So, here are my notes on "Hermeneutical Injustice" By Miranda Fricker.
As always, I've tried to put any wording that I took directly from the article into quotation marks, but since I was taking the notes for myself, I may have missed some.
Hermeneutical Injustice by Miranda Fricker
This was a particularly difficult article as I was unfamiliar with many of the terms, so I spent some time on dictionary.com before reading.
Epistemic means related to knowledge or knowing.
Hermeneutical injustice is when “someone has a significant area of their social experience obscured from understanding owing to prejudicial flaws in shared resources for social interpretation.”
So, a person’s lived experience cannot be understood (by themselves or by others?) because there are “flaws in shared resources for social interpretation.”
Systemic = of or pertaining to a system. Incidental = happening or likely to happen in an unplanned or subordinate conjunction with something else.
Hermeneutics = the science of interpretation.
Situated hermeneutical inequality: the flaws in the interpretive resources “prevent the subject from making sense of an experience which it is strongly in her interests to render intelligible.”
So, someone has an experience. It would be really useful and productive for her to be able to make sense of it, but the shared modes of interpretation (maybe things like common narratives?) prevent her from doing so.
Hermeneutical justice = the listener’s ability to lessen “the effects of hermeneutical injustice on the speaker.” This is “a hybrid ethical-intellectual virtue.” (Does this mean that the listener helps to interpret the events for the speaker?)
7.1 The Central Case of Hermeneutical Injustice
Power relations can inhibit a woman’s ability to understand her own experience. If you’re part of the dominated group, the world is not structured for your purpose, and in fact is “inimical” to it.
“Structured” here has three meanings.
If it’s read materially: “social institutions and practices favour the powerful”
If it’s read ontologically (regarding the branch of metaphysics that studies the nature of existence): “the powerful … constitute the social world”
If it’s read from an epistemological perspective: “the powerful have an unfair advantage in structuring collective social understandings.”
We’ll be focused on the third one, but not ignoring the others, since it’s material advantages that create the epistemological advantage. “If you have material power, then you will tend to have an influence in those practices by which social meanings are generated.” AND, “if understandings are structured a certain way, then so are the social facts.”
We’re focusing on our knowledge and knowing practices and their ethics.
“Social power has an unfair impact on collective forms of social understanding”. One way of looking at that idea is to
1. Think of the ways in which our understandings reflect “the perspectives of different social groups.”
2. Look at how unequal power can skew interpretive resources; “the powerful tend to have appropriate understandings of their experiences ready to draw on” while the less powerful will have “at best ill-fitting meanings to draw on in the effort to render them intelligible.”
Consciousness raising sessions – where women shared experiences – let women share experiences that they didn’t really understand, awakening “resources for social meaning that brought clarity, cognitive confidence, and increased communicative facility”. In these groups, women were “able to overcome” their habitual methods of social interpretation and come up with new interpretations. As a group they were coming up with new resources for understanding their experiences. This kind of thing is a BFD.
Example: one woman’s remembrance of a consciousness-raising workshop where hearing other women talk about their experiences with postpartum depression let her realize that she wasn’t deficient, but that “it was a combination of physiological things and a real societal thing, isolation.”
Her depression (as “female depression”) was “ill-understood by the subject herself, because collectively ill-understood.” There are reasons for this lack of understanding; lack of honesty about the prevalence of depression, for example. But if we’re looking for some social power disparity or unfairness, her breakthrough was “a moment in which some kind of epistemic injustice is overcome.”
The time before this understanding is being referred to here as “hermeneutical darkness”. This darkness was “a wrong done to her in her capacity as a knower”. Therefore it was a kind of epistemic injustice (an injustice related to knowledge and knowing) being referred to here as “a hermeneutical injustice.”
Another example (having to do with sexual harassment): a woman was harassed by a superior – not blatantly at first – he’d touch himself when near her or “brush against” her. One night he kissed her. After that she worked hard to avoid him but be cordial to his wife, but the stress took a physical toll. She ended up quitting, but was denied unemployment because she was too embarrassed to explain why she really quit. Eventually she told a female professor, whose students had been talking about encountering this kind of stuff, and there was an “aha moment” where they realized how common this was, and how none of them had ever told anyone. They found feminist lawyers to challenge the unemployment claim. Then they held a “speak-out in order to break the silence” about sexual harassment in the workplace (even though at the time there wasn’t even a name for it, so they had to come up with one).
The women who were dealing with this had “an acute cognitive disadvantage from a gap in the collective hermeneutical resource”. Technically he had the same disadvantage since he wasn’t able to understand what he was doing to her. But it’s only an injustice to her because it’s harmful and wrongful – obviously, his “cognitive disablement is not a significant disadvantage to him.” In fact, it’s almost an advantage because he can do it unchallenged. (She implies that it COULD be seen as a bit of “epistemic and moral bad luck” if he was actually a fairly decent person to the point where understanding the harm he was doing would have led him to stop it).
