Miranda Fricker and Catharine Jenkins
Miranda Fricker and Catharine Jenkins Lecture notes:
“injustice in relation to the intelligibility of those areas of experience. We would like to explore and illustrate these phenomena of epistemic injustice and their relation to ignorance by reference to the current and fast-changing issue of trans experience and identity. By "trans" we mean to refer, without distinction, to all people who identify as transgender, as transsexual, as trans*, or as trans (simpliciter). The movement for trans rights is not only a particularly pressing strand of social and legislative change, it is also one with special relevance to questions of ignorance, for there has long been (and continues to be—ourselves being no exception) widespread ignorance of trans perspectives, experiences, and the shared social meanings they call for. We believe the overcoming of ignorances that attend epistemic injustice in the manner set out above is an important part of the wider social project of overcoming ignorance in relation to trans experiences and identities. For our conception of trans experiences we shall rely almost entirely on the written testimony of people who are trans. It goes without saying that our bringing these experiences under this or that category of epistemic injustice is done tentatively, and in an exploratory spirit that welcomes multiple corrective responses on these complex and fast-evolving issues.”
What is Epistemic Injustice?: Failure of epistemic virtue, epistemic error.
Core concepts of epistemic injustice: “testimonial injustice,” “hermeneutical injustice,” and its precondition “hermeneutical marginalization”
1. Testimonial Injustice
“Is the injustice of receiving a degree of credibility that has been reduced by some kind of prejudice”
Unjust deficit of credibility
If a female politician’s policy proposal receives a reduced level of credibility from the electorate owing to gender prejudice, for instance, then she has been subject to a testimonial injustice. (Testimonial injustices need not strictly be in respect of testimonial speech acts, but rather any speech act whose acceptance depends on its receiving sufficient credibility; see Fricker 2007: 60.
Implicates a perpetrator, transgressor
When one’s/groups’ self-affirmations, self-judgements do not count as credible/accountable and negatively affected by prejudice or bias
2. Hermeneutical Injustice
is the injustice of being frustrated in an attempt to render a significant social experience intelligible (to oneself and/or to others) where hermeneutical marginalization is a significant causal factor in that failure.
“Its precondition is hermeneutical marginalization, someone counts as hermeneutically marginalized insofar as they belong to a social group that under contributes to the common pool of concepts and social meanings (unjust deficit of intelligibility)”
Structural Identity- related harm
“Hermeneutical injustice therefore consists in an unjust deficit of intelligibility. Imagine, for example, someone with a disability the experience of which is well understood by him, by his family and friends, and also by some other social groups to which he belongs (perhaps, for instance, those who have themselves had relevantly similar life experiences) but not by members of other groups to whom he may on occasion need to communicate his distinctive experience, such as his employer or his neighbor. Such a person is frustrated in his attempts to render his experiences intelligible to those significant others owing to the requisite concepts not being sufficiently widely shared, and where a significant part of the explanation why they are not sufficiently widely shared is his hermeneutical marginalization. When this happens, his communicative frustration exemplifies hermeneutical injustice.”
Epistemic Injustice as a form of ignorance:
Epistemic error and distorted social perception
Testimonial injustices cause blockage in the flow of interpersonal knowledge and preserves ignorance
Missed epistemic opportunity to inferentially enrich one’s belief system
“Not only immediate ignorant but also inferentially ramified”
If a social group is hermeneutically marginalized in this way, they will remain private
That lacks them from being able to participate in the collective content creation and hermeneutical collective resource
Epistemic injustice and trans identities
A. Testimonial injustices and Trans experience
Prejudices around Trans Identity cause “unjustified credibility” for their demands in institutional frameworks
B. Hermeneutical injustice and Trans experiences
The medicalized/or else discourses are not produced by Trans people cause identity related harms as their explorations of self-meanings are not included in institutional rhetoric/principles/conducts E.g. misgendering
Lecture summary:
Gender Identity and Self-Concept
Definition of Gender:
Gender is both an identity and a sense of self.
Involves understanding 'who' you are and what defines 'you'.
Social Practices:
Gender influences societal norms and practices, which are often value-laden and guide individual actions.
