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Epistemic Identities

Linda Martín Alcoff

Episteme / Volume 7 / Issue 02 / June 2010, pp 128 - 137

DOI: 10.3366/E1742360010000869, Published online: 03 January 2012

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S1742360000001489

How to cite this article:

Linda Martín Alcoff (2010). Epistemic Identities. Episteme, 7, pp 128-137 doi:10.3366/E1742360010000869

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 BOOK SYMPOSIUM:
MIRANDA FRICKER’S EPISTEMIC INJUSTICE:
POWER AND THE ETHICS OF KNOWING

LINDA MARTÍN ALCOFF

EPISTEMIC IDENTITIES

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the significant strengths of Fricker’s account, and then
develops the following questions. Can volitional epistemic practice correct
for non-volitional prejudices? How can we address the structural causes of
credibility-deflation? Are the motivations behind identity prejudice mostly other-
directed or self-directed? And does Fricker aim for neutrality vis-à-vis identity, in
which case her account conflicts with standpoint theory?

In the movie The Talented Mr. Ripley, a young man’s fiancée has good reason, as we
the viewers know, to suspect foul play when he turns up missing. Yet his father,
a Mr. Greenleaf, repudiates the young woman’s suspicions with a peremptory
dismissal of “female intuition” as being contrary to a clear assessment of “the
facts.” Greenleaf casts Marge, his son’s fiancée, as having an overly emotional
reaction to the disappearance, incapable of objective assessments, and, as a result,
unworthy of testimonial credibility, although as the father, he too has a strong
emotional attachment to the missing young man. With this example, Miranda
Fricker opens up an analysis of testimonial injustice.
In this splendid book, Fricker offers a comprehensive account of testimonial
injustice, which she defines primarily in relation to an arbitrary deflation of
credibility accorded a speaker on the basis of systematic identity prejudice, such as
the sexism Marge experiences at the hands of Mr. Greenleaf. She provides helpful
terms and distinctions to clarify when the withholding of credibility constitutes
injustice, how it operates systematically through identity prejudice, and how it
adversely affects knowers – both as hearers and as speakers – as well as the general
development of human knowledge. On her account, speakers who are wrongly
denied credibility are adversely affected in a very significant way because the
practice of speaking truthfully and authoritatively is a central feature of communal
recognition, but hearers are also adversely affected by having a foreshortened
128 E P I S T E M E 2010 DOI: 10.3366/E1742360010000869
 EPISTEMIC IDENTITIES
capacity to gain knowledge. Given how much of our knowledge is gained from
testimony in one form or another, and given that our capacity as reliable knowers
is a central feature of our status as human beings, injustice in the arena of testimony
is far-reaching indeed, retarding the values of equality and inclusiveness as well as
the capacity to develop reliably the effective skills of knowing. In fact, testimonial
injustice inflicts an interesting kind of hybrid harm, Fricker argues, with both ethical
and epistemic elements and ill effects.
Fricker develops the account of testimonial injustice in six chapters, and then
usefully develops the beginnings of an account of hermeneutical injustice in the
seventh chapter, defining the latter as occurring when persons or groups are unable
to participate in the formulation and construction of meanings. This suggests
that hermeneutic injustice actually occurs at a prior stage to testimonial injustice:
whereas testimonial injustice wrongly responds to speech, hermeneutical injustice
preempts speaking. Testimonial and hermeneutic injustice are in this way distinct
on her view, though they can be mutually supportive.
I admire this book tremendously, and will shortly explain some of its strengths,
but I will also raise some questions about assumptions built into Fricker’s account
of testimonial injustice that are passed over without enough exploration, and that
might open up new lines of inquiry. Then I will end with some comments on her
account of hermeneutic injustice. I begin with the overview.
Epistemologies of testimony fall into two broad groups: inferential and non-
inferential. The inferential camp takes testimony to be the grounds for an inference
one can make to justify one’s beliefs, thus providing indirect support. The non-
inferential camp takes testimony to confer justification directly. Strong inferential
accounts of testimony vastly reduce the scope of testimony’s role in the production
and circulation of knowledge since the hearer must find independent corroboration
before the testimony can contribute to justification. In essence, Fricker points
out, this asks for too much from hearers, as if we must establish independent
reasons for every claim we encounter through testimony before the testimony is
itself accepted. On the other hand, non-inferential accounts ask for too little from
hearers, as if we would be epistemically non-culpable if we were to take at face
value every claim we hear.
Fricker counters both of these positions and develops a third alternative through
making use of a phenomenological description of human communication. We
do not in general experience communication as a two-step process in which
we consciously filter and interpret every claim we hear; rather, she points out,
we generally communicate with others in a way that feels immediate and direct.
However, we can quickly shift from this default mode of relaxed receptiveness
to a doubtful, cautious attitude when some reason for doubt presents itself. This
