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EPISTEMIC JUSTICE
AND INJUSTICE
Nancy Daukas

Analytic philosophy conventionally represents epistemological concerns as distinct from ethical

and political concerns. Since the 1980s, a critical movement in epistemology (which I will call
liberatory social epistemology) has challenged that convention by showing that social power affects
practices through which communities produce, share, acknowledge, understand, and reward
knowledge and knowledge claims, in ways that benefit the more powerful and harm the less
powerful (Code 1991, 1995, Collins 1990, Fricker 1998, 1999, Mills 1997, Alcoff 1999).
Miranda Fricker identifies the distinctively epistemic harms inflicted by the politics of knowing as
epistemic injustices, and defines an epistemic injustice as “a wrong done to someone specifically in
their capacity as a knower” (2007: 2). With the publication of Fricker’s influential book, Epistemic
Injustice: Power & the Ethics of Knowing (2007), the political character of epistemic concepts and
practices is becoming more broadly recognized in social epistemology.
In that book, Fricker distinguishes two types of epistemic injustice: testimonial and hermeneut-
ical. David Coady proposes that there are also distributive epistemic injustices: members of
socio-economically disadvantaged groups are harmed as knowers when they are denied full
access to epistemic goods such as educational opportunities, information and communication
technologies, libraries, and so on (Coady 2010). The work in liberatory social epistemology
discussed below focuses primarily on the ideas of testimonial and hermeneutical injustices. This
chapter explains those ideas and their connections to related work in liberatory social epistem-
ology (although space limitations make it impossible to provide a comprehensive review), and
briefly discusses several proposals for how to change epistemic practices to avoid or counteract
epistemic injustices.

Testimonial Injustice and the Epistemology of Testimony

In epistemology, “testimony” refers to communicative acts, such as spoken, signed, and written
utterances, through which a speaker asserts something to an audience with the intention of
encouraging the audience to believe that what they1 say is true. Whenever a speaker tells some-
one something, they are giving testimony. Conventionally, the epistemology of testimony repre-
sents testimony as involving a generic speaker, S, who utters a generic proposition, P, to
a generic audience or hearer, H, in circumstance C. The standard questions are: Is testimony
a reliable source of beliefs, on a par epistemologically with an individual’s own perceptual experi-
ences and reasoning? Or does the justification of the belief that P that H acquires when S asserts
that P depend on H’s independent evidence that S is a reliable informant?

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From the perspective of liberatory social epistemology, the abstract generality of this picture
conceals the fact that audiences often respond differently to speakers who occupy different social
positions, and that such responsive differences can profoundly affect a speaker’s ability to partici-
pate fully in public epistemic life. When an audience respectfully attends and appropriately
responds to a speaker’s utterance, the audience acknowledges the speaker as a knower, provides
the social recognition necessary for their attempt at communication to succeed (Hornsby and
Langton 1998), and enables them (and what they say) to participate in the conversations and
inquiries through which the community’s public knowledge is produced and disseminated. When
an audience withholds that recognition, they undermine the speaker as a knower. On Fricker’s
view, when an audience’s prejudice concerning the speaker’s social identity causes that withhold-
ing of recognition, the audience inflicts a testimonial injustice upon the speaker. Testimonial injust-
ices often fuel other sorts of injustices: they may affect legal proceedings; the distribution and
quality of health care; how educators respond to particular students; how employers evaluate
resumes or job performance; how voters view political candidates; who is and is not granted
institutionalized social power; and so on.
Feminist epistemologist Lorraine Code argues that a realistic framework for understanding testi-
mony would acknowledge that testimonial exchanges occur in “rhetorical spaces” shaped by “hier-
archies of power and privilege,” so that whether or not a given knowledge claim “goes through”
depends on “who is speaking where and why” (1995: ix–x). Fricker provides precisely such
a framework for her epistemology of testimony. She argues that audiences spontaneously use stereo-
types (or assumed empirical generalizations) “about the trustworthiness of different social types in dif-
ferent social contexts” to form “credibility judgments” that attribute a higher or lower degree of
credibility to particular speakers regarding a given topic under the given circumstances. (2007: 72).
Often, stereotypes steer an audience in the right direction. For example, it makes good sense
to assume that a physician employed by a reputable medical practice is a credible authority
regarding issues of routine health care. However, it is wrong, epistemically and ethically, to
doubt a physician’s diagnosis because she is a black woman, for example. When an audience’s
credibility judgment relies on a prejudicial stereotype (or a stereotype that misaligns with and
resists correction by evidence) that attributes a “credibility deficit” to the speaker, the audience
inflicts a testimonial injustice on that speaker. For Fricker, then, the “central case” of testimonial
injustice occurs when a speaker receives a credibility deficit due to “identity prejudice in the
hearer” (2007:28). Where social conditions are shaped by a history of unjust power relations
among social groups, individuals routinely form credibility judgments on the basis of culturally
inherited prejudicial stereotypes that distort the ways that they perceive one another as knowers
and speakers. They are likely to perceive speakers who belong to socially privileged groups as
more credible than the available evidence suggests, and speakers who belong to socially marginal-
ized groups as less credible than the evidence suggests.

