Hermeneutical injustice

I caught a piece in the TImes Literary Supplement 3rd October issue with a really interesting snippet. The article, which I believe was by Miranda Fricker, said there were two types of injustice that people suffer as knowers of information – ‘testimonial injustice’, in which a listener ignores you because their prejudices mean they don’t believe you; and ‘hermeneutical injustice, which is when a speaker “is condemned to silence by a collective lack of appropriate conceptual resources – perhaps because the society or age he happens to live in suffers from a deficit in its social imagination and does not have conceptual space to accommodate the speaker’s lifeworld. The experience of many women in pre-feminist days would be a case in point.”

I just thought that was a really fascinating point, and one which I would like to follow up on. I couldn’t find the article online – just read the paper version in the British Library and noted down that quote. I’m pretty sure it was TLS October 3rd, though.  There was another article on Epicurean philosophy, which I don’t know anything about. Apparently it was about detachment and contemplation: “steer clear of stress, channel your desires safely, don’t be afraid of death, the gods are not vindictive.”

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There are 2 comments

  1. Fricker actually has a whole book on the subject which is really great called, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, you can get it on amazon, it’s worth a read.

  2. Thanks for the recommendation, Emily. I have added that to my ever-growing list of books I am going to read 🙂 Really liked the article, so I can’t wait to read more about it.

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