indicates that what initially feels to be a direct and guileless importation of claims
is in fact a process in which low-level critical faculties remain operative and ready
to be operationalized if perception warrants it. Fricker quotes Coady on this point:
“reception is normally unreflective but is not thereby uncritical.” (2007, 70) In most
E P I S T E M E 2010 129
Linda Martín Alcoff
instances, reception becomes critical on the basis of how we size up the person who
is communicating with us; this is the source of our confidence in the testimony,
and it can become grounds for doubt.
Thus, the reception of testimony is something like a theory-laden perception,
or essentially an interpretation. It may indeed not feel like an interpretation simply
because some theories are so conventional and common that what we are doing
feels like simple perception. But theories are implicitly operating in reception, and
theories, as we know, are fallible. Fricker resists the idea that the theories operative
in reception can be rendered via a set of rules, or an algorithm; rather, it is like, she
says, a “sensibility” that is too complex with too many variable contexts for coding
into rules. However, one’s testimonial sensibility is rational, or potentially rational,
even when it is largely unreflective. Because it is the product of training through
experience, it can be retrained, and thus improved.
Given this general approach to testimony, Fricker introduces her specific
account of testimonial injustice. The withholding of credibility in and of itself
is not necessarily unjust, of course. Rather, injustice occurs when the credibility
we accord a speaker is deflated for specious reasons having to do with identity.
Fricker introduces two concepts having to do with identity to help flesh this out:
identity power and identity prejudice. She explains that “whenever there is an
operation of power that depends in some significant degree upon such shared
imaginative conceptions of social identity, then identity power is at work.” (14)
Identity power is the effect of the conceptualizations of certain identities, as well
as the effect of the social location, status, and position of certain identities. Identity
power can be used actively, for instance, to reject someone’s testimony and rely
exclusively on our own judgment, as Mr. Greenleaf does with Marge, or identity
power can operate passively without conscious agency, just by the fact that one’s
identity mobilizes the common social imaginary in certain ways. Fricker thus
argues that “identity power is an integral part of the mechanism of testimonial
exchange, because of the need for hearers to use social stereotypes as heuristics
in their spontaneous assessments of their interlocutor’s credibility.” (16–7) She
wants to maintain a neutral meaning for the concept of “stereotype,” so that it
means merely something like a generalization or a heuristic that can be innocuous,
at least in some cases. The term “identity prejudice” is what she uses to refer
to negative, unfounded assessments that are not only incorrect but resistant to
counterevidence. And systematic identity prejudices are those negative assessments
that track given subjects through many dimensions of their social activity and
interaction, from economic contexts to educational, political, and legal ones, which
in turn renders subjects who experience such systematic prejudice “susceptible to
other forms of injustice besides testimonial.” (155)
Fricker then discusses the idea of credibility deficits and credibility excesses,
which may be either individual or collective, and she discusses the ways in which
having a credibility excess may be a burden in some cases, not simply an advantage.
She argues mainly, however, that experiencing constant credibility deficits harms
130 E P I S T E M E 2010
 EPISTEMIC IDENTITIES
persons as knowers, in so far as they are recognized as having a basic capacity to
know, and since one’s status as knower is a “defining human capacity, an essential
attribute of personhood,” (59) credibility deficits disrespect the person as a human
being. This puts them, in effect, into a sub-category by excluding them from the
possibility of trustworthy conversation.
Such exclusions have cumulative effects: being denied credibility means that one
is precluded from developing one’s intellectual abilities. Doubt from others often
leads to self-doubt, hesitation, reticence to speak, and thus an inability to formulate
clearly one’s thoughts. Marge, in the example from The Talented Mr. Ripley, becomes
almost hysterical after her claims about her fiancé’s murder are persistently ignored,
thus confirming Mr. Greenleaf’s a priori judgment of her in the beginning. And
what he of course does not recognize is the role he himself has played in producing
her hysteria through his belittlement of her basic epistemic capacities with regard
to the most serious matter of his son’s disappearance.
Fricker points out that such situations in which a person’s capacities are
debilitated through constant interactions involving identity prejudice occur in
contexts of “everyday practices of well-intentioned hearers operating in a social-
imaginative atmosphere of residual prejudice.” (58) Thus Fricker intends to
convince us that we are likely harming others much more frequently than we might
imagine. In some cases, we may take a person’s word, but in an objectifying manner,
treating them as a source of raw information rather than a rational informant
capable of reasoned analysis (ch. 6). For example, we might trust them to tell us
what they can see from the top of the ladder, but not to interpret what it means. In
such cases we are treating the person as little more than an object-like measuring
instrument, without the rational capacity of interpretation and judgment that is
