Episteme | 2019
Epistemic Objectification as the Primary Harm of Testimonial Injustice
Abstract
This paper criticises Miranda Fricker’s account of the primary harm of testimonial injustice as a kind of epistemic objectification, where the latter is understood on the model provided by Martha Nussbaum’s influential analysis of sexual objectification and where it is taken to involve the denial someone’s epistemic agency. I examine the existing objections to Fricker’s account of the primary harm, criticising some while accepting the force of others, and I argue that one of Fricker’s own central examples of testimonial injustice in fact offers the basis of a particularly telling objection. While Fricker’s other critics have mostly concluded that we need to look at alternative theoretical resources to offer an account of the primary harm of testimonial injustice, I aim to show that this is premature; both Fricker and her critics have underestimated the resources provided by Nussbaum’s analysis of objectification when offering an account of the primary harm, and something very much in the spirit of Fricker’s account survives the objections. 1. The Primary Harm of Testimonial Injustice Miranda Fricker characterises an epistemic injustice as ‘a wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower’ (2007: 1). Her focus is primarily on what she calls testimonial injustice, where a speaker’s word isn’t given due weight because her audience unjustly regards her as less credible on the subject matter at hand due to their biases. The main topic of this paper concerns the kind of harm suffered by someone who experiences testimonial injustice. In particular, I will criticise Fricker’s proposal that the primary harm involved is a kind of epistemic objectification, where this is understood on the model provided by Martha Nussbaum’s influential analysis of sexual objectification, and where this is taken to involve the denial of someone’s epistemic agency. I am not the first to criticise Fricker’s account of the primary harm, and I examine the existing objections, arguing that some put pressure on Fricker’s account while others do not. I then try to formulate what I take to be the most difficult problem for Fricker’s account, arguing that one of Fricker’s own central examples of testimonial injustice in fact offers the basis of a particularly telling objection. Finally, I turn to an assessment of what our reaction should be to these problems for Fricker’s account. Fricker’s other critics have mostly concluded that they motivate a move to an alternative account of the primary harm of testimonial injustice, one drawing on the resources of recognition theory. My aim in the final section of the paper is to show that this conclusion is premature. Both Fricker and her critics have underestimated the resources that are provided by Nussbaum’s analysis of objectification when offering an account of the primary harm, and something very much in the spirit of Fricker’s account survives the objections.1 The remainder of section 1 more fully introduces the notion of testimonial injustice and Fricker’s central examples, discusses the worry that the examples don’t seem to illustrate a 1 McGlynn forthcoming is a companion piece which looks at Fricker’s further exploration of the connections between epistemic objectification and sexual objectification, in particular at her interpretation of the claim that pornography silences women. unified phenomenon, and sets out Fricker’s account of the primary harm of such injustices as in part a response to that worry. Section 2 critically assesses Fricker’s account of the primary harm of testimonial injustice, examining recent objections due to José Medina, Gaile Pohlhaus Jr., and Emmalon Davis, as well as developing my own objection. Finally, section 3 outlines a Nussbaum-inspired account of the primary harm as a kind of epistemic objectification that avoids the problems that the objections raise of Fricker’s own version, and compares it to the currently popular rival account offered by recognition theory. What Fricker calls the ‘central case’ of testimonial injustice involves a systematic identityprejudicial credibility deficit (2007: 28). We can unpack this characterisation with Fricker’s own examples. In To Kill a Mockingbird, Tom Robinson faces a credibility deficit, since he is not believed by the all-white jury when truthfully testifying to his innocence at his trial for the rape of Mayella Ewell, a young white woman. This injustice is identity-prejudicial since it’s due to the prejudices about black men held by the jurors. Moreover, it’s systematic because these racial prejudices ‘track’ him ‘though different dimensions of social activity— economic, educational, professional, religious, and so on’ (2007: 27).2 Non-systematic—and so non-central—cases of testimonial injustice involve identity-prejudicial credibility deficits that are grounded in prejudices about someone’s identity that do not track in this manner; for example, Fricker