Imperfect Cognitions

This week's post is by Floriane Brunet (Service de pédopsychiatrie, CH de Saint Nazaire) and Christophe Gauld (Service de Psychopathologie du Développement de l’Enfant et de l’Adolescent, Hôpital Femme Mère Enfant – Hospices Civils de Lyon).  Floriane Brunet  Christophe Gauld Today, growing attention is being directed toward self-diagnostic practices among teenagers, a trend that may legitimately be related to the notions of childism and epistemic injustice within adolescent psychiatry. These two notions provide insight into the multiple processes through which adolescents’ testimonies are silenced within Western societies. Becoming aware of this systemic invisibilization of singular adolescent experiences, as well as of the continuum of violence directed toward them, calls for renewed forms of adult engagement. How does this bundle of domination shape the way clinicians listen to adolescents lived experiences? How can the reception of self-diagnostic practices at this ag...

This week's blogpost is from Kasper Møller Nielsen, Julie Nordgaard, and Mads Gram Henriksen on their recent publication  Fundamental issues in epistemic injustice in healthcare  ( Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy , 2025).  Kasper Møller Nielsen, Julie Nordgaard, and Mads Gram Henriksen In this blogpost, we sketch some key points from our recent article “Fundamental issues in epistemic injustice in healthcare” ( Nielsen et al., 2025 ), calling for more conceptual clarity, methodological rigor, and empirically balanced claims in this research field. In the article, we focus on Miranda Fricker’s ( 2007 , p. 28) concept of testimonial injustice, which she defines as a person receiving “a credibility deficit owing to identity prejudice in the hearer”. In our context, testimonial injustice is a form of transactional injustice, i.e., an injustice occurring in patient-clinician relations.  We report, to our own surprise and dismay, that core claims about epistemic ...

Today's post is from Karl Landström on his paper ' On Epistemic Freedom and Epistemic Injustice ', recently published in  Inquiry . Karl Landström ‘Seek ye epistemic freedom first’ is how Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni begins his book  Epistemic Freedom in Africa: Deprovincialization and Decolonization  (2018, 1). Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s book is a detailed study of the politics of knowing and knowledge production with emphasis on what he calls ‘the African struggle for epistemic freedom’. He locates the struggle for epistemic freedom in the continued entrapment of knowledge production in Africa within colonial, Euro- and North America-centric matrices of power.  The central contribution of the book is the development of a general account of epistemic freedom. For Ndlovu-Gatsheni, epistemic freedom entails the right to think, theorise and develop one’s own methodologies to interpret the world, and write from where one is located unencumbered by Eurocentrism. Further, he argues tha...

Today's post is by Annalisa Coliva on her new paper Hysteria, Hermeneutical Injustice and Conceptual Engineering  ( Social Epistemology , 2024). Annalisa Coliva In this paper, I dive into what Miranda Fricker calls "hermeneutical injustice" in her work  Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing  (2007), exploring how it plays out in the medical field. Using the long and problematic history of hysteria as a case study, I argue that this concept was misused as a diagnostic tool for centuries, until it was dropped in 1980 with the DSM-III. The reason for this lies in deep-rooted power structures shaped by prejudice against women. I propose that hysteria perfectly fits Fricker's idea of hermeneutical injustice, but it also reveals the need to broaden the concept itself. This approach is crucial for two key reasons. First, rather than treating the medical field as a passive arena for testing philosophical ideas, I show how medical history can actively refine ou...

Here  Martino Belvederi Murri (University of Ferrara) discusses research on epistemic justice and dignity for people with psychosis. A version of this post appeared on the EPIC blog in July 2024. Martino Belvederi Murri Individuals experiencing acute psychosis in inpatient psychiatric settings face unique challenges. Consider the case of Jake, a student who is struggling between familial conflicts and economic difficulties, as well as choices related to his life career. Auditory hallucinations may take the form of “voices” that comment on his everyday actions, and may lead Jake to think that people spy on him with malevolent intent. These symptoms can lead to angst and withdrawal from social activities, possibly culminating into severe anxiety and agitation. The grave societal stigma that is attached to mental illness exacerbates feelings of isolation and diminishes help-seeking. The promotion of patient empowerment is a key component of recovery, and is increasingly seen as a du...

On 11th and 12th April in beautiful Trento, the Foundation Bruno Kessler hosted the final conference of the two-year research project on Resilient Beliefs , organised by Eugenia Lancellotta and featuring a number of international speakers interested in conspiracy theories, religious beliefs, delusions, and similar phenomena. Programme of the conference The first speaker was Scott Hill (University of Innsbruck), highlighting problems for a prominent study on the use of "conspiracy theory". Hill started discussing Miranda Fricker's account of testimonial injustice and then argued that conspiracy theorists do not suffer from a credibility deficit. That is because the credibility they are assigned matches the credibility they deserve. Scott Hill The second speaker was Anna-Maria Asunta Eder (University of Cologne), also working in social epistemology, who discussed the phenomenon of learning from others and resisting the evidence of others. Eder aims to bring some issues wid...

This post is by Lisa Bortolotti who reports on a symposium was organised by Mark Flear to explore interdisciplinary perspectives (law, philosophy of psychiatry, bioethics, sociology, and more) on epistemic injustice, hosted by City University on 15th September 2023.  This is a report of some of the talks presented at the symposium. The other talks were given by Anna Drożdżowicz (on epistemic injustice and linguistic exclusion); Miranda Mourby (on reasonable expectations of privacy in healthcare); and Neil Maddox and Mark Flear (on epistemic injustice and separated human biomaterials).  The City Law School, venue of the symposium The first presentation was by David Archard (Queen’s University, Belfast) on lived experience and testimonial injustice. Lived experience is being increasingly used in debates on a number of controversial areas—as a source of special authority on a given subject. The appeal to lived experience often works in resisting claims that contradict live...

