Content warning: this paper mentions sexual assault (§4.3 only).
Sometimes, we struggle to tell people what we know. Miranda Fricker (2007) argues that this is sometimes the result of gaps in our shared resources. These gaps can prevent us from communicating knowledge1 to others or gaining knowledge ourselves. For example, before feminists coined the expression ‘sexual harassment,’ some linguistic communities had no expression that picked out unwelcome sexual behaviour.2 Fricker argues that, because of this gap, women in these linguistic communities could not communicate their knowledge of sexual harassment, nor understand their experiences of sexual harassment. When these women failed to communicate or understand their experiences, they were harmed in their capacity as knowers—they suffered an epistemic injustice. Fricker’s term for the epistemic injustice caused by a gap in shared resources is “Hermeneutical Injustice.”
Fricker argues that no individual is culpable for hermeneutical injustice. On her account, hermeneutical injustice is non-culpable because hermeneutical injustices are purely structural phenomena—there is no individual perpetrator and so no immediate issues of culpability (2007; 2013; 2016: 172). Here is one way of arguing for non-culpability via the claim that hermeneutical injustice is purely structural. When we communicate knowledge, we seem to do so with resources that we inherit from our epistemic community—shared language, shared concepts, shared epistemic standards, etc. If there is a gap in these resources, this is a purely structural fact—no individual controls whether there is a gap in the resources of an epistemic community. Since no individual can control a gap in these shared resources, no individual can be culpable for an injustice that results from this gap. For example, no individual can make it the case that English does not have the expression “sexual harassment.” Therefore, no individual can be responsible for resulting failures to communicate knowledge of unwelcome sexual behaviour.
In this paper, I argue that Fricker overlooks our capacity to build new resources on the fly—to innovate. Because agents have this capacity to innovate, hermeneutical injustice is not purely structural and is often culpable. Here is a sketch of my argument. Whenever an agent attempts to communicate despite a gap in shared resources, they are attempting to create an innovation to fill that gap. If the innovation is successfully used to communicate, then the agent successfully communicates knowledge, and there is no hermeneutical injustice. A hermeneutical injustice only occurs when interlocutors fail to innovate across a gap in their community’s resources. When individuals are culpable for a failure to innovate across gappy resources, they are culpable for the resulting hermeneutical injustice.
There are many kinds of shared epistemic resources. According to Pohlhaus (2012: 718), those resources include “language to formulate propositions, concepts to make sense of experience, procedures to approach the world, and standards to judge particular accounts of experiences.” Sliwa (2023: 9) adds “perspectives” (interconnected bundles of cognitive, experiential, affective, and motivational dispositions) and the linguistic “framing devices” (e.g., metaphors and imagery) which communicate these perspectives (11).
A gap in any of these epistemic resources might lead to a hermeneutical injustice. This is an important point to note at the outset since, for reasons of space, I focus on culpability for gaps in specifically linguistic resources. But the focus on linguistic resources does not limit the significance of the argument. First, the argument indirectly addresses culpability for gaps in conceptual resources. On standard views, communication is successful if the hearer uses a speaker’s intended meanings and concepts to interpret an utterance (e.g. Fodor 1975; 1998; Pagin 2008. Cf. Sperber & Wilson 1998; Carston 2002: ch. 5.4).3 Thus, successful communication with linguistic innovation entails successful conceptual innovation. Second, the argumentative strategy pursued here is easily applied to other shared epistemic resources—we can, and often do, innovate across gaps in these other resources (e.g. Carston [2002]; Wilson & Carston [2007] on conceptual innovation [ad hoc concepts]; Green [2022] and Chappell [2022: 408] on malicious innovation of epistemic procedures [sealioning or eironia]).
In §1, I outline three key features of Fricker’s hermeneutical injustice. In §2, I define linguistic innovation. Interlocutors successfully coordinate on a linguistic innovation when they speak and interpret with an expression, meaning, or expression-meaning pair that is not found in their community’s language. In §3, I present two ways in which interlocutors might fail to innovate, suggest a criterion of culpability for hermeneutical injustice, and summarise my argument. In §4, I distinguish between my own account of hermeneutical injustice and nearby forms of epistemic injustice. In §5, I consider two objections.
1. Hermeneutical Injustice
Here is Fricker’s definition of Hermeneutical Injustice:
Hermeneutical Injustice: “The injustice of having some significant area of one’s social experience obscured from collective understanding owing to a structural identity prejudice in the collective hermeneutical resources” (2007: 155).
We can use Fricker’s “sexual harassment” case to explicate her key terms. Here, the collective hermeneutical resources are the linguistic resources of whatever community lacks the expression ‘sexual harassment.’ In a community without the expression ‘sexual harassment,’ there is a structural identity prejudice in collective resources. Hermeneutical resources containing a structural identity prejudice “will tend to issue interpretations of [the affected group’s] social experiences that are biased because insufficiently influenced by [that group]” (Fricker 2007: 155). In the sexual harassment case, some communities’ linguistic resources give biased interpretations of women’s experiences of sexual harassment, partly because there is no expression that could pick out experiences of sexual harassment. In other words: because of a gap in shared linguistic resources, women were unable to share their knowledge of sexual harassment.
Three features of Fricker’s account of hermeneutical injustice are crucial for our purposes.
First, hermeneutical injustice can be cognitive, communicative, or both (Beeby 2011: 481; Goetze 2018: 78–80). As noted above, the injustice occurs when a subject aims to “render an experience intelligible, either to herself or an interlocutor” (Fricker 2007: 159, emphasis added). A cognitive hermeneutical injustice occurs when a subject attempts to render an experience intelligible to herself—e.g. confusion about one’s experiences or pervasive self-doubt. I will not say much about cognitive hermeneutical injustice.4 My focus, rather, is on communicative hermeneutical injustices. These occur when a subject fails to render an experience intelligible to an interlocutor: for example, when speakers cannot communicate their knowledge about sexual harassment. When I use the term ‘hermeneutical injustice,’ I mean communicative hermeneutical injustice.
The two forms of hermeneutical injustice come apart in one of Fricker’s paradigm cases. In the case, Joe tries and fails to report his stalker to the police:
“Are you the person being harassed?”
“Yes. I’ve been…”
“And is the person causing the nuisance with you now?”
“He’s standing outside my place this very minute.”
“Has he inflicted any physical harm on you?”
“No, but he…”5
According to Fricker, Joe has a clear idea of his experience—there is no cognitive hermeneutical injustice. However, Joe cannot communicate knowledge of his experience because the police officer has no concept male victim of stalking. Joe’s experience is unintelligible to the police officer, and Joe’s status as a knower is undermined.
