Discerning the Primary Epistemic Harm in Cases of Testimonial Injustice

Philosophizing from Experience: First‐Person Accounts and Epistemic Justice

“…Because professional work tends to be task-based rather than relationship-focused, the pursuit of goals like efficiency and productivity in the workplace can lead to treating people as having "truncated subjectivity," where their capacities as a subject are seen as derivative of others' goals. 15 People who are thought to be impaired in ways that diminish the accomplishment of aims such as efficiency and productivity are typically relegated as "epistemic others," not accepted by their peers as equal participants in relevant epistemic activities. This refusal to count the participation of people who are thought to be impaired as equal to others amounts to a denigration of these people within the relevant epistemic community, and a refusal to recognize their professional competence and to grant them credibility.…”

Typecasts, Tokens, and Spokespersons: A Case for Credibility Excess as Testimonial Injustice

“…Gaile Pohlhaus has argued that Fricker's notion of objectification misdiagnoses what is wrong with treating persons in the way we do when we assess their credibility in unjust ways (Pohlhaus ). Insofar as victims of testimonial injustice (as credibility deficit) are deemed insufficiently credible, they are assessed according to a set of epistemic rules and practices that we think uniquely apply to epistemic subjects.…”

“…Thus, it is not right to say that a victim of testimonial injustice is treated as an object in full; yet neither is it right to say of the speaker that she is a full subject, in that her capacities are shaped and co‐opted to meet the needs of the dominant. Rather, the speaker assumes a sort of “truncated” or “circumscribed” subjectivity (Pohlhaus , 105), what Beauvoir calls the status of the “other” (Beauvoir ). Pohlhaus concludes that the primary harm of testimonial injustice is not that one is relegated to the status of object, but that one is “relegated to the role of epistemic other, being treated as though the range of one's subject capacities is merely derivative” (107).…”

Sourcing Women's Ecological Knowledge: The Worry of Epistemic Objectification

“… Fricker has been criticized for misconstruing the intrinsic wrong of testimonial injustice as the wrong of epistemic objectification, as opposed to the wrong of “derivatization,” which treats its victim as a partial subject rather than as an object (see Pohlhaus ). …”

“… As Pohlhaus notes, the distinction between a source of information and an informant enables Fricker to accommodate cases in which “victims of testimonial injustice are not entirely excluded from the pooling of information altogether” (Pohlhaus , 4). …”