Philosophy of Gender
Critical Examination of Gender:
Philosophical inquiry seeks to question and understand the meanings of ‘manhood’ and ‘womanhood’.
Reflects on identity-forming beliefs that correspond with societal norms influencing behaviors, actions, and choices.
Questioning Norms:
Investigates common-sense understandings of gender categorizations.
Contemporary Trans Philosophy
Political Dimension:
Trans studies are politically charged, with a focus on the validity and legitimacy of trans lives.
Critique of Dominant Models:
Emerged from queer politics in the early 1990s, opposing gender and sex binarities and claiming that all aspects of gender/sex are socially constructed.
Importance of Trans Philosophy
Personal Connection:
Trans philosophy relates directly to the lived experiences of trans individuals, emphasizing their subjectivity within theoretical frameworks.
Political Relevance:
Does not treat trans identity as an abstract concept but acknowledges the legal and political implications affecting trans lives.
Lived Experience and Its Representation
Theory in Practice:
Contemporary trans studies focus on the lived experiences of trans individuals rather than abstract theories.
Trans individuals must be the primary creators and narrators of their identities within trans theory.
Intersectional Approach:
Acknowledges the complexities of identity, emphasizing that identities exist in a multifaceted social realm—beyond normative narratives.
World-Traveling Subjectivity
Concept of World-Traveling:
Individuals should be able to view themselves and others from different perspectives to foster understanding.
Oppressive Rhetoric:
Traditional categorizations can lead to a restrictive worldview, necessitating a 'world-traveling' perspective for comprehensive understanding.
Epistemic Injustice and Trans Experiences
Understanding Epistemic Injustice:
Definition: Fails to uphold epistemic virtue; it includes concepts like testimonial and hermeneutical injustice, with underlying issues of hermeneutical marginalization.
Types of Epistemic Injustice
Testimonial Injustice:
Defined as receiving diminished credibility due to prejudice. Example: A female politician facing bias that reduces her proposal's credibility.
Implication: Affects individuals whose self-advocacy isn't recognized or valued due to social biases.
Hermeneutical Injustice:
Frustration in articulating significant experiences due to a lack of shared social meanings.
Example: A person with a disability struggling to communicate their experience where their concept isn't recognized beyond their immediate group.
Hermeneutical Marginalization:
Occurs when a social group contributes insufficiently to the common pool of concepts, causing gaps in societal understanding.
Impact of Epistemic Injustice on Trans Identities
Testimonial Injustice Within Trans Experiences:
Prejudice leads to lower credibility for trans individuals' claims, affecting access to rights and recognition.
Hermeneutical Injustice Within Trans Experiences:
Institutional discourses often ignore trans individuals’ narratives, leading to harm as their meanings and identities remain unarticulated and invalidated.
Effects of Misunderstanding:
Misgendering and exclusion from medical and social conversations finalize the cycle of epistemic injustice within trans communities.
Recent Legislative Context
Alberta’s New Bills Impacting Trans Youth:
Latest legislation potentially reflects instances of epistemic injustice by restricting healthcare options for trans youth, framing the issues in a legal context.
Potential Exam Question:
Can Alberta's Bill 26 be identified as an act of epistemic injustice? Which type?
Miranda Fricker and Catharine Jenkins reading summary:
Key Concepts of Epistemic Injustice
Testimonial Injustice:
Definition: A type of injustice where an individual or group receives reduced credibility due to prejudice.
Example: A female politician’s proposal being dismissed due to gender bias.
Characteristics: Affects any speech act reliant on credibility, not only testimonial speech.
Hermeneutical Injustice:
Definition: Occurs when someone is unable to make sense of their social experience due to a lack of available concepts, often stemming from being hermeneutically marginalized.
Example: A person with a disability struggling to communicate their experience because the necessary vocabulary is not shared by significant others like an employer.
Characteristics: Involves structural factors, lacking a specific perpetrator.
Hermeneutical Marginalization:
Definition: Occurs when a social group contributes insufficiently to the common pool of meanings and concepts, impeding their ability to articulate their experiences.
