Mind Association

Review
Reviewed Work(s): Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing by Miranda
Fricker
Review by: Martin Kusch
Source: Mind, New Series, Vol. 118, No. 469 (Jan., 2009), pp. 170-174
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the Mind Association
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 170 Book Reviews

But with respect to Hegel, at least, Franks need not wait for the arrival of
high-quality interpretations at odds with his own. Robert Pippin's influential
reading presents Hegel as a non-metaphysical transcendental philosopher
(Hegel's Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989). And Stephen Houlgate argues carefully and persuasively
that Hegel's philosophy cannot be characterized as transcendental at all (Free
dom, Truth and History: An Introduction to Hegel, London: Routledge, 1991;
revised edition, Blackwell, 2006). Hegel does not, on this view, employ tran
scendental arguments to reveal the conditions of the possibility of experience,
but rather articulates the necessary determinations of being itself. If this is so,
then Hegel's mature enterprise, introduced by the Phenomenology (1807) and
executed in the Science of Logic (1812-1816) and the Encyclopedia of Philosophical
Sciences (1817), represents a truly distinctive philosophical project, rather than a
mere variation on the program of the early idealists. As such, it deserves inde
pendent consideration within any generalized account of German idealism.
Paul Franks has done extremely important and impressive work in sympa
thetically reconstructing the motivations and arguments of Kant and his
immediate successors, and it is to be hoped that this book will have the desired
effect of increasing appreciation of the contemporary significance of Agrippan
scepticism and German idealism. It is also to be hoped that such attention will
ultimately increase understanding of the distinctive philosophical contribu
tions of Hegel and the other 19th century idealists.

Philosophy Department will Dudley

Williams College
54 Stetson Court
Williamstown, MA, 01267
USA
doi:io. i093/mind/fzpoi9

Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, by Miranda

Fricker. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. x + 188.
H/b ?27.50.

The central premiss of this book is that traditional epistemology has gone
wrong in ignoring the many ways in which epistemic practices and social
power are intertwined. In order to illuminate the entanglement of knowledge
and power, Miranda Fricker suggests, we need a new type of philosophical
investigation that combines epistemology with ethics and political science.
One important fruit of this type of work is the identification of different forms
of epistemic injustice. According to Fricker, 'testimonial injustice' and 'herme
neutical injustice' are two particularly pressing forms. She dedicates six chap
ters to the former, one chapter on the latter.

Mind, Vol. 118 . 469 . January 2009 ? Mind Association 2009

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 Book Reviews 171

Fricker treats the situation of Tom Robinson in Harper Lee's To Kill a

Mockingbird as a paradigmatic case of testimonial injustice. Robinson, a
young black man, is on trial in 1930s Alabama for the alleged rape of a white
woman. Although Robinson is innocent, the jury dismisses his testimony on
the assumption that 'all Negroes lie' (p. 25). Robinson suffers from an 'iden
tity-prejudicial credibility deficit' (p. 28). This term applies to him on the fol
lowing grounds: (1) Robinson's report conveys knowledge; (2) Robinson's
audience does not accept his report; (3) this non-acceptance is due to the
audience's harbouring a distorting prejudice relating to Robinson's social
identity; and (4) the relationship between Robinson and his audience is one
of social power, that is, 'a practically situated capacity to control others'
actions' (p. 13). Prejudices relating to social identities are hard to combat
since they often operate at a non-doxastic level. Fricker seeks to capture this
level by distinguishing between beliefs and 'images': 'images can operate
beneath the radar of our ordinary doxastic self-scrutiny' (p. 40).
Testimonial injustice harms its victim on several levels. The primary aspect
of harm is that the subject is denied the capacity of being a knower. This is a
capacity essential to human value. The secondary aspect of harm has practical
as well as epistemic dimensions. The practical dimension is that the subject is
confined to a low place in the social hierarchy. The epistemic dimension
includes the subject's loss of confidence in her intellectual abilities. At the
extreme, exclusion from 'trustful conversation' may undermine the subject's
ability to 'steady her mind' by separating out her beliefs and desires.
Fricker defends a virtue-theoretical account of the ethics and epistemology
of testimony. A new form of 'non-inferentialism' in the reception of testimony
occupies a prominent place in this project. A critical reception of testimony
does not presuppose making inferences. Critical testimony reception is usually
a form of epistemic perception: the suitably critical?and thus virtuous?
hearer will act on the basis of 'perceptual deliverances of a well-trained testi
monial sensibility' (p. 71). Fricker elaborates on this thesis by drawing on an
analogy with moral perception. In both cases the model for judgement is per
ceptual; in both realms good judgement is uncodified; in both spheres judge
ment is intrinsically motivating and reason-giving; and in both areas an
emotional aspect is linked to the cognition.
Testimonial injustice can be undone and prevented by the 'virtue of testi
monial justice'; it 'neutralizes the impact of prejudice on ... credibility judg
ments' (p. 92). Critical reflection or personal familiarity are different routes to
this virtue and its deliveries. Fricker stresses the role of'cultural-historical con
tingency' in this regard (p. 99). A given culture might not equip its members
with the ethical or epistemic resources to identify and overcome their preju
dices. Such members' routine moral judgements might therefore be blameless
even though they are prejudiced.
Fricker seeks to anchor her central claims in the framework of 'state-of
nature epistemology' or 'genealogy'. Edward Craig's genealogy studies the

