Hermeneutical Dissent and the Species of Hermeneutical Injustice

According to Miranda Fricker, a hermeneutical injustice occurs when there is a deficit in our shared tools of social interpretation (the collective hermeneutical resource), such that marginalized social groups are at a disadvantage in making sense of their distinctive and important experiences. Critics have claimed that Fricker's account ignores or precludes a phenomenon I call hermeneutical dissent, where marginalized groups have produced their own interpretive tools for making sense of those experiences. I clarify the nature of hermeneutical injustice to make room for hermeneutical dissent, clearing up the structure of the collective hermeneutical resource and the fundamental harm of hermeneutical injustice. I then provide a more nuanced account of the hermeneutical resources in play in instances of hermeneutical injustice, enabling six species of the injustice to be distinguished. Finally, I reflect on the corrective virtue of hermeneutical justice in light of hermeneutical dissent.     

Hermeneutical Injustice and Liberatory Education

Hermeneutical injustice occurs when there is a gap in the interpretive resources available to members of a society due to the marginalization of members of a social group from sense‐making practices. In this paper, I address two questions about hermeneutical injustice that are undertheorized in the recent literature: (1) what do we mean when we say that someone lacks the interpretive resources for making sense of an experience? and (2) how do marginalized individuals develop interpretive resources? In response to (1), I argue that to lack interpretive resources is to lack conceptual skill or know how. In response to (2), I draw on resources from Gilbert Ryle and Andy Clark and provide a model of how marginalized individuals develop new conceptual skills by naming their shared experience and using it as a tool for scaffolding each other's conceptual performance. At the same time, I draw on the work of Gaile Pohlhaus and Kristie Dotson to show how these practices succeed only through the redistribution of epistemic power across differently situated social groups.     

Political Conviction and Epistemic Injustice

Philosophia - Epistemic injustice occurs when we fail to appropriately respect others as epistemic agents. Philosophers building on the work of Miranda Fricker, who introduced the concept, have...     

Narrative Fiction and Epistemic Injustice

This article looks at the role that narrative fiction—film, television, and literature—can play in countering and mitigating epistemic injustice. The notion of epistemic injustice is explicated by Miranda Fricker as a distinctive kind of injustice done to a knower in her role as a knower and is identified in two forms: testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice. The operation of both types of epistemic injustice depend upon the social imagination and the shared concepts of social identity within it—what it is to be a man, woman, straight, black, gay, transgender. It is here that narrative fiction becomes pertinent, as it has the potential to influence the social imagination for the better. Fricker uses fictional scenarios to clarify her notions of epistemic injustice; I argue that aside from elucidating analysis of our epistemic practices, fiction can also provide epistemic correctives. In the first through fourth sections of the paper, I explore ways in which narrative fiction can combat testimonial and hermeneutical injustice. The fifth section then considers the unique features of narrative fiction in this capacity to resist epistemic injustice and argues that it capitalizes on advantages that other approaches cannot share in.     

认知不公正：认知维度下理解医患互动的视角

从认知不公正的理论视角出发对医患互动予以重新审视。研究发现,医患间的认知不公正不仅阻碍医患间证言知识的有效传递,凸显二者在认知预期与互动意愿上的差异,而且呈现出波动性、形态多样性和伤害间接性的特点,加速医患互动工具化的同时,加剧双方弥合信任的难度。尽管医患主动采取“理直气和”与“关系就医”的调适策略,但医患关系的改善以及认知不公正的消除不仅是医疗领域内医患双方的合作问题,还需要从更广泛的社会维度出发,迈向扩大的医患共同体。

     

Epistemic Injustice and Open‐Mindedness

In this paper, I argue that recent discussions of culprit‐based epistemic injustices can be framed around the intellectual character virtue of open‐mindedness. In particular, these injustices occur because the people who commit them are closed‐minded in some respect; the injustices can therefore be remedied through the cultivation of the virtue of open‐mindedness. Describing epistemic injustices this way has two explanatory benefits: it yields a more parsimonious account of the phenomenon of epistemic injustice and it provides the underpinning of a virtue‐theoretical structure by which to explain what it is that perpetrators are culpable for and how virtues can have normative explanatory power.     