A second important feature of Fricker’s account is the distinction between hermeneutical marginalization and hermeneutical injustice. The distinction is between structures and their effects: Hermeneutical injustice is an effect of hermeneutical marginalization. Hermeneutical marginalization occurs when there is a gap in shared hermeneutical resources.6 In the sexual harassment case, women are hermeneutically marginalized because there is no shared expression to describe sexual harassment. Hermeneutical injustice occurs “only when [hermeneutical marginalization] is realized in a more or less doomed attempt on the part of the subject to render an experience intelligible, either to herself or an interlocutor” (Fricker 2007: 159). In the sexual harassment case, a hermeneutical injustice occurs when a woman attempts to explain her experience of sexual harassment and is blocked by a gap in shared linguistic resources.
The third important feature of Fricker’s account is that hermeneutical injustice is non-culpable. No agent is culpable for hermeneutical injustice, since “hermeneutical injustice is not inflicted by any agent, but rather is caused by a feature of the collective hermeneutical resource ….” (2007: 168). And again: “Hermeneutical Injustice is a purely structural phenomenon with no individual perpetrator” (2016: 172).
We can put this another way: No agent has control over the gaps in hermeneutical resources that cause hermeneutical injustice. This framing of Fricker’s position makes explicit the control condition on culpability. Hermeneutical injustice is caused by a gap in shared resources. This gap exists in a community’s language. No individual has control over a community’s language. So, no individual is culpable for a hermeneutical injustice.7
Here is Fricker’s non-culpability claim with the control condition on culpability made explicit:
Non-culpability: since no individual has control over the language used to communicate knowledge, no individual is culpable for a hermeneutical gap in that language, and no individual is culpable for a hermeneutical injustice.
I argue that Non-culpability is false. Fricker writes as though hermeneutical marginalization is sufficient for hermeneutical injustice—as though communication failures follow directly from the structure of a speaker’s language. On this picture, hermeneutical injustice follows from hermeneutical marginalization just as extreme weather events follow from climate change. The aim of this paper is to show that hermeneutical marginalization is not sufficient for hermeneutical injustice—individuals (generally hearers) must also fail to overcome hermeneutical marginalization, and they are sometimes culpable for that failure.
2. Communitarian Languages and Innovation
2.1. ‘Language’ and the Language Used to Communicate
A language is, among other things, a systematic pairing of words or sentences with meanings. I will understand this systematic pairing as a function from words to meanings (Lewis 1975). The term ‘language,’ in this paper, refers to this abstract object—a function that takes words as inputs and delivers meanings as outputs.8
Below, I present two views of language-use that disagree about the facts in virtue of which a language user is related to one language function rather than another. Imagine two languages. Language A pairs words with meanings such that the sentence “a cat sat on a mat” is true iff a cat sat on a mat. Language B pairs words with meanings such that “a cat sat on a mat” is true iff a dog slept on a bed. When I use language to speak or interpret speech, I am a speaker or hearer related to Language A rather than Language B.
That said, no individual is ‘related’ to just one language—each language user is related to many languages. A speaker’s relation to one language, call it L1, explains their actual utterance, including any mistakes that they make. A language user is likely related to L1 in virtue of facts about them as an individual (e.g. Chomsky’s I-languages [2006]). Yet another language, call it L2, describes how a speaker ought to speak or how a hearer ought to interpret a given utterance. Famously, facts about a speaker as an individual struggle to capture this sort of normative relation (Kripke 1982). A language user is likely related to L2 in virtue of facts about their linguistic community (Dummett 1993; Devitt 2021; Lepore & Stone 2016).
Of all the languages that we are related to, the one that matters for communicative hermeneutical injustice is the language we use to communicate knowledge. Again, we can use Fricker’s ‘sexual harassment’ case to flesh this out. Language C is English before coinage of the expression sexual harassment. According to Fricker, women once used language C to communicate knowledge to their hearers. Since C had no expression ‘sexual harassment,’ speakers could not communicate knowledge about sexual harassment. Or so Fricker argues.
Views of language-use also sometimes differ on whether I am related to language A or language B. This difference can support or undercut particular views of language-use. In the example above, we have prima facie reason to think that I am related the language where “a cat sat on the mat” is true iff a cat sat on the mat—Language A. So, if an account of language-use entails that I am related to language B, there is prima facie reason to disprefer that account. In §2.3, I use an observation of this sort to undercut Fricker’s preferred account of language, the communitarian view.
2.2. Communitarian Languages
On a communitarian view, language users are related to the language used to communicate in virtue of facts about a linguistic community.9 On this view, speaking and interpreting is like borrowing tools from a neighbourhood tool-shed. Further, since our language is determined by facts about our linguistic community, individuals cannot control which tools are in that shed.
Here is a rough version of a popular communitarian view. In my community, language-users expect that “a cat sat on a mat” is used iff it is true that a cat sat on a mat (abstracting away from jokes, hypotheticals, etc.).10 According to this type of communitarian, the pattern of expectations in my community explains why I am related to a language where my utterance of “a cat sat on a mat” is true iff a cat sat on a mat. In other words, the pattern of expectations in my community determines the language-function used to communicate.
On a communitarian view, Non-culpability makes good sense. On this view, the language used to communicate knowledge is always determined by facts about a community. No individual has control over those facts, so no individual has control over the language used to communicate knowledge. Thus, no individual is responsible for hermeneutical gaps in that language, nor for resulting hermeneutical injustices.
2.3. Innovation
Many philosophers have noted that facts about our community are not sufficient to explain language users’ relation to the language used to communicate. Language users often communicate using words, meanings, and word-meaning pairs that differ from their communitarian language—they speak innovatively or, as we may say, introduce an innovative language.11 In what follows, I fold quite different uses of language under “linguistic innovation.” On my usage, an ‘innovation’ is an extremely ordinary part of everyday language use.
A common source of innovation is zero-derivation, where aspects of meaning are preserved but not syntactic type:
-
(1)
She tried to whiskey the punch before the teachers arrived.12
In (1), the language used to communicate goes beyond the language user’s communitarian language. Suppose we adopt the communitarian view on which a communitarian language is fixed by the expectations of a linguistic community (the account mentioned above). Community expectations about word order and verb phrases tell hearers that ‘whiskey’ is probably verbified and transitive.13 Community expectations also give us clues to how ‘whiskey’ should be interpreted—it should describe an event that is related to whiskey. But these clues don’t get us very far. In (1), the speaker could mean that she tried to make the punch taste bad, make the punch taste good, or put the punch in a whisky bottle. It is difficult to come up with limits to what the subject did to the punch in (1). If the subject of (1) is well known for drunken conversations with whiskey bottles, then (1) could mean that the subject tried to speak with the punch before the teachers arrived. Suppose that, in the language used to communicate, the speaker’s utterance means “she tried to put whiskey in the punch.” This meaning would not be determined solely by facts about the speaker’s community (Clark & Clark 1979).
