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Hermeneutical Injustice and Polyphonic

Contextualism: Social Silences and
Shared Hermeneutical Responsibilities
Dr José Medina
Published online: 23 Apr 2012.

To cite this article: Dr José Medina (2012) Hermeneutical Injustice and Polyphonic Contextualism:
Social Silences and Shared Hermeneutical Responsibilities, Social Epistemology: A Journal of
Knowledge, Culture and Policy, 26:2, 201-220, DOI: 10.1080/02691728.2011.652214

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 Social Epistemology
Vol. 26, No. 2, April 2012, pp. 201–220

Hermeneutical Injustice and

Polyphonic Contextualism: Social
Silences and Shared Hermeneutical
Responsibilities
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José Medina

While in agreement with Miranda Fricker’s context-sensitive approach to hermeneutical

injustice, this paper argues that this contextualist approach has to be pluralized and ren-
dered relational in more complex ways. In the first place, I argue that the normative
assessment of social silences and the epistemic harms they generate cannot be properly
carried out without a pluralistic analysis of the different interpretative communities and
expressive practices that coexist in the social context in question. Social silences and her-
meneutical gaps are misrepresented if they are uniformly predicated of an entire social
context, instead of being predicated of particular ways of inhabiting that context by par-
ticular people in relation to particular others. I contend that a more nuanced—poly-
phonic—contextualization offers a more adequate picture of what it means to break
social silences and to repair the hermeneutical injustices associated with them. In the sec-
ond place, I argue that the particular obligations with respect to hermeneutical justice
that differently situated subjects and groups have are interactive and need to be deter-
mined relationally. That is, whether individuals and groups live up to their hermeneuti-
cal responsibilities has to be assessed by taking into account the forms of mutual
positionality, relationality, and responsivity (or lack thereof) that these subjects and
groups display with respect to one another. The central argument is developed through
an examination of what in race theory and in contemporary epistemologies of ignorance
has been termed “white ignorance”; that is, the kind of hermeneutical inability of privi-
leged white subjects to recognize and make sense of their racial identities, experiences,
and social positionality.

Dr José Medina is Associate Professor at Vanderbilt University. He works in Philosophy of Language, Social
Epistemology, and Race and Gender Theory. His books include Speaking from elsewhere (2006) and The
epistemology of resistance (in press). Correspondence to: Dr José Medina, Department of Philosophy,
Vanderbilt University, 111 Furman Hall, Nashville, TN 37240, USA. Email: [email protected]

ISSN 0269-1728 (print)/ISSN 1464-5297 (online) Ó 2012 Taylor & Francis

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02691728.2011.652214
 202 J. Medina
Keywords: Contextualism; Hermeneutical Injustice; Intelligibility; Nascent Meanings;
Race Theory; Relationality; Responsibility; Silence; Speech Act Theory; White Ignorance

Introduction
While in agreement with Miranda Fricker’s context-sensitive approach to herme-
neutical injustice in her ground-breaking book Epistemic injustice (2007), I will
argue that this contextualist approach has to be pluralized and rendered relational
in more complex ways. In the first place, I argue that the normative assessment of
social silences and the epistemic harms they generate cannot be properly carried
out without a pluralistic analysis of the different interpretative communities and
interpretative practices that coexist in the social context in question. Social silences
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and hermeneutical gaps are incorrectly described if they are uniformly predicated
of an entire social context, instead of being predicated of particular ways of inhab-
iting that context by particular people in relation to particular others. I contend
that a more nuanced—polyphonic—contextualization offers a more adequate pic-
ture of what it means to break social silences and to repair the hermeneutical
injustices associated with them. In the second place, I argue that the particular
obligations with respect to hermeneutical justice that differently situated subjects
and groups have are interactive and need to be determined relationally. That is,
whether individuals and groups live up to their hermeneutical responsibilities has
to be assessed by taking into account the forms of mutual positionality, relational-
ity, and responsiveness (or lack thereof) that these subjects and groups display with
respect to one another. I will develop the core of my argument through an exami-
nation of what in contemporary epistemologies of ignorance has been termed
“white ignorance”; that is, the kind of hermeneutical inability of privileged white
subjects to recognize and make sense of their racial identities, experiences, and
positionality in a racialized world.
This is how I plan to make Fricker’s social contextualism more deeply pluralis-
tic, interactive, and dynamic. First, I will argue that we need to pay more attention
to the performative and pragmatic aspects of communicative dynamics to fully
appreciate the patterns of silence that are part of hermeneutical injustices. In the
second and core section, I will try to show that a more deeply pluralistic account
of hermeneutical injustice is needed, one that takes into account the communica-
tive dynamics of a plurality of publics that are internally heterogeneous and con-
tain multiple voices and perspectives. Finally, in the third section, I will use my
polyphonic contextualism to expand Fricker’s view of what counts as virtuous
interpretative responsiveness and to offer a more robust notion of epistemic respon-
sibility with respect to hermeneutical injustice.

Silences and the Communicative Approach to Epistemic Agency

In the communicative approach I will be defending in this paper, hermeneutical
injustice is treated, roughly, as the kind of injustice that appears when communi-
 Social Epistemology 203

