Philosophy
Fricker explains how prejudice can wrong people as knowers through discounted testimony and gaps in shared interpretive resources.
When a listener gives a speaker less credibility because of prejudice about who the speaker is, the speaker is wronged in a specific way: as a giver of knowledge. The harm is not only that a truth goes unheard. The person is treated as unfit to know or to tell what they know.
Privileged groups get an excess of credibility and are treated as authorities on their own lives and on other people's lives too. Oppressed groups get a credibility deficit and are judged unqualified to describe even their own experience. Social power, the capacity to control what others do, shows up as patterns of disbelief, misreading and silencing.
A second, earlier injustice happens when a society has no shared concept for what someone is going through. That person then struggles to make sense of their own experience, let alone get a hearing for it. This happens before any listener has a chance to doubt them.
A society's interpretive resources are mainly produced by the groups that hold power. As a result, these resources tend to leave out or stigmatise the experiences of everyone else. The gaps in collective understanding are therefore not random but follow the lines of social power.
Stereotypes can shape how much we trust a speaker without our noticing, even when we sincerely believe the opposite. Ordinary self-scrutiny of our beliefs can miss this bias, because the bias works below the level of what we consciously think.
Some prejudices attach to a type of person rather than to one setting. These 'tracker' prejudices follow that person across work, courts, medicine and daily talk. Because they repeat in every setting, they do systematic damage, unlike one-off bias that stays in a single place.
Prejudice can make the fair verdict feel psychologically impossible. To a prejudiced hearer, trusting a member of the disfavoured group over a favoured one can seem unthinkable. Biased judges or juries can then keep unjust power going while believing they are simply weighing evidence.
Being persistently disbelieved can destroy a person's confidence to take part in trusting conversations. A single humiliating dismissal can even redirect someone's intellectual path. When the harm goes deep, it reaches the person's very humanity and can stop people from becoming who they are.
The book's proposed remedy is a virtue in the listener: a sensibility trained, like ethical character, to notice and correct prejudiced judgments of credibility as they happen. Fricker argues that collective political change is needed and that it depends on this ethical groundwork. A reviewer contests that claim.
A society's collective imagination carries the stereotypes that distort whom we believe, so it is an ethical and epistemic liability. Fricker argues it is also a mighty resource for change. New concepts can generate indefinitely many new meanings, which lets people name experiences that had no name before.