Skip to content

linguistic epistemic injustice

📖 Definitions

"Testimonial injustice consists in an undue credibility deficit: the speaker is not adequately believed because the hearer has conscious or unconscious biases about the speaker’s social group. Hermeneutical injustice consists in an undue intelligibility deficit: the speaker is not adequately understood because of biases in either conceptual or expressive resources. What makes credibility or intelligibility deficits undue—that is, what makes them cases of epistemic injustice—is that these deficits in credibility or intelligibility stem from biases on the part of interlocutors in AAAP [Anglo-American analytic philosophy], rather than from a lack of competence or sincerity on the part of academic migrants. Below I introduce six relevant subtypes of testimonial and hermeneutical injustice, showing how each affects academic migrants who are non-native English users in AAAP. As implied by the claim that they face epistemic injustice, and hence that the credibility or intelligibility deficits they face are undue, the idea here is not that non-native English users are somehow unable to perform well in AAAP. Rather, the claim is that despite their philosophical competence and sincerity, they are exposed to undue credibility or intelligibility deficits in AAAP because of biases that interfere with credibility or intelligibility allocations." (Catala 2022, 331)

💡 Examples

  • Academic migrants experience linguistic epistemic injustice in Anglo-American analytic philosophy and other areas of academia where they are perceived as non-native speakers.

🔗 Relations

📚 References

  • Catala, Amandine. 2022. “Academic Migration, Linguistic Justice, and Epistemic Injustice.” Journal of Political Philosophy 30 (3): 324–46. https: doi.org/10.1111/jopp.12259.