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 172 Book Reviews

development of our concept of knowledge; Bernard Williams' version aims to

explain the importance of virtues like 'accuracy' and 'sincerity'. The accurate
person aims to be a true believer regarding a wide range of questions; the sin
cere person commits to being an honest testifier. Fricker sees the virtue of'tes
timonial justice' as equally basic and equally central. Even in a fictitious state
of nature there must be some social categorization and thus the potential for
identity-prejudice. Testimonial justice is needed as a corrective.
Craig hypothesizes that?already in prehistoric times?our concept of
knowledge developed out of the perspectival concept of a co-operative good
informant relative to a given hearer. Craig calls 'objectivization' the process of
conceptual development in which perspectival elements are eradicated from a
concept. Fricker thinks that Craig's theory allows us to further analyse the
harm of testimonial injustice. The intrinsic form of harm is 'epistemic objec
tification': the prejudiced interlocutor denies the speaker the role of an
informant and reduces her to being 'a mere source of information' (p. 134).
And since testimony is?as Craig's analysis shows?'the core of the very con
cept of knowing', we can see 'how the [testimonial] injustice cuts deep' (p. 145).
Fricker's final chapter discusses a second form of epistemic injustice:
'hermeneutical injustice'. In this case powerlessness has the effect of preventing
a group from generating the collective conceptual resources for understanding
their social experience. One example are women before the concept of sexual
harassment became widely available. The harms caused by hermeneutical
injustice include the exclusion from collective hermeneutical resources, physi
cal symptoms of stress, and the undermining of the victim's ability to make
sense of her world. The 'virtue of hermeneutical justice' is needed to repair or
prevent these forms of harm. The person possessing this virtue will recognize
the victim's situation and help her overcome it.
This is a wonderful and important book not just for social or feminist epis
temologists, but for the discipline as a whole. Fricker succeeds admirably in
achieving her main goal of offering a detailed and wide-ranging ethical and
epistemological analysis of testimonial injustice. And her success in this regard
in turn gives strong support to her more general claim that epistemology must
include a critical reflection upon the manifold relations between epistemic
practices and social power. Moreover, the book is beautifully written and Fric
ker coins many memorable technical terms, including 'hermeneutical hotspot'
or 'epistemic objectification'. I have only a few minor quibbles.
First, it is unclear why the analysis of testimonial injustice is so much more
thorough than the investigation of the hermeneutical form. Why, for instance,
is no effort made to link hermeneutical injustice to Craig's and Williams's
genealogy?
Second, while it is clearly right to insist that many important prejudices are
situated on a non-doxastic level, it seems less obvious that this non-doxastic
level should in general be taken to consist of images. In some cases this seems
correct; for instance, we do have prejudicial images or pictures of what a man

