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.

The Scope of Epistemic Injustice in Psychiatry

In this post, Themistoklis Pantazakos and Sarah Arnaud argue that the concept of testimonial epistemic injustice has been too broadly used in psychiatry, leading to confusion and doubts about its usefulness. They suggest that once the concept is properly focused on phenomenology, these issues are largely resolved.

In broad terms, to do an epistemic injustice is to harm somebody in their capacity as a knower (Fricker, 2007). The concept has taken the world of philosophy of psychiatry by storm, with a surge of academic articles and presentations over the past decade. However, many fundamental aspects of the concept remain unclear. For instance, it is often ambiguous what type of knowledge mental health service users contribute, or why and when psychiatrists should listen to them. “Listening to the voice of the marginalized (service users)” has become a common go-to phrase for finding a remedy to epistemic injustice, however it remains too vague. Overall, there is a pressing need for accounts that clarify the mechanisms and specifics of epistemic injustice with an eye to making it clinically useful.

In our recent article in Philosophical Psychology, we address these questions, beginning with a recent debate in philosophy of psychiatry, focusing specifically on the testimonial strand of epistemic injustice, which involves the information provided by service users. Kious et al. (2023) recently argued that the concept of testimonial epistemic injustice is at best superfluous and at worst detrimental to psychiatric conduct, presenting two key arguments for this. Firstly, that uncritically believing everything a service user says would undermine the critical skepticism necessary for effective psychiatric practice. Secondly, that the careful consideration of information provided by service users is already covered by existing psychiatric guidelines. Unsurprisingly, friends of the epistemic injustice concept responded swiftly and intensely (Aftab, 2023; Kidd et al., 2023).

Kious et al. discuss various psychiatric incidents to support their position, arguing that these cases, often cited as examples of testimonial epistemic injustice, do not involve moral missteps by the attending psychiatrists. Their opponents claim the opposite. Disagreeing with both, we contend that these incidents, regardless of their general moral aspects, are unsuitable for demonstrating testimonial epistemic injustice in psychiatry. To do this, we first clarify that the primary mission of psychiatry is to help service users cope better, i.e., to improve what it is like to be them. We then argue that psychiatrists should not listen to service users indiscriminately or merely for the sake of participation. Instead, they should listen when service users speak about their area of expertise, which regards foremostly what it is like to be them. The cases discussed by Kious et al. and their opponents concern issues outside the natural expertise of service users, who therefore may not be the primary epistemic sources in these contexts.

Generalizing this approach, we propose that the concept of testimonial injustice in psychiatry should be centered on phenomenology, or the study of the lived experience of service users. This conceptualization allows for what Kious et al. call “a degree of healthy skepticism”, which we agree is crucial in psychiatry. Moreover, it highlights an epistemic dimension that is overlooked in psychiatric practice guidelines, thereby clarifying the novelty and the necessity of the epistemic injustice concept for the field. We conclude by examining historical cases in psychiatry, including schizophrenia and autism, to demonstrate that this form of epistemic injustice, which we term phenomenological epistemic injustice, has been prevalent in the profession.

Themistoklis Pantazakos

Sarah Arnaud