a-cautionary-tale- on limiting epistemic oppression opresion epistemica dotson

Frontiers, Inc.
A Cautionary Tale: On Limiting Epistemic Oppression

Author(s): Kristie Dotson
Source: Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Vol. 33, No. 1 (2012), pp. 24-47
Published by: University of Nebraska Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5250/fronjwomestud.33.1.0024
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A Cautionary Tale
On Limiting Epistemic Oppression
kristie dotson
I cannot recall the words of my first poem

but I remember a promise
I made my pen
never to leave it
lying
in somebody else’s blood.
Audre Lorde, “To the Poet Who Happens to Be Black and
the Black Poet Who Happens to Be a Woman”1
introduction
In this paper, first and foremost, I aim to issue a caution. Specifically, I cau-
tion that when addressing and identifying forms of epistemic oppression one
needs to endeavor not to perpetuate epistemic oppression. Epistemic oppres-
sion, here, refers to epistemic exclusions afforded positions and communities
that produce deficiencies in social knowledge. An epistemic exclusion, in this
analysis, is an infringement on the epistemic agency of knowers that reduces
her or his ability to participate in a given epistemic community.2 Epistemic
agency will concern the ability to utilize persuasively shared epistemic re-
sources within a given epistemic community in order to participate in knowl-
edge production and, if required, the revision of those same resources.3 A
compromise to epistemic agency, when unwarranted, damages not only in-
dividual knowers but also the state of social knowledge and shared epistemic
resources.
Unfortunately, avoiding unwarranted epistemic exclusions is an exceed-
ingly difficult task. It may well be impossible. For example, we simply do not
have the capacity to track all the implications of our positions on any given
24 frontiers/2012/vol. 33, no. 1
issue, which would, arguably, be necessary to avoid epistemic oppression en-
tirely. This realization relegates efforts to be conscious of and minimize epis-
temic oppression to a kind of naïveté characteristic of utopian dreamers who
advocate pie-in-the-sky goals achievable only in theory. Like many forms of
pessimism, pessimism about epistemic fairness assumes an all-or-nothing
stance. Either we can eliminate epistemic oppression entirely, or we can do
nothing about epistemic oppression at all. This position is an obvious over-
simplification of the many options available. One can advocate for better,
more responsible epistemic conduct capable of reducing epistemic oppres-
sion, without also harboring unrealistic expectations for superior epistemic
conduct and abilities necessary for eliminating epistemic oppression entirely.
In this vein here I issue a caution and a proposal for minimizing epistemic
oppression.
To issue this caution, I take Miranda Fricker’s book Epistemic Injustice:
Power and the Ethics of Knowing as a paradigmatic case of the challenges that
arise when attempting to avoid epistemic oppression, even while drawing at-
tention to epistemic forms of oppression.4 By bringing attention to specifi-
cally epistemic forms of injustice, Fricker’s work offers a strong and valuable
contribution to a tradition of feminist thought that aims to highlight the
observation that “when it comes to knowledge, women get hurt.”5 However,
her framing of epistemic bad luck as an antithesis to epistemic injustice con-
ceptually forecloses the possibility of other forms of epistemic injustice and
hence can be used to demonstrate the pervasiveness of epistemic oppression.
Fricker, I claim, inadvertently perpetrates epistemic oppression by utilizing a
closed conceptual structure to identify epistemic injustice. This limitation of
Fricker’s view illustrates the difficulty of avoiding epistemic oppression and
demonstrates an avenue for reducing it in one’s own analyses.
This paper will proceed in two parts. First, I introduce Fricker’s two forms
of epistemic injustice, testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice, and
a third form of epistemic injustice, contributory injustice. I will also briefly
gesture to the pervasive nature of epistemic oppression. Second, I use Fricker’s
concept of epistemic bad luck as a contemporary example of how easy it is to
perpetrate epistemic oppression, even while working to address epistemic op-
pression. Specifically, I show how Fricker’s account deploys a closed concep-
tual structure that prematurely forecloses the possibility of alternative forms
of epistemic injustice, like contributory injustice, and thereby perpetuates
epistemic oppression. Ultimately, the strengths and limitations of Fricker’s ef-
forts to outline epistemic injustice highlight a need to move toward open con-
ceptual structures that signify without absolute foreclosure so as to reduce the
continued propagation of epistemic oppression.
Dotson: Limiting Epistemic Oppression 25
three forms of epistemic injustice
In this section I introduce three forms of epistemic injustice. They are: (1) tes-
timonial injustice, (2) hermeneutical injustice, and (3) contributory injustice.
For each form of epistemic injustice I offer a definition, an example, and the
level of change required to address the injustice. To illustrate the changes nec-
essary to address each form of injustice, I use the order-of-change model from
organizational development, that is, first-, second-, or third-order change; as a
heuristic. Using the order-of-change heuristic aids in distinguishing between
the different forms of epistemic injustice introduced. That is, the three forms
of epistemic injustice described in this section can be shown to be distinct
forms by identifying the kinds of changes each minimally requires for justice.
First-Order Epistemic Injustice: Testimonial Injustice