cative obstacles affect people differently in how they are silenced; that is, in their
inability to express themselves and to be understood. Understanding the commu-
nicative dynamics in and through which people are differentially silenced is the
key to understanding hermeneutical injustices. Fricker distinguishes two different
kinds of socially produced silences based on identity prejudices. In the first place,
there are pre-emptive silences: people can be pre-emptively silenced by being
excluded in advance from participating in communicative exchanges. Fricker
emphasizes that pre-emptive silencing is “highly context-dependent.” It is unlikely
that we could find subjects “whose knowledge or opinions were never solicited on
any subject matter” (2007, 130–131). Instead, our contextualist analyses of pre-
emptive silencing should look for specific contexts of communicative interaction
in which the participation of particular groups of people become constrained in
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particular respects. But within a particular context and with respect to a particular
topic or set of issues, the communicative dynamics may not exclude any group
from participation, and nonetheless the members of different groups may enjoy
quite different voices in that context, and they may be heard differently. Even
when subjects are not excluded from participating in communication, the appreci-
ation of their contributions may not be on a par with that of others. This is
addressed (at least in part) in the second kind of silencing that Fricker analyzes:
what she calls “epistemic objectification” (2007, 133).
In this second kind of silencing, people’s participation in communicative
exchanges is allowed, and their contributions are in fact used for knowledge-
production and knowledge-transmission purposes; but nonetheless, they are not
treated as informants—that is, as subjects of knowledge or “epistemic agents who
convey information”—but only as sources of information—that is, as objects or
“states of affairs from which the inquirer may be in a position to glean informa-
tion” (Fricker 2007, 132). Fricker emphasizes that “context is all” when it comes
to determine whether an epistemic objectification amounts to an epistemic injus-
tice (2007, 133). Regarding others as objects in epistemic interactions is not intrin-
sically wrong and, in fact, it is unproblematic when the speakers so regarded are
also, at other moments, treated as subjects of knowledge and not as mere objects. It
follows from this contextualist insight that we need to follow communicative
exchanges long enough in order to detect their patterns of epistemic interaction
and the communicative dynamics that unfolds in them overtime. I could not agree
more with this contextualist perspective. In fact, I have argued elsewhere that epi-
stemic injustices can only be detected in temporally and socially extended contexts
where patterns of communicative interaction unfold (see Medina 2011). However,
while in agreement with Fricker’s approach, I submit that her notions of silencing
and “epistemic objectification” need to be expanded.
According to Fricker, a speaker is epistemically objectified when she is under-
mined “in her capacity as a giver of knowledge” (2007, 133; emphasis added). But
a speaker can also be undermined in her capacity as a producer of knowledge; that
is, not as an informant who reports to an inquirer, but as an inquirer herself, as an
investigative subject who asks questions and issues interpretations and evaluations
 204 J. Medina
of knowledge and opinions. Assuming that all silencing and all objectifying are
avoided when speakers are treated as informants is wrong, for their voices can still
be constrained and minimized, and their capacities as knowers can still be
undermined. The epistemic agency of an informant qua informant is limited and
subordinated to that of the inquirer’s—it is at the service of the inquirer’s ques-
tions, assessments, and interpretations. There is of course nothing wrong in treat-
ing someone as an informant. But there could be problems of epistemic justice in
treating someone only as an informant, for there is no full and equal epistemic
cooperation when that is the case. When one is allowed to be an informant without
being allowed to be an inquirer, one is allowed to enter into one set of communi-
cative activities—those relating to passing knowledge and opinions—but not oth-
ers, precisely those others that are more sophisticated, happen at a higher level of
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abstraction, and require more epistemic authority: formulating hypotheses, probing

and questioning, assessing and interpreting opinions, and so forth. Giving people
“epistemic subjectivity” instead of treating them as mere objects does not guaran-
tee that “their general status as a subject of knowledge” may not be constrained or
minimized in specific respects in particular communicative dynamics. The treat-
ment of women as hysterics, of queer people as pathologically deviant, and of peo-
ple of color as perennially immature was consistent with treating them as
informants with epistemic subjectivity and agency of a limited and defective sort.
Even on the topics and in the contexts in which these subjects have been given a
differential voice and differential epistemic agency, they could nonetheless be trea-
ted as subjects of knowledge, but without the full range of epistemic capacities that
other subjects enjoy as inquirers and evaluators of knowledge.
Identifying deficits in attributions of epistemic agency requires that we pay
attention to subtle aspects of the communicative dynamics among participants in
epistemic exchanges. Communicative contexts are typically populated by differently
situated voices with differential epistemic agency; and participants in communica-
tive exchanges have to make special efforts to promote their equality and to work
against biases that affect their interaction. As fair communicators who treat each
other as equals, participants in these exchanges have communicative obligations
with respect to epistemic justice that go beyond allowing others to speak and to
enjoy the generic status of an epistemic subject. In particular, they have an obliga-
tion to remain open to the (in principle) reversibility of roles in communication,
inquiry, and interpretation. The communicative relations that are established in
epistemic interaction have to be in principle reciprocal, with their roles—of
inquirer and informant, for example—being potentially reversible. Nothing short
of this reversibility and reciprocity can guarantee the equality in communicative
participation required by fair epistemic practices. This has been emphasized by
those theorists who have drawn normative epistemic implications from Speech Act
Theory. It was done by Jürgen Habermas in his Theory of communicative action
(1984), and more recently by Jennifer Hornsby and Rae Langton in their article
“Free speech and illocution” (1998).
 Social Epistemology 205

Hornsby and Langton establish a close link between reciprocity and uptake. In
the communicative dynamics of an interaction it is crucial to pay attention not
only to how the speaker’s utterances are semantically assessed by the hearers, but
also how the hearers performatively address the speaker and how they respond or
fail to respond to the illocutionary aspects of the speaker’s speech acts: for exam-
ple, responding to “Look out!” as a warning, or to “No!” as an act of refusal or
withholding consent. Hearers are not mere spectators who analyze and assess utter-
ances from a distance; they are engaged participants who have the capacity to
respond and engage with the speaker’s communicative actions. A continued lack
of uptake silences speakers and produces communicative dysfunctions which call for
special efforts at interpretation. The paradigmatic case of dysfunctional communi-
cative dynamics that Hornsby and Langton analyze is that of women’s attempts at
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rejecting sexual advances when they receive no proper uptake. They argue that in
cases such as these we should construe the lack of uptake as a form of silencing.
Fricker agrees with Hornsby and Langton’s treatment of these communicative dys-
functions, but she takes issue with the communicative account of silencing that
they offer.
Fricker contends that Hornsby and Langton provide “a purely communicative
conception of silencing” which is non-epistemic (2007, 141). She argues that, on
this account, what is at issue is not the hearer’s appraisal of the speaker’s credibil-
ity, but rather the performative dynamics between them and the illocutionary pos-
sibilities available to the speaker:
the silenced woman’s problem is not that her interlocutor regards her word as so
worthless that when she says “No” he doesn’t hear her; rather, his stance towards her
in the context is such that she is prevented from (fully successfully) performing the
illocutionary act of refusal in the first place. (Fricker 2007, 141)

