Hermeneutical Injustice Through Defective Concept Possession

Abstract This paper identifies and analyses a novel species of hermeneutical epistemic injustice (HI). Fricker’s traditional account analyses HI in terms of a collective conceptual gap. (Epistemic injustice: power and the ethics of knowing, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007). Building on this, Simion’s analysis (in: Bondy P, Carter JA (eds) Well-founded belief: new essays on the epistemic basing relation. Routledge, New York, 2019) suggests the phenomenon is broader, and thus more ubiquitous: specifically, that agents who have been hermeneutically marginalised can be susceptible to HI through failing to ground their social experience in conceptual resources that are already available. This paper advances the literature further and presents a novel strand of the phenomena, where agents both have, and base, their experience on available concepts but are still subject to HI. I argue that this is an important species of HI that should be investigated and accounted for, and I suggest that in virtue of being hermeneutically marginalised, often agents only have available to them defective or oppressive concepts. I further provide a case study of what this can look like online and new concerns social media presents for this kind of HI. CW: Mentions of transphobia, racism, sexism, rape.