ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the relatively new concept of epistemic injustice and its relevance to nursing philosophy. Epistemic injustice articulates the kind of injustices that can be done to someone in their capacity as a knower. For example, their testimony can be disbelieved or downgraded, their requests can be ignored, and their interpretations can be marginalised and excluded from meaning-making practices. I argue that ill persons are particularly vulnerable to epistemic injustice, and that this is part of what Ian Kidd and I more generally call ‘the predicament of patients’.
Ill persons are vulnerable to several kinds of epistemic injustice. They are vulnerable to testimonial injustice through the presumptive attribution of characteristics like cognitive unreliability and emotional instability that downgrade the credibility of their testimonies. Ill persons are also vulnerable to hermeneutical injustice because many aspects of the experience of illness are difficult to understand and communicate and this often owes to gaps in collective hermeneutical resources.
I end by considering other forms of epistemic injustice that might arise owing to the epistemic asymmetry between different health care professionals within institutions of contemporary health care services. Some health care professionals enjoy epistemic privilege owing to their training, expertise, and third-person psychology, and there is also an implicit privileging of certain styles of articulating and evidencing testimonies in ways that marginalise ill persons. I close by suggesting that a phenomenological approach may be part of an effort to ameliorate epistemic injustice.