By contrast, Fricker argues that her “epistemic model […] requires less erosion of
women’s human status” (2007, 142), explaining the silencing of women’s voices
only in terms of their lack of credibility. But Fricker’s epistemic analysis, I want to
suggest, is perfectly compatible with the performative analysis; in fact, they nicely
complement each other. Women’s credibility is indeed at issue, but so is the
broader issue of whether women can mean what they say and are in a position to
assess their communicative intentions vis-à-vis others. And the latter concerns
basic communicative capacities that subjects must enjoy if they are to be consid-
ered epistemic agents in a full sense. The communicative and performative
approach enables us to recognize whether subjects can talk back and have agency
and negotiating power in the interpretation and evaluation of their experiences,
and whether they have full status as inquirers and interpreters. Asking us to choose
between the communicative and the epistemic analysis of the phenomena of silenc-
ing creates a false dichotomy with which we should not be confronted. For silenc-
ing raises both an epistemic and a communicative problem. As I will discuss in
the next section, silencing is typically accompanied by processes of struggling to
make sense, in which issues of credibility and issues of intelligibility are
 206 J. Medina
intertwined. Silencing is one of the areas in which we cannot separate out commu-
nicative and epistemic agency: it is because of impoverished communicative
dynamics without reciprocity and uptake that epistemic trust cannot be established
and credibility is undermined; and when epistemic subjectivity and agency are seri-
ously compromised, the subject’s communicative capacities cannot be recovered
and she will enjoy, at best, an inferior voice in the interaction. When communica-
tive negotiations are impaired, epistemic negotiations become limited and defec-
tive, and vice versa.
Drawing on the communicative approach defended here, in the next section I
will argue that Fricker pays insufficient attention to the interactive and performa-
tive dimension of hermeneutical injustice, which is treated mainly as a semantic
phenomenon concerning the intelligibility of experiential contents. In addition,
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although Fricker offers a powerful contextualist approach that I endorse, I will

argue that this approach is insufficiently pluralized, making it difficult to account
for some cognitive dysfunctions and hermeneutical harms that recent epistemolo-
gies of ignorance have analyzed.

Communicative Pluralism and Hermeneutical Injustice

As I have argued elsewhere (Medina 2011), hermeneutical and testimonial injus-
tices are often interrelated so intimately that we cannot understand one without
the other. Fricker talks about their convergence as if it was an occasional occur-
rence, a special case in which “a double epistemic injustice” is committed and “the
speaker is doubly wronged: once by the structural prejudice in the shared herme-
neutical resource, and once by the hearer in making an identity-prejudiced credi-
bility judgment” (2007, 159). This “grim possibility,” Fricker observes, appears
when we find a “speaker struggling to make herself intelligible in a testimonial
exchange” (2007, 159). My communicative interactionism suggests that these two
types of injustice feed each other and deepen the effects of each other. On the one
hand, hermeneutical injustices are maintained and passed on through testimonial
dynamics that exhibit systematic failures of communicative and performative
responsiveness: interpretative gaps among partners in communication are formed,
maintained, and passed on because those who are struggling to make sense are per-
sistently not heard and their inchoate attempts at generating new meanings are
blocked or unanswered. In other words, these gaps emerge from and are supported
by testimonial insensitivities. And, on the other hand, testimonial injustices take
place when the persistence of hermeneutical gaps renders certain voices less intelli-
gible (and hence less credible) than others on certain matters, and their attempts
to articulate certain meanings are systematically regarded as nonsensical (and
hence incredible). Because of difficulties in hearing and interpreting certain
things—because of hermeneutical insensitivities—people’s credibility gets under-
mined. Testimonial insensitivities and hermeneutical insensitivities converge and
feed each other.1
 Social Epistemology 207

