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structural testimonial injustice

📖 Definitions

"Testimonial exclusion becomes structural when institutions are set up to exclude people without anyone having to decide to do so." (Anderson 2012, 166)

"structural forms of testimonial injustice are more pervasive than acknowledged in Fricker’s work, and [...] such structural injustices require structural remedies. To see this, we need to get past the prejudice model of testimonial injustice and consider other ways in which disadvantaged social groups can be unjustly denied credibility. [...] Let us consider three structural causes of group-based credibility deficits: differential access to the markers of credibility; ethnocentrism; and the 'shared reality bias.'" (Anderson 2012, 169)

"structural testimonial injustice – emerges when one focusses on the social institutions within which the practice of testimony operates. The injustice here stems from structural inequalities within such institutions that lead to diminished possibilities of participation in the social practice of testimony." (Wanderer 2017, 38)

💡 Examples

  • Anderson gives the example of unequal access to education, which "generates additional structural inequalities in opportunities for exercising full epistemic agency, which is an injustice to the speakers." (Anderson 2012, 169)

🔗 Relations

📚 References

  • Anderson, Elizabeth. 2012. "Epistemic Justice as a Virtue of Social Institutions." Social Epistemology 26.2: 163–173. https://doi.org/10.1080/02691728.2011.652211
  • Wanderer, Jeremy. 2017. “Varieties of Testimonial Injustice.” In The Routledge Handbook on Epistemic Injustice, edited by Ian James Kidd, Gaile Pohlhaus, and José Medina. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315212043