ESPF Colloquium: Christine Bratu (Göttingen)

Title: Why there isn’t any testimonial injustice (just plenty of disrespect).

Abstract: In this talk, I will argue that, contrary to what Miranda Fricker sustained in her influential work „Epistemic Injustice“, there is no such thing as testimonial injustice. In the first part of my talk, I will clarify that Fricker’s understanding of testimonial injustice implicitly relies on the idea of morally grounded epistemic duties, i.e. on the idea that people owe it to each other (not) to have certain beliefs about each other. In the second part, I will argue that positing such duties would curtail our freedom of thought and that there aren’t any considerations weighty enough to warrant such curtailment. In the last part of my talk, I will therefore propose a different interpretation of situations that have been hitherto considered paradigmatic instances of testimonial injustice: Rather than conceptualizing them as situations in which a person is violated in her right to be considered a credible source of knowledge, we should think about them as situations in which a whole social group is disrespected in its epistemic standing.

More information via Charlotte Knowles.