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Thesis Testimonial injustice is a failure of knowledge, not only a failure of fairness

Keisha Monroe Fellow
· 6 replies · 308 views
Evidence & testimonyAfrican & AfricanaAmericanAnalyticFeminist philosophyMiranda FrickerW. E. B. Du Bois#credibility#epistemic-injustice#prejudice#testimonial-injustice
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Where it stands

I teach eleventh-grade English in Atlanta, and every year we read To Kill a Mockingbird. Every year a student asks why the jury did not believe Tom Robinson when the evidence was on his side. And every year I hand them Miranda Fricker, who uses that trial as a central example in Epistemic Injustice (2007).

Fricker's idea of testimonial injustice: a speaker receives less credibility than the evidence warrants because of prejudice about who they are. The usual reaction is to treat this as a moral wrong. It is unfair, it insults the speaker, it is racist. All true.

My thesis is that it is also, and distinctively, an epistemic failure. The jury in that novel did not just wrong Tom Robinson; it failed to know what happened when the knowledge was there for the taking. Prejudice cost the hearers truth. A community that systematically discounts some speakers believes less truth than it could, about precisely the things those speakers are best placed to know.

The Black feminist tradition said this long before the term existed. Anna Julia Cooper insisted in the 1890s that Black women had knowledge of their situation that no one else could supply; Patricia Hill Collins later wrote about who gets to validate knowledge claims. Du Bois's double consciousness is in part a theory of what the excluded can see.

The objection I expect: "the epistemic harm is just a side-effect of the moral one." I'd like to hear it argued properly.

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6 replies

For the thesis 3

  1. Femke Bosman

    For Fellow

    Sam, Fricker builds the answer into her definition. An identity prejudice is a judgement that resists counter-evidence. A stereotype that tracked reliability and updated with evidence would not be a prejudice in her sense. So the case you describe is not testimonial injustice at all.

    And there is a second epistemic dimension Keisha didn't mention: the speaker is wronged in their capacity as a knower. That is not a generic insult; it is a specific harm to someone as a giver of knowledge. Fricker also introduced hermeneutical injustice, where a group lacks the concepts to make sense of its own experience; her example is women before the phrase "sexual harassment" existed.

    Helpful · 1
  2. Dima Nasser

    For Fellow

    From disability: people in wheelchairs are routinely not believed about their own pain, their own access needs, even their own preferences, and are believed far too readily when they say something pleasantly inspiring. Both errors, the deficit and the excess, make the hearer understand less. My doctors have repeatedly failed to know things about my body that I told them plainly.

    Helpful · 3
  3. Tsion Bekele

    For Fellow

    In clinical medicine the epistemic cost is measurable. When a patient's account of their symptoms is discounted, diagnoses are missed. I've seen it happen to patients from rural areas who describe pain in their own idioms. The harm is not only that they are disrespected; it is that the doctor ends up knowing less about the disease in front of her.

    Helpful · 1

Against the thesis 2

  1. Sam Ellery

    Against Contributor

    I'll make the case against, since debate is my day job. Suppose a prejudice happened, by accident, to track reliability, say a group really was less reliable on some topic for reasons that had nothing to do with the prejudice. Discounting them would then be unjust but epistemically harmless, even beneficial. If the epistemic harm can vanish while the injustice remains, the injustice is the essential thing and the epistemic loss is contingent.

    1. Keisha Monroe

      Fellow

      Sam, there is also a practical problem with "just evaluate the argument". Testimony is not an argument. When a student tells me what happened in the hallway, there is nothing to evaluate except whether to believe her. Credibility is the whole transaction. That is why prejudice in credibility does epistemic damage so directly: it corrupts the only channel there is.

      Helpful · 2
  2. Sam Ellery

    Against Contributor

    Keisha, I concede the point about testimony not being argument; that is a better reply than my opponents usually give. And Femke's definitional move is fair. My remaining worry is about the remedy. If the cure is for hearers to "adjust" credibility according to identity, we risk replacing one distortion with another. I'd want the virtue to be attention to evidence, not compensation.