Fricker’s testimonial injustice is the first form of epistemic injustice that I will
outline. Fricker defines testimonial injustice as the epistemic injustice that “oc-
curs when prejudice causes a hearer to give a deflated level of credibility to a
speaker’s word.”6 Prejudice, here, refers to a negative identity-prejudicial ste-
reotype that affects the perception of hearers concerning a speaker’s credibil-
ity. Fricker defines a “negative identity-prejudicial stereotype” as
a widely held disparaging association between a social group and one or
more attributes, where this association embodies a generalization that
displays some (typically, epistemically culpable) resistance to counter-
evidence owing to an ethically bad affective investment.7
A prejudicial stereotype is resistant to counterevidence as a result of “an ethi-
cally bad affective investment.” Patricia Williams’s Benetton shop can illus-
trate Fricker’s understanding of testimonial injustice.
When commenting upon the buzzer-entry phenomenon in New York
shops, Patricia Williams, in her book The Alchemy of Race and Rights, de-
scribes an encounter with anti-black racism. In attempting to shop at the
SoHo Benetton’s, Williams was denied entry at one o’clock in the afternoon,
during the Christmas shopping season, even though there were a number of
white patrons shopping in the store. Williams identifies no reason for being
refused entry into the shop other than racial prejudice.8 As Williams explains,
being excluded from the shop was due to certain social beliefs about what she,
as an African American woman, represented; that is, she represented undesir-
able patronage.
The actual incident of racial discrimination in the store, however, is not
where Williams experiences testimonial injustice. Rather, her experience of
testimonial injustice follows from the responses she received when attempting
to tell her story to others. Williams describes being unwarrantedly stripped
of credibility on a number of occasions. For example, she identifies being af-
forded a credibility deficit when a Stanford Law School class reviewed one
of Williams’s articles attempting to describe her experience and its legal
ramifications:
A rumor got started that the Benetton’s (Soho shop) story wasn’t true,
that I had made it up, that it was a fantasy, a lie that was probably the
product of a diseased mind trying to make all white people feel guilty.
At this point I realized it almost didn’t make any difference whether I
was telling the truth or not—that the greater issue I had to face was the
overwhelming weight of a disbelief that goes beyond mere disinclina-
tion to believe and becomes active suppression of anything I might have
to say. The greater problem is a powerfully oppressive mechanism for
denial of self-knowledge and expression. And this denial cannot be sep-
arated from the simultaneously pathological willingness to believe cer-
tain things about blacks—not believe them, but things about them.9
There are many problems that Williams faces when attempting to testify to
her experience of racial prejudice that followed from an automatic disincli-
nation to believe her testimony; that is, her unwarranted credibility deficit.
Williams maintains that the continual questioning of her credibility in her
attempt to testify to her experience in Benetton is indicative of stereotypes
that label African Americans “liars” and “paranoid.” If African Americans, as
a social group, are seen as “liars,” “paranoid,” or other negative-identity preju-
dicial stereotypes, then those holding these stereotypes will face difficulties in
perceiving the credibility of African American testifiers. Being given the desig-
nation of “liar,” due to one’s racial group, seriously hinders a testifier’s ability
to appear trustworthy even if she is. In turn, perceiving that all African Ameri-
cans are “paranoid” will make it difficult for a listener to perceive a testifier
like Williams as competent. In this way Williams describes being divested of
credibility via what is believed about her.
The credibility deficit, given as a result of negative prejudicial stereotypes,
is only part of Fricker’s definition of testimonial injustice. On her account
knowers who perpetrate testimonial injustice also hold ethically bad affec-
tive investments in negatively stereotyping another group. To understand this
criterion for testimonial injustice, one need only imagine all of the ethically
suspicious reasons one could have to hold the judgment that African Ameri-
cans are liars or paranoid, especially when testifying to continued racial dis-
crimination. Williams offers an account of the “bad affective investments” of
her audience. She identifies an oppressive investment in the “denial of self-
knowledge and expression” in the guise of “neutrality” that preserves a willful
ignorance of racial discrimination and other social ills.10 The value of neutral-
ity, according to Williams, aids in preserving a state of not knowing and not
wanting to know about racial discrimination by demanding the suppression
of genuine accounts of racial discrimination.11 Certainly, it is much easier to
brand Williams a liar and paranoid than it is to face the persistence of ra-
cial prejudice in the United States, especially when an epistemic standard, like
neutrality, can be used to maintain one’s willful ignorance.
According to Fricker, testimonial injustice harms targeted groups in their
“capacity as knowers.”12 Williams, then, is harmed in her capacity as a knower
insofar as she is hindered from being seen as a credible source on her experience
of racial discrimination, in certain contexts.13 To address testimonial injustice,
at minimum, one needs to pursue first-order changes or single-loop directives.
A first-order change requires interventions that “focus on solving problems so
that established patterns can function more effectively.”14 For example, address-
ing problems of unwarranted credibility deficits requires reform within the
framework where credibility still confers authority. The function and value of
credibility are not challenged. Rather, how we confer credibility and, quite pos-
sibly, when credibility assessments should be allowed need to be addressed. It is
for this reason that Fricker advocates developing a reflexive, critical, testimo-
nial sensibility.15 What is required to address testimonial injustice, for Fricker,
is a testimonial sensibility that “has been suitably reconditioned by sufficient
corrective experiences so that it now reliably issues ready-corrected judgments
of credibility.”16 Advocating for a testimonial sensibility is a reform that prom-
ises to make our credibility judgments more accurate but does not necessarily
challenge the value of credibility.17 The value of accurate credibility remains the
same; it is how we pursue it that alters. This kind of shift in activity concerns
single-loop behaviors. Kate Walsh, in her article “Interpreting the Impact of
Culture on Structure,” explains that single-loop behaviors can be “small, behav-
ioral adjustments.”18 “Small adjustments” here does not connote easy adjust-
ments. Improving one’s ability to render accurate credibility assessments is no
easy task, but it does not simultaneously require an uprooting of the value of
