Testimonial Injustice and the Nature of Epistemic Injustice

This chapter examines Miranda Fricker’s concept of testimonial injustice (TI), in which speakers face unjust credibility deficits due to identity-based prejudice. While her framework has been foundational, critics highlight its limitations. Her focus on transactional cases involving individual prejudice risks overlooking structural injustices, non-assertoric speech harms, and earlier critiques of epistemic silencing from feminist and anti-colonial thought. The paper traces how subsequent scholarship has expanded TI’s scope to include interpretive and discursive injustices, credibility excesses, and structural injustice. It then examines competing accounts of TI’s primary harm, alongside Fricker’s virtue-based approach to redress. Situating TI within broader discussions of the natures of epistemic injustice, epistemic oppression, and epistemic violence helps reveal systemic forms of epistemic exclusion that challenge Fricker’s original framing.