Robert Henderson
When
Landmark work by Fricker (2007) defines epistemic injustice as a kind of wrong done to someone in their capacity as a knower. In that work, she discusses two subtypes: (i) testimonial injustice, in which concerns decreasing the credibility of an interlocutor, and thus their contributions, in virtue of prejudice or bias, (ii) hermeneutical injustice, in which a society's shared interpretive resources disadvantage a person in terms of their ability to understand their experiences.
Against this backdrop, we take up recent work by Flores, which, through the example of "trauma narratives" by expelled colonists, establishes that hermeneutical injustice does not only flow from lacunas or the prevalence of bad interpretive resources. Facially neutral (i.e., not bad) and accessible (i.e., no lacuna) conceptual frames like "X was a victim in event E and traumatized by it" can be deployed in a way that leads to hermeneutical injustice. Based on work in McCready and Henderson on the reliability of testimonial evidence in a social meaning setting (Henderson and McCready 2025), we build a formal pragmatic model of hermeneutical injustice in the Flores case, which produces an improved account of its pragmatic source. It also links hermeneutical injustice to testimonial injustice, making the latter prior to the former. This is an important result because it contradicts previous literature, which takes hermeneutical injustice to lead to testimonial injustice, rather than the reverse.
Zoom: https://arizona.zoom.us/j/6895456750
Room: COMM 311