Contents
Uniting epistemology, ethics, and Justice, epistemic injustice refers to situations where someone is wronged “in their capacity as a knower”. gaslighting seems like an example of this because the victim is not only misled, but induced to doubt their epistemic faculties.
In addition to epistemic harm resulting from injustice, I notice a related class of injustice in which various kinds of harm result from the epistemology (typically, the ignorance) of the powerful. Power not only magnifies the costs of ignorance, but allows those who wield it to shift the costs of their ignorance on to others. In Behave, Robert Sapolsky laments one example of a common scenario: the refusal of those in power to believe the reported experience of others until presented with a different kind of evidence that fits their epistemic regime:
It struck me that if it took brain scans to convince legislators that there’s something tragically, organically damaged in combat vets with PTSD, then these legislators have some neurological problems of their own.
Power and Knowledge
From “What Makes Epistemic Injustice an “Injustice”?” (Byskov 2020):
according to Fricker (2007, 147), because it unfairly advantages those who are able to have their experiences represented in the collective body of knowledge to be able to successfully communicate their experiences to other people: “the powerful have an unfair advantage in structuring collective social understandings.”
This reminds me of Michel Foucault‘s concept of power/knowledge. He’s mentioned in a footnote:
Consider, example, how the rise of psychological, sociological, and biological studies of sexuality since the 18th Century made sexuality into an object of knowledge, which in turn allowed those who control this knowledge––in particular, scientists, and government officials––a greater ability to control the discourse on sexuality and, especially, the concepts we are able to use to define our own sexuality, such as labeling sex outside of marriage a “perversion” and female sexuality “hysteria” (Foucault 1978).
Further Reading
- Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing by Miranda Fricker