It’s really in her best interest to understand her situation; “without that understanding she is left deeply troubled, confused, and isolated, not to mention vulnerable to continued harassment.”
If you can’t understand it, you can’t speak up against it, much less implement a system that would stop it.
If someone had a disorder that caused socially inappropriate behavior, but the disorder wasn’t yet understood or commonly diagnosed, you would “suffer a hermeneutical disadvantage.” However, it’s not hermeneutical injustice. Just sucky.
In order to figure out “the deeper source,” we need to look at the social conditions in the situation. Women’s social powerlessness, participation in things like “journalism, politics, academia, and law.” Because women were relatively powerless, they could not participate in the areas that created hermeneutical understanding in general. (I think).
7.2 Hermeneutical Marginalization
Because “we try hardest to understand those things it serves us to understand,” “a group’s unequal hermeneutical participation will tend to show up in a localized manner in hermeneutical hotspots.”
So, places “where the powerful have no interest in achieving a proper interpretation” or where they actually want to perpetuate the misinterpretation, like with the sexual harasser guy. The “unequal hermeneutical participation” is disguised by his interpretation of it (“flirting”) so it’s hard to see that there’s another interpretation.
So, with cases like the woman being harassed above, “the whole engine of collective social meaning was effectively geared to keeping these obscured experiences out of sight.”
“When there is unequal hermeneutical participation… members of the disadvantaged group are hermeneutically marginalized.”
The idea of marginalization indicates “subordination and exclusion from some practice that would have value for the participant.” It can happen in a big-picture sense or in smaller, more short-term cases. You can be marginalized in some contexts but not others, depending on which aspect of your identity is highlighted at that point (woman, upper-class, white). So you can be excluded from the understanding-forming process in some social areas, but included in others.
Sometimes your marginalization is because of “material power” – based on stuff like socio-economic background. Sometimes “identity power” – based on prejudicial stereotypes. Most likely it’s a combination.
“We can now define hermeneutical injustice of the sort suffered by women like Carmita Wood. It is: the injustice of having some significant area of one's social experience obscured from collective understanding owing to persistent and wide‐ranging hermeneutical marginalization.”
So, it’s the idea that part of your experience is obscured from the collective understanding.
So why is hermeneutical marginalization bad? “it renders the collective hermeneutical resource structurally prejudiced”. Interpretations of things that affect the less-powered will be biased toward the more-powered: marital rape, workplace harassment, etc. It causes “structural identity prejudice.”
So now, “Hermeneutical injustice is: 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 resource.”
“Now what exactly does ‘systematic’ mean in the hermeneutical context?”
Hermeneutic marginalization involves socio-economic marginalization, since it involves non-participation in areas like “journalism, politics, law, and so on” that are able to participate. Marginalization “tracks the subject” through different areas of his/her life – not just the hermeneutical.
Systemic cases are more “persistent, wide-ranging,” while incidental cases are fleeting or “highly localized.” Incidental hermeneutical injustices arise from “one-off moment of powerlessness.”
Example from a book where a guy is stalked but not threatened, and the police say they can’t do anything about it – “a collective hermeneutical lacuna is preventing him from rendering his experience communicatively intelligible.” The two misinterpretations – that HE’S being too obsessed, and that he’s overreacting – trivialize his experience. BUT, this particular hermeneutical injustice isn’t coming from “general social powerlessness”.
“The generic definition now called for captures hermeneutical injustice per se as the injustice of having some significant area of one's social experience obscured from collective understanding owing to hermeneutical marginalization.”
An incidental hermeneutical injustice isn’t any less “ethically serious” than a systematic one.
If you’re disadvantaged b/c your experience isn’t understood because of “a lacuna in the collective hermeneutical resource,” then you can “claim… hermeneutical injustice” even if it’s an isolated incident. However, if the lacuna is “caused… by a wide-ranging and persistent hermeneutical marginalization” it’s systematic. It’s “part of a more general susceptibility” to other kinds of marginalization and injustice. However, in hermeneutical injustice there’s no bad guy or agent of injustice.
“Hermeneutical injustice might often be compounded by testimonial injustice.” Which we didn’t read about. “In such a case, the speaker is doubly wronged: once by the structural prejudice in the shared hermeneutical resource, and once by the hearer in making an identify‐prejudiced credibility judgement.”
If you’re of some other devalued class and try to explain a situation that has lots of lacunas, you may end up with “the perfect conditions conducive to a runaway credibility deflation”
Lacuna might affect not only content but also form. “Thus the characteristic expressive style of a given social group may be rendered just as much of an unfair hindrance to their communicative efforts as an interpretive absence can be.”
