Trust, credibility, and injustice › The Same Warning, a Different Reception

Imagine a meeting about a faulty product. An employee describes a recurring failure and explains how to reproduce it. The chair dismisses the report as confusion. Later, a colleague repeats the same explanation and receives careful attention. Suppose the difference comes from a stereotype about the first employee's social background, rather than from evidence about either person's competence. The team has mishandled information. It has also wronged someone in a particular way: it has treated their contribution as less credible because of who they are taken to be.

This hypothetical example introduces the question at the centre of Miranda Fricker's Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. What happens when prejudice damages a person's standing in the practices through which people share knowledge and understand experience? Fricker's answer connects epistemology, the study of knowledge, with ethics. Her target is a wrong done to someone specifically as a knower. The author's book page identifies the work's original publication as 2007.

The book develops two forms of that wrong. Testimonial injustice involves prejudiced judgments of a speaker's credibility. Hermeneutical injustice involves unfair disadvantages in the shared resources for understanding social experience. Keeping these mechanisms distinct matters: a listener can unfairly reject an intelligible account, while a person can struggle to make an experience intelligible even before anyone decides whether to believe them.