Miranda Fricker
People can be wronged as knowers: when they are not believed because of prejudice, or when society lacks the concepts to make sense of what they experience.
Placement
Social epistemologist at NYU: people can be wronged as knowers – disbelieved because of prejudice (testimonial injustice) or left without the concepts to understand their own experience (hermeneutical injustice).
Key ideas
- Epistemic injustice
- Testimonial and hermeneutical injustice
- Virtues of epistemic justice
Teachers: Bernard Williams
Influence
Influenced by 3
Aristotle
influenced by
Fricker modelled testimonial and hermeneutical justice as Aristotelian virtues of the hearer, a trained, second-nature sensibility that corrects prejudice in judging credibility (Epistemic Injustice, 2007). M. Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (2007)
Evidence: AI draft
Aristotle › 384–322 BCE
Michel Foucault
influenced by
Fricker adopted Foucault’s point that power can operate structurally, without a particular agent, in her notion of identity power behind testimonial injustice (Epistemic Injustice, 2007). M. Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (2007); SEP “Michel Foucault”
Evidence: AI draft
Michel Foucault › 1926–1984
Bernard Williams studied with
studied with
Fricker’s Oxford DPhil (1996) was co-supervised by Bernard Williams and Sabina Lovibond; in Epistemic Injustice (2007) she takes up Williams’s genealogical method. M. Fricker, personal website (mirandafricker.com, “About”); M. Fricker, Epistemic Injustice (2007)
Evidence: AI draft
Bernard Williams › 1929–2003
Criticism
Criticized by 2
José Medina
criticised by
Medina, largely agreeing with Fricker, objected that her ‘collective hermeneutical resource’ suggests a single pool, and argued for analysing plural interpretive communities (‘Polyphonic Contextualism’, 2012). J. Medina, “Hermeneutical Injustice and Polyphonic Contextualism”, Social Epistemology 26 (2012) 201–220; The Epistemology of Resistance (2013); M. Fricker, Epistemic Injustice (2007); Fricker’s reply: “How is Hermeneutical Injustice Related to ‘White Ignorance’?”, Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 2 (2013)
Evidence: AI draft
José Medina › b. 1968
Kristie Dotson
criticised by
Dotson argued that Fricker’s two forms of epistemic injustice miss ‘contributory injustice’: marginalised groups have interpretive resources, but dominant knowers wilfully ignore them (‘A Cautionary Tale’, 2012). K. Dotson, “A Cautionary Tale: On Limiting Epistemic Oppression”, Frontiers 33 (2012), 24–47; “Conceptualizing Epistemic Oppression”, Social Epistemology 28 (2014); M. Fricker, Epistemic Injustice (2007)
Evidence: AI draft
Kristie Dotson › contemporary
Position
“Epistemic Injustice” identified a kind of wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower. Testimonial injustice occurs when prejudice leads a hearer to give a speaker less credibility than they deserve – a woman’s well-founded suspicion dismissed as “female intuition”, a Black man disbelieved by a white jury, as in “To Kill a Mockingbird”. Hermeneutical injustice occurs earlier, when a gap in a society’s shared concepts leaves people unable to make sense of an important area of their own experience; her example is women who suffered sexual harassment before the concept existed and had no name for what was being done to them. Both wrongs harm people not only in their access to information and justice but in their standing as rational beings, and both arise from unequal social power, which she analyses, drawing partly on Foucault, as working through identities and a shared social imagination. The remedy lies partly in virtues: hearers can cultivate “testimonial justice” by correcting for prejudice, and “hermeneutical justice” by attending to what speakers struggle to say. The book founded a lively field of research. Her later work, much of it in conversation with Williams, concerns blame, forgiveness and the social point of moral practices.
Life & context
Miranda Fricker (born 1966) studied philosophy and modern languages at Oxford and women’s studies at the University of Kent, and took her doctorate at Oxford in 1996 under Sabina Lovibond and Bernard Williams. She taught for many years at Birkbeck, University of London, then from 2012 at the University of Sheffield and from 2016 at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York. Since 2022 she has been at New York University, where she is Julius Silver Professor of Philosophy and co-director of the New York Institute of Philosophy. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Main works
- The Cambridge Companion to Feminism in Philosophy (ed. with Jennifer Hornsby, 2000)
- Epistemic Injustice (2007)
- What’s the Point of Blame? (2016)
- The Epistemic Life of Groups (ed. with Michael Brady, 2016)
Appears in
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