generally accorded to subjects. A lifetime of such treatment is debilitating indeed.
Testimonial injustice, she concludes, is a “form of injustice that can cause deep and
wide harm to a person’s psychology and practical life, and it is too often passed over
in silence.” (145) Her goal is not simply to make it more visible, but also to develop
an expanded account of the epistemic virtues that would counteract testimonial
injustice.
Most of the existing accounts of relational epistemic virtues, such as one
can find in Bernard Williams’s and Edward Craig’s work, center on virtues that
speakers should have, such as the virtues of accuracy and sincerity. And Williams
in particular gives a naturalistic motivation for the development of such virtues
given the critical need for human groups to have a division of epistemic labor,
which requires an extensive reliance on testimony. The need for speakers to
deliver testimony with sincerity and accuracy is required for survival on such
naturalistic accounts. But that same division of epistemic labor also requires the
development of virtues for the hearer of testimony. Given that testimonial injustice
most adversely affects speakers, to the point of debilitating their capacities, then
what needs development is an account of the virtue of hearers. To counteract
testimonial injustice, we need to develop virtues that would develop our reflexivity
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Linda Martín Alcoff
about identity power and identity prejudice, and we need to create mechanisms
by which we can neutralize the impact of prejudice in credibility judgments either
through correcting a deficit, maintaining neutrality when we would otherwise be
skeptical, or recognizing, and making adjustments for, the challenges some persons
may be facing when they are trying to articulate their claims.
These are all volitional practices, or ones we might consciously cultivate and
practice. And this raises the first question I would direct to Fricker’s account:
if identity prejudice operates via a collective imaginary, as she suggests, through
associated images and relatively unconscious connotations, can a successful
antidote operate entirely as a conscious practice? Will volitional reflexivity, in other
words, be sufficient to counteract a non-volitional prejudice?
Theory-laden perception, of the sort Fricker blames for identity prejudice,
operates much of the time below the level of conscious awareness, as the
Implicit Association Test and a host of other recent social psychology experi-
ments have demonstrated.1 Prejudice can operate quite effectively even when it
runs counter to a person’s own consciously held values and commitments, a fact
that the IA test brings home most forcefully by revealing the latent anti-black
prejudices of many black people who take the test. This suggests that developing
a virtue approach that operates in the volitional, conscious sphere will only be
able to provide a very partial antidote to testimonial injustice. We must be willing
to explore more mechanisms for redress, such as extensive educational reform,
more serious projects of affirmative action, and curricular mandates that would
help to correct the identity prejudices built up out of faulty narratives of history.
We also need to ask whether identity prejudice is merely the result of ignorance
or a deficient rationality, or whether there are non-rational processes at work
as well.
Related to this point, we need to ask how much responsibility we can accord
to identity prejudice itself for credibility deflation. The withholding of credibility is
indeed a systematic trend in market-based societies where there is an encroachment
of advertising culture – a culture that is structurally incapable of being sincere,
accurate, or truthful – in the public sphere. Fricker discusses a case of an exchange
with an atypically honest used car salesman, raising the question of whether he
has been wronged by his hearer when his atypically honest pitch is discredited.
Fricker concludes, plausibly, that the salesman has not been wronged, because the
conventions of the trade rightfully dissuade hearers from conferring credibility.
In effect, Fricker allows that structural background conditions generally preclude
either honesty or gullibility in such exchanges, circumventing the possibility of
authentic communication. But this invites more analysis because the form of
communicative practice one adopts in such encounters is far from atypical in
modern societies: it is not merely the purchase of a second-hand car that requires
skepticism as a matter of course, but every mercantile exchange of any sort in any
store or any encounter that involves communications sponsored by advertising
with the aim of sales, since such communication is often then edited for content
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by the needs of the larger pecuniary project. Sophisticated consumers, who
increasingly make up the general public, are becoming increasingly cynical toward
communication of all sorts, which also has infected political exchange in the public
sphere to such an extent that a voter who believes what a candidate or public office
holder says at face value is held up to ridicule for extreme naïveté.
Arguably, the normativity of strategic speech dominates most organizations
(educational or otherwise) in which we all work, resulting in a cautious attitude
toward the daily stream of communication by our co-workers, employees, or
bosses, who we know may be advancing a personal agenda, a departmental
agenda, or just socialized by the conventions of corporate-speak to frame events in
certain ways, edit their assessments, or retreat from critical assessment altogether.
University leaders who espouse new programs for the good of the students or
