Against Hermeneutical Gatekeeping: Or, How to Be a Materialist About (Some) Epistemic Injustices

Recently David Ludwig has argued that spending finite attentional resources on the question of how to achieve epistemic justice can contribute to sidelining the question of how to achieve material justice, even though achieving material justice is often what is most pressing. I respond to this ‘challenge of distorting agendas’ on behalf of work on at least some epistemic injustices of two widely-discussed sorts, namely hermeneutical injustices and contributory injustices. I show that key is to recognize that many epistemic injustices of both these sorts originate in practices of hermeneutical gatekeeping, by which I mean people’s access to needed goods being made contingent on their first rendering intelligible various things about themselves. Significantly, recognizing the origin of many epistemic injustices of both these sorts in practices of hermeneutical gatekeeping not only grounds a response to the challenge of distorting agendas, but also points towards a range of novel materialist strategies for tackling these epistemic injustices.