This post is by Dan Degerman, Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at the University of Bristol, soon to join the new project EPIC (Epistemic Injustice in Healthcare), funded by a Wellcome Discovery Award. (A version of this post appeared on the EPIC blog on 15th September 2023.) Some members of team EPIC: Matthew Broome, Ian Kidd, Dan Degerman, Havi Carel, Kathleen Murphy-Hollies, and Fred Cooper. Silence is an important phenomenon in mental health. But while philosophers have had much to say about the social silencing of people with psychiatric diagnoses, other ways in which silence can feature in psychopathology have been underexplored. In a recent workshop at the University of Bristol, generously funded by the Leverhulme Trust, we sought to begin to address this neglect by exploring the different faces of silence in psychopathology. Ian Kidd opened the workshop with a talk that explored painful silences common in bereavement grief. In particular, he focused on four silences, ea...

Today's post is by Dan Degerman  on his recent paper, " Epistemic injustice, naturalism, and mental disorder: on the epistemic benefits of obscuring social factors " ( Synthese , 2023). Dan Degerman is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in Philosophy at the University of Bristol.  Dan Degerman Naturalistic understandings that frame human experiences and differences as biological dysfunctions constitute a major source of epistemic injustice in disease and disability, according to many philosophers. Epistemic injustice refers to injustices committed against people in their capacity as knowers. This occurs, for example, when someone is disbelieved because of their social identity or when a lack of suitable interpretive resources means that someone cannot make their experiences intelligible to themselves or others. Critics have argued that naturalistic understandings of human experiences and differences can lead to both kinds of epistemic injustice because they tend t...

Today’s post is by Eisuke Sakakibara, who is currently a lecturer at the University of Tokyo Hospital. He is a clinical psychiatrist as well as a researcher in the field of philosophy of psychiatry. Since 2013, he has been leading a study group in Tokyo, aptly named Philosophy of Psychiatry and Psychology.  His recent publication, “ Epistemic injustice in the therapeutic relationship in psychiatry ,” published in Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics , discusses the effects of epistemic injustice on the interactions between psychiatrists and their patients. Originally, this post appeared on the EPIC blog on 6 June 2023. Eisuke Sakakibara I first heard of the concept of epistemic injustice in 2019 in San Francisco. From that moment on, I intuitively knew that it is a concept suitable to highlight practical and ethical issues of communication that arise between psychiatrists and psychiatric patients. I have decided to further my research. The psychiatrist-psychiatric patient relationsh...

This post is by Eleanor Harris, Lucienne Spencer, and Ian James Kidd. A version of this post was originally published on the EPIC blog on 24th May 2023. Harris is a M4C funded doctoral researcher at the University of Birmingham, working on epistemic injustice and epistemic vigilance.  Spencer is a postdoctoral researcher working on the Wellcome Trust-funded project ‘Renewing Phenomenological Psychopathology’ at the Institute of Mental Health, University of Birmingham.  Kidd is a lecturer in philosophy at the university of Nottingham and works on epistemology, philosophy of illness and healthcare.  Eleanor Harris Does epistemic injustice matter in psychiatric contexts? Brent Kious and colleagues have recently argued ‘No’ (see paper in Psychological Medicine ). While it is welcome to have our assumptions challenged, we think the answer should still be that epistemic injustice should matter to psychiatrists. (See our full response  in Philosophy of Medicine ). Befo...

Today's post is by Nuria Gardia, a Mental Health Master’s student at University of Birmingham with a newly discovered passion for Philosophy. Her interests lay in the intersection between philosophy and psychology to better understand how the mind “overcomes” trauma and the relationships between mind-body and self-world. Specifically, how trauma affects human experience and thus, human reality.  This is part of a series of posts by students of the Philosophy and Ethics of Mental Health and Wellbeing module at the Institute for Mental Health. They share some of their views on key topics discussed in the module. Nuria Gardia Autistic women navigate a world made by-and-for neurotypicals within a society that ignores their strengths ( Russell et al. 2019 ), and wrongfully denies their capacity as knowers ( Catala et al. 2021 ), by underdiagnosing them and excluding them from research ( D'Mello et al. 2022 ). Moreover, without a diagnosis, autistic women are wrongly deprived vital ...

This post is by Eleanor Harris. Eleanor Harris is a Philosophy PhD candidate at the University of Birmingham, funded by the AHRC Midlands4Cities Doctoral Training Partnership. Her research explores Delusions, Epistemic Injustice, and Epistemic Vigilance. Here, she provides a report on The Association for the Advancement of Philosophy and Psychiatry's (AAPP) annual conference.   AAPP conference poster 2022 The Association for the Advancement of Philosophy and Psychiatry (AAPP) held their 33rd annual conference on 21st-22nd May 2022 at the Hilton Riverside in New Orleans, Louisiana. Unlike previous years’ conferences that had a set theme which was narrower in focus, the theme for this year’s annual conference was open to all topics that address either philosophical issues that are relevant to psychiatry, or psychiatric issues with relevance to philosophy. Over two days there were a total of 19 talks, on a wide range of topics such as psychiatric euthanasia, policing and the prod...