Sometimes, speakers abandon lexical similarities to their shared language, preserving only phonetic14 resemblances to their community’s language and using shared expectations about syntax. Coinage of new terms is one such case.15 An English speaker without a word for aeroplanes might describe an aeroplane crash by coining the term ‘thoom’ (imitating the aeroplane’s struggling engine):
-
(2)
A huge thoom has fallen out of the sky!16
In (1) and (2), facts about speakers’ linguistic communities underdetermine the communicated meaning of innovative terms. In (1), a communitarian expression is paired with a new meaning. In (2), a new expression is paired with a new meaning. In these cases, facts about the speakers’ community fail to explain the language users’ relation to the language used to communicate. In other words, the speakers do not use a communitarian language to communicate. They use an innovative language.
These cases, together with the functional definition of a language, give us a neat definition of a linguistic innovation:
Linguistic Innovation: An expression, meaning, and/or a pairing of expression with meaning that is used to communicate and that does not occur in language L, for any L specifiable only with facts about a language user’s linguistic community.
It is tempting to dismiss the above toy examples as marginal cases—oddities to thrill philosophical puzzle-solvers. But innovation is crucial to language-use. Communitarian languages are important for speaking with strangers. If I visit Melbourne and ask a stranger, “What’s the time?,” the likelihood that we share a communitarian language also makes it likely that I will get a useful answer. However, communitarian languages are limited—we cannot talk about everything that is important to us. We often need to talk about things our community has never encountered before, or things we regularly encounter that aren’t codified in our community’s language. Perhaps a community of idealised agents with limitless lexical memories, complete knowledge of their world, and endless time to communicate could develop a communitarian language that covered everything they could ever want to talk about. But for agents like us, we need a way to adapt our community’s linguistic tools to whatever context we find ourselves in. (Indeed, a language in which we can share new knowledge is valuable because we are not these idealised agents.)
To make communitarian languages useful, speakers use a wider range of strategies than those exemplified above. They temporarily extend ordinary expressions through metaphor (Sperber & Wilson 1986b), adopt other speakers’ idiosyncrasies (Brennan & Clark 1996), and negotiate the extensions of everything from gradable adjectives (‘tall’) to kind terms (‘athlete’) (Plunkett & Sundell 2013; Ludlow 2014). Communitarian languages also include terms that require innovation. Placeholder names like ‘thingy’ and ‘whatsit’ require language users to assign new meanings on almost every occasion of use. The wide range of context-sensitive expressions identified by contextualists are also good examples of prescribed innovation. Genitives like “John’s book” could be used to talk about the book John owns, the book John wrote, the book John called dibs on, etc. (Recanati 1989: 298). Linguistic innovation is central to human language use, not an annoying, marginal case.17
2.4. Beyond “Innovation”
Throughout the above discussion, I have referred to language users. This includes both speakers and hearers. On my definition of Linguistic Innovation, language users ‘innovate’ if an expression is new to the speaker or hearer. Innovation includes, for example, a teenager who uses well-worn slang that is new to her grandmother. Despite the teenager’s familiarity with the slang term, this counts as a linguistic innovation. The term ‘innovation’ applies awkwardly to such cases. The awkwardness arises because ‘innovation’ is commonly understood as an intentional act performed by an individual. In other words, the term suggests that the innovative expressions are new for the speaker.
In this paper, innovation is a joint action. This is because we are interested in the language used to communicate knowledge. Suppose a speaker suggests an innovation, but the innovation is not taken up by the hearer. In this case, the interlocutors fail to communicate using the innovation, so the innovation is not included in the language used to communicate knowledge. This is an important point for communicative hermeneutical injustice. When an innovation fails, this is a failure of the duo of speaker and hearer. If a member of that duo has failed to do their part, then that member might be culpable for a resulting hermeneutical injustice.
A clearer account of the failure involved in hermeneutical injustice would involve a hyper-local language that a particular speaker-hearer pair cooperatively construct on the fly. Since this involves a duo of speaker and hearer, we might call such a language a “Duolect.”18 There is not space to develop an account of Duolectical language here. For brevity, I will continue awkwardly referring to ‘innovations.’ I briefly return to this point in §4.3.
3. Innovation Failures
There are at least two ways that language users exert control over the language used to communicate. Speakers suggest innovations, and hearers accept or reject innovations. Thus, there are at least two ways in which language users can fail to innovate. First, the speaker can suggest an innovation that is inaccessible to the hearer. Second, the hearer can fail to accept an innovation. In some of these cases, language users are culpable for a gap in the language used to communicate and culpable for a resulting hermeneutical injustice.
3.1. Accessing Innovations
If a speaker suggests an innovation that is inaccessible to the hearer, the language users will fail to coordinate on an innovation. Suppose I suddenly turn to the person next to me and utter “Fitzbikter,” intending to communicate that the apple I am holding is rotten. In this case, the hearer cannot access the language in which “Fitzbikter” is true iff the apple I am holding is rotten.
Accessibility is a graded notion, with many contributing factors. One factor is the distance between the suggested innovation and the language a hearer brings to the conversation.19 Suppose I intend to describe a restrictive relationship to a monolingual Italian-speaker. I use the metaphorical expression: “He’s suffocating me.” The suggested innovation is so far from the hearer’s prior language (Italian) that it is completely inaccessible to the Italian-speaker. Compare this with uttering the same sentence to a Scots speaker, or an English-speaker from a very different social background, or a close friend. As my hearers get closer to my own linguistic community, their prior languages are better suited to interpreting “He’s suffocating me.”
A speaker also makes an innovation more accessible for their hearer by attending to or providing appropriate clues. Some of these clues already exist in the language users’ context. If I approach the reader of these last few paragraphs and utter “Fitzbikter,” my hearer may already have the clues needed to figure out what I mean. Other clues are provided by the speaker. The speaker may add extra information to the innovation: “Fitzbikter. So you’ll get sick if you eat it.” Or they may explicitly introduce the term: “When I say ‘Fitzbikter,’ I mean ‘This apple is rotten.’ Fitzbikter.” If a speaker suggests an innovation without sufficient clues, the innovation will be inaccessible to the hearer.
3.2. Accepting Innovations
A hearer accepts an innovation if they use the innovative pairing of words and meaning to interpret the speaker’s utterance.20 If a hearer does not accept an innovation, then the speaker and hearer fail to coordinate on an innovation. Innovating with language is a perfectly ordinary way of communicating. So, ceteris paribus, a hearer ought to accept a speaker’s innovation. Suppose I point to an apple and say “Fitzbikter” to the reader of this paper. If my hearer dismisses my utterance as nonsense, then the hearer’s contribution to the innovation has failed. (And I would not feel so bad if they ate the apple!)
