Epistemic injustice

Epistemic injustice is a wrong done to someone in their capacity as a knower. It includes prejudice that unfairly damages credibility or obstructs participation in shared understanding.

Testimonial injustice: A credibility deficit imposed on a speaker because of prejudice tied to their social identity. This is the form in which prejudice directly discounts someone’s testimony.
Credibility excess: An unjustified surplus of credibility granted to a speaker. It contrasts with the credibility deficit central to testimonial injustice.
Miranda Fricker: A British philosopher whose work developed the influential account of testimonial and hermeneutical injustice. Her 2007 book named and systematized the two central forms.
Medical epistemic injustice: Epistemic injustice arising in healthcare, where patients’ knowledge or interpretive needs are unfairly discounted. Clinical authority can cause patients’ testimony about their bodies to receive inadequate credibility.
Epistemic oppression: Systematic constraints on people’s ability to contribute to, access, or shape knowledge practices. Epistemic injustice is one way broader structures can restrict people as knowers.
Hermeneutical injustice: A structural gap in shared interpretive resources that unfairly hinders people from understanding or communicating important experiences. This form obstructs understanding rather than merely discounting a speaker’s credibility.
Silencing: The prevention or disabling of speech acts so that they fail to communicate or receive uptake. A hearer’s prejudiced response can prevent testimony from being understood as intended.
José Medina: A philosopher whose work examines epistemic resistance, social identity, and power in knowledge practices. His account extends analysis toward resistance and the dynamics of epistemic oppression.
Standpoint theory: An approach to knowledge that examines how social position shapes access to evidence and understanding. It helps explain how marginalized social positions can disclose features of power that dominant perspectives miss.
White ignorance: Socially produced patterns of ignorance that protect white dominance and distort understanding of race. It illustrates how dominant groups can sustain ignorance alongside harms to marginalized knowers.

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