Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing

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Clarendon Press, Jul 5, 2007 - Law - 188 pages
In this exploration of new territory between ethics and epistemology, Miranda Fricker argues that there is a distinctively epistemic type of injustice, in which someone is wronged specifically in their capacity as a knower. Justice is one of the oldest and most central themes in philosophy, but in order to reveal the ethical dimension of our epistemic practices the focus must shift to injustice. Fricker adjusts the philosophical lens so that we see through to the negative space thatis epistemic injustice.The book explores two different types of epistemic injustice, each driven by a form of prejudice, and from this exploration comes a positive account of two corrective ethical-intellectual virtues. The characterization of these phenomena casts light on many issues, such as social power, prejudice, virtue, and the genealogy of knowledge, and it proposes a virtue epistemological account of testimony. In this ground-breaking book, the entanglements of reason and social power are traced in a newway, to reveal the different forms of epistemic injustice and their place in the broad pattern of social injustice.

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Contents

Introduction
1
1 Testimonial Injustice
9
2 Prejudice in the Credibility Economy
30
3 Towards a Virtue Epistemological Account of Testimony
60
4 The Virtue of Testimonial Justice
86
5 The Genealogy of Testimonial Justice
109
The Wrong Revisited
129
7 Hermeneutical Injustice
147
Conclusion
176
Bibliography
178
Index
185
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About the author (2007)

Miranda Fricker is Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College.

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