Here are three candidates for inclusion in the ceteris paribus clause. Firstly, the innovation must be accessible in the sense described above. The hearer does not fail if they do not accept an innovation that they can’t understand. Secondly, interlocutors ought to gain something by innovating. If there is already a usable term in the communitarian language, then the suggested innovation unnecessarily complicates communication. There are many things that a speaker might hope to gain from an innovation. The speaker might aim for secrecy, humour, or they might just want to seem cool. These are legitimate goals for a speaker, and the hearer ought not refuse them. Thirdly, the hearer might be an authority on the subject matter. Experts’ semantic authority ensures that we talk about the same thing when we talk about, e.g., arthritis, bosons, or COVID. An expert usually need not accept a non-expert’s innovation if the innovation involves a presumptively misused technical term.
3.3. Constraints on Culpability
I have sketched some of the ways in which innovation might fail. Here is a criterion of culpability for hermeneutical injustice based on the above:
Culpability for Hermeneutical Injustice: a language user is culpable for a hermeneutical injustice iff they are culpable for a failure to innovate across a gap in hermeneutical resources.
If we can get a grip on culpability for innovation failures, then, by the above criterion, we get a grip on culpability for hermeneutical injustice.
We cannot adopt the simple view on which causal responsibility for an innovation failure is culpability for that innovation failure. On such an account, when a marginalised speaker does not provide an accessible innovation, they are a victim of hermeneutical injustice and also culpable for that injustice. So, we need to constrain the account of culpability for innovation failures.
Plausibly, a language user who sincerely contributes to coordinating on an innovation is not culpable if their contribution fails. Speakers who sincerely attempt to communicate are not culpable for innovations that are inaccessible. Similarly, hearers who sincerely attempt to understand an innovation are not culpable if they fail to understand and to accept the innovation.
Individuals might also be excused from culpability for hermeneutical injustice. For example, a hearer might be excused from culpability if they are unluckily distracted when the speaker attempts an innovation. Individuals might also justifiably fail to coordinate on an innovation. Many of the experiences obscured by hermeneutical marginalization are painful to talk about. Sometimes, speakers use obfuscatory language to justifiably hide their experience from others. Hearers may also justifiably refuse to innovate with speakers who suggest morally reprehensible innovations. It is a feature of my view that I can explain these sorts of ‘acceptable hermeneutical injustices’ as justified failures to innovate.
3.4. Hermeneutical Injustice
We now have everything needed to assign culpability for a hermeneutical injustice. Here is a case based on Fricker’s “sexual harassment” case.
Kaiya lives in a community without the expression ‘sexual harassment.’ She has been sexually harassed by John. She understands her experience as an experience of unwanted sexual behaviour, so experiences no cognitive hermeneutical injustice. Kaiya speaks to someone in Human Resources about John.
Kaiya: I need to make a complaint about John.
HR: What’s wrong?
Kaiya: John has a thousand hands… You know what I mean? He’s always creeping up on women in the office and I don’t feel safe around him…
Kaiya uses an innovative metaphor (“John has a thousand hands”) and signals that it will take a bit of effort to grasp the metaphor (“You know what I mean?”). She also provides clues as to how her metaphor should be interpreted. There are many ways that HR could respond to Kaiya. First, consider a response on which HR would be responsible for a resulting hermeneutical injustice:
HR: A thousand hands? Like Avalokiteśvara, the Boddhisattva of compassion and mercy? I’d like to see that!
In this response, HR fails to innovate with Kaiya. Kaiya’s innovation was not inaccessible, so HR is culpable for the failure to communicate and culpable for the resulting hermeneutical injustice.
Second, consider a response on which HR and Kaiya avoid the possible hermeneutical injustice:
HR: A thousand hands… Do you mean he’s always touching you and other women in the office?
Kaiya: Yeah, that’s right.
HR: That sounds awful. I’ll sort that out.
In this second response, HR clarifies the metaphor, then accepts Kaiya’s innovation. The process of innovation here is cooperative. Kaiya and HR successfully coordinate on a linguistic innovation that communicates Kaiya’s knowledge of sexual harassment and that avoids a hermeneutical injustice.
When speakers attempt to communicate despite a gap in shared resources, they tend to know what they’re doing. They suggest metaphors, coin terms, and give meaning-clues that a cooperative hearer can pick up on. On Fricker’s view, these speakers are shouting into the wind—a hermeneutical injustice is preordained by gaps in interlocutors’ communitarian languages. On my view, speakers who speak across a gap in shared resources do so rationally, but their hearers often let them down.
3.5. Culpable Hermeneutical Injustice
Here, again, is the claim I am arguing against:
Non-culpability: since no agent has control over the language used to communicate knowledge, no agent is culpable for a hermeneutical gap in that language, and no agent is culpable for a hermeneutical injustice.
Fricker assumes that the language used to communicate is always a communitarian language. This leaves out linguistic innovation. When speakers encounter a gap in their community’s language, they can and do innovate over the gap.
(P1) Whenever there is a gap in communitarian resources, and a subject attempts to communicate in spite of that gap, that subject attempts a linguistic innovation.
Linguistic innovation is a means by which individuals exert control over the language used to communicate knowledge. Speakers exert control over a language by suggesting innovations, hearers exert control by accepting or rejecting innovations.
(P2) When innovating, language users exert control over the language they use to communicate knowledge.
Taken together, P1 and P2 contradict Non-culpability. Contra Fricker, the language used to communicate is not simply inherited from one’s community. Individuals can exert control over the language used to communicate. If individuals can exert control over the language they use, then they can be culpable for the nature of that language.
The argument so far leaves open a bad response: Perhaps many cases of hermeneutical injustice do not involve linguistic innovation. An objector might constrain the notion of hermeneutical injustice to those cases that do not involve linguistic innovation, arguing that these cases are non-culpable. This is a bad response because communicative hermeneutical injustice necessarily involves attempts at innovation. If a speaker attempts to communicate despite a gap in a language user’s communitarian language, then they attempt to communicate using an expression, meaning, or expression-meaning pair that is not already in one interlocutor’s communitarian resources.21
(P3) In every case of communicative hermeneutical injustice, a subject attempts a linguistic innovation.
P1 to P3 support:
Culpable Hermeneutical Injustice In every case of hermeneutical injustice, a language user might be culpable for that hermeneutical injustice.
4. Other Epistemic Injustices
We can get further purchase on culpable hermeneutical injustice by comparing my account with nearby epistemic injustices. In this section, I compare my own account of culpable hermeneutical injustice with Fricker’s testimonial injustice, Pohlhaus’ willful ignorance, and Falbo’s positive hermeneutical injustice.