the faculty are rarely believed. Workspaces in general, as well as the socializing
activities connected to them, are spheres of communication in which strategic aims
and structural background conditions, often related to our economic livelihood,
routinely infect the exchange of thoughts and ideas.
My point here is not that Fricker should become Habermas, but that the
excellent work on testimony beginning to develop in analytic philosophy runs the
risk of irrelevance to real social life once again unless we find ways to address
the majority of communicative interactions in which sincerity and trustworthiness
are affected by the strategic designs of speech and overdetermined by economic
necessities. I don’t believe that academic philosophy, small as it is, provides a
refuge from these structural effects, since even in philosophy (especially in such
contexts as the panels at the Eastern APA where so many jobs are being pursued),
papers, commentaries, and question and answer sessions can become aggressive
and competitive displays of competence where livelihoods are at stake. Relying
on the identity prejudices of one’s audience can become an effective route to
persuasion, and thus career enhancement. Disassociating oneself from feminist
philosophy may, for example, have an important though perhaps unconscious
effect on search committee attitudes.2
In terms of psychological mechanisms that may inhibit communication, Fricker
rejects the concept of the social imaginary because she says it is too wedded to
psychoanalysis. This despite the fact that she, too, wants to move away from a
hyper-rationalist model that would disallow subliminal motivations to serve as
causes, if not reasons, for our attitudes toward others. I share her concern with
getting caught in the snares of psychoanalysis, which can become a closed set of
theoretical options and tends toward a pessimistic determinism. But there are more
mid-level models she might use that retain the possibility of conscious intervention.
One such example developed by a philosopher is Michèle LeDoeuff’s notion of the
social imaginary (1989, 2007). In LeDoeuff’s account, the social imaginary operates
in the public sphere, rather than locked away in an unreachable unconscious, and
it motivates questions as well as the interpretation of evidence and the acceptance
of hypotheses. LeDoeuff considers in some detail the reasons why assessments
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of women’s deficient reasoning and moral capacities were accepted throughout
the history of western philosophy by men who in regard to most other topics
held much better standards of empirical and analytical reasoning than those they
displayed in regard to the topic of women. She argues that the testimonial injustice
they displayed to the women in their lives was motivated not simply by their
faulty regard toward others but also by their overarching regard for themselves
and their social position. The desire to remain in a dominant position over others
often requires maintaining the illusion that our social or career success is totally
meritorious. The point is that self-perception, and not just other-perception, needs
to be involved in the account of how identity prejudices come to exist, and we
need to make use of concepts of the imagined self, or habit-body. I thought of this
especially in connection to the example of Mr. Greenleaf. Wouldn’t Mr. Greenleaf,
the father of the missing young man, have every reason in the world to seek out
the truth about his son’s disappearance? Well, not necessarily, if such a pursuit
could compromise his own inflated sense of himself and his superiority over most
others in his world. Mr. Greenleaf might well be motivated to avoid looking too
closely into his son’s disappearance if he fears, for example, that it might lead to
a disclosure of homosexuality or some other revelation that would affect his own
identity in the world. The epistemic motivations to correct for testimonial injustice,
of which Fricker adumbrates in convincing detail, do not, alas, trump all others.
I suspect that Fricker would agree with all the points I have raised, since these
really call for an expansion of her account and the need for other related work on
the topic rather than a disagreement with her claims.
A last point I want to raise in relation to testimonial injustice (before I turn
to hermeneutic injustice) concerns the ways that Fricker addresses identity in her
account. Identity figures in this book’s consideration of testimonial injustice as
either the ground of unearned privilege or the basis of undeserved demerit. What
drives her notion of justice and virtue in regard to identity considerations is the
aim of neutrality, that is, the aim of becoming inured to either unearned privilege
or undeserved demerit, where one might learn to correctly and fairly assess when
identity is truly relevant (because it confers a likely knowledge to the speaker),
and to ignore it in all other cases. The kinds of cases Fricker explores in which
identity merit might be earned is restricted to experience fairly narrowly conceived.
Social position in and of itself on her account does not provide general epistemic
resources of any sort. But what if identity is not merely the source of unearned merit
or undeserved demerit, but a general epistemic resource – not simply because one
is in a momentary position to see something I cannot, but because one is structurally
positioned in society to tend to see what I cannot? I am thinking of the kinds of
arguments that have been made that those low down in social status may have some
resources useful for a critique of social conventions, or those engaged in physical
labor may have resources for understanding the real cost of various social projects,