describes philosophers of science being subject to identity-prejudicial credibility deficits at a conference dominated by working scientists (2007: 28-9). Fricker’s other central example is that of Marge Sherwood in (the screenplay of) The Talented Mr 2 This example has proved to be richer than Fricker’s initial discussion fully explored: see Pohlhaus 2012, Medina 2013, Curry 2017, and Tremain 2017 for relevant discussion. Ripley, who has her (initially well-founded) suspicions about the role of Tom Ripley in her fiancé Dickie Greenwood’s death dismissed by Dickie s father Herbert on the grounds that they’re merely based on ‘female intuition’ (2007: 9). Here again we have a case of a systematic identity-prejudicial credibility deficit, but this time it’s prejudices associated with Sherwood’s gender rather than her race that are at work, and which track her across her social interactions. That’s one difference between Fricker’s two cases, but it’s not the most important difference for our purposes here. Greenleaf very clearly doubts (and wants to cast doubt on) Sherwood’s capacity to know what has happened to his son. That marks a contrast with the case involving Tom Robinson; the jurors think that Robinson knows fine well what happened between himself and Mayella Ewell, but they think that he is being insincere. While it’s easy to see how the former kind of case is one in which Sherwood is treated unjustly in her capacity as a knower, it seems like much more of a stretch to insist that the latter kind of case also falls under this characterisation (Pohlhaus 2014: 101). Fricker is well aware that there is a potential worry here, and she can be read as attempting to address it in two complementary ways. First, she endorses a view about the function of knowledge ascriptions due to Edward Craig (1990), according to which (roughly) to attribute knowledge that P to someone is to tag them as a good informant on the question of whether P, and this gives the ‘core’ of our concept of a knower. To be excluded from the community of epistemic trust is, given this thesis, ‘a matter of exclusion from the very practice that constitutes the practical core of what it is to know’ (Fricker 2007: 6). Adopting this thesis yields a clear sense in which one who is unjustly regarded as insincere when testifying is subject to harm in their capacity as a knower. However, neither Craig’s methodology for epistemology nor his specific claim about the purpose of knowledge attributions has been widely accepted, and both have been subject to substantial criticisms (see e.g. Kappel 2010, Kelp 2011, and Lackey 2012). For example, Kelp (2011) argues that a priest who takes the seal of confession appropriately strictly can be a knower without being a remotely good informant, and that a conspiracy theorist who masks her real beliefs about global warming by asserting what the best science tells us may be an excellent informant while falling far short of knowing. Kelp is careful not to present these as counterexamples to Craig’s thesis, since Craig isn’t engaged in the business of trying to offer strict necessary and sufficient conditions for being a knower, but Kelp does think they should give us pause and that they motivate seeking an alternative to Craig’s account of the function of knowledge attributions.3 So Fricker is appealing to a controversial and implausible claim as a loadbearing element of her account of testimonial injustice, and she does so without providing any defence of this claim; the burden of proof would seem to be on her to persuade us that Craig’s account is much more plausible than it appears to be. 3 Both Kelp and Kappel (2000) defend the view that the real function of knowledge attributions is to signal when someone has brought inquiry to a successful conclusion; this rival to Craig’s account clearly wouldn’t be to Fricker’s purpose at all, since it doesn’t support her claim that someone who has been dismissed in their role as an informant has been excluded ‘from the very practice that constitutes the practical core of what it is to know’ (Fricker 2007: 6). I have glossed over some details in Craig’s discussion, but these are taken into account in the criticisms offered by Kelp and others. Fricker’s second line of reply brings us directly into contact with my focus in this paper, since she suggests that another, related sense in which there is unity between cases of unjust imputation of incompetence and those of unjust imputation of insincerity emerges when we look at what she calls the primary harm of testimonial injustice: ...despite the possibility that a prejudice might separate the twin components of epistemic untrustworthiness, I suggest that the experience of testimonial injustice remains unified enough to warrant a unified ethical characterisation in terms of being wrong qua giver of knowledge. (2007: 45) Fricker describes several secondary harms of testimonial injustice, including both practical harms, such as being found guilty and sentenced to prison in Tom