Characteristics: Leads to hermeneutical injustice, affecting understanding and communication.
Types of Epistemic Injustice
Transactional vs. Structural Testimonial Injustice:
Transactional: Involves specific prejudiced individuals or groups.
Structural: Based on broader systems where certain voices are silenced (e.g., the 2016 Oscar nominations).
Active vs. Willful Ignorance:
Active: Individuals resist engaging with unfamiliar concepts due to biases.
Willful: A refusal to acknowledge or understand the knowledge of marginalized groups.
The Intersection of Ignorance and Injustice
Prejudice leads to ignorance by blocking knowledge acquisition, leading to both propositional and practical ignorance.
Testimonial Injustice often preserves hermeneutical marginalization, limiting social understanding and reinforcing ignorance.
Example: A patient dismisses medical advice due to prejudice against the provider’s ethnicity, leading to serious health risks later on.
Trans Experiences and Testimonial Injustice
Clinical Context: Historical biases in gender clinics required trans individuals to conform to narrow definitions to gain treatment.
Example: Trans persons faced credibility deficits if they did not meet socially constructed norms of femininity or masculinity.
Preemptive Testimonial Injustice:
Definition: A situation where trans voices are disregarded before they can even provide testimony due to preconceived notions about their identity.
Example: Media focusing on sensationalized narratives of trans experiences, ignoring the diversity of those experiences.
Hermeneutical Injustice in Trans Communities
Trans people often lack the means to articulate their identities due to medical and social discourse that does not represent their realities.
Misrepresentations in clinical settings reinforce misunderstanding and ignorance in broader society.
Contributory Injustice:
Definition: When the dominant culture fails to engage meaningfully with the insights and experiences of marginalized groups, perpetuating misunderstanding.
Combatting Epistemic Injustice
Efforts to combat epistemic injustice include recognizing and addressing conceptual ignorance within social frameworks.
Manifest vs. Operative Concepts:
Manifest: Official definitions used in laws or guidelines.
Operative: Practical concepts that inform everyday understanding and communication within a community.
Overcoming epistemic injustice involves moving community-specific operative concepts into wider understanding, ensuring they influence manifest knowledge systems.
Challenges in Addressing Epistemic Injustice
Social movements progress slowly, often leading to discrepancies between manifest and operative concepts which require ongoing activism to align.
Critical interventions include teaching and sharing more inclusive terms that allow space for all experiences while gradually dismantling harmful narratives that limit intelligibility.
Core Concepts of Epistemic Injustice:
Testimonial Injustice: The injustice of receiving less credibility due to prejudice. It results in an unjust deficit of credibility.
Example: A female politician’s policy proposal is not given full credibility because of gender prejudice.
Testimonial injustices are not limited to speech acts but include any act whose acceptance depends on credibility.
Hermeneutical Injustice: The injustice of being unable to render a significant social experience intelligible due to a lack of shared understanding.
Hermeneutical Marginalization: The condition of belonging to a social group that contributes insufficiently to the common pool of concepts.
Example: A person with a disability whose experience is understood by certain groups (like family) but not by others (like employers) due to the lack of shared concepts.
Hermeneutical injustice results from an underlying poverty of intelligibility, not individual fault.
Differentiation Between the Two:
Testimonial Injustice: Always has a perpetrator—someone who makes a credibility judgment affected by prejudice.
Hermeneutical Injustice: Structural, with no individual agent to blame for the lack of understanding.
Structural Epistemic Injustice:
Elizabeth Anderson’s Distinction: Differentiates between "transactional" and "structural" testimonial injustices.
Structural Testimonial Injustice: Occurs without a specific perpetrator due to structural mechanisms (e.g., an institution's makeup).
Example: The 2016 all-white Oscar nominations as a structural testimonial injustice resulting from the Academy being overwhelmingly composed of white voters.
Augmentation of Hermeneutical Injustice:
José Medina’s Challenge: Suggests hermeneutical injustices are not always purely structural and can involve individual culpability.
Medina argues that members of the epistemic community may collude in sustaining ignorance by resisting unfamiliar concepts or ignoring challenges to their social position.