credibility as such. Because testimonial injustice does not necessarily demand
that we jettison the value of credibility for establishing epistemic authority, tes-
timonial injustice can be addressed with first-order changes. That makes it a
first-order epistemic injustice. As a result, what is required to address testimo-
nial injustice and faulty credibility assessments are “incremental modifications
that make sense within an established framework.”19
Second-Order Epistemic Injustice: Hermeneutical Injustice
For Fricker an agent always inflicts testimonial injustice. However, in Fricker’s
second form of epistemic injustice an agent is only a tool within some so-
cioepistemic structure. Fricker calls this structural form of epistemic injustice
hermeneutical injustice. Hermeneutical injustice is defined as “the injustice of
having some significant area of one’s social experience obscured from collec-
tive understanding owing to a structural identity prejudice in the collective
hermeneutical resource.”20 Now a structural-identity prejudice is quite dif-
ferent from a negative-identity prejudicial stereotype. A structural-identity
prejudice is not primarily located within the cognitive landscape of individual
perceivers per se. It exists within collective hermeneutical resources them-
selves. That is to say, our resources for making sense of our worlds can be-
come discriminatory due to an asymmetrical ability of some groups to affect
the ways in which a given society makes sense of the world. I take Fricker’s
concept of hermeneutical resources to be akin to Gaile Pohlhaus’s concept of
epistemic resources. In her article “Relational Knowing and Epistemic Injus-
tice,” Pohlhaus writes, “Knowing requires resources of the mind, such as lan-
guage to formulate propositions, concepts to make sense of experience, pro-
cedures to approach the world and standards to judge particular accounts of
experience.”21 Fricker labels the asymmetrical ability to affect hermeneutical
resources necessary for knowing hermeneutical marginalization. She writes,
“when there is unequal hermeneutical participation with respect to some sig-
nificant area(s) of social experience, members of the disadvantaged group are
hermeneutically marginalized.”22 It bears noting that, according to Fricker, her-
meneutical marginalization renders
the collective hermeneutical resources structurally prejudiced, for it will
tend to issue interpretations of . . . [the marginalized] group’s social ex-
periences that are biased because [the interpretations are] insufficiently
influenced by the subject group, and therefore unduly influenced by
more hermeneutically powerful groups.23
The problem of biased hermeneutical resources is discussed often in the work
of women of color. For example, Patricia Hill Collins identifies structurally
prejudiced assessments of knowledge that work to suppress the knowledge of
black women in the United States.24
Fricker’s paradigmatic example of hermeneutical injustice discusses cir-
cumstances surrounding the creation of the term sexual harassment. She of-
fers the example of Carmita Wood’s experience with sexual harassment as
a university employee in a nuclear physics department, as related by Susan
Brownmiller. As Brownmiller explains, an “eminent man” would “jiggle his
crotch when he stood near her [Wood’s] desk and looked at his mail, or he’d
deliberately brush against her breasts while reaching for some papers.” These
and other inappropriate actions caused Wood’s health to erode and led her
finally to quit her job in the department.25 Wood was denied unemployment
benefits due to an inability to describe her experience. A discussion held over
unwanted sexual advances in the workplace, in which Wood shared her story,
made it apparent that many women shared Wood’s experience. The common-
ality of the experience and the need to represent Wood led those involved
in her unemployment-benefits appeal to feel prompted to break the silence
about such experiences. Breaking the silence, however, required naming the
experience for the sake of ready identification. Eventually, the term sexual ha-
rassment was settled upon.26
As Fricker explains, the coining of the term sexual harassment exempli-
fies “a story about how extant collective hermeneutical resources can have a
lacuna where the name of a distinctive social experience should be.”27 With
respect to sexual harassment, the hermeneutical lacuna surrounding this ex-
perience enables hermeneutical injustice, and it is a lacuna equally shared by
the harasser and the harassed. However, hermeneutical injustice concerns the
harassed. A “hermeneutical lacuna creates an asymmetrical disadvantage for
the harassee” and, as such, demonstrates the existence and harm caused by
hermeneutical injustice.28 When gaps in collective hermeneutical resources
create significant and potentially harmful obstacles to diagnosing and un-
derstanding one’s own experiences, one is encountering hermeneutical injus-
tice.29 Though the harasser and the harassed are equally subject to the lacuna,
they do not suffer equally. The harassed is placed in a state of “situated herme-
neutical inequality,” which, for Fricker, constitutes the harm of hermeneutical
injustice.30
In hermeneutical injustice credibility is no longer the site of epistemic in-
justice. Rather, the socioepistemic structures that create and sustain situated
hermeneutical inequality are the problem. As Rae Langton suggests, what is
required to address hermeneutical injustice is a “conceptual revolution.”31 A
change or alteration in the socioepistemic structures is required. As such, to
address this kind of epistemic injustice, a second-order change is required.
Jean Batrunek and Michael Moch define a second-order change as “the con-
scious modification of present schemata in a particular direction.”32 Schemata,
here, refers to frameworks that “generate shared meanings or frames of refer-
ence.” They are hermeneutical resources.33 In addressing an epistemic injus-
tice that exists as a structural notion, as Fricker describes, the very structure
itself must come under examination. The values inherent within it and the so-
cioepistemic conditions that construct and maintain it must be interrogated.
In this way hermeneutical injustice is not addressed in the activity of naming
an obscured experience alone. The need for such activity simply exemplifies
the existence of hermeneutical injustice. To address hermeneutical injustices,
one must seek out the socioepistemic conditions that foster hermeneutical in-
justice. Fricker, it seems, advocates for a virtue, the virtue of hermeneutical
justice, that could foster this kind of endeavor.34 And though Langton holds
suspicions about the extent to which an individually held virtue can address
this form of injustice, it remains the case that addressing hermeneutical injus-
tice minimally requires a revision of the structure itself or, as Langton puts it,
a conceptual revolution.35 Hence, second-order change, change located at the
level of frameworks and structures themselves, is required in order to address
hermeneutical injustice in the long term.
Third-Order Epistemic Injustice: Contributory Injustice

