Epistemic Injustice

Miss Triggs’ situation is familiar to many of us: inaudible, unable to make any impact on those around. When you speak what you say is not valued, while the very same thing said by someone else is heard. Sometimes this is individual – Miss Triggs in particular just does not command her audience. Sometimes it is generic: for example, membership of an undervalued group may silence you. It happens to women, to people of colour, to the members of the LGBT+ community and many other disadvantaged groups. Sometimes membership of such a group makes you invisible, too: speaking of the disabled as if they are not there (‘does she take sugar?’) fails to treat them as people at all.

But this is peculiar, isn’t it? After all, ask the men round the table whether they actually heard what Miss Triggs said, and they will agree that they did. Ask the person offering the cup of tea whether they see the wheelchair user, and they will say, of course, aren’t they about to give them a cup of tea? We are not literally invisible or inaudible. So what does it mean to say that we are? And why does it matter? We might think it is somehow unfair, but what does fairness have to do with truth? So long as the truth is said by someone, why does it matter whether Miss Triggs is the one who says it?

Miss Triggs somehow does not count. Members of disadvantaged groups, likewise, often seem to count for less than others do – and the structures of power thrive on these anomalies. But this seems peculiar, too: is it that Miss Triggs does not count as a person? Ask anyone whether women or persons of colour or members of the LGBT+ community or the disabled are in fact people, they will insist that they are. So in what sense do they, do we, not count?

Perhaps this is about power: some count for less because of the brute interests of those who count for more – and this may self-perpetuate, as the wielders of power reinforce the same behaviour. But that power especially makes some people inaudible when they say the truth; and invisible, too, when they seek to contribute to what we know. So the damage is not to people as such (these are indeed real people, making real noise), but to people as knowers: these people are silenced as knowers, as speakers of the truth.

But, again, so long as the truth is said by someone, why should it matter who says it? So long as knowledge is out there, it is value-free, we might think, indifferent to who has it or how it is transmitted. What difference does it make to what is known how it is known, or who knows it, or from what point of view? Does it matter how things are known, or by whom? Is knowledge value-free?

There is no doubt that silencing is pernicious. Sometimes the victims themselves are complicit in their own silencing unawares; they are less confident in their truths, less sure of their voices, so they are less believed. The structures of power reinforce this silence, make it normal. Sometimes, the silencing is deliberate: a strategic attempt to make the victim believe they are incapable of knowing (mad, perhaps, or incompetent): this is gaslighting – and unlike in the movies, some villains get away with it all the time.

But this is not simply an exercise of power, but an exercise of power over knowledge. What should control power of this kind? One obvious answer might be that justice should control power – these silencings are injustices done to the silenced people. But the injustice is not a straightforward assault on their rights as persons. Instead, it is a devaluation what they know, and how they know it. This has come to be called epistemic injustice. Injustice happens when someone is less heard or less believed just because they belong to some ‘wrong’ group: should your gender, your race, your orientation or your disability be a reason to disbelieve you? Injustice happens, too, when the entire perspective of any such group is left out of what we think we know.

This raises a puzzle about knowledge. Should what we know include different perspectives and points of view? Is what we know determined by how we know it, or it knowledge simply unadorned truth, the recording of sheer fact? Does knowledge work like that? Is knowledge value-free, or is it perspectival in complex ways: and if so, should it be determined by principles of justice? If we think it is value-free, it is hard to explain the injustice; if there is epistemic injustice, perhaps knowledge is not value-free.