This is seen as a failure of epistemic virtue, specifically hermeneutical justice.
Conclusion:
Both testimonial and hermeneutical injustices involve a deficit (credibility or intelligibility).
Testimonial injustice can be structural, while hermeneutical injustice can involve individual culpability, especially when there’s resistance to unfamiliar concepts or social meanings.
Relation Between Epistemic Injustice and Ignorance:
Prejudice and Ignorance:
Prejudice is not the same as ignorance but contributes to it by determining what one knows and ignores.
Prejudice involves a maladjustment to evidence, often producing epistemic errors and distorted perceptions.
Example: A person who has prejudiced views of foreigners may ignore valuable knowledge they could gain from a foreigner, preserving their ignorance.
Testimonial Injustice and Ignorance:
Testimonial Injustice: Occurs when a speaker’s testimony is not given enough credibility due to prejudice (e.g., due to jingoism).
Ignorance is preserved because the listener fails to learn important knowledge from the speaker.
The blocked knowledge can lead to inferentially ramified ignorance, where other related beliefs are also impacted.
Example: A patient dismisses a doctor’s advice due to prejudice, and this blocks knowledge that could affect their future health decisions (e.g., ignoring symptoms of a heart attack).
Practical Ignorance:
Prejudice not only causes propositional ignorance but also creates practical ignorance—a lack of conceptual know-how.
Sustained testimonial injustice can lead to hermeneutical marginalization, where a group’s experiences or concepts are not recognized or understood by others.
This marginalization prevents the group from contributing to the common pool of social meanings, making their knowledge private.
Active Ignorance and Willful Ignorance:
Active Ignorance: The failure of out-groups to acquire knowledge from marginalized in-groups, often due to resistance to unfamiliar concepts.
Willful Ignorance (Gaile Pohlhaus) or Active Ignorance (José Medina): The refusal to acknowledge or engage with new social meanings or knowledge.
Example: A boss may resist understanding a worker’s PTSD triggers, which leads to both the employee’s hermeneutical injustice and the boss’s maintained ignorance.
Contributory Injustice:
Contributory Injustice (Kristie Dotson): When a listener is willfully insensitive to the speaker’s perspective, ignoring or resisting the speaker’s well-supported concepts.
Mutual Ignorance and Hermeneutical Justice:
Hermeneutical Injustice: When someone’s social experience is unintelligible to others due to a lack of shared concepts.
Testimonial and Hermeneutical Injustice both preserve ignorance, but they affect different aspects:
Testimonial injustice preserves propositional ignorance (missed facts).
Hermeneutical injustice leads to practical conceptual ignorance (lack of understanding of social concepts).
Impact of Ignorance in Epistemic Injustice:
In cases of epistemic injustice, those who are subject to prejudice or marginalization tend to suffer the effects of ignorance in their interlocutors.
However, oppressed groups may sometimes strategically exploit their oppressors’ ignorance for their own advantage, despite the general tendency for ignorance to harm the marginalized.
Summary:
Epistemic injustice preserves both propositional ignorance and practical ignorance.
Testimonial injustice blocks knowledge acquisition, while hermeneutical injustice causes a lack of conceptual competence and understanding between social groups.
Active and willful ignorance may result from resistant out-groups refusing to engage with marginalized groups' experiences and knowledge.
Epistemic Injustice and Trans Experiences:
Causal Flow of Epistemic Injustice:
Socially patterned testimonial injustice leads to:
Hermeneutical marginalization in certain social experiences.
This, in turn, causes hermeneutical injustice, where experiences are unintelligible to others due to a lack of shared concepts.
Relevance to Trans Experience:
Trans experiences and identities have been historically marginalized and misunderstood, with widespread ignorance of their perspectives and social meanings.
Overcoming this ignorance is crucial to advancing trans rights and overcoming epistemic injustice.
Testimonial Injustice in Clinical Settings:
In the past, gender clinics (1960s-80s) required trans individuals to fit narrow criteria to access medical transition (e.g., hormone therapy, surgeries).
Trans individuals had to present in gender-normative ways and express strong body dissatisfaction, with a history of early childhood gender dysphoria.