such as war or capital accumulation, or that women and/or minority groups may
have insight into the how of identity-based oppression, or the cost of it, even
134 E P I S T E M E 2010
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if they don’t necessarily know the why of it, etc.3 If we accept these sorts of claims,
then this makes a big policy difference on the solution side: if neutrality is the aim,
then diversifying the pool of knowers or researchers or “deciders” is not a project
with epistemic motivation. We could theoretically avoid testimonial injustice and
achieve neutrality with an all-white Congress. Whereas if social identities across
socially hierarchical and diverse societies carry potential epistemic resources for
various knowledge projects, then promoting diversity rather than (or alongside)
maximizing neutrality would be the goal. I wonder what Fricker thinks about
this idea.
Finally, let me turn to her last chapter on hermeneutic injustice. Hermeneutic
marginalization is distinct from testimonial injustice because it is related to one’s
inability to participate in the construction of new meanings and new languages,
and because this results in an interpretive incapacity to render one’s experiences
intelligible to others. To be marginalized from the construction of meanings and
terms can produce what Fricker calls a “hermeneutic gap” of intelligibility, and
she notes that this can affect content – the absence of available terms – as well as
style – the manner in which we communicate. As in the case of testimonial injustice,
the adverse effects here tend to amalgamate and feed on each other, such as in the
case she discusses of a woman who is sexually harassed before the second wave of
the feminist movement invented this concept: she is unable to name her problem
or its source in a way that will be understood correctly and taken seriously, and then
is further cut off from social participation because she quits her job, cannot obtain
unemployment benefits since she quit rather than was fired and cannot name the
cause, and continues to fall in a spiraling effect. Post-second-wave feminism, I think
we continue to see such spiraling effects resulting from the stereotyping of women
who claim sexual harassment as angry feminists, then young women not wanting to
appear as angry feminists and therefore undesirable, and so inhibited from naming
their problem, and the cycle continues. The end result is a deflation of the very
hermeneutic community that might be engaged in the work of developing new
meanings and terms as well as manners of redress.
Fricker’s account of hermeneutical injustice and marginalization is quite on
target in recognizing the creative and variable nature of language. It is a short step
from her account to see natural languages as constituted in no small measure by
power relations, in which case we would need to think in a more radical way about
how to make the development of meanings more inclusive and representative of
multiple experiences. There is a lot of work of various sorts on the role of power
in the rhetorics of meaning, from George Lakoff’s analyses of political speech to
Catherine MacKinnon’s, Rae Langton’s, Ishani Maitra’s, and other feminists’ work
on the way we talk about sex and violence. What I liked especially about Fricker’s
approach is that she emphasizes the need to be concerned not only about rhetorical
strategy or the effects on speakers but also about preempting truth.4 I very much
agree with her that what is at stake here is not simply social justice or the efficacy
of human communication but a very arbitrary circumscription of knowledge.
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Linda Martín Alcoff
This raises a question for me, however, about Fricker’s account of hermeneutic
injustice, especially when she says things like “hermeneutical lacunas are like holes
in the ozone.” (161) I wonder if this implies a realist account of meaning as
reference to already existing, fully formed objects, objects existing, like global
warming, whether they are acknowledged by this season’s political administration
or not. Language is rather more complicated, I think, especially in regard to the
sensitive political interactions Fricker is so often concerned with. That is, our
ability to name experiences can in some cases change their shape and their affective
texture. Consider again the case of sexual harassment, in which the term we use
to classify the experience changes it from amorphous or generic aggravation to
a specific and remediable injustice, or from ‘women’s lot in life’ to communally
sanctioned harm. There is a rather sensitive relationship between the way life
appears and feels, and the conceptual repertoire we have available to us to describe
it. And changes in the terms by which we bring experiences under a description can
affect the actual things themselves – especially in so far as these are experiences –
that are referred to by the terms. So in cases where hermeneutic empowerment, so
to speak, leads to new terms and new experiences, we may be subject to complaints
of fomenting meanings out of whole cloth unless we can account for this feedback
loop. This goes, in my view, even to the construction of many of the objects of
which we speak, as Foucault put it and as Ian Hacking has developed it. In regard
to objects of inquiry that emerge in societies at a specific historical juncture, such
as stable sexual orientations, these ‘objects’ begin to speak, act, and take on a life of
their own with experiences affected by the available meanings in their milieu. So I
think the idea of hermeneutic marginalization needs to address the messy, circular
ways in which language and human experience is linked, and the ways in which
hermeneutic democracy might yield new worlds, and not merely new words.