The third, and last, form of epistemic injustice I will identify is contributory
injustice. Contributory injustice is caused by an epistemic agent’s situated ig-
norance, in the form of willful hermeneutical ignorance, in maintaining and
utilizing structurally prejudiced hermeneutical resources that result in epis-
temic harm to the epistemic agency of a knower. Both the structurally preju-
diced or biased hermeneutical resources and the agent’s situated ignorance
are catalysts for contributory injustice. As such, it is located within the gray
area between agential and structural perpetuation of epistemic injustice.
There are two salient differences between Fricker’s hermeneutical injustice
and contributory injustice that will aid in developing the concept of contribu-
tory injustice. First, Fricker seems to assume that there is but one set of collec-
tive hermeneutical resources that we are all equally dependent upon. I do not
share this assumption. We do not all depend on the same hermeneutical re-
sources. Such an assumption fails to take into account alternative epistemolo-
gies, countermythologies, and hidden transcripts that exist in hermeneutically
marginalized communities among themselves.36 It also fails to curtail the role
power plays in hindering the hermeneutical resources of the marginalization.
The power relations that produce hermeneutically marginalized populations
do not also work to suppress, in all cases, knowledge of one’s experiences of
oppression and marginalization within those marginalized populations.37 As
a result there is always more than one set of hermeneutical resources avail-
able. Recognition of this reality, however, is thwarted by situated ignorance.
Situated ignorance “follows from one’s social position and/or epistemic loca-
tion,” which works to institute epistemic differences, while obscuring those
same differences.38 Contributory injustice occurs because there are different
hermeneutical resources that the perceiver could utilize besides structurally
prejudiced hermeneutical resources, and the perceiver willfully refuses “to ac-
knowledge and acquire the necessary tools for knowing whole parts of the
world.”39 The agent plays a role in contributory injustice by willfully refusing
to recognize or acquire requisite alternative hermeneutical resources. Pohl-
haus calls this refusal willful hermeneutical ignorance. The second difference
follows from the fact that, for Fricker, the hermeneutical lacuna in herme-
neutical injustice renders some experiences difficult to conceptualize for the
marginalized and the perceiver alike. Contributory injustice does not render
experiences equally unintelligible. In fact, those who experience contributory
injustice find that they can readily articulate their experiences. However, those
articulations generally fail to gain appropriate uptake according to the biased
hermeneutical resources utilized by the perceiver. In this way contributory in-
justice compromises the epistemic agency of a knower. Hence contributory
injustice, in this analysis, is defined as the circumstance where
an epistemic agent’s willful hermeneutical ignorance in maintaining
and utilizing structurally prejudiced hermeneutical resources thwarts
a knower’s ability to contribute to shared epistemic resources within a
given epistemic community by compromising her epistemic agency.
A notable exchange between Barbara Smith and Deborah Chay can serve
as a good example of contributory injustice. The Chay/Smith exchange dem-
onstrates a clash between a proponent of high theorizing and a grassroots in-
tellectual.40 The exchange began when Barbara Smith took offense at Deborah
Chay’s treatment of her now-classic essays “Toward a Black Feminist Criti-
cism” and “The Truth That Never Hurts.”41 Deborah Chay, in her article “Re-
reading Barbara Smith: Black Feminist Criticism and the Category of Experi-
ence,” attempts to identify “foundational” problems in Smith’s work that act
to undermine the legitimacy of black feminist criticism. Chay, in a perhaps
impressive feat in the application of guidelines for theorizing to avoid essen-
tialism, attempts to highlight a broad failure to “appropriately” theorize black
feminist criticism in Smith’s work.42 She levels this accusation by identifying
an inherent essentialism in Smith’s stance concerning the identities of black
feminist critics and an untenable reliance upon a “representation represents
reality” theoretical foundation.43 Smith, allowed to respond to Chay’s analysis,
promptly rejects these criticisms due to the privileging of theory and theo-
rizing that underwrites them. Chay, who concludes her paper by gesturing
to the ineffective theoretical basis of Smith’s two articles, certainly privileges
theory.44 As a result Smith bluntly explains that Chay simply “doesn’t get”
her work, due in part to Chay’s overreliance on theory and her academic ap-
proach to black feminist thought.45
Smith and Chay rely on different sets of collective hermeneutical resources.
For Smith, viewing and assessing her work according to the dictates of “high
theory” distorts her efforts, intentions, and methods in an attempt to elimi-
nate the importance of Smith’s contribution to black feminist thought. Rather
than engaging the content of Chay’s text, Smith examines the hermeneuti-
cal resources that Chay uses to judge her work and finds them wanting. She
writes, “Even though you have obviously examined these two articles [‘To-
ward a Black Feminist Criticism’ and ‘The Truth That Never Hurts’] inten-
sively, your assumptions about what I intended to do and your understand-
ing of what I actually wrote are completely erroneous. You make dozens of
points that are based upon inaccurate suppositions.”46 Smith takes Chay to
task for (1) not having done the historical legwork necessary to understand
the conditions under which Smith’s initial essay was published—that is, for a
magazine aimed at reaching a wider audience; (2) not attending to temporal
considerations—that is, Smith’s essay was written in 1977, before the privileg-
ing of theory became popular; and, finally, (3) not being a fair enough critic
to consider that these contextual factors should influence the criteria accord-
ing to which her work should be judged.47 Smith effectively charges Chay with
exhibiting willful hermeneutical ignorance that maps onto her epistemically
culpable failure to judge Smith’s essays fairly. For Smith, Chay’s employment
of hermeneutical resources incompatible with Smith’s own causes her to de-
liberately distort the meaning of her text.
In the foreword to Wild Women in the Whirlwind, an anthology aimed
at showcasing literary criticism of black women about black women, Audre
Lorde indicates that this kind of distortion hinders the long-lasting contribu-
tions of black women to “dominant” collective hermeneutical resources. She
writes: “It’s not that we haven’t always been here, since there was a here. It is
that the letters of our names have been scrambled when they were not to-
tally erased, and our fingerprints upon the handles of history have been called
the random brushings of birds. . . . Invisible words.”48 Lorde gestures, here, to
three mechanics of exclusion for black women’s lives, words, and work. They
include: (1) scrambling or distorting, (2) erasure, and (3) disregard. Smith ac-
cuses Chay of scrambling her words, thereby attempting to render her work
invisible. Invisible here does not mean unspoken or, as is the case with her-
meneutical injustice, without conceptualization. Rather, according to Smith,
Chay’s treatment of her words scrambles them and, if taken seriously, threat-
ens effectively to lessen Smith’s contribution to black feminist scholarship
and literary criticism.49 Accordingly, Smith accuses Chay of using biased in-
terpretative methods that distort her position by virtue of a willful herme-
neutical ignorance. In short, Smith accuses Chay of perpetrating contributory
injustice.
In her response to Smith’s reaction essay, Chay makes a couple of impor-
tant concessions to Smith concerning the difference between political orga-
nizing and academic work. However, her reply ends with a staunch defense of
the importance of being critical in an academic setting for the sake of social
transformation.50 Perhaps Chay’s reply to Smith’s accusation of contributory
injustice is most telling. The belief that the point of Smith’s reply was to deny
the importance of being critical in academia speaks to Chay’s inability to see
that it is her own hermeneutical resources that are at issue, not the right to
be critical or even academia itself. In fact, a literary critic herself, Smith most
likely holds a similar view of the importance of criticism for social transfor-
mation. Chay, however, fails to detect Smith’s shift to questioning the her-
meneutical resources utilized by Chay to distort Smith’s position and instead
reads Smith’s response implausibly as targeting the legitimacy of academic lit-
erary criticism.
A cursory examination will uncover that Chay, if guilty of epistemic injus-
tice, is not guilty of perpetuating Fricker’s versions of epistemic injustice.51
Chay extends both credibility to Smith and, as her analysis and follow-up
demonstrate, a great deal of academic respect. She takes Smith’s work very
seriously. Also, the exchange between Smith and Chay is not characterized by
a shared gap in collective hermeneutical resources. There are, however, gaps.
Smith seeks to highlight gaps in Chay’s hermeneutical resources, which influ-
ences her approach to Smith’s writings; that is, the gaps that result from privi-
leging theory. The scrambled account offered by Chay, however, is not only
a problem of biased hermeneutical resources. According to Smith, Chay also
demonstrates willful hermeneutical ignorance in relying upon the faulty re-
sources she employs. Both biased hermeneutical resources and the ignorance
of the epistemic agent in utilizing these resources cause contributory injustice.
Addressing contributory injustice is difficult but not impossible. It requires
third-order changes. A third-order change requires perceivers to be aware of
a range of differing sets of hermeneutical resources in order to be capable
of shifting resources appropriately.52 Where a second-order change involves
altering a single set of shared hermeneutical resources, a third-order change
requires the ability to shift hermeneutical resources, which requires fluency in
differing hermeneutical resources. One could say that addressing contribu-
tory injustice demands a kind of “world”-traveling.53 As Mariana Ortega ex-
plains, in her article “Being Lovingly, Knowingly Ignorant”:
“World”-traveling has to do with actual experience; it requires a tre-
mendous commitment to practice: to actually engage in activities where
one will experience what others experience; to deal with flesh and blood
people not just their theoretical construction; to learn people’s language
in order to understand them better not to use it against them; to really
listen to people’s interpretations however different they are from one’s
own; and to see people as worthy of respect rather than helpless beings
that require help.54
The demands of “world”-traveling, according to Ortega, require that we
come to appreciate genuine differences, of which alternative hermeneutical
resources are an example. However, this is not easy. Many sets of hermeneuti-
cal resources, particularly those following from resistance discourses, are very
difficult to access. One’s motives must be assessed, an epistemic community
willing to apprentice the perceiver must be located, and a relationship of trust
must be built before one can even begin to learn a set of hermeneutical re-
sources that follow from a given resistant epistemological position. The extent
of the trust required here cannot be underestimated. Third-order changes and
the kinds of engagements necessary to affect them have been compared with
experiences of the mystical. As Bartunek and Moch explain, in a third-order
change “a person must be aware of experience that cannot be contained or
represented by any conceptual scheme (at their avail), and must be exposed to
a form of communication that is not simply analogical, but that exposes the
person to transconceptual reality that provides the ground for conceptual hu-
man understanding.”55
This kind of communication requires a kind of embodied engagement that
extends beyond conversation and dialogue.56 Even if the space for transcon-
ceptual communication has been opened, which is by no means easy, as men-
tioned earlier, it could literally take decades to become truly fluent in an alter-
native set of hermeneutical resources. It is the high demands that addressing
contributory injustice places on a perceiver that render it a form of epistemic
bad luck according to Fricker’s account of epistemic injustice.
identifying the pervasiveness of epistemic oppression