The central suggestion of my communicative interactionism is that hermeneuti-

cal gaps have to be understood in terms of failures in communicative and interpre-
tative responsiveness; that is, as deficits in hermeneutical sensibility. Hermeneutical
insensitivities involve the inability to respond to attempts (however inarticulate) to
express certain meanings. It is because of socially cultivated hermeneutical
insensitivities that communicative attempts to articulate certain meanings can
remain systematically unattended and hermeneutical gaps can be formed and kept
in place. The agential aspect of hermeneutical gaps is obscured by Fricker’s analogy
with ozone holes, which can be misleading: “Hermeneutical lacunas are like holes
in the ozone—it’s people who live under them that get burned” (2007, 161). But
hermeneutical gaps are nothing like ozone holes if these are conceived as fixed
spots whose existence and power over our lives are independent of our agency. On
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the other hand, they are a lot like ozone holes if these are conceived as intimately
and interactively related to our agency: as the result of our ways of moving about
and inhabiting the world, as an accumulation of negative effects of our actions,
which, once formed, has a negative impact in our lives. It is—at least in part—
because of the cumulative effects of our environmentally insensitive behavior that
ozone holes are formed, and, once in place, they handicap our environmental lives
and are hard to eradicate. Similarly, it is—at least in part—because of the cumula-
tive effects of our hermeneutically insensitive behavior that hermeneutical gaps are
formed, and, once in place, they handicap our communicative lives and are hard
to eradicate. In order to identify and properly diagnose hermeneutical insensitivi-
ties, communicative dynamics matter deeply: it is of the utmost importance who is
communicating (or trying to communicate) what to whom. But Fricker’s analysis
of hermeneutical injustice focuses mainly on the lack of intelligibility of the experi-
ence of certain groups, without specifying for whom experience is being rendered
intelligible, in what kind of communicative interaction and according to which
dynamic.
Communicative dynamics are not in the forefront of Fricker’s analysis of her-
meneutical injustice, which is not initially couched in explicitly communicative
terms, but in terms of the intelligibility of experience. Initially, Fricker describes
hermeneutical injustice as resulting in the “occluded experiences” of hermeneuti-
cally marginalized subjects, contending that what characterizes hermeneutically dis-
advantaged groups is their inability “to understand their own experiences” (2007,
147–148). A deficit in self-understanding can be indeed a key component of her-
meneutical marginalization. But, with and through the development of new
expressive and interpretative resources, hermeneutically marginalized subjects can
eventually achieve understanding of their obscured experiences while they may still
remain systematically misunderstood by others (some others) when they try to
communicate about those experiences. In these cases the hermeneutical injustice
continues even after the lack of self-understanding disappears, which shows that
the problem goes deeper and concerns not only a deficient self-understanding, but
also and more fundamentally a precarious and unequal relation to expressive and
interpretative practices in which experiences are shared with others. Later in her
 208 J. Medina
book, Fricker’s focus shifts to the communication of experiences, and she then
describes being hermeneutically marginalized as enjoying unequal participation in
communicative practices in which meanings are generated and expressed. But the
problem remains in the ambiguity of the expression “the intelligibility of experi-
ence” as a semantic category detached from particular communicative dynamics.
The multifaceted aspects of the struggles to make sense of one’s experiences to
oneself, to those who undergo similar experiences, and to other groups are obscured
by simply talking about the intelligibility or unintelligibility of experience without
specifying to whom, in what communicative context and with what dynamic; for,
quite different possibilities are opened up (or can be opened up) depending on those
variables: whether one is talking to oneself, to sympathetic or to unsympathetic sub-
jects; whether the communicative context—or the speakers claiming agency in it—
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allows for semantic innovations, flexibility and playfulness; whether the speaker finds
receptivity and responsiveness when deviating from standard semantic expectations;
and, in general, how the communicative interaction unfolds.
Fricker remarks that hermeneutical injustices take place when and because “a
collective hermeneutical gap prevents members of a group from making sense of
an experience that is in their interest to render intelligible” (2007, 7). What is
meant by this hermeneutical activity of “making sense of an experience”? It is not
the same to try to make sense of one’s experience to oneself, to others within one’s
group or in the same predicament, or to others who do not share the experience
in question. And when it comes to hermeneutical gaps, it is crucial to pay atten-
tion to the communicative attempts through which members of a new emerging
public struggle to communicate among themselves about silenced experiences.
Through these communicative attempts, subjects begin to work on the melioration
of hermeneutical sensibilities, starting with their own and with that of those like
them. Through repeated attempts to communicate with ourselves and with those
we trust about experiences that have been obscured, we can expand our hermeneu-
tical sensibilities and eventually add to the hermeneutical resources of our group
through contributions that could also spread to other groups, with new interpreta-
tive tools acquiring progressively wider circulation. According to this dynamic
view, it is misleading to assume that only what has been antecedently recognized
and included in the shared hermeneutical resources can be rendered intelligible,
whether to oneself or to others. In this sense, it is dangerous to establish too close
a link between intelligibility and linguistic labels. Fricker is certainly right that
sometimes we find “a lacuna where the name of a distinctive social experience
should be” (2007, 150–151). But multiple struggles to make sense have to be sus-
tained over time for a group of subjects to develop this definite sense of the con-
tours of a social experience that still lacks a name. This is, roughly, the story of
new interpretative tools created by movements of resistance such as the Women’s
Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, or the Sexual Liberation Movement.
We should be careful not to tie too closely people’s hermeneutical capacities to
the repertoire of readily available terms and coined concepts, for oppressed sub-
jects often find ways of expressing their suffering well before such articulations are
 Social Epistemology 209

available. For example, non-heterosexual subjects had ways of signaling to them-

selves and to others like them that they were being sexually oppressed long before
terms such as “homophobia” and “heterosexism” were in circulation. And women
suffering abuse from their partners were struggling to make sense of their
experiences and to give expression to their predicament, even if in fragmentary
and precarious ways, long before labels such as “marital rape” and “domestic vio-
lence” were available.2 It is crucial to develop a hermeneutical sensibility with
respect to embryonic and inchoate attempts at communicating about experiences that
do not yet have standard formulations. Nascent meanings may be in an embryonic
process of formation, and their tentative expressions may not yet be accepted by
the mainstream public (or even by most publics) within a culture. And this goes
not only for negative experiences of suffering that are silenced, but also for positive
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experiences and life-affirming situations that new emerging publics may be strug-
gling to make sense of, or simply struggling to convey to others.3
There may be hidden communicative processes and embryonic formulations of
meaning even in the most adverse hermeneutical contexts. As Charles Mills (2007),
for one, has suggested, even during slavery there were multiple ways in which
black voices found ways to express their suffering and to speak out against racial
oppression. And it would be to indulge in a dangerous fiction to postulate a dark
time in which everybody was blind to the wrongs of slavery and nobody knew how
to communicate about them. As I have argued elsewhere (Medina 2006), commu-
nicative contexts are always polyphonic, and the plurality of experiential and her-
meneutical perspectives in any given context is such that we can always find voices
that depart from the available communicative practices and dynamics, and their
eccentric agency exceeds standard meanings and interpretative resources. There is
a point in Fricker’s discussion where she formulates this pluralistic phenomenon
of there being perspectives that go beyond what the dominant interpretative frame-
work and its hermeneutical resources allow. This is where she describes the experi-
ence of dissonance between one’s experience and the interpretative horizon one has
inherited. She describes this experience as the source of an important form of
“resistance”—hermeneutical resistance, we can call it—which originates in the fol-
lowing way:
Authoritative constructions in the shared hermeneutical resource […] impinge on us
collectively but not uniformly, and the non-uniformity of their hold over us can create
a sense of dissonance between an experience and the various constructions that are
ganging up to overpower its nascent proper meaning. (Fricker 2007, 166)

