Epistemic Injustice and Contact Experiencers: Constitutive Experiences and Ontological Threat

This paper argues that contact experiencers, or those who report experiences with advanced intelligences they suspect or believe are non-human, should be taken seriously as victims of epistemic injustice. Through comparison with other groups of knowers who report a constitutive experience, we surface situations in which speakers are doubted on the grounds that the constitutive experience is argued not to be possible, in part because it poses an ontological threat to hearers’ conceptions of identity or reality. Experiences may threaten hearers’ existing ontological categories, introduce ontological ambiguity, or suggest a need for new ontological categories. We show that contact experiencer claims represent threats in all three of these ways, as well as threats to anthropocentric norms and the perceived human knowability of the world. To begin to redress these harms, we suggest a radical phenomenology coupled with ontological openness as a starting point for restorative hearing.