Toward a Broader Understanding of Testimonial Injustice

Elizabeth Anderson argues that individuals’ prejudices are not the only causes of credibility deficits—
structural forces cause credibility deficits regardless of whether or not individual participants are preju-
diced. For example, socio-economic segregation may deny members of disadvantaged groups access
to the educational resources through which to develop the styles and patterns of communicative
behavior that members of privileged groups recognize as “markers of credibility”. The absence of
those markers confers a credibility deficit on the speaker. And ethnocentrism (or “bias in favor of
groups to which one belongs”) may cause members of privileged groups to see one another as more
credible than members of other groups, again resulting in a credibility deficit being attributed to
a given member of a less privileged group, and inflicting a testimonial injustice (2012: 169).

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Along with the “standard case” of testimonial injustice that Fricker delineates, there are other
patterns that we might also identify as testimonial injustices. These include patterns in whose tes-
timony is (and is not) solicited, who tends to be interrupted, whose claims are remembered, who
takes or receives credit for whose ideas, whose intellectual labor is acknowledged, whose ques-
tions and comments receive engaged follow-up, who is permitted to steer a conversation, and so
on. Further, when the powerful speak for the oppressed (even with good intentions), they may
create the appearance that the oppressed are not adequately articulate or informed to speak for
themselves, or that the more powerful understand the lives, needs, and experiences of the mar-
ginalized better than the marginalized understand themselves (Alcoff 1991, Okin 2003).
When audiences inflict testimonial injustices, they inflict harm by denying speakers acknow-
ledgment as knowers. Being, and being seen as, a knower is a core aspect of personhood. There-
fore Fricker considers testimonial injustice to provide “a direct route to undermining [speakers]
in their very humanity” (44). Further, when audiences systematically deny speakers acknowledg-
ment as knowers due to social group membership, they reinforce the grip of prejudicial stereo-
types over social perceptions and so contribute to reinforcing existing power relations that
disadvantage some groups while benefiting others. All of this ultimately impoverishes the broader
community’s shared knowledge by blocking the (potentially transformative) benefits that diversity
in beliefs, understandings, and interpretive resources generally offers. This brings us to
Fricker’s second category of epistemic injustice.

Hermeneutical Injustice
Fricker defines hermeneutical injustice as

the injustice of having some significant area of one’s social experience obscured from
collective understanding owing to a structural identity prejudice in the collective her-
meneutical resource.
(2007: 155, italics in original)

By “the collective hermeneutical resource,” Fricker refers to the stock of meanings, concepts,
and understandings broadly available to all for making one’s experiences intelligible to oneself
and/or to others in a given community. Where there is social inequality, the more powerful will
tend to enjoy disproportionate control over those resources and the less powerful are likely to be
“hermeneutically marginalized” vis-a-vis some area(s) of their social experience (153). The resources
that are publically validated and widely disseminated therefore serve the communicative needs
and interests of the powerful more effectively than they serve the communicative needs and
interests of the marginalized. As a result, according to Fricker, the community’s collective her-
meneutical resources may “have a lacuna where the name of a distinctive social experience
should be,” causing “an acute cognitive disadvantage” for members of marginalized groups
(2007: 150–151). That disadvantage is a hermeneutical injustice, a kind of epistemic injustice that
may cut so deeply as to “cramp the very development of the self”:

When you find yourself in a situation in which you seem to be the only one to feel the
dissonance between received understanding and your own intimated sense of a given
experience, it tends to knock your faith in your own ability to make sense of the world.
(Fricker 2007: 163)

It is easiest to recognize hermeneutical injustices retrospectively, after the responsible hermeneut-

ical gaps have been filled. For example, what we now recognize as sexual harassment was long