4.1. Testimonial Injustice
A testimonial injustice occurs when a hearer assigns an unfairly low credence to a speaker because the hearer employs a prejudiced stereotype when assessing the speaker’s testimony (Fricker 2007: 28, 36). Fricker gives an example drawn from Harper Lee’s (1960) To Kill a Mockingbird. Tom Robinson is a black man accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell. Robinson gives testimony, explaining why he was at Ewell’s house. When Robinson’s jury assesses his testimony, they apply the stereotype of black men as untrustworthy. The jurors assign an unfairly low credence to Robinson’s testimony and convict him—they perpetrate a testimonial injustice against him.
Fricker (2007: 33) argues that testimonial injustice is usually culpable. If my argument is on the right track, then testimonial and hermeneutical injustices are culpable in similar ways.
Stereotypes are inherited from one’s community. Whenever the relevant stereotypes exist in a community, the subjects of these stereotypes are at risk of a credibility deficit—a testimonial injustice. When hearers employ these stereotypes and unfairly evaluate a speaker’s testimony, the hearer perpetrates a testimonial injustice. On Fricker’s account, the hearer is sometimes excused from culpability for this testimonial injustice. A hearer might be so deeply influenced by the prejudices of their day that “it is simply too much to expect the subject to … realign his habits of credibility judgement” (2007: 33).
On my account, hermeneutical injustice operates in a parallel way. When there is a gap in communitarian hermeneutical resources, marginalized individuals are at risk of a communication failure—a hermeneutical injustice. When a hearer employs only these gappy communitarian resources to interpret a speaker’s innovative utterance, the hearer perpetrates a hermeneutical injustice. Hearers are sometimes excused from culpability for this hermeneutical injustice. For example, when an innovation is inaccessible to a hearer, it is simply too much to expect the hearer to accept the suggested innovation.
4.2. Wilful Hermeneutical Ignorance and Motivated Ignorance
My account of culpable hermeneutical injustice also evades Fricker’s response to authors like Medina (2012) and Pohlhaus (2011), who articulate culpable forms of motivated ignorance.
Pohlhaus’ wilful hermeneutical ignorance is a motivated refusal to “learn the epistemic resources developed from marginalized groups” (2011: 722). Dominantly situated knowers remain ignorant of marginalized resources because it is in their interests to remain ignorant. For example, some men might have refused to learn the expression ‘sexual harassment’ after it was coined, because it was in their interests to remain ignorant. When such men fail to understand a woman who says, “John sexually harassed me,” they are culpable for their wilful hermeneutical ignorance.
Pohlhaus sees wilful hermeneutical ignorance and hermeneutical injustice as distinct “since the former is not purely structural, but also wilful” (2011: fn 6). Similarly, Mason (2011) and Dotson (2012) articulate culpable epistemic injustices that they take to be distinct from hermeneutical injustice. Mason highlights a kind of unknowing in which members of “dominant groups … fail to have a proper understanding of the social experiences of marginalized groups by disregarding or distorting interpretations offered by marginalized groups” (2011: 306). Dotson introduces “contributory injustice,” which occurs when an agent’s wilful ignorance thwarts a knower’s ability to contribute to shared epistemic resources (2012: 32). These views are distinct, however, as Fricker (2016: 170–176) notes, each author articulates a kind of motivated ignorance.
Medina (2012) finds a closer relationship between hermeneutical injustice and motivated ignorance (specifically, Mills’ [1997] white ignorance). Medina argues that both hermeneutical injustice and motivated ignorance require the same culpable “failures in hermeneutical responsibility” (215). If Medina is right, we can infer from culpability for motivated ignorance to culpability for hermeneutical injustice.
Responding to Medina, Fricker “offer[s] an account of the boundary between” (2016: 170) hermeneutical injustice and the motivated ignorances characterised by Pohlhaus (2011), Mason (2011), Dotson (2012), and Mills (1997). Fricker (170–176) argues that, since hermeneutical injustice and motivated ignorance are distinct, we cannot infer from culpability for motivated ignorance to culpability for hermeneutical injustice.22 Fricker (174–175) accepts that there is overlap between motivated ignorance and hermeneutical injustice. In some “minimal” cases of hermeneutical injustice, the speaker’s community possesses a resource which the hearer’s community does not possess and which the hearer refuses to learn. The resulting communication failure is at once a hermeneutical injustice and motivated ignorance. However, Fricker points out two ways in which hermeneutical injustice and motivated ignorance come apart.
First, many cases of hermeneutical injustice are not cases of motivated ignorance (2016: 172). In some cases of hermeneutical injustice, neither the hearer’s nor the speaker’s community possesses the relevant expression (e.g. the HR case above). However, in cases of motivated ignorance, one community does possess the relevant resources, which another community refuses to learn. Second, many cases of motivated ignorance are not cases of hermeneutical injustice (2007: 176–177). In some cases of motivated ignorance, there is no gap in shared resources. In these cases, the hearer’s community is aware of the relevant epistemic resources, but the hearer refuses to use those resources (e.g. a modern English speaker who treats the expression ‘structural racism’ as nonsensical).
My account of hermeneutical injustice is strikingly similar to the above accounts of motivated ignorance.23 Thus, we might think that my account is also vulnerable to Fricker’s boundary-drawing response. However, my account avoids Fricker’s response in two ways. First, innovation failures do not come apart from communicative hermeneutical injustice. As noted in §3.5, all cases of communicative hermeneutical injustice are failures to innovate across a gap in communitarian resources. If a speaker attempts to communicate despite a situation of hermeneutical marginalization, then she attempts to use an expression, meaning, or expression-meaning pair that is not captured by her communitarian language. She only experiences a communicative hermeneutical injustice if that innovation fails. If an agent does not attempt to communicate across a gap in shared resources (does not attempt to innovate), then there can be no communicative hermeneutical injustice. A communicative hermeneutical injustice occurs only when there is “a more or less doomed attempt on the part of the subject to render an experience intelligible … [to] an interlocutor” (Fricker 2007: 159).
The second way in which my account avoids Fricker’s boundary-drawing response is that innovation failures come apart from motivated ignorance.24
As with hermeneutical injustice, many cases of innovation failure are not cases of motivated ignorance. In many cases of innovation failure, neither the speaker’s nor the hearer’s community possesses the relevant expression. The HR case from §3.4 is of this sort. In these cases, innovation is often thoroughly cooperative—the innovation must be passed back and forth between interlocutors. One interlocutor suggests an innovation, which the other interlocutor then refines. This happens in the good HR case—Kaiya suggests an innovation, which HR refines by clarification. Compare this with cases of motivated ignorance, where the speaker contributes a fully-formed resource that the hearer refuses to use (e.g. a man who refuses to use the expression ‘sexual harassment’).
