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A review by jonathonjones
Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing by Miranda Fricker
4.0
Epistemic Injustice can be divided into two parts: Testimonial, and Hermeneutical. The first has to do with a listener giving a speaker less credibility than she deserves, especially when the reduced credibility has to do with a prejudice about the speaker (for example, that women are merely intuitive rather than rational and therefore less likely to know what they're talking about). The second has to do with the kinds of experience that can be understood in a culture - a person is at a disadvantage when the kinds of experience they are having are not easily categorized or understood by themselves and others. For example, without the concepts of sexual harassment, or postpartum depression, these things are harder to deal with, to explain, and to get help with. When the missing concepts are those that would be useful for an already disadvantaged group, that's where the injustice comes in.
The author spends the vast majority of time on the first of these, exploring in detail how testimony in general is supposed to work and how it features in the epistemic life of listeners and speakers. Hermeneutical Injustice has only a single chapter at the end, and feels much less well developed. Which is unfortunate, because to me it is the more difficult to understand and also more interesting of the two. I wonder whether the book would have been better if it had stuck strictly to testimonial injustice, or instead split the book more evenly between the two concepts - as it was, I was disappointed in the short-shrift given to the latter.
Still, I couldn't ask for anything more regarding testimonial injustice - it's really very carefully thought-through here. And each of these concepts has given me better language to understand some of the political dynamics happening in the world currently, so I am very appreciative of that!
The author spends the vast majority of time on the first of these, exploring in detail how testimony in general is supposed to work and how it features in the epistemic life of listeners and speakers. Hermeneutical Injustice has only a single chapter at the end, and feels much less well developed. Which is unfortunate, because to me it is the more difficult to understand and also more interesting of the two. I wonder whether the book would have been better if it had stuck strictly to testimonial injustice, or instead split the book more evenly between the two concepts - as it was, I was disappointed in the short-shrift given to the latter.
Still, I couldn't ask for anything more regarding testimonial injustice - it's really very carefully thought-through here. And each of these concepts has given me better language to understand some of the political dynamics happening in the world currently, so I am very appreciative of that!