Hermeneutical resistance is the phenomenon in which a dissident voice rebels

against mainstream voices; and hermeneutical dissonance is the phenomenon in
which the communicative conflict is internalized and both the dominant and the
resistant voices are within one and the same subject. Fricker pays some attention
to communicative dynamics in her discussion of hermeneutical injustice when she
shifts from semantic contents to voices and expressive styles: “a hermeneutical gap
might equally concern not (or not only) the content but rather the form of what
 210 J. Medina
can be said” (2007, 160). At this point Fricker’s discussion turns to the develop-
ment of a voice under adverse hermeneutical climates, shifting the focus from the
semantics of experiential contents to the pragmatics of meaning-making and
meaning-sharing activities. However, Fricker’s discussion quickly goes back to the
semantic level as she goes on to analyze “the wrong of hermeneutical injustice” in
terms of the intelligibility or unintelligibility of experience. Given the heterogeneity
and fluidity of discursive possibilities in communicative interactions, I find it
problematic that Fricker operates with the working assumption that, when there is
a hermeneutical gap, a range of experiences will be rendered unintelligible for
everybody independently of particular communicative dynamics. To being with, the
unintelligibility of an experience in the speaker’s terms is quite different when the
speaker’s attempts to communicate the experience encounter inattention and her-
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meneutical neglect—the interlocutors’ being unmoved or unable to identify what

is being talked about—and when they encounter counter-interpretations that sys-
tematically distort the speaker’s communicative attempts—for example, when a
woman trying to convey that she feels sexually harassed is interpreted as overreact-
ing to “harmless flirting.” As recent epistemologies of ignorance have emphasized,4
it is not always the case that hermeneutical gaps render experiences unintelligible
for everybody equally and in every communicative dynamic. As epistemologists
(such as standpoint theorists) writing on inter-racial, inter-gender, and inter-sexual
(mis)communication and (mis)understanding have emphasized, when we encoun-
ter hermeneutical problems in situations of oppression, it is of the utmost impor-
tance to keep in mind that a complex society often contains diverse publics with
heterogeneous interpretative resources and practices.
There is a significant degree of pluralism in Fricker’s perspective which derives
from her contextual approach: she does emphasize that differently situated subjects
are affected differently by pervasive hermeneutical gaps. But, nonetheless, she does
assume that all subjects will be affected by these gaps, as if they were inescapable
and all-encompassing lacunas that cover the entire social fabric. This is dangerous
to assume because it is important to keep always open the possibility that we may
find more hermeneutical resources than we expected in remote and obscure cor-
ners of the social fabric. Fricker’s contextual approach has to be further pluralized,
and the assumptions she makes about the pervasiveness of hermeneutical lacunas
and their influence on entire collectivities have to be interrogated. These assump-
tions are expressed in her very definition of hermeneutical injustice:
Hermeneutical injustice is: the injustice of having some significant area of one’s experi-
ence obscured from collective understanding owing to a structural identity prejudice in
the collective hermeneutical resource. (Fricker 2007, 155; emphasis added)

But whose “collective understanding”? And whose “collective hermeneutical

resource” (in the singular!)? If the collectivity in question has multiple publics
which in turn contain heterogeneous subgroups, it is not clear that we can (or
should) talk about the “collective understanding” of an experience without qualifi-
cation. And, more importantly, Fricker’s expression “the collective hermeneutical
 Social Epistemology 211