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represented as harmless flirting—an understanding that expresses the experience of the harasser
and conceals or invalidates the experiences of the harassed. The introduction and dissemination
of the expression “sexual harassment” enhanced the ability of the harassed to understand their
experiences, and shifted public understandings in ways that helped to promote gender justice
(2007: 149–151). Other concepts that, once validated, have enhanced shared interpretive
resources and supported social activism include ableism, homophobia, transphobia, and white privilege,
to name only a few. Fricker’s epistemic injustice belongs on this list as well.
Perhaps the most powerful reverberations of hermeneutical injustice emerge from their role in
the social construction of social identity categories, such as gender, race, class, and so on. Control
over hermeneutical resources allows meanings that express the perspective of the powerful to be
normatively enforced, so that the social world becomes as those meanings represent it to be.
That is, hermeneutical power exerts control over how things are, including how people are
socialized to be. Therefore, continues Fricker,

hermeneutical injustice can mean that someone is socially constituted as, and perhaps
even caused to be something they are not, and which it is against their interests to be
seen to be.
(168)

Toward a Broader Understanding of Hermeneutical Injustice

We might consider Fricker’s definition of hermeneutical injustice to have a broader scope than her
account of it suggests. Fricker clarifies her view of hermeneutical injustice by explaining that, in
contrast to testimonial injustice, “no agent perpetrates hermeneutical injustice—it is a purely struc-
tural notion” (2007: 159). In response, Jose Medina argues that hermeneutical injustices can be
both agential and structural: “hermeneutical gaps are performatively invoked and recirculated—
reenacted, we could say—in the speech acts of daily life” (2013: 110). An example might be when
a co-worker responds to the complaints of a victim of sexual harassment by advising them to
lighten up and enjoy the compliment. In that sort of case, background conditions “erupt into [her-
meneutical] injustice” through the agency of an individual to undermine an “actual attempt at
intelligibility” (Fricker 2007: 159).
Fricker characterizes both hermeneutical and testimonial injustices as episodic, that is, as occur-
ring in particular times and places, during particular communicative exchanges (or attempted
communicative exchanges). But although it seems clear that testimonial injustices and some her-
meneutical injustices are episodic (such as the co-worker’s failure to comprehend the speaker in
the above example), other hermeneutical injustices do not seem episodic. One of Fricker’s central
cases is an example: consider a woman suffering from post-partum depression before the expres-
sion was widely available (2007: 149). If she keeps her suffering to herself, she may never endure
a localized episode of agent-enacted hermeneutical injustice. Yet there is a hermeneutical gap in
shared resources (due to the traditional hermeneutical marginalization of women) that denies the
subject self-understanding and prevents her experiences from being understood in public space,
thus harming her as a knower. Here, a gap in shared resources creates sustained, persistent
epistemic harm to members of a subordinated social group.
On Fricker’s account of hermeneutical injustice, gaps in available resources leave both the
marginalized and the powerful without resources for adequately understanding the experiences of
the marginalized. But hermeneutical gaps in the resources preferred by the powerful often pre-
vent only the powerful from understanding the experiences of the marginalized. The marginal-
ized use resources of their own to understand and successfully communicate with one another

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about their experiences, but the powerful are either oblivious to, or illiterate in, those alternative
resources. Gaile Pohlhaus identifies the refusal “to acknowledge already developed epistemic
resources for knowing the world from situations other than their own” as a form of willful her-
meneutical ignorance (Pohlhaus 2011:19). Kristie Dotson links such ignorance to a further kind tes-
timonial injustice: it creates an environment in which the oppressed are likely to censor or
withhold their own testimony to avoid the predictable and potentially harmful misinterpretations
of the privileged. Dotson calls such self-censoring testimonial smothering (2011).
Dotson identifies the root source of hermeneutical injustices as contributory epistemic injustice,
which occurs when the hermeneutical ignorance of the powerful “thwarts a knower’s ability to
contribute to shared epistemic resources within a given epistemic community” (2012: 32). We
might extend the category of contributory epistemic injustice to include cases in which the
powerful knowingly exclude the epistemic resources of the marginalized from the stock of favored
or preferred resources, as when a colonial power deliberately suppresses the traditional resources
of the colonized. Even more broadly, we can think of systemic contributory epistemic injustice,
together with the resulting problems of systematic hermeneutical and testimonial injustice, as
forms of participatory epistemic injustices, where participatory epistemic injustice is understood to
include injustices of recognition (Cf McConkey 2004).