As with hermeneutical injustice, many cases of motivated ignorance are not cases of innovation failure. Recall our definition of linguistic innovation on which an innovation is an expression, meaning, or expression-meaning pair which does not occur in L, for any L specifiable only with facts about a language user’s community. As Fricker notes (2016: 176–177), in many cases of motivated ignorance, a hearer’s community possesses the relevant epistemic resource, but the hearer refuses to use that resource. In such a case, both the speaker’s and hearer’s communitarian languages already contain the word-meaning pair that the speaker is trying to use. In these cases of motivated ignorance, there is no linguistic innovation, no innovation failure, and no hermeneutical injustice.
4.3. Positive Hermeneutical Injustice
Arianna Falbo’s (2022) account of positive hermeneutical injustice highlights a shortcoming in the above discussion of ‘innovation.’25 Falbo argues that Fricker gives an account of negative hermeneutical injustice, which occurs when there is some lack of intelligibility due to a gap in shared resources. In contrast, Falbo’s positive hermeneutical injustice occurs when there is no gap in shared resources, but hermeneutical resources interact to pre-empt the apt use of some resource(s).
Falbo draws an example from the trial of Brock Turner, “a former student-athlete at Stanford University who was discovered raping an unconscious woman” (2022: 349). In letters to the judge presiding over the case, Turner’s friends and family highlighted the ways in which Turner satisfied the concept golden boy—he had many friends and a long list of athletic and academic achievements. Falbo argues that the concepts golden boy and rapist interact to prevent the apt use of the latter concept. rapist applies to a “creepy stranger, loner, monster, or animal” (2022: 349). Falbo argues that some in Turner’s community had difficulty applying rapist to Turner, because they also applied golden boy to Turner. golden boy interacted with rapist to pre-empt the apt use of the latter concept.
As defined above, innovations introduce new resources to deal with hermeneutical gaps. However, in cases of positive hermeneutical injustice, interlocutors do not need a new resource. Rather, they need to change the relationships between extant resources or remove a particular resource. Here is an objection derived from Falbo’s view: individuals can only exert control over the language used to communicate via innovation; individuals cannot control positive hermeneutical injustice via innovation; therefore, individuals have no control over positive hermeneutical injustice and are not culpable for positive hermeneutical injustice.
There are two possible responses to the above objection. First, my argument might only establish culpability for negative hermeneutical injustice. On this response, individuals are culpable for Fricker’s negative hermeneutical injustice, but not for Falbo’s positive hermeneutical injustice.
Second, we can amend the above discussion of ‘innovation’ to support individual culpability for both types of hermeneutical injustice. In §2.4, I noted that a complete account of culpable hermeneutical injustice would use a hyper-local language spoken by a duo of speaker and hearer—their duolect. (Falbo’s point about interacting resources is most compelling for non-linguistic resources. For the purposes of discussion, assume that a duolect includes not just a pairing of words and meanings, but all the epistemic resources needed to communicate knowledge, e.g. concepts, perspectives, etc.) If parts of the language users’ duolect interact to prevent communication, then one interlocutor might experience a positive hermeneutical injustice. However, the nature of this duolect is within interlocutors’ control. Interlocutors introduce innovations into the duolect to deal with negative hermeneutical injustice, or they change the relations between parts of this duolect to deal with Falbo’s positive hermeneutical injustice. Faced with positive hermeneutical injustice, interlocutors in Turner’s community might remove golden boy from their duolect, or they might resist the communitarian clash between golden boy and rapist by simply applying both concepts to Turner. Such interlocutors do not introduce an innovation, but they do speak an innovative duolect.
5. Objections
Here are the two strongest objections to the argument in this paper. First, an objector might argue that I have mischaracterised hermeneutical injustice. Innovation failures are not a necessary feature of hermeneutical injustice, properly defined. Second, an objector might argue that I have mischaracterised why hermeneutical injustice is non-culpable. An individual might be culpable for the faux pas of an innovation failure, but they are never culpable for the background conditions which make this faux pas an injustice.
5.1 Boundary-Drawing and Innovation Injustice
In §4.2, I noted Fricker’s boundary-drawing response, in which she draws a boundary between motivated ignorance and hermeneutical injustice. I argued that my account avoids Fricker’s response, since all communicative hermeneutical injustices involve a failure to innovate across a gap in shared resources.
However, I can only evade the boundary-drawing response if communicative hermeneutical injustice is a communication failure caused by hermeneutical marginalization. All communication failures caused by hermeneutical marginalization involve a failure to innovate across gappy resources. However, an objector might give an account on which hermeneutical injustice, properly defined, is not a communication failure. I consider a range of such accounts in this sub-section.
The boundary-drawing objector provides an account of hermeneutical injustice that distinguishes hermeneutical injustice from failures to innovate across gappy shared resources. To ease discussion, let’s coin a term for these failures to innovate across gappy resources: “Innovation Injustices.” On my account, hermeneutical injustices and innovation injustices are identical. The objector gives an account on which hermeneutical injustices and innovation injustices are distinct.
Non-Epistemic Harms
Communication under conditions of hermeneutical marginalization is difficult. Take the “sexual harassment” case. When a communitarian language lacks the expression ‘sexual harassment,’ speakers must exert more effort to communicate experiences of sexual harassment. They might invent metaphors, check their hearer’s understanding, or reveal painful emotions. In short, communication under conditions of hermeneutical marginalization is burdensome.
The objector might use this observation to distinguish between innovation injustice and hermeneutical injustice. ‘Innovation injustice’ refers to failed communication caused by hermeneutical marginalization, and ‘Hermeneutical injustice’ refers to burdensome communication caused by hermeneutical marginalization.
The objector has identified an important harm associated with hermeneutical marginalization. However, on their revised account, hermeneutical injustice is no longer an epistemic injustice.
Epistemic injustices are epistemic because subjects of epistemic injustice necessarily experience an epistemic harm. In Fricker’s words, epistemic injustices are necessarily “a wrong done to someone … in their capacity as a knower” (2007: 1). Examples of epistemic harms include: reducing a subject’s knowledge, blocking a subject’s contribution to shared knowledge, or insulting the subject’s capacity to know (Tanesini 2021: ch. 7; Watson 2021: chs. 3–4). For our purposes, the important point to note is that epistemic harms are essential to epistemic injustices.
Burdensome communication does not necessarily harm a subject in their capacity as a knower. A subject who experiences burdensome communication necessarily spends time and energy on communication, which contingently leads to epistemic harms. For example, interlocutors might become so tired that they fail to coordinate on an innovation and fail to communicate. However, interlocutors may also push through their innovation-fatigue and successfully communicate knowledge. An epistemic failure is likely but not necessary. Since burdensome communication does not necessarily harm a subject in their capacity as a knower, hermeneutical injustice is not burdensome communication caused by hermeneutical marginalization.