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 Book Reviews 173

or woman 'should' look like. But in many other cases of non-doxastic preju
dice, talk of images is merely metaphorical. In many situations it seems more
adequate to speak of the non-doxastic level as one of intentional and non
intentional dispositions: for instance, dispositions to display a hostile body lan
guage towards members of the other sex or towards some minority groups, or
dispositions to form negative beliefs or desires regarding them.
Third, Fricker's inquiry into epistemic injustice is fundamentally asymmet
rical: with respect to the victim Fricker offers detailed ethical and psychologi
cal investigations into the various forms of harm; with respect to (possible)
perpetrators, she puts forward ethical-epistemological demands. This division
of perspectives has the?no doubt unwanted?effect of portraying the victim
as invariably passive and the perpetrator alone as holding all the keys to an
improvement. To avoid this effect it might have been useful to stress the epis
temic harm inflicted by perpetrators upon themselves, and the forms of epis
temic resistance open to victims.
Fourth, while I share Fricker's admiration for Craig's and Williams's geneal
ogy, I am not fully convinced by her specific ways of exploiting this framework.
For instance, Fricker's suggestion according to which the victim of testimonial
injustice suffers 'epistemic objectification' remains too vague. Epistemic objec
tification is said to reduce an informant to a mere source of information, and
the latter is analysed on the model of sexual objectification. But to be silenced
is not the same as being treated as a mere source of information.
Fifth, Fricker reads Craig's genealogy as having established that testimony
'defines the core of the very concept of knowledge'. I disagree. All Craig sug
gests is that our concept knowledge developed out of another concept?call it
protoknowledge?that was closely linked to the idea of a good informant rela
tive to the needs of a specific hearer. But this does not make protoknowledge the
core of knowledge. The process of objectivization deleted not only the perspec
tival elements of protoknowledge, it also severed the links between knowledge
and testimony. It is true that Craig believes our concept of knowledge to 'still
bear certain marks of its [testimonial] origin' (Knowledge and the State of
Nature: An Essay in Conceptual Synthesis, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990,
p. 95). But it is an ominous sign that Craig never tells us what these marks are.
Sixth and finally, Fricker finds no use for Williams's important idea that
Craig's 'imaginary' genealogy needs to be complemented by history qua 'real'
genealogy. Williams insists that in moving from imaginary to real genealogy
we do not leave philosophy behind: 'philosophy cannot be too pure if it really
wants to do what it sets out to do' (Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Geneal
ogy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 39). Fricker displays no interest
in the history of traditional epistemology, and no interest in the history of our
pre-theoretical epistemic intuitions and practices. She does not ask how and
why traditional and mainstream epistemology ended up excluding social
political questions from its remit. And she never seems to worry that the epis
temic and ethical intuitions she builds upon might themselves be part and

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 174 Book Reviews

parcel of a history of the creation and maintenance of identity-prejudicial ster

eotypes. Perhaps it is due to Fricker's quick dismissal of 'postmodernism'
(pp. 2 f.) that such questions do not seem more pressing to her.

Department of History and Philosophy of Science martin kusch

Cambridge University
Free School Lane
Cambridge CB2 3RH
doi:io.i093/mind/fzpo20

The Phenomenological Mind: An Introduction to Philosophy of

Mind and Cognitive Science, by Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi. Lon
don and New York: Routledge, 2008. Pp. xi + 244. P/b ?16.99.

In The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology

(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970, p. 68) Husserl says of the
phenomenological method: 'This greatest of all revolutions must be charac
terized as the transformation of scientific objectivism ... into a transcenden
tal subjectivism'. Once upon a time, and not too long ago, those who dared
embark on phenomenological research projects, being good revolutionaries,
were eager to criticize what they took to be the mechanistic, reductionist, and
'unbiological' computational theory of mind commonly associated with clas
sical cognitive science. The idea of inner computational states acting as the
vehicles of specific contents, and displaying full quasi-linguistic, combinato
rial structure, was treated with suspicion by those versed in the Husserlian
tradition?a tradition historically rooted in a profound distrust of naturalis
tic methodologies. The whole approach endorsed, they argued, a Cartesian
view of the mind as a separate arena, to be studied in ways largely insulated
from issues concerning embodiment and environmental surround. In con
trast with this third-person, objectivist view of the mind, the phenomenolog
ical method focuses on first-person involvement in the construction of the
world as experienced by the subject. Husserl's maxim 'to the things them
selves' is (somewhat confusingly) an invitation to focus not on the things 'out
there', but on the things as experienced by the subject?things that become
shaped and described through the subject's act of experiencing them.
Husserl's once-revolutionary call has, more recently, paved the way toward a
more reformist and co-operative stand. With the computational view of the
mind dethroned by a renewed interest in all those mental phenomena that
such a view allegedly left out, the rise of embodied and embedded accounts of
cognition, and the staggering advances in neuroscience, the time now seems
right to reveal phenomenology and cognitive science not as antagonistic views
of the mind, but as compatible and mutually constraining disciplines. Shaun
Gallagher and Dan Zahavi's scientifically informed, theoretically balanced,
ecumenical, textbook is a good illustration of this call for mutual enlighten

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