#miranda fricker

[romancenjoyer]

Even in agential operations of power, however, power is already a structural phenomenon, for power is always dependent on practical co-ordination with other social agents. As Thomas Wartenberg has argued, (what he calls) dyadic power relationships are dependent upon co-ordination with ‘social others’, and are in that sense ‘socially situated’.⁵ The point that power is socially situated might be made in a quite general way as a matter of the importance of social context taken as a whole: any operation of power is dependent upon the context of a functioning social world—shared institutions, shared meanings, shared expectations, and so on. But Wartenberg’s point is more specific than that, since he argues that any given power relationship will also have a more significant, direct dependence on co-ordination with the actions of some social others in particular. He presents the example of the power that a university teacher has over her students in grading their work. This power is of course broadly dependent upon the whole social context of university institutions and systems of grading, and so on. But it is also more directly dependent upon co-ordination with the actions of a narrow class of social others: for instance, the potential employers who take notice of grades. Without this co-ordination with the actions of a specific group of other social agents, the actions of the teacher would have no influence upon the behaviour of the students, for her gradings would have no bearing on their prospects. Co-ordination of that more specific kind constitutes the requisite social ‘alignment’ on which any given power relation directly depends. Or rather, the social alignment is partly constitutive of the power relation.

– Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (2007)

[olameni]

Reflection on Epistemic Injustice

The text is largely confirmation for the ways in which marginalized persons are not given the credibility they deserve.

This text could have been titled Why People Don't Listen

I'm contemplating (along with author) about the ways in which I can combat epistemic injustice in my own judgments about credibility as well as how to point these things out to those i counsel and mentor. Also to what degree is the answer simply to cultivate curiosity.

I am very appreciative to Fricker for taking seriously the idea the knowledge that one might have had but is now lost as product of epistemic justice. I feel this in deepest parts of me. We often speak of these the things in terms of their material impact and rightfully so but often at the expense of the lost potential when are consumed by our biases is equally disturbing to me.

I think most people when they say gaslighting actually mean not being afforded the credibility they deserve. What Fricker call testimonial injustice.

[romancenjoyer]

It is distinctive uniquely of philosophy that it is centrally concerned with rational idealizations of human beings and their activities. Philosophers are very keen to understand what it is to get things right. That’s fine; but we should not stop there if we also want to understand the human practices that may only very patchily approximate the rational ideal. The focus on justice creates an impression that justice is the norm and injustice the unfortunate aberration. But, obviously, this may be quite false. It also creates the impression that we should always understand injustice negatively by way of a prior grasp of justice. But, less obviously, the route to understanding may sometimes be the reverse. My interest here is in injustice specifically in the sphere of epistemic activity, and certainly in this sphere I believe that there are areas where injustice is normal, and that the only way to reveal what is involved in epistemic justice (indeed, even to see that there is such a thing as epistemic justice) is by looking at the negative space that is epistemic injustice.

– Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (2007)

[indizombie]

When knowledge becomes an exclusive product under savarna domination, it creates an unjust system of power hierarchy where knowledge produced and communicated by DBA communities are either discarded or delegitimized without a second thought. The injustice done to a person in their capacity as a knower (producer and communicator of knowledge) is called Epistemic Injustice. This is a concept in social epistemology that refers to the unfair distribution of knowledge, credibility, or intellectual resources when someone is denied access to knowledge or is not believed, despite having relevant knowledge or expertise, because of their social identity, such as their race, caste, gender, class, or disability. The term was coined by a British philosopher, Miranda Fricker.

Pranav Jeevan, ‘Epistemic Injustice: Does Knowledge have Caste?’, Round Table India

[dipnotski]

Miranda Fricker – Epistemik Adaletsizlik (2023)

“Adalet” felsefe tarihinin en eski ve en merkezî konularından biri, ancak epistemik, yani bilgi temelli uygulamalarımızın etik boyutunu ortaya çıkarmak için odak noktamızı “adaletsizliğe” kaydırmaya ne dersiniz? Ortaya koyduğu kavramsal çerçeve ile çığır açan kitap, epistemik adaletsizliğin yaşamın pratik boyutlarında ve toplumsal adaletsizlik modeli içindeki yerini gösteriyor. Fricker’ın yer yer…

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[lovewillbreakyourheartforever]

Hermeneutical inequality is inevitably hard to detect. Our interpretive efforts are naturally geared to interests, as we try hardest to understand those things it serves us to understand. Consequently, a group's unequal hermeneutical participation will tend to show up in a localized manner in hermeneutical hotspots—locations in social life where the powerful have no interest in achieving a proper interpretation, perhaps indeed where they have a positive interest in sustaining the extant misinterpretation (such as that repeated sexual propositions in the workplace are never anything more than a form of ‘flirting’, and their uneasy rejection by the recipient only ever a matter of her ‘lacking a sense of humour’). But then in such a hotspot as this, the unequal hermeneutical participation remains positively disguised by the existing meaning attributed to the behaviour (‘flirting’), and so it is all the more difficult to detect. No wonder that moments of its revelation can come as a life‐changing flash of enlightenment. 

Mirander Fricker, “Hermeneutical Injustice” in Epistemic Injustice: Power & the Ethics of Knowing

[lovewillbreakyourheartforever]

Prior to the collective appreciation of sexual harassment as such, the absence of a proper understanding of what men were doing to women when they treated them like that was ex hypothesi quite general. Different groups can be hermeneutically disadvantaged for all sorts of reasons, as the changing social world frequently generates new sorts of experience of which our understanding may dawn only gradually; but only some of these cognitive disadvantages will strike one as unjust. For something to be an injustice, it must be harmful but also wrongful, whether because discriminatory or because otherwise unfair. In the present example, harasser and harassee alike are cognitively handicapped by the hermeneutical lacuna—neither has a proper understanding of how he is treating her—but the harasser's cognitive disablement is not a significant disadvantage to him. Indeed, there is an obvious sense in which it suits his purpose.

Mirander Fricker, “Hermeneutical Injustice” in Epistemic Injustice: Power & the Ethics of Knowing

[imjuzzsaying]

“Testimonial injustice occurs when prejudice causes a hearer to give a deflated level of credibility to a speaker's word; hermeneutical injustice occurs at a prior stage, when a gap in collective interpretive resources puts someone at an unfair disadvantage when it comes to making sense of their social experiences.”

Epistemic injustice by Miranda Fricker