Other versions of the boundary-drawing objection make a similar mistake. In the ‘sexual harassment’ case, a speaker has no expression that guarantees institutional censure for the harasser, that has the legal and political force of ‘sexual harassment,’ or that contributes to negotiation of norms around sexual harassment. Each of these are important harms that occur under conditions of hermeneutical marginalization. However, none of them are necessarily epistemic, so none can be used to distinguish hermeneutical injustice and innovation injustice.
Epistemic Harms
Other versions of the boundary-drawing objection do necessarily track epistemic harms.
For example, an objector might argue that innovating interlocutors use less appropriate concepts than they might use if they had the appropriate communitarian resources. A hermeneutical injustice occurs, they argue, whenever (i) a speaker communicates some concept A that differs from the concept B, (ii) the speaker would use concept B if it were available via communitarian resources, (iii) concept A fails to capture an important part of the speaker’s experience, and (iv) concept B would capture an important part of the speaker’s experience. These three conditions can be satisfied even when interlocutors successfully innovate, so innovation injustice is again distinguished from hermeneutical injustice.
Take the HR case again. Kaiya and HR successfully communicate, so HR interprets Kaiya’s utterance using Kaiya’s intended concepts (or sufficiently similar concepts). Let’s suppose that Kaiya intends for her utterance to be interpreted with the concept unwanted sexual behaviour. This is not the concept sexual harassment. For the purposes of discussion, let’s stipulate that these concepts are different because only the latter is related to concepts like legal liability, misogyny, and patriarchy. Kaiya would communicate the concept sexual harassment if it were available in her communitarian resources, but she merely communicates the concept unwanted sexual behaviour.
We can derive a similar objection from Paulina Sliwa’s (2023) account of hermeneutical inquiry.26 Sliwa argues that hermeneutical injustice is caused by the lack of an apt perspective on a situation. Perspectives, here, are interconnected bundles of cognitive, experiential, affective, and motivational dispositions (Sliwa 2023: 9). Sliwa does not take a stand on the question of culpable hermeneutical injustice. Nevertheless, the boundary-drawing objector might distinguish innovation injustice and Sliwa’s hermeneutical injustice. Interlocutors might successfully innovate on a new linguistic unit but fail to communicate an apt perspective on their experience.
These objections fail to distinguish between innovation injustice and hermeneutical injustice. Take the HR case. Insofar as unwanted sexual activity falls short of sexual harassment, this is an innovation failure. In the example given above, this innovation failure is non-culpable—Kaiya sincerely attempts to communicate her experience of sexual harassment but falls short. In other cases, the innovation failure is culpable—Kaiya might innovate in more detail, intending for her utterance to be interpreted as related to the concepts legal liability, misogyny, and patriarchy. Her hearer might then culpably fail to accept this innovation.27 Similarly, to whatever extent interlocutors fail to amend a perspective (Sliwa 2023), this is a failure of innovation.
5.2. A Different Account of Non-Culpability
In general, a culpable innovation failure is a mere faux pas. When this faux pas occurs against a background of hermeneutical marginalization, we get a hermeneutical injustice. An objector might argue that, since interlocutors are never culpable for this background, they are never culpable for the injustice.
Take the bad case from §3.4, where HR fails to innovate with Kaiya. HR’s rudeness causes an injustice because their rudeness contributes to the hermeneutical marginalization of women. If women were not hermeneutically marginalized, then HR would not cause an injustice. On the current objection, HR is culpable for rudeness, but not for a hermeneutical injustice.
On this objection, I have mischaracterised why hermeneutical injustice is non-culpable.28 On my reading, hermeneutical injustice is non-culpable if individuals lack control over the causal process leading from hermeneutical marginalization to hermeneutical injustice. This takes seriously Fricker’s explanation of why hermeneutical injustice is non-culpable: “Hermeneutical Injustice is a purely structural phenomenon with no individual perpetrator” (2016: 172).
On the objector’s reading, hermeneutical injustice is non-culpable because individuals lack control over the facts in virtue of which an innovation failure is an injustice. Fricker may have this in mind when she says of supposed perpetrators of hermeneutical injustice: “… being culpable for one’s part in a broader injustice makes one a perpetrator only of that part; it does not make one a perpetrator of the broader injustice itself.” (2016: fn 16). Although an individual might be culpable for the failure to innovate, they are not culpable for an injustice, since they could not control whether their failure was a faux pas or a serious injustice.
The objector’s reading of the non-culpability claim opens more issues than I can satisfactorily deal with here. For example, the interlocutor who fails to innovate suffers from bad moral luck—their faux pas, unluckily, turned out to be an injustice (Nelkin 2019; Williams 1976; Nagel 1979). Further, hermeneutical marginalization is built up by a large and diffuse set of individual actions. The hermeneutical injustice, then, can be seen as a collective harm triggered by an interlocutor’s failure to innovate.29 Here is a quick response that suggests a modest conclusion and a strong conclusion for the argument in this paper.
The modest conclusion for this paper is that Non-culpability is false. Stated this way, my argument responds to Fricker’s claim that Hermeneutical Injustice is non-culpable because it is purely structural. The objector’s account of non-culpable hermeneutical injustice does not touch the modest conclusion. The strong conclusion is that there is no plausible account on which hermeneutical injustice is non-culpable. If the objector’s reading of the non-culpability claim is plausible, then my argument does not establish the stronger claim, although my argument does deal with one line of support for the objector’s reading of the non-culpability claim.
We have reason to be hopeful about the stronger conclusion—individuals are often treated as culpable for microaggressions, which have a similar structure to my account of hermeneutical injustice (McTernan 2018; O’Dowd 2018; Friedlander 2018; Rini 2020). A microaggression is a “small act of insult or indignity, relating to a person’s membership in a socially oppressed group, which seems minor on its own but plays a part in significant systemic harm” (Rini 2020: 12). Common microaggressions include racist jokes, interrupting a speaker, and insults. On their own, these acts are wrongful but often insignificant. Against a background of oppression, these microaggressions are a serious wrong. Similarly, on their own, innovation failures are wrongful but often insignificant. Against a background of hermeneutical marginalization, innovation failures are a serious wrong. If individuals are sometimes culpable for microaggressions, we have reason to think that individuals are sometimes culpable for hermeneutical injustice.
Conclusion
I have argued that individuals are sometimes culpable for hermeneutical injustice. Every instance of communicative hermeneutical injustice involves an attempt at linguistic innovation. Speakers and hearers can culpably fail to innovate with their conversational partner. When a language user culpably fails to innovate across a gap in a communitarian language, and a speaker is blocked from communicating knowledge of an experience, then that language user is culpable for a hermeneutical injustice.