Testimonial injustice occurred when trans people who didn’t meet these criteria were denied access to transition-related procedures due to prejudiced assumptions about their gender identity.
This was compounded by mental health stigma, where trans identities were pathologized as a disorder, making trans people’s testimonies less credible and dismissed as unreliable.
Resulted in ignorance—healthcare professionals learned little about trans experiences, as their testimonies were blocked or dismissed.
Pre-emptive Testimonial Injustice:
Pre-emptive testimonial injustice occurs when trans people’s credibility is questioned in advance, ensuring that their testimonies are not even solicited.
In media and publishing, trans authors often face preemptive testimonial injustice, where only narrow narratives (e.g., transition stories with normative gender presentation and surgery details) are accepted.
Trans people may be invited to share their stories but dropped when they refuse to conform to these limiting and sensationalized narratives.
This preserves ignorance by limiting the range of trans experiences and identities that reach wider audiences.
Testimonial Smothering:
Testimonial smothering (Dotson 2011) occurs when trans individuals adjust or compromise their message to fit the expectations of publishers or media, thus partially silencing themselves.
Example: Juliet Jacques, in her autobiography, "Trans: A Memoir," initially wanted to write about the broader history of trans people in Britain, but publishers only considered her personal transition story.
This results in reduced knowledge transmission, as the audience is only exposed to a limited, possibly misleading, version of trans experiences.
Impact on Ignorance:
Testimonial injustice and pre-emptive testimonial injustice contribute to maintaining ignorance by limiting the understanding of trans lives and identities.
Testimonial smothering exacerbates this, as it provides a compromised version of the speaker's intended message, further perpetuating ignorance about the diversity of trans experiences.
Connection Between Testimonial Injustice and Hermeneutical Marginalization:
Testimonial Injustice: Trans people suffer from testimonial injustice, where their voices are marginalized, especially in clinical and medical settings.
Cis clinicians hold power and control over transition-related medical services, dismissing trans people’s experiences and silencing their voices.
Hermeneutical Marginalization:
Trans people were excluded from developing the discourses surrounding their own experiences and identities, leaving cis people (without first-hand experience) to dominate this discourse.
As a result, trans voices were not given equal weight, contributing to hermeneutical marginalization—where trans people’s ability to communicate and be understood was severely limited.
Hermeneutical Injustice:
Occurs when attempts at intelligibility are frustrated due to hermeneutical marginalization.
Trans people’s experiences were often misunderstood because concepts and terms did not match their lived reality, as these were shaped by cis medical and societal discourses.
Misleading Medical Discourses:
Misconceptions such as the desire for genital surgery being a necessity for being trans arise from medicalized discourses not shaped by trans people.
The media often perpetuates this idea, contributing to ignorance regarding the diversity of trans experiences.
Hermeneutical Injustice in Legal and Social Contexts:
US legal system: Trans people’s discrimination claims are often addressed based on cisgender norms, failing to engage with trans experiences on their terms (Aultman 2016).
Misfit Concepts and Lack of Intelligibility:
Trans people like Juliet Jacques struggle to find terms to describe their experiences, as available labels (e.g., “transvestite,” “transsexual”) do not fit their identities.
Jacques felt existing terms were inaccurate or loaded with negative connotations (e.g., “transvestite” felt sexual and “transsexual” implied medical procedures).
Primary Harm of Hermeneutical Injustice:
The primary harm is an intrinsic injustice—the denial of intelligibility. This causes confusion and difficulty in understanding both oneself and others.
Secondary Harm of Hermeneutical Injustice:
Difficulty expressing their identities leads to practical consequences such as:
Difficulty accessing medical care for transition.
Stigmatization and worsened access to basic social goods (employment, housing).
Increased vulnerability to physical violence.
Identity-Related Harm:
Trans people experience identity-related harm, either in how society counts them (misgendering, harmful stereotypes) or how they see themselves.
Misgendering (e.g., a trans woman being placed in a men’s prison) can have life-or-death consequences, like in the tragic case of Vicky Thompson.
Stereotypes like the "deceptive transsexual" or the "pathetic transsexual" contribute to harmful perceptions.