resource” strongly suggests that we can pool all the hermeneutical resources avail-
able to all groups and create some kind of exhaustive inventory. But no matter
how unified and well communicated the social body happens to be, such inventory
should be suspect, for it is likely to be an artificial unification invoked from a the-
oretical standpoint, which always runs the risk of disregarding some marginalized
and hard-to-find interpretative resources—those that are still in the making and
remain fragmentary and inarticulate. Throughout the chapter Fricker talks about
“the collective hermeneutical resource,” but is there always such thing? (Can there
even be such thing?) Even highly monolithic and homogeneous societies are likely
to contain interpretative diversity, and they could at least contain the possibility of
hermeneutical dissidence and of the embryonic formation of counter-publics.
Moreover, a heterogeneous social fabric contains multiple publics with different
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ways of talking and of making sense of their experiences; and even within distinc-
tive publics with their peculiar resources, there will be expressive differences, devia-
tions, and idiosyncrasies. It is crucial to pay attention to this diversity and not to
assume what a collective social body, as a whole, is or is not in a position to
understand. Of course there are quite extended social blindspots and hermeneuti-
cal insensitivities, but it is also frequent to find in those scenarios some groups or
collection of individuals struggling to make sense of experiences that fall under
those blindspots and have been so far ill understood (if recognized at all) by most
people. So, we need to ask: what about those hermeneutical resources that are not
widely shared, especially those that are buried in the interstices and obscure corners
of the social fabric?
A complex social body always contains heterogeneous publics with diverse
resources, but this heterogeneity is accentuated and radicalized in a society that is
fractured, for social division typically results in groups developing their own com-
municative and interpretative practices and dynamics. This is what happens under
conditions of oppression. For example, in The souls of black folks ([1903] 1994),
W. E. B. Du Bois famously talked about the two Americas divided along racial lines,
black and white, and he gave us powerful descriptions of the hermeneutical predica-
ments of: those who lived exclusively in the white world—unequipped to under-
stand what took place in the other world (and even in their own world); and those
who were forced to live in two worlds—the one imposed on them and the one they
created, the one they served and the alternative one they could call home. For Du
Bois, while white Americans exhibited a special kind of blindness in the obscure
world they had created, black Americans developed a “double vision” and a “double
consciousness” that was attentive to dual meanings and had special insights into the
two worlds. Following Du Bois, I would add that racially privileged subjects tended
to develop a special kind of hermeneutical insensitivity with respect to racial meanings,
whereas racially oppressed subjects tended to become attentive and sensitive to
them. Interestingly, the subjects who became most epistemically harmed and herme-
neutically disadvantaged to make sense of their social experiences of racialization were
in fact those who benefitted the most from the hermeneutical obstacles, the recipi-
ents of the non-epistemic privileges that these obstacles helped to protect. The Du
 212 J. Medina
Boisian analysis of the racial blindness of racially privileged subjects has been
elaborated further under the rubric of “white ignorance” in the recent literature. In
his now classic The racial contract, Charles Mills (1997) argues that privileged white
subjects have become unable to understand the world that they themselves have
created; and he calls attention to the cognitive dysfunctions and pathologies
inscribed in the white world and constitutive of its epistemic economy, which
revolves around a carefully cultivated racial blindness of the white gaze. As Mills
suggests, white ignorance is a form of self-ignorance: the inability to recognize one’s
own racial identity and the presuppositions and consequences of one’s racial posi-
tionality. In Revealing whiteness, Shannon Sullivan (2006) has offered a detailed
analysis of how privileged white subjects have maintained the ignorance of their
own racialization through well-entrenched racial habits that hide themselves: white-
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ness has been rendered invisible for white subjects and needs to be revealed. Not
having developed their own expressive practices and interpretative devices to under-
stand their experiences of racialization, white subjects have been lost in a racialized
world. A lot has been written on the invisibility of whiteness and the hypervisibility
of blackness in the racialized world of American culture. But of course whiteness
has been invisible only for the white gaze but not for racially oppressed subjects,
who—as Mills emphasizes—have formed a powerful counter-public, with their
alternative experiences and interpretations, and their counter-memory.5 The vari-
ously silenced black experiences and counter-memories that Mills describes as get-
ting systematically disqualified and whited out contain scattered hermeneutical
resources, which, in fact, give interpretative advantages to the oppressed and other-
wise hermeneutically marginalized subjects.
As the analyses of white ignorance show, until recently, privileged white sub-
jects have lacked the motivation and the opportunity to develop expressive activi-
ties and interpretative tools to make sense of their own social experiences of
racialization and to understand how their lives have been affected by racism and
its legacy. And of course this self-ignorance, this inability to interpret their social
experiences on racial matters, certainly undermined their hermeneutical sensibili-
ties in their communicative interaction with others. The phenomenon of the active
ignorance and interpretative impoverishment of the privileged has also been ana-
lyzed by epistemologists of ignorance with respect to gender and sexuality. As epis-
temologists of ignorance have shown,6 the hermeneutical gaps that emerge from
structures of oppression and identity prejudices create bodies of active ignorance
for those subjects whose privileged positions are protected by the hermeneutical
blindspots and insensitivities in question. Not only are the privileged subjects not
exempted from the hermeneutical harms, but they are in fact more negatively
affected in some areas of their experience. This constitutes an anomaly for Fricker’s
view; and it runs contrary to her pronouncements when she considers the “idea
that relations of unequal power can skew shared hermeneutical resources”:
the powerful tend to have appropriate understandings of their experiences ready to
draw on as they make sense of their social experiences, whereas the powerless are more
 Social Epistemology 213

likely to find themselves having some social experiences through a glass darkly, with at
best ill-fitting meanings to draw on in the effort to render them intelligible. (2007,
148; emphasis added)

But what if it is the powerful who tend to have “some social experiences through
a glass darkly,” enjoying precarious interpretative resources (if any at all), as seems
to be the case in the phenomenon of white ignorance? There are two important
considerations in Fricker’s discussions that can be used to address this kind of
case, but I will argue that they do not explain, fully and adequately, the hermeneu-
tical harms of the privileged and their contributions to hermeneutical injustice;
and, therefore, white ignorance remains a recalcitrant case for her approach.
In the first place, Fricker offers some considerations that are directly relevant
to the phenomenon of privileged subjects becoming hermeneutically disadvan-
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taged. She discusses explicitly one case in which “the proverbial white, educated,
straight man” (Fricker 2007, 157) finds himself unable to understand certain things
and to be understood when he talks about them. This is the predicament of the
protagonist of Ian McEwan’s novel Enduring love, which Fricker analyzes (2007,
156–158). This character is being stalked by another male character and he has a
hard time rendering his experience of harassment intelligible when he talks to his
wife and to the police about it. Fricker argues that the hermeneutical disadvantage
encountered here is “a one-off moment of hermeneutical marginalization” (2007,
157), thus assimilating it to those cases of hermeneutical injustice that “are not
systematic but incidental” (2007, 156). This is because, Fricker reasons, the charac-
ter’s hermeneutical disadvantage “has nothing to do with any general social power-
lessness or any general subordination as a generator of social meaning” (2007,
157). But clearly, in the case of white subjects who find themselves unable to
understand their racialized identities and experiences and to talk about them, their
hermeneutical inabilities are part of a widespread pattern. In privileged white igno-
rance we have something quite systematic and not merely one-off and incidental.
As I have argued elsewhere (Medina, in press), white ignorance is a prime example
of active ignorance, which is the kind of recalcitrant, self-protecting ignorance that
builds around itself an entire system of resistances. This active ignorance is to be
contrasted with the mere absence of belief or the mere presence of false beliefs, for
it has deep roots in systematic distortions and in hard-to-eradicate forms of blind-
ness and deafness. Active ignorance involves being hermeneutically numbed to cer-
tain meanings and voices; and this systematic kind of hermeneutical insensitivity
cannot be brushed aside as merely incidental.
In the second place, Fricker recognizes that “different groups can be hermeneu-
tically disadvantaged for all sorts of reasons, as the changing social world fre-
quently generates new sorts of experience of which our understanding may dawn
only gradually” (2007, 151). And she is right to emphasize that hermeneutical dis-
advantages only amount to hermeneutical injustices if they are not only “harmful
but also wrongful” (2007, 151; emphasis added). Fricker provides a persuasive
example in which subjects who suffer from a yet unknown medical condition find
 214 J. Medina
themselves unable to render intelligible what is going on with them, given the lack
of relevant medical knowledge. Here we have indeed a hermeneutical disadvantage
that is not part of an injustice. As Fricker puts it, the “non-comprehension of their
condition […] is a poignant case of circumstantial epistemic bad luck” (2007,
152). However, privileged white ignorance is not simply a matter of mere epistemic
bad luck, but rather an integral part of a pattern of epistemic injustice. Unlike the
example of an unknown medical condition, in the case of white ignorance we can
link the hermeneutical disadvantages directly to an unfair and discriminatory treat-
ment. The hermeneutical disadvantages inscribed in white ignorance are not only
harmful, but wrongful, although the wrong is committed against someone else:
interestingly and crucially, the hermeneutical harms are wrongful for others, not for
those upon whom the epistemic harms are directly inflicted. Here we can make
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use of Fricker’s distinction between primary and secondary harms in her discussion
of situated hermeneutical inequality (2007, 162). Roughly, the primary harm of a
hermeneutical inequality is the inability to render something intelligible, whereas
the secondary harms include all the further practical harms that result from such
inability, such as psychological, economic, or political consequences. In white igno-
rance, however, we have an epistemic asymmetry in which the hermeneutically dis-
advantaged (i.e. those without resources to understand their racial identities and
experiences) are not those who suffer the practical consequences (i.e. those victim-
ized by racial ignorance); that is, the recipients of the primary harms are not the
recipients of the secondary harms. In fact, in white ignorance the primary and sec-
ondary harms diverge so radically that those who are unable to make sense of part
of their identity and experience—the white subjects—at the same time enjoy prac-
tical benefits and ways to hold on to their privileges thanks to their hermeneutical
disadvantages, whereas others who are comparatively more hermeneutically advan-
taged with respect to racial meanings suffer the practical and political conse-
quences of the hermeneutical obstacles. The privileged white subjects’ inability to
understand their own racialized identities and experiences is part of a pattern of
injustice not against them, but against those who suffer the consequences of white
privilege. This interesting phenomenon of racial hermeneutical injustice runs con-
trary to Fricker’s contention that subjects can only be hermeneutically harmed with
respect to those areas of their experience that relate to exclusion and subordina-
tion, but not with respect to those that relate to privilege.
According to Fricker’s definition, hermeneutical injustice consists of being pre-
vented from understanding experiences that are in your interest to render intelligi-
ble. While in one sense it may be in the epistemic interest of privileged white
subjects to overcome their racial ignorance (so that they can better navigate their
social world and improve their own self-understanding), it is not in their interest
in another sense (in so far as it makes them vulnerable, undermines their author-
ity, and requires them to pay attention to things that can be uncomfortable and
disempowering). And, at any rate, it is undoubtedly in the interest of others that
such ignorance be overcome, for its overcoming will meliorate the communicative
and epistemic agency of underprivileged subjects, allowing them to interrogate
 Social Epistemology 215

