Epistemic Injustice: Fricker on Testimonial and Hermeneutical Harm

Miranda Fricker's Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (2007) introduced and named a category of wrong that had previously lacked a precise philosophical vocabulary: a wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower, distinct from other forms of unfairness such as material deprivation or straightforward discrimination. Fricker distinguishes two principal species of this wrong. Testimonial injustice occurs when a hearer, owing to prejudice, gives a speaker's testimony less credibility than it warrants — Fricker's central illustrative example, drawn from Harper Lee's novel To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), is the jury's racially prejudiced refusal to believe Tom Robinson's truthful testimony over the false testimony of his white accuser, a case Fricker uses to show how a "credibility deficit" tracking a hearer's identity prejudice — here racial prejudice — can cause a speaker's true, well-evidenced testimony to be wrongly disbelieved, with potentially severe practical consequences for the speaker quite apart from any purely epistemic harm.