Negative Internalized Harm:
Trans people may internalize societal prejudices, leading to self-directed hatred and difficulty in accepting their true identity.
Serano describes how societal messages led to self-hatred, affecting her self-identity development.
Delay in self-realization: Some trans people might not realize they are trans until much later due to a lack of available concepts, which could have been prevented with better resources.
Interconnected Harm of Hermeneutical Injustice:
Trans people can suffer the full range of harms due to hermeneutical injustice:
Primary harm: Intelligibility deficit.
Secondary harm: Practical issues like stigmatization and violence.
Identity-related harm: Impact on both how others perceive them and how they perceive themselves.
Ignorance is maintained not just among cis people but also within the trans community, hindering self-knowledge.
Complex Interaction of Injustices:
There is an interweaving of testimonial injustice, hermeneutical marginalization, and hermeneutical injustice that perpetuates ignorance and harms trans people’s experiences.
Cisgender ignorance is a key factor in reinforcing negative identity prejudices, leading to further testimonial injustice against trans people.
Epistemic Injustice and Conceptual Ignorance:
Combatting Epistemic Injustice involves overcoming conceptual ignorance—not merely gaining propositional knowledge but acquiring conceptual know-how.
This process focuses on developing new operative concepts that can help communities better understand and express their experiences, especially in cases of hermeneutical injustice.
Haslanger’s Distinction: Manifest vs. Operative Concepts:
Manifest Concepts: Official, formal definitions or ideas (e.g., school rules about tardiness).
Operative Concepts: Concepts that are practically used by people in their daily lives, often varying by context or community.
Example: Tardiness might officially be defined by school rules, but in practice, it depends on individual teachers’ policies.
Remedying hermeneutical injustice starts by creating new operative concepts within specific communities that more accurately reflect their lived experiences.
Carmita Wood and Trans Communities as Examples:
In the Carmita Wood case, her participation in a consciousness-raising group helped her form the concept of sexual harassment, which was previously absent.
Similarly, for trans people, adopting an operative concept where anyone who identifies as a woman is considered a woman (regardless of assigned gender at birth or genital status) could help remedy hermeneutical injustice.
Operative Concepts vs. Manifest Concepts:
Operative concepts, often more progressive, can challenge outdated manifest concepts.
Activism often focuses on pushing for laws and policies to reflect more inclusive operative concepts (e.g., legal recognition of trans people based on their self-identified gender).
Successful activism can help overcome practical ignorance and spread these operative concepts more broadly.
Potential Issues with Manifest Concepts:
Manifest concepts may evolve, but people may still misuse or misunderstand them (e.g., wrongly thinking that gender transition requires genital surgery).
In some cases, the manifest concept can lag behind the operative concept in terms of broader understanding. Ongoing work is needed to reconcile both concepts to prevent confusion and injustice.
Challenges in Learning New Concepts:
Simply introducing a new concept (operative or manifest) can be difficult, as it may not easily fit into existing practices or mental frameworks.
Sometimes, stepping-stone concepts are used to bridge gaps, though these may not fully capture the depth of the issue they are intended to address.
Example: The concept of being a "woman trapped in the body of a man" was once widely used but has become problematic and mocked over time, even though it served a useful purpose initially by offering a transitional explanation for trans experiences.
Stepping-Stone Concepts:
Such transitional concepts help people understand issues at a basic level but may oversimplify or even distort the lived experiences of trans individuals.
"Woman trapped in the body of a man" was initially useful for explaining some trans experiences but was often reduced to a mockable soundbite.
These concepts might be discarded once they have served their purpose in simplifying complex issues for broader understanding.
Evolution of Shared Hermeneutical Resources:
The development of a shared hermeneutical resource (knowledge and concepts) happens through contributions from more localized communities (e.g., trans communities offering new ways of understanding gender).
Progress in understanding may sometimes feel slow or inconsistent (two steps forward, one step back), but it still represents significant movement towards greater inclusivity and recognition of marginalized groups.
The key is to continue pushing for more inclusive operative and manifest concepts to combat epistemic injustice and achieve collective progress.