REFERENCES

Alcoff, L. M. 2007. “Epistemologies of Ignorance: Three Types.” In N. Tuana and

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Amodio, D. M. 2008. “The Social Neuroscience of Intergroup Relations.” European Review
of Social Psychology 19: 1–54.
Fricker, M. 2007. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Gladwell, M. 2005. Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking. New York: Little, Brown
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Harding, S. 1986. The Science Question in Feminism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Harding, S. (ed.) 2004. The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader. New York: Routledge.
Haslanger, S. 2008. “Changing the Ideology and Culture of Philosophy: Not by Reason
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Hirschfeld, L. A. 1996. Race in the Making: Cognition, Culture, and the Child’s Construction of
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LeDoeuff, M. 1989. The Philosophical Imaginary. C. Gordon (trans.). Stanford: Stanford
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LeDoeuff, M. 2007. Hipparchia’s Choice: An Essay Concerning Women, Philosophy, Etc. T. Selous
(trans.). New York: Columbia University Press.
MacDonald, K. 2006–7. “Psychology and White Ethnocentrism.” The Occidental Quarterly
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Steele, C. M. 1997. “A Threat in the Air: How Stereotypes Shape the Intellectual Identities
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Trawalter, S. and J. A. Richeson. 2006. “Regulatory Focus and Executive Function After
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NOTES

1 See https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/. See also Amodio (2008), Trawalter et al.

(2008), Trawalter and Richeson (2006), Hirschfeld (1996), MacDonald (2006–7), Steele
(1997), Gladwell (2005), and Steele and Aronson (1995).
2 See, e.g., Haslanger (2008).
3 See, e.g., Alcoff (2007), Harding (1986), and Harding (2004).
4 This is a concern generally shared by the philosophers working on these topics but less
so by the sociologists of language.

Linda Martín Alcoff is Professor of Philosophy at Hunter College and the CUNY
Graduate Center. Her books include Real Knowing: New Versions of the Coherence Theory
(Cornell 1996), Singing in the Fire: Tales of Women in Philosophy (Rowman and Littlefield
2003), Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self (Oxford 2006), and The Blackwell Guide
to Feminist Philosophy, co-edited with Eva Feder Kittay (2006).

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