There are, of course, limitations of the order-of-change approach to differen-
tiating different forms of epistemic injustice. Utilizing a first-, second-, and
third-order change heuristic runs the risk of implying that one can address a
third-order epistemic injustice without addressing relevant changes for first-
order epistemic injustice. Recent reviews of Fricker’s book rightly reject the
idea that individual and structural forms of epistemic injustice can be ad-
dressed in isolation.57 Though I introduce the kinds of changes each form of
epistemic injustice minimally demands, those changes cannot be genuinely
separated except in theory. That is to say, a conceptual revolution (second-
order change) may require the ability to confer credibility accurately (first-or-
der change). In like fashion, to be capable of shifting among collective sets of
hermeneutical resources (third-order change), one may need to be capable of
effecting and recognizing conceptual revolutions. Further, as was suggested,
the amount of trust necessary for a third-order change with respect to acquir-
ing and utilizing alternative hermeneutical resources requires that one be able
to confer credibility well with respect to those resources. The interrelations
among these “orders” of changes cannot be neatly mapped. And yet, though
shifting hermeneutical resources, effecting conceptual revolutions, and con-
ferring credibility accurately require related abilities and circumstances, they
also require the cultivation of unrelated abilities and circumstances. Shifting
hermeneutical resources will require more, in terms of demands on our epis-
temic conduct, than accurate credibility or conceptual revolutions. Though
they all require a kind of diligence with respect to epistemic fairness, I under-
stand the three forms of epistemic injustice outlined here to be distinct due to
the fact that addressing one will not automatically address the others. Unless
one attends to the demands of each form specifically, one runs the risk of per-
petrating epistemic oppression.
This reality, that different forms of epistemic injustice have different de-
mands to address, is what makes epistemic oppression so difficult to avoid.
Epistemic oppression, again, is primarily characterized by detrimental exclu-
sions from epistemic affairs. Whether concerning hermeneutical resources or
discourse on an important matter of social policy, epistemic oppression con-
cerns routine and harmful exclusions from some domain of knowledge pro-
duction. All the forms of epistemic injustice introduced here involve some form
of pervasive, harmful epistemic exclusion. As such, they are all species of epis-
temic oppression. The different demands to address the different forms of epis-
temic injustice actually indicate that epistemic oppression is a multifaceted op-
pression that cannot be addressed by any one particular countermeasure. For
example, in the Smith/Chay exchange Chay is to be commended for seriously
considering black feminist writings. She is also to be commended for pursuing a
kind of conceptual revolution with her work. Unfortunately, she may have been
overzealous in her application of an ill-fitting set of hermeneutical resources.58
One can believe that they have avoided harmful epistemic exclusions of some
forms of epistemic oppression only to find out that one has utterly failed in
avoiding others. This reality marks the pervasiveness of epistemic oppression.
“ innocent errors ” and epistemic injustice
Epistemic injustice, according to Fricker, cannot be cast so that it becomes
too easy to commit. In accordance with this inclination Fricker attempts to
identify cases of epistemic harm that appear as if they are cases of epistemic
injustice but are actually cases of epistemic bad luck. Though Fricker offers
insightful accounts of two forms of epistemic injustice, her understanding of
epistemic injustice itself, particularly as it relates to epistemic bad luck, serves
to foreclose the possibility of identifying contributory injustice as an epis-
temic injustice. That foreclosure begins with the inclination to believe that
epistemic injustice cannot be conceptualized so that it is too easy to com-
mit. The reality is that epistemic injustice is very easy to commit. In fact, it is
extraordinarily difficult to avoid it. By not recognizing the pervasiveness of
epistemic injustice and, by extension, epistemic oppression, Fricker concep-
tualizes epistemic injustice according to a closed system that itself perpetrates
contributory injustice.
In order to demonstrate this claim, I will briefly first outline Fricker’s ac-
count of the concept of epistemic bad luck. Second, I will turn to highlight-
ing how examples of contributory injustice can be seen as particularly “poi-
gnant” cases of epistemic bad luck due to the high demands for addressing
such injustice. Ultimately, Fricker’s account runs the risk of propagating epis-
temic oppression, in the form of contributory injustice, due not to her forms
of epistemic injustice per se, but to her utilizing a closed conceptual structure
when demarcating the concept of epistemic injustice itself.
Epistemic Injustice and Epistemic Bad Luck

