ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the epistemic injustice implicated in assertions about the agential deficiencies of members of disadvantaged groups, as well as the injustice of withholding what is called "semantic authority" from the interpretations of social life that would underwrite the social agency of such persons. By "second order agency", it refers to the ability to produce, acquire, or to avail oneself of the facilitating conditions of action in the first-order sense. The chapter focuses on systematic or structural epistemic occlusions that compromise the exercise of first-order agency, occlusions for which the agents cannot be held responsible. By "an injustice of an epistemic sort", the chapter also refers to the injustice of failing to acknowledge the agent's epistemic state when that state, or the structural conditions responsible for it, unfairly compromise the agent's ability to act. This is the compound injustice of having one's agency compromised by an epistemic limitation.
