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Revisiting Epistemic Injustice in the Context of Agency Lubomira Radoilska 1 Accepted: 26 October 2020/ # The Author(s) 2020

Abstract

What makes an injustice epistemic rather than ethical or political? How does the former, more recent category relate to the latter, better-known forms of injustice? To address these questions, the papers of this Special Issue investigate epistemic injustice in close connection to different conceptions of agency, both epistemic and practical. Keywords Agency . Generics . Epistemic attention deficit . Epistemic disempowerment . Epistemic injustice . Epistemology of ignorance . Explanatory injustice . Logocentrism . Objectification . Violability What makes an injustice epistemic rather than ethical or political? How does the former, more recent category relate to the latter, better-known forms of injustice? To address these questions, the papers of the Special Issue investigate epistemic injustice in close connection to different conceptions of agency, both epistemic and practical. The underlying ambition is to bring together and redirect a number of ongoing debates. Some of the articles challenge the current understanding of what constitutes epistemic injustice and how various kinds of agency might be involved. Others, by contrast, revisit from a fresh angle fundamental concepts, such as knowledge, epistemic agency and democratic legitimacy. They all make an original contribution to philosophy by reconnecting state-of-the-art work across several areas of practical and theoretical philosophy, which have developed in relative isolation from each other. To forge a new direction in the analysis of epistemic injustice, the selected papers engage in close dialogue with the two main theoretical frameworks, within which the topic has been addressed so far. The first is that of virtue epistemology. Building on Fricker (Fricker 2007), which introduced the topic into mainstream analytic philosophy, harm inflicted to individuals in their capacity of knowers, believers, inquirers and/or communicators is the distinctive feature of epistemic injustice. Its different kinds, e.g. testimonial and hermeneutical are best understood in terms of criticisable dispositions, such as indifference. By contrast, epistemic justice is associated with the active exercise of specific intellectual virtues including openmindedness, well-placed trust and intellectual courage. The virtue-epistemic framework is * Lubomira Radoilska [email protected]

1

Department of Philosophy, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, UK

L. Radoilska

well-suited to track the individual contributions to just and unjust epistemic relations and outcomes. At the same time, however, it is open to criticism for underestimating the structural and systemic underpinnings of epistemic injustice, which make it entrenched, insidious and difficult to overcome. To resolve these issues, a second framework has been developed within political philosophy. Drawing on insights from feminism and critical race theory, this framework not only helps sh