According to Fricker, epistemic injustice seems to have at least three features.
Epistemic injustice (1) is nonaccidental (broadly construed), (2) produces
epistemic inertia, and (3) causes epistemic harm to knowers. Nonaccidental
refers to the fact that both of Fricker’s forms of epistemic injustice can be
traced to some intentionality with respect to the epistemic misconduct of a
perceiver, that is, bad affective investment or hermeneutical marginalization.
A bad affective investment is not an accident, even if it can be nonculpable,
according to Fricker. In like fashion hermeneutical marginalization that fol-
lows from a historical precedence is also not an accident. These nonaccidental
features of epistemic injustice produce prejudices, individual and structural,
that lead to a kind of epistemic inertia that is difficult to halt. This inertia, or
resistance to change, produces harm to one’s capacity as a knower.
By contrast, cases of epistemic harm to knowers that result from “inno-
cent errors” do not constitute epistemic injustice for Fricker, but represent
instances of epistemic bad luck. She offers two forms of epistemic bad luck:
(1) circumstantial epistemic bad luck that resembles testimonial injustice and
(2) circumstantial epistemic bad luck that resembles hermeneutical injustice.
Both forms of epistemic bad luck share at least two features. Epistemic bad
luck (1) is typically accidental or historically incidental and (2) causes harm
to knowers. Fricker never explicitly offers these criteria for either epistemic
injustice or epistemic bad luck, but they emerge from her attempt to juxta-
pose epistemic injustice with corresponding versions of epistemic bad luck.
Because contributory injustice has both agential and structural catalysts, in
order for it to be cast as a form of epistemic bad luck, it will need to be shown
to fit both of Fricker’s forms of epistemic bad luck.
Circumstantial epistemic bad luck with respect to testimonial injustice is
presented according to what Ishani Maitra, in her essay “The Nature of Epis-
temic Injustice,” calls a “continuity argument.”59 Fricker offers the examples of
(1) an extremely shy testifier whose failure to meet the eyes of his interlocutor
and self-conscious pauses are taken to indicate a general insincerity; (2) an
“honest second-hand car salesman” who is taken for being dishonest by virtue
of his profession; and 3) a habitual liar who is disbelieved when she is telling
the truth due to being a confirmed liar.60 Fricker claims that because these
examples are a result of generally reliable stereotypes, they do not represent
cases of epistemic injustice, but rather instances of circumstantial epistemic
bad luck. In the three cases mentioned Fricker explains:
The hearer has not put a foot wrong—she has made a credibility judg-
ment that is in line with the evidence, yet, as bad luck would have it, the
case proves an exception to the rule. All three examples are cases of in-
nocent error on the part of the hearer: no epistemic culpability, and no
ethical culpability.61
Relying upon a generally reliable stereotype serves to render one’s judgments
innocent and one’s perceptions appropriate for Fricker, even if they result in
epistemic harm. One may already begin to detect the danger this idea engen-
ders in rendering contributory injustice as a form of epistemic bad luck.
In contributory injustice an epistemic agent, as a result of willful herme-
neutical ignorance, obscures or distorts genuine epistemic differences through
the use of a different, incompatible set of hermeneutical resources. To the
epistemic agent utilizing biased hermeneutical resources, the prejudgments
being relied upon are perfectly reliable. In fact, within biased hermeneutical
resources the distortions indicative of contributory injustice are perfectly rea-
sonable, and if asked to defend her judgments, an agent perpetrating con-
tributory injustice would claim that she had not “put a foot wrong.” And, in
a sense, this would be true, if we were to focus solely on the reliability of the
stereotypes operative in the judgment. The perpetrator of contributory injus-
tice holds a host of reliable stereotypes that will be the catalyst for contribu-
tory injustice. Maitra offers an example that illustrates this point. Suppose,
she writes, that
the speaker is a victim of a crime—say a rape victim—and the hearer
is a police officer to whom she is reporting her ordeal. Even granting
that the stereotype here is genuinely reliable and nonprejudical, if this
police officer dismisses the victim merely because of her shifty manner,
without making any further effort to check whether she is really lying,
he (intuitively speaking) seems to commit a wrong against the victim.62
I agree with Maitra here. A wrong is committed in this example. Stereotypes
that read the behavior of rape victims as shifty and untrustworthy are part of
biased hermeneutical resources that, at the very least, cause epistemic harm.
To maintain them, even though they are generally reliable in other contexts, is
problematic and a catalyst for contributory injustice.
Now, one can defend Fricker’s account by saying, in the case of the po-
lice officer, that he is obviously “putting a foot wrong.” But how so? The po-
lice officer is undoubtedly making an error. With respect to victims of sexual
violence a stereotype connecting shifty behavior to a lack of trustworthiness
is not apt or reliable. However, Fricker claims that this is generally a reliable
stereotype, and applying it means that one is letting one’s judgment fit the
evidence. In talking of applying a reliable stereotype, Fricker says nothing of
applying the stereotype where it is apt. In this case the stereotype, though reli-
able, does not provide the appropriate conceptual frame with which to under-
stand the testimony of a victim of sexual violence, and as a result the police
officer utilizes ill-fitting hermeneutical resources. According to Fricker, this
would amount to an innocent error and thereby indicate a case of epistemic
bad luck.63 On my account the victim of sexual violence experiences contribu-
tory injustice at the hands of the police officer.
Fricker also offers an account of circumstantial epistemic bad luck that re-
sembles hermeneutical injustice. She gives the example of “someone [who]
has a medical condition affecting their social behavior at a historical moment
at which that condition is misunderstood and largely undiagnosed.”64 The rel-
atively little information known about the condition causes a hermeneutical
lacuna that is similar to the hermeneutical lacuna identified with respect to
the experience of sexual harassment. However, for Fricker, though the person
with the medical condition may experience a “hermeneutical disadvantage
that is, while collective, especially damaging to them in particular,” such a cir-
cumstance is not epistemic injustice. It is an example of “circumstantial epis-
temic bad luck.”65 The explanation as to why this is a case of circumstantial
epistemic bad luck tracks the idea that the person suffering from the medi-
cal condition, it is presumed, does not also suffer from hermeneutical mar-
ginalization, but rather was born in an unfortunate time. That is to say, the
relatively little-known medical condition in question is obscured due to an
accident of history, whereas those who suffer hermeneutical lacunae due to
marginalization suffer from a nonaccidental historical circumstance. Without
being able to establish historical patterns of hermeneutical marginalization,
one cannot be said to suffer from hermeneutical injustice and, by extension,
epistemic injustice.66 It is unclear precisely what counts as a historical prec-
edent for hermeneutical marginalization. Fricker offers the example of gen-
der-based marginalization and the ways that women, specifically, have been
historically hermeneutically marginalized.67
The person suffering from the unexplored medical ailment may not suffer
hermeneutical injustice, on Fricker’s account, but he may suffer contributory
injustice. It is entirely plausible that a person who suffers from a medical ail-
ment about which knowledge is underdeveloped is very much aware of the
symptoms and problems he and, possibly, others like him suffer. As Pohlhaus
explains:
When there is a tension between the world of experience and the re-
sources that we use to make sense of our experiences, for example, when
the proper language for describing an experience appears to be missing,
or when our current concepts fail to track reoccurring patterns, we reca-
librate our epistemic resources and/or create new ones until the tension
between our resources and the world is alleviated.68
To imagine that the person with the underresearched medical ailment re-
mains in the same state of unawareness as general society is, generally, absurd.
Alternative hermeneutical resources often arise in response to circumstances
such as these. Though dominant hermeneutical resources may remain behind
on conceptualizing his ailment, his knowledge may not be lagging at all, in
terms of the ability to render it intelligible. What is barred, then, is gaining the
appropriate uptake by those utilizing dominant hermeneutical resources as
opposed to the alternative resources he and others in his same position have
developed. This failure to gain uptake so as to influence dominant herme-
neutical resources is a form of epistemic injustice on my account—contribu-
tory injustice. Yet the failure of the ailing man’s knowledge to gain uptake, for
Fricker, may be a particularly poignant case of epistemic bad luck due to his
inability to establish a historical precedence of hermeneutical marginalization
and not an epistemic injustice at all.69
Neither stories about fitting evidence and innocent errors nor hermeneuti-
cal marginalizations are relevant to establishing the existence of contributory
injustice. If epistemic injustice is cast according to these lines, then contribu-
tory injustice is a particularly pervasive form of epistemic bad luck. I am cer-
tain this is not an effect Fricker intended. However, it is an unfortunate im-
plication of the account she provides. Fricker’s attempt to delimit epistemic
injustice with an account of epistemic bad luck is the culprit here. By nar-
rowing epistemic injustice to acceptable permutations of the forms she out-
lines, Fricker creates a conceptual frame that, if taken seriously, would serve to
exclude pervasive forms of epistemic injustice, like contributory injustice. As
such, Fricker creates a closed conceptual structure that identifies all forms of
epistemic injustice that do not fit the form she outlines as epistemic bad luck.
This is more than unfortunate. Within sets of hermeneutical resources that
take Fricker’s work seriously, contributory injustice will remain epistemically
excluded and obscured.70 In short, the limitations Fricker places on the con-
cept of epistemic injustice, if allowed to shape hermeneutical resources, will
perpetrate epistemic oppression.
Open and Closed Conceptual Structures

