or testing of philosophical ideas, it uses medical data to improve a philosophical notion. Accordingly, I propose that hermeneutical injustice may depend not only on gaps in hermeneutical resources, but also on the presence of faulty ones, such as HYSTERIA. 

Second, once thus improved upon, HERMENEUTICAL INJUSTICE can be used to advocate for other forms of amelioration of concepts, which still embed identity prejudice against certain groups. I claim that it can do so by eschewing the more traditional path taken in current debates on the amelioration of concepts such as WOMAN. These debates risk perpetrating an “essentialist” outlook – let it be grounded in biological “nature” or in socially-acquired “nature” – on what women “really” are (or should be), which is fraught with problems.

By bringing the concept of HERMENEUTICAL INJUSTICE to bear onto this kind of discussion we can bypass that “essentialist” outlook altogether and be more inclusive and open to further applications of WOMAN, if these applications can help people, such as transwomen, to make sense of their experience and if doing so can help remove identity prejudice against them. 

The debate over the concept WOMAN is but one example of the areas in which a reconfigured concept of HERMENEUTICAL INJUSTICE could play a role. In fact, once so reconfigured, HERMENEUTICAL INJUSTICE could also be used to diagnose what is epistemically amiss in the use of those slurs, epithets and pejoratives which likewise embed identity prejudice against certain groups.

In fact, HYSTERIA is a clear example of a harmful concept rooted in identity prejudice against women. Its use undermines women’s ability to understand, express, and reason about their experiences, perpetuating forms of epistemic injustice like testimonial and what I call “rational(ity) injustice”— that is, the injustice of downplaying, diminishing and impeding the development of women’s rational abilities, due to identity prejudice against them. Therefore, I argue that using “hysterical"” and related terms descriptively should be banned.

Still, HYSTERIA could potentially be reclaimed by women, like other harmful concepts rooted in identity prejudice that were initially rejected for their damaging effects but later embraced by marginalized groups to strenghten identity and belonging.

Annalisa Coliva is Professor of Philosophy at University of California Irvine, and Editor in Chief of the Journal for the History of Analytic Philosophy. 

Annalisa's interests are in Epistemology, Philosophy of mind and language, and History of Analytic Philosophy.

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.