Imperfect Cognitions

This post is by Lina Lissia. Lina's research focuses on formal epistemology, philosophy of action, clinical psychology, and psychoanalysis. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cagliari within the PRIN PNRR project Metaphor and Epistemic Injustice in Mental Illness: The Case of Schizophrenia . In addition to her academic work, she practices as a psychoanalyst in Paris. Lina Lissia Miranda Fricker introduced the concept of hermeneutical injustice , a type of epistemic injustice in which individuals or groups lack the conceptual tools to articulate their experiences. This absence of language prevents recognition and understanding, leaving certain realities invisible. In recent years, this phenomenon has become especially evident in the world of dating, where a surge of neologisms— ghosting , breadcrumbing , orbiting , zombieing , and many more—has emerged as an attempt to give shape to experiences that were previously unrecognized. The rising of dating neol...

This blogpost is by Miriam Solomon on her recently published paper, ' The Elusiveness of Hermeneutical Injustice in Psychiatric Categorizations ' ( Social Epistemology , 2024). Miriam Solomon Miranda Fricker’s (2007) concept of “hermeneutical injustice” is a helpful critical tool for thinking about how improved social identities become available to those who can benefit from them. Fricker argues that dominant conceptual frameworks are often inadequate and unjust in that, for reasons of social prejudice, they get in the way of understanding important aspects of one’s own social experience. For example, during the 1950s, dominant stereotypes about male homosexuals—stereotypes that were both negative and inaccurate—prevented men who preferred sex with men from understanding their societal roles.  Fricker writes about the “Aha!” moment when a more accurate and positive social identity becomes available, correcting the hermeneutic injustice. Her examples include 1960s gay male iden...

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...

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...

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 ...

Today's post is by Rosa Ritunnano (University of Birmingham and Melbourne), consultant psychiatrist and PhD candidate at the Institute for Mental Health, Birmingham, UK. Here she talks her recent paper which has been awarded the 2021 Wolfe Mays Essay Prize for Early Career Researchers by The British Society for Phenomenology (BSP) and the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology (JBSP).  Rosa Ritunnano In this paper, I argue that the adoption of a critical phenomenological stance may improve conditions of hermeneutical marginalisation as experienced by individuals who have attracted a diagnosis of psychosis (although I believe that the suggested approach can be transferrable to other conditions). In cases of hermeneutical injustice , one is unable to understand their own experience or effectively communicate it to others because they lack an adequate conceptual framework for making sense of this experience. The classic example used in the literature on hermeneutical injust...

This post is by Veli Mitova (University of Johannesburg), who guest-edited a special issue of Philosophical Papers on  Epistemic Decolonisation  and here introduces the topic to us and presents the seven essays contributing to the special issue.  Veli Mitova   We live in an epistemically colonial world; that’s no secret. Although the Global North physically left as colonial ‘master’ long ago, it still gets to tell the Global South what counts as genuine knowledge and real science. The call to epistemic decolonisation – which is gaining increasing traction in both academia and everyday life – is the dual call to dismantle the North’s self-arrogated epistemic superiority, and to re-centre the South’s knowledge enterprise onto our geo-historical here and now.  Decolonising Knowledge Here and Now Veli Mitova , the guest editor of the special issue and the author of this post, models epistemic decolonisation on Kwasi Wiredu’s conceptual decolonisation: it involves t...

This post is by Alex Miller Tate , who works in the philosophy of the cognitive sciences, and is currently completing a PhD at the University of Birmingham. Here, he summarises his paper " Contributory Injustice in Psychiatry " recently published in the Journal of Medical Ethics. Significant service user involvement in the provision of and decisions surrounding psychiatric care (both for themselves as individuals and in the formation of policy and best practice) is, generally-speaking, officially supported by members of the medical profession (see e.g. Newman et al 2015 ; Tait & Lester 2005 ). Service user advocacy organisations and others, however, note that the experience of service users (especially in primary care) is of having their beliefs about, feelings regarding, and perspectives on their conditions ignored or otherwise thoughtlessly invalidated. Some deleterious consequences of this have been noted before, including impoverished clinical kn...

Benjamin Elzinga recently completed his PhD at Georgetown University with a dissertation on epistemic agency. His research interests include epistemology, the problems of free will, and the philosophy of mind. In this post, he presents work he recently published under the title " Hermeneutical Injustice and Liberatory Education ". In the 50s and 60s, women joining the U.S. workforce and members of the broader society in some sense lacked the conceptual skills for making sense of sexual harassment. Through the practices of the U.S. women’s liberation movement, especially through the organization of consciousness raising groups and speak-outs in the early 70s, feminists developed these resources and encoded them into the legal system. According to Miranda Fricker this is an instance of recognizing and to some extent addressing a problem of hermeneutical injustice, which occurs when members of a certain group are unjustly prevented from developing and distributing import...