What does not fall between the vectors established by Fricker’s account of
epistemic injustice falls into the realm of epistemic bad luck. The need to in-
dicate the outside of epistemic injustice prompts Fricker to offer an account
of epistemic injustice that is bordered by epistemic bad luck, thereby creating
a closed conceptual system where similar kinds of epistemic harm are per-
petrated by epistemic bad luck or epistemic injustice. The desire to delimit
epistemic injustice, as a form of epistemic oppression, creates problems for
Fricker’s account that could have been easily avoided. It prompts responses
like those of Ishani Maitra and Rebecca Mason who rightly, given the closed
nature of Fricker’s concept of epistemic injustice, feel the need to either ex-
pand or contract Fricker’s forms of epistemic injustice so that they can serve
as catchall forms of epistemic injustice. A catchall theory of epistemic injus-
tice is an unrealistic expectation. Epistemic oppression is simply too perva-
sive. Epistemic exclusions in the form of epistemic injustice that hinders so-
cial knowledge may be impossible to fully diagnose. By looking at only three
levels of epistemic injustice, I have indicated that addressing and identifying
epistemic injustice will be far more challenging than any one account can ac-
commodate. The call for open conceptual structures is a call for an active real-
ization of this reality that is built into the very structure of our inquiries into
epistemic oppression. One has to remain constantly aware that there is always
more to say and remain sensitive to the inevitability of damaging oversights.
An open conceptual structure is a simple thing. The simple use of a well-
placed indefinite article, a, can take one very far. An a, as opposed to the defi-
nite article the, along with the corresponding shift in perspective that makes
an indefinite article appropriate, may be all it takes to create an open-ended
conceptual structure. What Fricker offers is an account of epistemic injustice.
This indicates that there are strengths and limits to her account. Instead of
taking her to task about what she overlooks or what her account cannot track,
we can simply acknowledge the strengths and limitations of her position and
move on to offer another theory of epistemic injustice that addresses the limi-
tations of her account. Accounts of epistemic injustice, then, can stand side by
side, useful for different kinds of analyses in possibly compatible and incom-
patible sets of hermeneutical resources.
If this seems like an easy fix, it is not. It demands a conscious author capa-
ble of detecting points in her theory that need to be open ended and readers
capable of attending to the limits and scope of the position(s) offered. A ca-
pable author and a capable reader allow for engagement that maintains open-
ness to further insight and examinations, which can help reduce epistemic
oppression. Epistemic exclusions become addressable without tearing down
positions whose limitations can be used to shore up those exclusions. And a
simple, well-placed set of indefinite articles delegitimizes using theories for
hard and fast foreclosures that entail absolute exclusions. An indefinite article
and the conceptual structures required to make its deployment appropriate
can offer positions that signify without absolute foreclosure, but it is up to the
author who deploys indefinite articles and the audience who relies upon them
to maintain the openness inherent in the structure. Again, avoiding epistemic
oppression entirely may be impossible. However, effective open conceptual
structures can aid in reducing the perpetuation of epistemic oppression. That
is to say, they can help us toward the goal of never leaving our pen lying in
someone else’s blood.71
notes
1. Audre Lorde, “To the Poet Who Happens to Be Black and the Black Poet Who
Happens to Be a Woman,” in The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde (New York: Norton,
2000), 360. These lines are reprinted here by permission of the publisher, W. W. Nor-
ton & Company, Inc.
2. This definition of epistemic exclusion relies heavily on Irene Omolola’s use of the
term. See Irene Omolola Adadevoh, “Women’s Epistemic Exclusion and the Question
of Equitable and Sustainable Educational Empowerment,” Philica (2011): 1–9 (http://
www.philica.com/display_article.php?article_id=227). For a similar theory of epis-
temic oppression see Miranda Fricker, “Epistemic Oppression and Epistemic Privi-
lege,” Canadian Jounral of Philosophy 25 (1998): 191–209.
3. This definition is influenced by Cynthia Townley’s definition of agency. See
Cynthia Townley, “Trust and the Curse of Cassandra (an Exploration of the Value of
Trust),” Philosophy and the Contemporary World 10, no. 2 (2003): 109–10.
4. Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2007).
5. Rae Langton, “Feminism in Epistemology: Exclusion and Objectification,” in The
Cambridge Companion to Feminism in Philosophy, ed. Miranda Fricker and Jennifer
Hornsby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 129.
6. Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, 1.
8. Patricia Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights: A Diary of a Law Professor
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 42.
9. Williams, Alchemy of Race and Rights, 242n5 (emphasis added).
10. Williams, Alchemy of Race and Rights, 44–51. Williams is not the only scholar
to identify an “inverted epistemology” that follows from delusions of neutrality. See
also Charles W. Mills, “‘Ideal Theory’ as Ideology,” Hypatia 20, no. 3 (2005): 165–84;
Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999); Charles
W. Mills, “White Ignorance,” in Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, ed. Shannon Sul-
livan and Nancy Tuana (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007).
11. For “knowing and not wanting to know” see Nancy Tuana, “The Speculum of
Ignorance: The Women’s Health Movement and Epistemologies of Ignorance,” Hypa-
tia 21, no. 3 (2006): 10.
13. Williams, Alchemy of Race and Rights, 50–51.
14. Jean M. Bartunek and Michael K. Moch, “First-Order, Second-Order, and
Third-Order Change and Organization Development Interventions: A Cognitive Ap-
proach,” Journal of Applied Behavioral Science 23, no. 4 (1987): 487.
15. Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, 91–98.
17. Addressing testimonial injustice need not be conceived solely according to in-
dividual changes or, in Fricker’s case, individual virtues. As Rae Langton suggests in
her review of Epistemic Injustice, broad structural changes may be required to address
testimonial injustice. For example, the ways tests are administered and graded may
need to be changed as a way to train a testimonial virtue, and this, for Langton, is a
structural change, not an individualistic one. See Rae Langton, “Review of Epistemic
Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing,” Hypatia 25, no. 2 (2010): 463. Regardless
of whether one locates necessary corrective actions at the individual or the structural
level, the kind of changes needed are first-level changes since the value of credibility is
not challenged.
18. Kate Walsh, “Interpreting the Impact of Culture on Structure,” Journal of Ap-
plied Behavioral Science 40, no. 3 (2004): 306.
19. Bartunek and Moch, “First-Order,” 484.
21. Gaile Pohlhaus, “Relational Knowing and Epistemic Injustice: Toward a Theory
of Willful Hermaneutical Ignorance,” Hypatia (2011): 4.
22. Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, 153 (emphasis in original).
23. Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, 155 (emphasis in original).
24. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and
the Poltiics of Empowerment, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2000). For similar discus-
sions see also Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a
History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999); Hazel
Carby, “White Woman Listen! Black Feminism and the Boundaries of Sisterhood,” in
The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain, ed. The Centre for Contem-
prary Cultural Studies (London: Hutchinson, 1982); Williams, Alchemy of Race and
Rights.
25. Susan Brownmiller, In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (New York: Dial Press,
1990), qtd. in Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, 150.
26. Brownmiller, In Our Time, qtd. in Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, 150.
