Trust, credibility, and injustice › Credibility and Identity Power

In the introduction's outline of chapter 1, Fricker characterizes social power as a socially situated capacity to control others' actions. Identity power depends on shared conceptions of social identities. Such conceptions can influence whose interventions sound authoritative, whose doubts seem reasonable, and whose experiences appear typical. The concept directs attention to the social meaning attached to a speaker, rather than only to what a hearer explicitly professes.

Credibility judgments need not be all-or-nothing. A listener might partially discount a report, demand extra corroboration, or give it less attention. Fricker's earlier paper, “Epistemic Injustice and a Role for Virtue in the Politics of Knowing”, discusses credibility excess and deficit. Its accent example illustrates how social perception can affect degrees of trust without simply turning belief into disbelief.

A hypothetical comparison makes the distinction useful. It may be reasonable to ask whether someone has inspected a machine before accepting their diagnosis of its failure. It would be different to treat their accent as evidence that they cannot understand the mechanism, despite an accurate demonstration. A relevant competence assessment and an identity-based discount may produce superficially similar questions. Their grounds differ.

Diagnosis therefore requires care. Unequal treatment raises a question; it does not by itself prove prejudice caused the difference. A fair inquiry must consider relevant differences in evidence, opportunities to observe, and reliability. Fricker supplies a conceptual account of a wrong, rather than a mechanical test that lets an observer infer its presence from every disagreement.