Expressive Epistemic Injustice: Definition, Measurement, and Deliberative Cure

Epistemic injustice means that knowledge relevant to collective decisions gets discounted, thus inflicting harm on disadvantaged groups. The most familiar kinds (established by Fricker 2007) are testimonial (dismissing arguments because of the social characteristics of the speaker) and hermeneutical (lack of collective interpretive resources to make sense of oppression). We develop the idea of expressive epistemic justice, which exists when social forces induce a systematic failure for an individual or group’s values and beliefs to be reflected in what the individual or group expresses as its wants. Expressive epistemic injustice can persist even if testimonial and hermeneutic injustice were to be eliminated. The degree of failure can be quantified, enabling us in an empirical analysis of multiple cases to locate the source of expressive epistemic injustice in the conditions of discourse in a public sphere awash in symbolic manipulations by relatively powerful actors. We then show how citizen deliberation can remedy expressive epistemic justice. Our analysis adds to existing epistemic arguments for deliberative democracy, for it shows that deliberation increases the likelihood that collective decisions will respond to the values and beliefs that define these decisions as good to begin with.