Epistemic Injustices and Social Epistemic Harm

We have seen that epistemic injustices harm individuals and entire social groups. Over time, systemic
patterns of epistemic injustice also harm a community’s knowledge system itself. Most obviously,
they prevent it from being as extensive as it could be, by excluding contributions and withholding
opportunities for epistemic development. This sort of harm may seem to be straightforwardly quanti-
tative: because of epistemic injustice, the stock of broadly shared public beliefs is smaller than it could
be. But epistemic injustices impoverish a community’s belief system in a further way: they sustain
cultural biases and perspectival narrowness, and so make the belief system less objective than it could
and should be. This sort of harm is particularly evident in the sciences.
When we identify objectivity as an epistemic standard, we (minimally) express the conviction
that what a community accepts as knowledge ought not to be biased by prejudice or parochial
narrowness. The practices through which the sciences produce knowledge are conventionally
understood to promote objectivity by rooting out biases. But historically, the sciences (and phil-
osophy) have been dominated by members of powerful groups. Members of powerful groups are
likely to share sorts of background experiences and culturally inherited presuppositions, and
unlikely to notice how those shared presuppositions bias their epistemic practices and products.
A large body of work in feminist science studies argues that social diversity, together with an
equitable distribution of epistemic authority amongst diverse participants, promotes objectivity,
because participants with diverse backgrounds are able to notice how one another’s presupposi-
tions bias their inquiry (Longino 1990). In a field with a history of social exclusion, centering
inquiry on experiences and understandings of members of excluded or underrepresented groups
therefore is likely to enhance objectivity (Harding 1993). Since epistemic injustices sustain such
exclusions and authorial inequities, they obstruct objectivity in the sciences, and undermine the
epistemic integrity and potential of the epistemic community.

Overcoming Epistemic Injustices: Virtue-Theoretical Responses

Fricker and others propose virtue-theoretical responses to problems of epistemic injustices. Virtue
epistemology analyzes epistemic practices and concepts by reference to the enduring character states
of epistemic agents and the sorts of dispositions and habits those character states support. Virtue-

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theoretical responses to problems of epistemic injustice offer normative guidance for cultivating
character states and sensitivities that would dispose us to avoid inflicting, disrupt, or rectify epi-
stemic injustices. My own work is an example: it emphasizes the importance of cultivating
a critical self-awareness through which to recognize and alter the ways that epistemic politics
affect our assumptions regarding our own, and others’, epistemic trustworthiness. (Daukas 2006,
2011).
Fricker’s virtue theoretical response to testimonial injustice urges individuals to specifically cul-
tivate the virtue of testimonial justice, that is, a sensitivity to “the impact of prejudice in [their] credibil-
ity judgments”, to develop strategies for neutralizing that impact (2007: 92, italics in original).2 To
overcome tendencies to contribute to hermeneutical injustice, Fricker urges agents to cultivate
the virtue of hermeneutical justice, that is,

an alertness or sensitivity to the possibility that the difficulty one’s interlocutor is having
as she tries to render something communicatively intelligible is due not to its being
nonsense or her being a fool, but rather to some sort of gap in collective hermeneutical
resources.
(169)

Medina’s virtue-theoretical proposal engages with the willful ignorance that often fuels epistemic
injustice. Medina diagnoses willful hermeneutical ignorance as a symptom of the epistemic short-
coming (or vice) of “meta-insensitivity”, that is, insensitivity to one’s insensitivity toward others.
As a remedy, he urges epistemic agents to cultivate “meta-lucidity”, or awareness of their cognitive
“blind spots,” and a “communicative openness and responsiveness to indefinitely plural interpret-
ive perspectives” (2013: 112–113).
In response to Fricker and Medina, Jack Kwong argues that there is no need to multiply our
stock of recognized epistemic virtues to respond to problems of epistemic injustice, since already
recognized virtues such as open-mindedness and humility provide the needed resources (2015).
Kwong is right to point out that tendencies to inflict epistemic injustices reveal failures of open-
mindedness and epistemic humility. But in the past, virtue epistemologists have attended to and
promoted those virtues, while remaining oblivious to the routine patterns of epistemic injustice
that widespread failings of those very virtues express. Introducing new resources into virtue epis-
temology (such as the idea of the virtue of testimonial justice) stimulates new patterns of attention
and facilitates productive change (Cf Daukas 2018).
However, as Linda Alcoff argues, virtue-theoretical responses to problems of epistemic injust-
ice may be too demanding: we may not be able to achieve the degree of critical self-awareness
necessary to discern our prejudices and patterns of ignorance (2010) Further, it is not clear how
engaging in projects of self-transformation can enable scattered individuals to effectively transform
the deeply entrenched social structures responsible for long-standing, systematic participatory and
distributive epistemic injustices. For this, we need to consider other possibilities.