29. In outlining hermeneutical resources, Fricker may appear to be assuming that
only one prevailing set of hermeneutical resources exists for social discernment. This
assumption, of course, is false. Much has been made of alternative epistemologies and
counterdiscourses, which serve to produce differing hermeneutical resources. How-
ever, the existence of alternative hermeneutical resources does not in itself challenge
Fricker’s account of hermeneutical injustice. What is required for hermeneutical in-
justice is a lacuna caused by hermeneutical marginalization within the hermeneutical
resources upon which one relies. To establish hermeneutical injustice, one need only
point to lacunas in operative hermeneutical resources that result from marginaliza-
tion, regardless of how many sets of collective hermeneutical resources are in opera-
tion. I return to this point that there exist multiple sets of hermeneutical resources. In
outlining contributory injustice, I illustrate a form of epistemic injustice that is caused
by the misuse of a given set of hermeneutical resources.
31. Langton, “Review,” 460, 63.
35. Langton, “Review,” 463.
36. For good recent essays making this point see Rebecca Mason, “Two Kinds of
Unknowing,” Hypatia 26, no. 2 (2011); Pohlhaus, “Relational Knowing.” See also Col-
lins, Black Feminist Thought; Hortense Spillers, “Interstises: A Small Drama of Words,”
in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Sexuality, ed. Carol Vance (Boston: Routlegde,
1984), 84; James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 4; Maria Lugones, “Multiculturalism and
Publicity,” Hypatia 15, no. 5 (2000): 175–78.
37. For a now-classic essay illustrating this point see, among others, Gayatri Spivak,
“Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nel-
son and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998).
38. Kristie Dotson, “Tracking Epistemic Violence, Tracking Practices of Silencing,”
Hypatia 26, no. 2 (2011): 248.
39. Pohlhaus, “Relational Knowing, 15.”
40. Barbara Smith, “Reply to Deborah Chay,” New Literary History 24, no. 3 (1993):
654–55.
41. Barbara Smith, “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” in Black Feminist Cultural
Criticism, ed. Jacqueline Bobo (Malden: Blackwell 2001); Barbara Smith, “Truth That
Never Hurts: Black Lesbians in Fiction in the 1980s,” in Wild Women in the Whirlwind:
Afra-American Culture and the Contemporary Literary Renaissance, ed. Joanne Braxton
and Andree McLaughlin (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990).
42. Farah Jasmine Griffin, “That the Mothers May Soar and the Daughters May
Know Their Names: A Retrospective of Black Feminist Literary Criticism,” Signs: Jour-
nal of Women in Culture and Society 32, no. 2 (2007): 492.
43. Deborah G. Chay, “Rereading Barbara Smith: Black Feminist Criticism and the
Category of Experience,” New Literary History 24, no. 3 (1993): 648–49.
44. Chay, “Rereading Barbara Smith,” 648–49.
45. Smith, “Reply to Deborah Chay,” 653.
46. Smith, “Reply to Deborah Chay,” 653.
47. Smith, “Reply to Deborah Chay,” 654–56.
48. Audre Lorde, “Foreword,” in Braxton and McLaughlin, Wild Women in the
Whirlwind, xi.
49. It is important to note that Chay, in her response to Smith, identifies part of
Smith’s rejection of her analysis. She makes it clear that it was never her intention to
devalue Smith’s work. Chay writes, “Barbara Smith’s work remains valuable for many
of us who are concerned with questions of race, gender, and power in the 1990s.” See
Deborah G. Chay, “Deborah Chay’s Reply,” New Literary History 24, no. 3 (1993): 656.
50. Chay, “Rereading Barbara Smith,” 656.
51. I have only established the accusation of contributory injustice, not the exis-
tence of it in Chay’s essay. I use the Smith/Chay exchange here not to personally ac-
cuse Chay of perpetuating contributory injustice, but to offer an example that high-
lights the nature of contributory injustice.
52. Bartunek and Moch, “First-Order,” 486, 88.
53. Maria Lugones, “Playfulness, ‘World’-Travelling, and Loving Perception,” Hypa-
tia 2, no. 2 (1987): 3–19. Mariana Ortega, who identifies a similar phenomenon to con-
tributory injustice in her article “Being Lovingly, Knowingly Ignorant,” advocates for
“world-traveling” to address distortions of and disregard for the lives and work of
women of color work by lovingly knowingly ignorant white feminist scholars. See
Mariana Ortega, “Being Lovingly, Knowingly Ignorant: White Feminism and Women
of Color,” Hypatia 21, no. 3 (2006): 69.
54. Ortega, “Being Lovingly, Knowingly Ignorant,” 69.
55. Jean M. Bartunek and Michael K. Moch, “Third-Order Organizational Change
and the Western Mystical Tradition,” Journal of Organizational Change Management 7,
no. 1 (1994): 27–28.
56. For other articles that advocate for change that requires more than dialogic en-
gagement, see Maria Lugones and Elizabeth V. Spelman, “Have We Got a Theory for
You! Feminist Theory, Cultural Imperialism, and the Demand for ‘the Woman’s Voice,’”
Women’s Studies International Forum 6, no. 6 (1983): 573–81; Ortega, “Being Lovingly,
Knowingly Ignorant”; Pohlhaus, “Relational Knowing”; Lugones, “Playfulness.”
57. Both Rae Langton and Ishani Maitra make the point that testimonial and her-
meneutical injustice cannot be easily separated according to individual and structural
elements, but rather require a consideration of structural and individual concerns. See
Ishani Maitra, “The Nature of Epistemic Injustice,” Philosophical Books 51, no. 4 (2010);
Langton, “Review.”
58. Some might argue that in the Chay/Smith exchange neither interlocutor actu-
ally gives the appropriate amount of credibility to the other and that neither is gen-
uinely pursuing a conceptual revolution, but, rather, that both are in the throes of
“boomerang perception.” For positions that imply this critique see Maria Lugones,
Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions (Lanham:
Rowman and Littlefield, 2003); Elizabeth Spelman, Inessential Woman (Boston: Bea-
con, 1988), 12. This interpretation is entirely likely, but it does not remove the primary
insight here. Addressing epistemic oppression, in all of its forms, is extraordinarily
difficult.
59. Maitra, “Nature of Epistemic Injustice,” 202.
62. Maitra, “Nature of Epistemic Injustice,” 203.
63. This interpretation of Fricker’s account of epistemic bad luck is only possible
due to the vagueness that surrounds the concept in her book. It is unclear what an
“innocent error” amounts to, and it is equally unclear to what “evidence fits the judg-
ment” refers. See Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, 41–43.
67. Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, 152. Nancy Tuana gives examples of hermeneutical
lacunas concerning medical conditions of women due to hermeneutical marginaliza-
tion. See Tuana, “Speculum of Ignorance”; Nancy Tuana, “Coming to Understand: Or-
gasm and the Epistemology of Ignorance,” Hypatia 19, no. 1 (2004).
68. Pohlhaus, “Relational Knowing.”
69. For the sake of this paper I grant Fricker the possibility that hermeneutical
marginalization is always historical, though I am suspicious of this criterion.
70. It is important to note that I am not advocating that Fricker’s account will ex-
tend to all sets of hermeneutical resources and somehow taint them all. Such a posi-
tion is absurd and puts far more importance than is reasonable on the effect of philo-
sophical texts. Fricker’s account of epistemic injustice is being offered as an example,
whereas if her text were to be allowed to affect a set of collective hermeneutical re-
sources, it would have the effect of obscuring the existence of contributory injustice
and would, hence, perpetrate epistemic oppression.
71. Lorde, “To the Poet,” 360.

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Frontiers, Inc.

A Cautionary Tale: On Limiting Epistemic Oppression

I cannot recall the words of my first poem

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Dotson: Limiting Epistemic Oppression 25

First-Order Epistemic Injustice: Testimonial Injustice

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Third-Order Epistemic Injustice: Contributory Injustice

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identifying the pervasiveness of epistemic oppression

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Epistemic Injustice and Epistemic Bad Luck

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Open and Closed Conceptual Structures

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