Manuel Almagro and Carmela Vieites
Affiliation: University of Valencia
Epistemic injustice is the well-known label coined by Miranda Fricker (2007) to refer to situations that harm the disenfranchised in their capacity as knowers. The literature on epistemic injustice has grown enormously, and analyses of the phenomena discussed by Fricker have expanded. Disenfranchised people’s testimony, for instance, can be impaired not only as a result of a credibility deficit, but also because of the audience’s testimonial epistemic incompetence, leading victims to truncate their own testimony (Dotson 2011). Hermeneutical injustice, on the other hand, may arise not only from a conceptual gap, but also from the presence of alternative concepts that distort the understanding of the experience at hand (Falbo 2022; Mason 2021). Moreover, new forms of epistemic injustice have been introduced. For instance, disenfranchised groups can suffer epistemic appropriation (Davis 2018), which involves stripping them of the epistemic resources they produce in a way that benefits the privileged.
Epistemic injustice, under its various forms, calls for epistemic resistance. We are in need of strategies and actions aimed at alleviating the incidence of epistemic injustice in the world. Proposals for epistemic intervention have been varied (see Berenstain et al. 2022). Fricker’s own suggestion is that combating epistemic injustice requires cultivating individual epistemic virtues (Fricker 2007, ch. 4). According to this proposal, we all, as potential hearers of testimonies, and therefore as potential perpetrators of epistemic injustice, must develop a testimonial sensibility (see Joshi & McKenna 2024) to achieve the virtue of testimonial justice, i.e., a situation where we are able to detect and correct the influence of identity prejudice, as well as recognize relevant concepts so that oppressed people can understand and share their own experiences of the world properly.
However, other authors have emphasized that strategies of epistemic resistance cannot rely solely on epistemic interventions such as efforts by individuals to self-correct the influence of their prejudices in credibility judgments. Instead, they emphasize the need to modify certain aspects of our linguistic practices. José Medina (2013) has suggested that assigning appropriate credibility to someone’s testimony requires certain communicative dynamics allowing hearers to recognize the speech acts that the oppressed are attempting to perform through their testimonies (2013, 91-96). Building on Medina’s remark, Saray Ayala (2022) has recently highlighted the relevance of discursive practices for intervention. Ayala argues that epistemic resistance requires discursive resistance, and has coined the slogan “Epistemic resistance will be discursive, or it won’t be”. In particular, Ayala’s idea is that epistemic resistance must be complemented by discursive resistance. We need to improve not only as knowers but also as interlocutors.
Thus, epistemic resistance can be approached from two frameworks. The first focuses exclusively on epistemic interventions. Fricker and others think that epistemic resistance amounts to correcting certain epistemic (psychological) vices: we need to be attentive to whether stereotypes are influencing how much credibility we attribute to certain testimonies. The second framework maintains that epistemic resistance must be complemented by discursive interventions. Ayala and others emphasize that epistemic resistance requires first addressing the unequal distribution of discursive affordances (Ayala 2016). Before we can critically assess the impact of our prejudices on credibility judgments, the speaker must first be able to perform the act of testifying. However, this is not always guaranteed, as unjust discursive norms can systematically distort some individuals’ speech acts (see Ayala 2018 and Ayala & Vasilyeva 2015). Performing the very speech act of asserting that something is the case is not equally easy for everyone. Ayala states that only if this is guaranteed we can put the specifically epistemic strategies to work.
In this paper, we take issue with a shared assumption in both frameworks. Despite their important differences, both frameworks assume what David Beaver and Jason Stanley call “neutrality of integration”: the assumption that processes of comprehension of meaning and integration of beliefs are independent (Beaver & Stanley 2023, p. 122). That is, these frameworks assume that epistemic practices –such as assigning credibility to someone’s speech and attributing knowledge to them, as well as updating our belief systems after hearing a testimony– are independent from discursive practices –such as determining the meaning conveyed by a certain testimony and the capacity that different groups of people have to perform speech acts. However, a key aspect of epistemic resistance is missed if we assume a sharp division between them.
We endorse Ayala’s claim that epistemic resistance will be discursive, or it won’t be at all. But we interpret it not as stating that epistemic resistance needs to be complemented with discursive resistance. In our view, resisting discursively is resisting epistemically, because epistemic and discursive practices are not independent. To show this, we present several cases in which the language used to describe them –i.e., the words chosen, what it is omitted, where attention is drawn, etc., i.e., the narratives involved, are incompatible with certain people being perceived as subjects of knowledge, and therefore it already includes and promotes a certain pernicious epistemic perspective. We also draw on empirical studies showing how language inadvertently affects our beliefs (Loftus & Palmer 1974).
This more radical interpretation of Ayala’s slogan allows us to introduce a third framework. According to it, the processes of assigning credibility to testimony, attributing knowledge to others, and updating our belief system after hearing testimony are essentially linked to discourse construction and meaning determination beyond the specific speech act performed. That is, the way in which certain discourses are constructed, together with the discursive dynamics of our linguistic interactions, automatically affect our epistemic processes of assigning credibility and updating our belief system. So in order to resist epistemic injustice, we need to resist certain discursive practices that not only prevent oppressed people from performing certain speech acts, but also present them under a certain normative light. This requires a broader theory of meaning.
References (in the document)