Notes
- More carefully, speakers communicate what they believe to other people. In this paper, I will say that speakers communicate what they know, following convention in discussions of epistemic injustice. This avoids insinuating that marginalized speakers are mistaken about their own experiences. ⮭
- This example is tellingly controversial. Berenstain (2020) highlights a long history of black American women who understood and communicated their knowledge of sexual harassment without using the expression ‘sexual harassment.’ ⮭
- Most views also require that this occurs because the hearer recognises the speaker’s intention. This extra condition is not relevant for the relationship between this paper’s argument and conceptual gaps. On most non-standard views of successful communication, there is little room for concepts in the first place, so no injustice of conceptual gaps. E.g. Quine’s linguistic behaviourism: “There is nothing in linguistic meaning beyond what is to be gleaned from overt behaviour in observable circumstances.” (1992: 37–38) ⮭
- Fricker treats cognitive and communicative hermeneutical injustice as different harms of a unified phenomenon. If my argument is successful, more should be made of the distinction between communicative and cognitive hermeneutical injustices. Nevertheless, there is a close causal link between cognitive and communicative hermeneutical injustices. An agent without thoughts of x will struggle to speak about x, and an agent who has never spoken about x will unlikely have thoughts of x. ⮭
- From Ian McEwan’s (1997) Enduring Love, as cited in Fricker (2007: 156). ⮭
- Fricker sometimes also writes as if ‘Hermeneutical Marginalization’ refers to a situation where a group’s members cannot participate fully in the construction of shared resources—e.g. women were unable to contribute to the construction of language used in the workplace. This then, contingently, leads to a gap in shared resources. The interpretation in the main text follows Beeby (2011). ⮭
- In §6.2, I consider another way of arguing for non-culpable hermeneutical injustice. ⮭
- Much of my argument fits with alternative frameworks for the formal representation of language. Psychologists about language might resist positing a language function (e.g. Chomsky 2000). However, Psychologists will also resist Fricker’s ‘shared sets of resources’ that lead to hermeneutical injustice. ⮭
- More carefully, language users relate to a particular language in virtue of facts about membership in a linguistic community. For brevity, I refer to “facts about a linguistic community.” ⮭
- This is a rough gloss of Lewis’ (1969; 1975) communitarian conventions. For Lewis, a community speaks a particular language L iff there is a convention of truthfulness and trust in L. Roughly, there is a convention of truthfulness and trust in L iff members expect each other to speak truthfully and interpret each other trustingly, where the rules for truthful speech and trusting interpretation are set by the language L (e.g. “a cat sat on the mat” is true iff a cat sat on a mat). See also Camp 2016, Dummett 1993, Devitt 2021, Lepore & Stone 2015. ⮭
- Armstrong (2016) highlights the problem of linguistic innovation for communitarian views, drawing on Davidson (1986) and recent contextualists (e.g. Carston 2002; Recanati 1989; Ludlow 2014; Sperber & Wilson 1986a). Armstrong borrows the term ‘innovation’ from Gleitman & Gleitman (1971). ⮭
- Example adapted from Armstrong (2016). ⮭
- This is generous towards the communitarian: These expectations about syntax already go beyond the most popular communitarian view, i.e. Lewis’ (1975) conventions of truthfulness and trust. ⮭
- Communal, phonetic constraints on coinage change over time, but seem to be non-negotiable in conversation. For example, English does not contrast glottal stops (the ‘t’ in the Cockney ‘butter’) with alveolar taps (the ‘t’ in the Australian ‘butter’). I.e., in English, you could not coin two words that differ only with respect to these consonants. ⮭
- The dynamics of coinage in public languages is well studied (e.g. Burridge & Bergs 2017). These dynamics might only reflect the coinages that catch on in a population of human speakers. ‘Innovations’ include a broader range of coinages, including those lasting only for a single utterance. ⮭
- Example adapted from Wilson (1982). ⮭
- Some argue that the strategies listed in the main text are pragmatic uses of an unchanging communitarian language (e.g. Devitt 2021; Lepore & Stone 2015). My argument, translated into this devoutly communitarian framework, is that Fricker overlooks the pragmatics of language use. ⮭
- Cf. Armstrong’s (2016) hyperlocal conventions, Ludlow’s (2014) Microlanguages, and Davidson’s (1986) passing theories. ⮭
- See Davidson (1986) on prior and passing theories. ⮭
- This includes cases where a hearer gives no outward sign that they have accepted the speaker’s innovation. If all innovations required explicit negotiation, then hermeneutical injustice would be a species of Podosky’s Metalinguistic Injustice (2022). Hermeneutical Injustice would be those instances of Metalinguistic Injustice where metalinguistic negotiation fails to repair a gap in shared resources. ⮭
- Fricker’s notion of hermeneutical injustice only occurs when there is a “a more or less doomed attempt on the part of the subject to render an experience intelligible, either to herself or an interlocutor” (2007: 159). This distinguishes hermeneutical injustice from silencing—cases where a speaker does not even attempt an innovation. ⮭
- Fricker also distinguishes the two phenomena by noting that motivated ignorance is culpable while hermeneutical injustice is not culpable. I leave out this point—in the current context, it would be question-begging. ⮭
- Thanks to two anonymous reviewers for pressing this point. ⮭
- Just as with hermeneutical injustice, innovation failures overlap with motivated ignorance. Suppose a speaker uses an expression that is innovative for the hearer only. The hearer’s refusal to innovate with the speaker is at once an innovation failure and motivated ignorance. ⮭
- Thanks to an anonymous referee for this point. ⮭
- Thanks to an anonymous referee for this point. ⮭
- The objector might continue that it is overdemanding to expect Kaiya and her interlocutor to co-ordinate on all the relevant features of sexual harassment. As noted in §4.1, this overdemandingness objection parallels the situation for testimonial injustice, a paradigmatically culpable epistemic injustice. ⮭
- Thanks to Daniel Stoljar and Regina Rini for pressing this point. ⮭
- Kagan 2011; Nefsky 2012; see Rini (2020: ch. 3) for oppression as a collective harm. ⮭
Acknowledgements
For comments and discussion of drafts, thanks to Philip Pettit, Victoria McGeer, Daniel Stoljar, Shalom Chalson, Brandon Yip, Aidan Ryall, and participants at the Epistemic Injustice WIP Group at ANU. For helpful comments and discussion, thanks go to graduate students at ANU, audiences at the 2020 Conference on Social Categories and Oppression at ANU and the 2022 AAP, and to Rachael Brown, Regina Rini, Szymon Bogacz, and Conor Leisky. This research is supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarship.
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