ABSTRACT
It is a truism that the voices of many people are silenced or set aside in our society, and that their testimony is consistently devalued compared to privileged groups; this phenomenon has recently been studied in social epistemology under the name ‘epistemic injustice.’ This paper examines the particular case of gender and how it interacts with judgements about epistemic authority. It starts with a brief discussion of the literature on the topic, and then turns to report on experimental evidence for linguistic effects on reliability in one particular case in which factors irrelevant to truth-tracking influence judgements, that of gender, focusing on English and Cantonese data. The chaptr then indicates some linguistic tools that are used by speakers to try to regain epistemic authority in these cases, namely at-issue appeals and several kinds of discourse particles. It is concluded that such strategies, while useful, are far from a panacea: they are both of limited effectiveness and available only in languages with the relevant lexical resources.
