Boult on normative expectations and testimonial injustice

Boult has recently suggested that there are two distinct ways in which testimonial injustice is epistemically blameworthy namely (1) when it embodies a kind of culpable irrationality in believing someone less credible than they are; and (2) when it embodies a deficiency of normative epistemic expectations of a speaker. Importantly, he argues that the second is independent of the balance of evidence and so provides a way in which testimonial injustice is blameworthy even in cases of contaminated evidence in which unjust social structures generate misleading evidence regarding the epistemic capacities of marginalised groups. I raise a number of questions about his appeal to deficient normative epistemic expectations including (1) whether it provides an epistemic answer to the question of when we owe it to a speaker to accept their word; (2) whether the kind of wrong involved in it is specifically epistemic; and (3) whether it overgeneralises, characterising the deficient normative expectations of victims of oppression as blameworthy.

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Publication Details

Journal
Inquiry
Published
2025-09-03
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1080/0020174x.2025.2549728
Primary Topic
Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00
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article

Boult on normative expectations and testimonial injustice

Jessica Brown
Inquiry
Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics
article

Boult on normative expectations and testimonial injustice

Jessica Brown
article en

Abstract

Boult has recently suggested that there are two distinct ways in which testimonial injustice is epistemically blameworthy namely (1) when it embodies a kind of culpable irrationality in believing someone less credible than they are; and (2) when it embodies a deficiency of normative epistemic expectations of a speaker. Importantly, he argues that the second is independent of the balance of evidence and so provides a way in which testimonial injustice is blameworthy even in cases of contaminated evidence in which unjust social structures generate misleading evidence regarding the epistemic capacities of marginalised groups. I raise a number of questions about his appeal to deficient normative epistemic expectations including (1) whether it provides an epistemic answer to the question of when we owe it to a speaker to accept their word; (2) whether the kind of wrong involved in it is specifically epistemic; and (3) whether it overgeneralises, characterising the deficient normative expectations of victims of oppression as blameworthy.

Inquiry
University of St Andrews (GB)
Openalex Percentile: Top 77%
Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics
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Boult on normative expectations and testimonial injustice — Jessica Brown · Inquiry (2025) | TGRS Research Map | TGRS