The Beneficent Nudge Program and Epistemic Injustice

Is implementing the beneficent nudge program morally permissible in worlds like ours? I argue that there is reason for serious doubt. I acknowledge that beneficent nudging is highly various, that nudges are in some circumstances morally permissible and even called for, and that nudges may exhibit respect for genuine autonomy. Nonetheless, given the risk of epistemic injustice that nudges typically pose, neither the moral permissibility of beneficent nudging in the abstract, nor its case-by-case vindication, appears sufficient to justify implementing a nudge program in worlds like ours. Drawing on Miranda Fricker’s account of epistemic injustice, I argue that the cogent defense of any nudge program, relative to worlds like ours, stands in need of serious attention to its potential for fostering or sustaining epistemic injustice. A more specific point hinges on recognizing a form of epistemic injustice not enough attended to in the literature to date, which I call reflective incapacitational injustice. This includes relative disadvantages in the attaining of (or opportunity to exercise) the capacity to engage in critical reason, such as the capacity to go in for potentially critical reasoned deliberation and discursive exchange concerning ends. Since Cass Sunstein’s First Law of behaviorally informed regulation would be taken, in worlds like ours, to justify indeterminately many nudges leading to such epistemic injustice we have general grounds for doubting the moral permissibility of this nudge program. We should hence oppose the implementation of any such program until it is shown not to violate the demands of epistemic justice.     

Mary Astell on Bad Custom and Epistemic Injustice

Mary Astell is a fascinating seventeenth‐century figure whose work admits of many interpretations. One feature of her work that has received little attention is her focus on bad custom. This is surprising; Astell clearly regards bad custom as exerting a kind of epistemic power over agents, particularly women, in a way that limits their intellectual capacities. This article aims to link two contemporary sociopolitical/social‐epistemological projects by showing how a seventeenth‐century thinker anticipated these projects. Astell's account of bad custom shows that she was attuned to the kinds of institutional or structural explanations theorized by Sally Haslanger, and that she acknowledges that bad custom—as an institutional or structural explanation—is intimately linked with epistemic injustice, albeit a kind not yet captured by contemporary social epistemologists. I call this form of epistemic injustice found in Astell epistemic internalization injustice. I argue that the epistemic significance of Astell's notion of bad custom is that it enables us to understand how bad custom conditions human relations in such a way as to result in epistemic injustice. Through coming to understand her notion of bad custom, we can expand our understanding of social epistemic phenomena like epistemic injustice.     

Ignorance,Knowledge, and Two Epistemic Intuitions

Philosophia - One of the most venerable and enduring intuitions in epistemology concerns the relationship between true belief and knowledge. Famously articulated by Socrates, it holds that true...     

Fairness in Knowing: Science Communication and Epistemic Justice

Science communication, as a field and as a practice, is fundamentally about knowledge distribution; it is about the access to, and the sharing of knowledge. All distribution (science communication included) brings with it issues of ethics and justice. Indeed, whether science communicators acknowledge it or not, they get to decide both which knowledge is shared (by choosing which topic is communicated), and who gets access to this knowledge (by choosing which audience it is presented to). As a result, the decisions of science communicators have important implications for epistemic justice: how knowledge is distributed fairly and equitably. This paper presents an overview of issues related to epistemic justice for science communication, and argues that there are two quite distinct ways in which science communicators can be just (or unjust) in the way they distribute knowledge. Both of these paths will be considered before concluding that, at least on one of these accounts, science communication as a field and as a practice is fundamentally epistemically unjust. Possible ways to redress this injustice are suggested.     

Thoughts on Knowing: Epistemic Implications of Counseling Practice

There are various ways to conceptualize the process of knowing, or epistemology, as it applies to the counseling situation. However, the essential elements of the epistemic literature are often difficult to grasp. The author reviews various epistemic systems, clarifies the ways they enrich the understanding of counseling processes, and proposes a meta‐epistemic system that integrates the elements of the competing systems. He discusses implications of this system for the practice of counseling and provides illustrative case examples.     

Knowing and Not‐Knowing For Your Own Good: The Limits of Epistemic Paternalism

Epistemic paternalism is the thesis that a paternalistic interference with an individual's inquiry is justified when it is likely to bring about an epistemic improvement in her. In this article I claim that in order to motivate epistemic paternalism we must first account for the value of epistemic improvements. I propose that the epistemic paternalist has two options: either epistemic improvements are valuable because they contribute to wellbeing, or they are epistemically valuable. I will argue that these options constitute the foundations of a dilemma: either epistemic paternalism collapses into general paternalism, or a distinctive project of justified epistemic paternalism is implausible.