Is Testimonial Injustice Epistemic? Let Me Count the Ways
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Show full item recordEditorial
Cambridge University Press
Date
2021-11-03Referencia bibliográfica
Almagro Holgado, M., Navarro Laespada, L., & De Pinedo García, M. (2021). Is Testimonial Injustice Epistemic? Let Me Count the Ways. Hypatia, 36(4), 657-675. doi:[10.1017/hyp.2021.56]
Sponsorship
Spanish Government FFI2016-80088-P BES-2017-079933 FPU16/04185 PID2019-109764RB-I00; Junta de Andalucia B-HUM-459-UGR18; FiloLab Group of Excellence - University of GranadaAbstract
Miranda Fricker distinguishes two senses in which testimonial injustice is epistemic. In the
primary sense, it is epistemic because it harms the victim as a giver of knowledge. In the
secondary sense, it is epistemic, more narrowly, because it harms the victim as a possessor
of knowledge. Her characterization of testimonial injustice has raised the following objection:
testimonial injustice is not always an epistemic injustice, in the narrow, secondary
sense, as it does not always entail that the victim is harmed as a knowledge-possessor.
By adopting a perspective based on Robert Brandom’s normative expressivism, we respond
to this objection by arguing that there is a close connection, conceptual and constitutive
rather than merely causal, between the primary and the secondary epistemic harms of testimonial
injustice, such that testimonial injustice always involves both kinds of epistemic harm.
We do so by exploring the logic and functioning of belief and knowledge ascriptions in order
to highlight three ways in which the secondary epistemic harm caused by testimonial injustice
crystallizes: it undermines the epistemic agency of the victim, the epistemic friction necessary
for knowledge, and the possibility of occupying particular epistemic nodes.