Just How Testimonial, Epistemic, Or Correctable Is Testimonial Injustice?

Abstract

In her book Epistemic Injustice: Power & the Ethics of Knowing, Miranda Frickerargues that there is a distinctly epistemic kind of injustice, which she calls testimonial injustice, resulting from identity-prejudicial credibility deficit–identity prejudic causing a hearer to give a deflated level of credibility to a speaker’s word. Sheargues that testimonial injustice is correctable through hearers developing a capacity for self-correcting for it within a virtue-epistemological framework. In this essay, I examine Fricker’s argument, and conclude that Fricker’s exposition of identity-prejudicial credibility deficit is sound, but that she has not demonstrated either that testimonial injustice is a distinctly testimonial phenomenon or that identity-prejudicial credibility deficit is a distinctly epistemic phenomenon, or how a virtue-epistemic framework might be successfully employed as a corrective methodology. I further suggest that her conception of testimony as distinctly evidential is too narrow to be applied to everyday instances of identity-prejudicial credibility deficit, and should be reconfigured within a broader framework.