privileges, to make unequal dynamics and their consequences visible and intelligi-
ble, and to communicate their experiences. The interests of others that render
white ignorance an injustice are both epistemic and non-epistemic (economic,
legal, political, etc.). In white ignorance, it may or may not be in the interest of
the hermeneutically disadvantaged subjects to understand and know the obscured
experiences. But it is clearly in the interest of those who suffer its practical
consequences that those experiences be understood and known. And if “interest” is
construed in socio-economic terms and not in epistemic or ethical terms, it can
even be argued that it is in the interest of the hermeneutically disadvantaged white
subjects not to understand and know the obscured experiences.
In the article “On needing not to know and forgetting what one never knew,”
Robert Bernasconi (2007) has suggested that the active ignorance which protects
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privilege and hides complicity with oppression is motivated by the need not to
know, which in turn is directly related to the need to know of those negatively
affected by the injustice or of those genuinely interested in fighting it. Maintaining
privilege can indeed be a powerful source of resistance against expanding your her-
meneutical sensibilities, stubbornly refusing to understand certain things that can
destabilize your life and identity. Maintaining the secondary (practical) harms of
white ignorance can provide a powerful motivation for the self-inflicted harms that
happen at the epistemic level; that is, for white subjects to bring the primary (her-
meneutical) harms upon themselves. I am not suggesting, of course, that anybody
does this consciously and deliberately, but there have been obvious incentives for
white culture to foster ignorance and hermeneutical insensitivity among its most
privileged subjects. But whatever its socio-genesis, white ignorance remains a case
that Fricker’s account of hermeneutical injustice, as stated, does not cover:
privileged subjects are also hermeneutically marginalized subjects, for they are
conceptually ill-equipped to make sense of certain things; but the things that they
are ill-equipped to understand are precisely the things they may not want to
understand—perhaps what they need not to know to keep enjoying their privileges
without facing uncomfortable questions.
Whether conscious or unconscious, socio-economically motivated or otherwise
generated, white ignorance clearly involves a failure in hermeneutical responsibility
if one is obligated to be responsive to the meanings and expressive concerns that
one encounters. To conclude, I will offer some reflections and suggestions about
our responsibilities with respect to hermeneutical justice.

