Beyond Credibility: Formative Epistemic Injustice and the Allocation of Epistemic Goods

Classroom discourse is structured by asymmetry: a knowledgeable party solicits responses from learners to assess their understanding and guide instruction. This paper argues that when the epistemic goods at stake in these exchanges — attention, interpretive effort, and evaluative uptake — are allocated on nonpedagogical grounds, learners suffer a formative epistemic wrong. It develops formative epistemic injustice as a category of epistemic injustice that requires its own analytical framework rather than extension from Miranda Fricker’s testimonial model. Fricker’s framework centres on credibility deficits in exchanges between epistemic peers, but pedagogical contexts operate under constitutive asymmetries that render credibility unsuitable as an allocative principle. The just distribution of epistemic goods in classrooms adheres instead to pedagogical norms. When these norms are violated, the primary wrong targets learners’ developing epistemic agency, distorting the capacities on which mature knowledgeproduction depends. This account explains how unjust allocation can become entrenched even without identity prejudice. Concentrated authority limits correction, developmental vulnerability weakens contestation, and temporal stability transforms momentary skew into persistent practice. Remedies combine teacher virtues of pedagogical discernment and transparency with institutional design that diffuses authority and makes patterns of attention and evaluation visible and revisable.