Epistemic Injustice

The concept of epistemic injustice refers to the injustice that an individual suffers specifically in their capacity as a knower or epistemic agent – that is, as someone who produces, conveys, or uses knowledge. Epistemic injustice is problematic because it undermines individuals’ epistemic agency, or their capacity to produce, convey, or use knowledge. People exercise their epistemic agency every day when they engage in basic epistemic practices: for example, when they contribute to a conversation or when they employ concepts to interpret the social world or make sense of their experience. The literature typically distinguishes between two main types of epistemic injustice. First, when a person is not adequately believed or consulted by their interlocutors due to biases on the interlocutors’ part, the person suffers testimonial injustice. For example, if a woman’s contribution to a meeting is not taken seriously because she is a woman, she faces testimonial injustice because she receives less credibility than she should due to her interlocutors’ biases. Second, when a person or their experience is not adequately understood or represented due to biases in the society’s mainstream pool of interpretive resources (e.g. words, concepts, social representations, shared meanings, or collective understandings), the person suffers hermeneutical injustice. Because a society’s interpretive resources are mainly produced by dominant groups, they tend to neglect or stigmatise the experience of non-dominant groups. For example, prior to the coining of the term, women could not communicate as such their experience of sexual harassment. Their experience was instead inadequately characterised as harmless flirting and therefore remained collectively misunderstood. Women faced hermeneutical injustice because they received less intelligibility than they should have due to their society’s conceptual biases, which obscured and misrepresented the experience of sexual harassment. A person can thus face epistemic injustice in two main ways. With testimonial injustice, the person receives an unduly diminished level of credibility because they are not adequately believed or consulted. With hermeneutical injustice, the person receives an unduly diminished level of intelligibility because they or their experience are not adequately understood or represented. In both cases, the person faces these deficits of credibility or intelligibility because they belong to one or more non-dominant groups – for example, women, LGBTQIA2+, BIPOC folks, people of lower socio-economic status, disabled people, neurodivergent people, or psychiatrised individuals. To face epistemic injustice, then, is to be denied equal status as an epistemic agent because of biases – which may be individual or structural, and conscious or not – of a sexist, cisheteronormative, racist, Eurocentric, classist, ableist, neuronormative, or sanist nature, for example. The phrase ‘epistemic injustice’ was introduced by Miranda Fricker (Fricker 2007), who also introduced the two main categories of epistemic injustice, namely testimonial and hermeneutical injustice. It is important to underline, however, that the concept of epistemic injustice captures some of the epistemic imbalances that had previously been brought into sharp relief and powerfully critiqued – albeit not under the specific label of epistemic injustice – by feminist epistemologists (e.g. Alcoff 1991; Code 1991), including Black feminists and critical race theorists (e.g. Crenshaw 1991; Hill Collins 1990; Mills 1997) as well as standpoint theorists (e.g. Harding 1986; Hartsock 1983). Fricker’s original analysis of testimonial injustice focuses primarily on undue deficits of credibility taking place in an actual epistemic exchange between two or more interlocutors, where the bias at play is directed at the identity of the speaker (Fricker 2007:ch.1). Further developments of the concept by other scholars have shown that testimonial injustice can also be a matter of undue credibility excesses (Davis 2016; Medina 2011, 2013:ch.2) and of undue deficits of criticism (Hazlett 2020); that testimonial injustice can occur independently of an actual epistemic exchange, through silencing (Dotson 2011b; Fricker 2007:ch.6); that testimonial injustice can also be structural (Anderson 2012; Catala 2022); and that testimonial injustice can also stem from biases that concern the content of the speaker’s contribution, regardless of their identity (Davis 2021). Fricker’s original analysis of hermeneutical injustice has likewise been expanded by other scholars, from one that focused mainly on the lack of appropriate terms such as ‘sexual harassment’ (Fricker 2007: ch.7), to ones that focus on the lack of circulation or adoption of new terms coined at the margins such as ‘date rape’ or ‘cisheteropatriarchy’ (Dotson 2012; Mason 2011; Medina 2011, 2013: ch.1; Pohlhaus 2012, or the lack of adequate understanding of existing terms such as ‘racism’ (Catala 2015, 2019). Further developments in the literature on epistemic injustice and oppression have identified the phenomena of epistemic exploitation (Berenstain 2016), epistemic appropriation (Davis 2018), and non-propositional epistemic injustice (Catala 2020, 2025).