“their powerlessness bars them from full participation in those practices whereby social meanings are generated, for these are also the practices whereby certain expressive styles come (p. 161 ) to be recognized as rational and contextually appropriate.”
“ If one lives in a society or a subculture in which the mere fact of an intuitive or an emotional expressive style means that one cannot be heard as fully rational, then one is …subject to a hermeneutical injustice.”
7.3 The Wrong of Hermeneutical Injustice
“Hermeneutical lacunas are like holes in the ozone—it's the people who live under them that get burned.”
There might be formal equality but situated inequality. Everyone has health care but not dental = formally equal. Some people can afford their own dental = situated inequality. “some group(s) [are] asymmetrically disadvantaged by a blanket collective lack”
The primary harm: “The first prejudicial exclusion is made in relation to the speaker, the second in relation to what they are trying to say and/or how they are saying it.” Secondary harm: for instance, the sexually harassed woman had stress, had to quit her job, and couldn’t collect unemployment. Secondary epistemic disadvantages: “subject’s loss of epistemic confidence.” Can cause you to lose knowledge, prevent you from learning new knowledge, and make you less like to gain “certain important epistemic virtues, such as intellectual courage.”
When you feel like what you feel and what you’re being told are sharply at odds, “it tends to knock your faith in your own ability to make sense of the world.”
So let’s look at how situated hermeneutical inequality can “influence the construction of the individual subject.” Hermeneutical injustice can be “so damaging that it cramps the very development of self”.
Growing up gay. “collective understandings… construct not only the subject’s experience (his desires become shameful…) but also his very self.”
“At some level his personal sexual experience was of a simple love of men; yet this aspect of his experience being inarticulable, the only psychological rebellion he could hope to pull off against what this meant about his identity was denial. Denial is the first stage of the double‐think (the sleight of hand, the act of bad faith) that is required in order to rebel against internalized yet falsifying hermeneutical constructions of one's social identity.”
“But something else that allows for resistance is that other aspects of one's identity (being educated and middle‐class, perhaps) might equip one with resources for rebellion, as will certain personal characteristics (our narrator was surely fiercely intelligent, psychologically tough, and socially resourceful).”
“As individuals, some authoritative voices have special power over us, while others, for whatever reason, do not.”
An individual may start to feel dissonance if he realizes that one of the “common constructions” of his sexuality is false, he might start to think about other parts of that discourse and whether or not they might be false too. Dissonance is a starting point for critical thinking and “moral-intellectual courage that rebellion requires.”
“In certain social contexts, hermeneutical injustice can mean that someone is socially constituted as, and perhaps even caused to be, something they are not, and which it is against their interests to be seen to be.” This could prevent them “from becoming who they are”.
Questions of culpability still arise – we have to think about how to listen when you know there may be speakers “whose attempts to make communicative sense of their experiences are unjustly hindered.”
7.4 The Virtue of Hermeneutical Justice
It will be corrective. Nobody’s just immune to the unintelligibility caused by lacunas. You have to be sensitive to the fact that someone might be having trouble communicating not because it’s “nonsense” or the speaker is “a fool, but rather to some sort of gap in collective hermeneutical resources. The point is to realize that the speaker is struggling with an objective difficulty and not a subjective failing.”
“The virtuous hearer, then, must be reflexively aware of how the relation between his social identity and that of the speaker is impacting on the intelligibility to him of what she is saying and how she is saying it.” This will help the speaker appear more credible.
“ in hermeneutical contexts the orientation to truth needs to allow for the possibility that there is more than one interpretation with equal title to truth”.
(I’m having a hard time with the repeated use of the word “virtuous”).
A virtuous hearer will try to make a “credibility judgment” based on if the speaker’s interpretation “would make good sense if the attempt to articulate it were being made in a more inclusive hermeneutical climate – one without structural identity prejudice”.
Louise Antony suggests that a man should think that “when a woman, or any member of a stereotyped group, says something anomalous, they should assume that it's they who don't understand, not that it is the woman who is nuts”.
“ the virtuous hearer may effectively be able to help generate a more inclusive hermeneutical micro‐climate through the appropriate kind of dialogue with the speaker.”
“Virtuous hearers' performance is constrained by their own social identity vis‐à‐vis that of the speaker.”
“the virtuous hearer may seek out extra corroborating evidence; for instance, by consulting other relevantly placed people”
“ the virtue of hermeneutical justice may simply be a matter of reserving judgement, so that the hearer keeps an open mind as to credibility.”
You’d have to be SUPER virtuous to spontaneously be this hermeneutically just.
handy thanks!
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