Institutional Reform and Structural Change

Karen Jones recounts a case in which a US judge denied a Ghanaian woman’s legitimate petition
for political asylum as a result of inflicting a testimonial (and perhaps also a hermeneutical) injust-
ice. The judge saw her as confused and irrational, and for that reason, disbelieved her testimony.
Jones proposes a methodological principle or heuristic for avoiding such epistemic injustices: an
audience ought to assess the plausibility of what is said separately from, and prior to, forming
credibility judgments about the speaker (2002). Introducing such a methodological reforms in
high-stakes institutionalized settings would clearly provide an effective means by which to avoid

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many testimonial injustices in those particular settings. However, it would not effectively disrupt
the web of meanings, assumptions, and ignorance that sustain patterns responsible for much dis-
tributive and participatory epistemic injustices.
Code argues that to rid our epistemic practices of harmful power inequities, we must institute
a “new social imaginary” or set of meanings, expectations, and imagined possibilities through
which to understand ourselves as mutually independent, socially positioned knowers. She seeks to
institute such a change in epistemology (2006). How might we bring about such a change in the
broadly prevailing social consciousness? Medina looks to successful activist movements of the past
for an answer to that question. He recommends creating “communities of resistance” coordinat-
ing multiple consciousness-raising efforts into highly visible “chained actions” (2013). But given
the extent of the willful ignorance that needs to be overcome, it is not clear how broadly
effective even organized consciousness-raising activism can be. Anderson argues that structural
problems call for structurally instituted change, and surely she is right. Since she sees ongoing
socio-economic segregation as the root cause of epistemic (and other) injustices, she urges
reforms that would effectively end segregation. (2012)
Clearly multiple avenues of structural and individual response are needed. I think that effective
structural changes must include educational reform, including reforms that counteract the long his-
tory of socioeconomic segregation at all levels of education. But genuinely successful integration
must effect equitable redistributions of epistemic authority. That sort of change calls for educational
reform specifically aimed at cultivating epistemic virtues and reversing a widespread public ignor-
ance regarding the character of knowledge itself. That is, we need to habituate young minds to
skills and attitudes that promote critical epistemic self-awareness and open-mindedness. And we
need to teach basic principles of liberatory social epistemology at all levels, to inform that critical
awareness and inspire that open-mindedness. That is, we need to teach that knowing subjects are
always socially positioned; that epistemic communities and their beliefs are shaped by their cultural
histories (including histories of conquest and prejudice); that the practices and products of western
science bear the marks of their cultural histories; that scientific knowledge continually evolves
through critique and social change; and that diversity is epistemically valuable.

Conclusion
Recent decades have carved out a rich and evolving area of work in social epistemology that
bridges the conventional divide separating epistemology and justice theory. Work on epistemic
injustice lies at its center. Epistemic injustices permeate epistemic practices in communities
shaped by unjust power relations. They inflict harm on individuals and on historically oppressed
social groups by sustaining unjust institutional practices and social structures, they undermine
objectivity in the sciences, and avoidably impoverish public knowledge. Analyses of epistemic
injustices clearly demonstrate the need for significant reform in accepted epistemic practices. Such
reform requires continued theoretical work on multiple fronts, paired with sustained, coordin-
ated, focused activism. Such reform promises to make us better knowers, better community
members, and better epistemologists.

Notes
1 Throughout, I use conventionally plural pronouns (they, them, their) as gender-neutral singular (and
plural) pronouns.
2 This virtue informs the normative component of Fricker’s epistemology of testimony: when an audience
comes to believe testimony through exercising the virtue of testimonial justice, they are justified in their
testimonial beliefs (2007:77).

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Alcoff, L. (2010). Epistemic Identities, Episteme 7(2), pp. 128–137.
Anderson, E. (2012). Epistemic Justice as a Virtue of Social Institutions, Social Epistemology 26(2), pp. 163–173.
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Harding, S. (1993). Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology: What is Strong Objectivity? In: L. Alcoff and
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Further Reading
Code, L. (2006). Ecological Thinking: The Politics of Epistemic Location, New York: Oxford University Press.
(Presents a model of knowing called “ecological thinking” to counteract the harmful affects of social power
on epistemic practices and epistemological understandings, and reshape practices and understandings to
promote social and environmental well-being.)
Fricker, M. (2013). Epistemic Justice as a Condition of Political Freedom? Synthese 190, pp. 1317–1332.
(Argues that epistemic justice is a necessary condition for political freedom).

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