Our Hermeneutical Responsibilities with Respect to Multiple Publics

How do we responsibly respond to hermeneutical inequalities and work towards
the equal participation of all in the generation and expression of meanings?
Communities share a collective responsibility to do everything they can to facilitate
everyone’s ability to participate in meaning-making and meaning-expressing prac-
tices. Institutions and people in a position of power bear special hermeneutical
burdens, but we all share the collective responsibility to facilitate the hermeneutical
 216 J. Medina
agency of communicators, especially if they have been marginalized. Besides these
general aspects of our hermeneutical duty, we also have specific hermeneutical
responsibilities with respect to the interpretative gaps that appear in the communi-
cative dynamics in which we participate, and we have an obligation to actively find
out what those gaps might be. In order to become hermeneutically responsible
interlocutors, we need to interrogate the limits of our interpretative horizons and
to expose ourselves to interpretative challenges that may require extending or
transforming the interpretative resources available to us. Fricker’s account of her-
meneutical virtue at the end of Chapter Seven teaches us a great lesson about her-
meneutical responsibility, which includes the hermeneutical obligation to confront
our interpretative limitations and vulnerabilities and to cultivate hermeneutical
openness. However, although I am in agreement with the normative conclusions of
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Fricker’s account, I disagree with her disavowal of any direct responsibility on the
part of interlocutors with respect to hermeneutical injustices (see especially Fricker
2007, 159, quoted below). A more agential and interactive approach to hermeneu-
tical injustice is needed in order to develop a more robust notion of hermeneutical
responsibility.
The responsibility with respect to hermeneutical justice that differently situated
subjects and groups have needs to be determined relationally in particular contexts
of interaction. That is, whether individuals and groups live up to their hermeneuti-
cal responsibilities has to be assessed by taking into account the forms of mutual
positionality, relationality, and responsiveness (or lack thereof) that these subjects
and groups display with respect to one another. Our communicative interactions
can work to accentuate or to alleviate the hermeneutical gaps and silences that our
cultures have created over time. Hermeneutical gaps are performatively invoked
and recirculated—re-enacted, we could say—in the speech acts of our daily life.
And we have to take responsibility for how our communicative agency relates to
the blind-spots of our social practices (re-inscribing them, challenging them, etc.).
We have to evaluate whether or not our communicative interactions are contribut-
ing to interrogate and expand hermeneutical sensibilities. However, since Fricker’s
primary focus on the semantic dimension of hermeneutical gaps eclipses the
importance of their pragmatic and performative dimension, her view makes it hard
to appreciate any direct link between hermeneutical injustices and people’s com-
municative and interpretative agency. In fact, she denies such a link:
No agent perpetrates hermeneutical injustice—it is a purely structural notion. The
background condition for hermeneutical injustice is the subject’s hermeneutical mar-
ginalization. But the moment of hermeneutical injustice comes only when the back-
ground condition is realized in a more or less doomed attempt on the part of the subject
to render an experience intelligible. (Fricker 2007, 159; original emphasis and emphasis
added)

But why is the attempt to make sense of a hermeneutically marginalized experi-

ence “more or less doomed”? When we have the sense that a speaker has next to
no chance of getting herself understood while she is struggling to make sense of
 Social Epistemology 217

something, it is because her interlocutors have been trained not to hear or to hear
only deficiently and through a lens that filters out the speaker’s perspective. And
the habitual ways in which interlocutors fail to respond to the speaker’s communi-
cative attempts, or respond only in a negative way, will keep stocking the herme-
neutical chances against the speaker, whose future attempts will be in the same, or
even worse, situation. But not all interlocutors will display the same lack of
interpretative charity and hermeneutical responsiveness. Some may be more adept
at paying attention, at recognizing the communicative failures, at making the
speaker comfortable so that she can keep trying, at facilitating new communicative
dynamics that can bring about more hermeneutical openness, and so forth. Some-
times it takes hermeneutical heroes to do that: extremely courageous speakers and
listeners who defy well-entrenched communicative expectations and dominant per-
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spectives, and manage to change (or at least disrupt) hermeneutical trends to make
room for new voices and meanings. But more often hermeneutical melioration is
achieved through the agency of unexceptional communicators and interpreters; it
is the result of the sheer accumulation of partially failed and partially successful
communicative attempts of wholly ordinary speakers who have received the atten-
tion of hermeneutically sensitive hearers. However, for as long as we remain
entrenched in dynamics that block new forms of understanding and foster com-
municative dysfunctions, we are contributing to hermeneutical marginalization
and, if that marginalization is based on identity prejudices and correlated with dis-
parities in identity power, we are co-perpetrating a hermeneutical injustice.
It is important that we take responsibility for impoverished communicative
and interpretative habits, no matter how well-entrenched, unconscious and ines-
capably socially produced those habits may be. And it is also important to keep in
mind that there is always at least some minimal wiggle-room to start modifying
those habits. Even if hearers cannot be expected to suddenly develop a complete
openness with respect to something they have been trained not to hear or to hear
only deficiently, they can be blamed for not even trying in the least to interrogate
their interpretative habits and to make an effort to consider the speaker’s perspec-
tive. And this shift of the communicative and interpretative burdens from the
speaker to the hearer goes especially for hermeneutically marginalized speakers
who have the chances of being understood stocked against them. In the spirit of
making special arrangements for antecedently marginalized subjects, Louise Antony
has suggested a policy of epistemic affirmative action, which recommends that
interpreters operate with the “working hypothesis that when a woman, or any mem-
ber of a stereotyped group, says something anomalous, they should assume that
it’s they who don’t understand, not that it is the woman who is nuts” (1995, 89).
Fricker sees some merits in this proposal, but she argues, persuasively, that “the
hearer needs to be indefinitely context sensitive in how he applies the hypothesis”
and that “a policy of affirmative action across all subject matters would not be jus-
tified” (2007, 171; emphasis added). Indeed, hermeneutically marginalized speakers
have the chances of being understood stocked against them only in certain areas of
experience and only in certain communicative contexts and dynamics. To address
 218 J. Medina
the highly situated forms of hermeneutical marginalization that interlocutors can
encounter, what we need is not a set of fixed principles of interpretation, but
rather, as Fricker argues, something like a communicative and interpretative virtue:
an indefinitely context-sensitive hermeneutical sensibility that displays attentiveness
and responsiveness to those struggling to make sense given adverse hermeneutical
climates. This is exactly what Fricker’s account of the corrective nature of the vir-
tue of hermeneutical justice captures (see especially 2007, 169).
Fricker’s account of the virtue of hermeneutical justice invokes precisely the
kind of communicative pluralism that my polyphonic contextualism defends, for
she grounds the open and corrective nature of virtuous hermeneutical sensibility
precisely in the responsiveness to the plurality of interpretative perspectives that
one can find in communicative contexts. As I announced earlier, I am in full
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agreement with the normative conclusions of Fricker’s account. And yet I find
problematic the lack of attention that Fricker pays to the agential aspects of her-
meneutical injustice. Although her account can accommodate the interactive her-
meneutical responsibilities I have called attention to, she nonetheless introduces an
unnecessary gap between hermeneutical injustice and the communicative and inter-
pretative agency of interlocutors. But why not accept that where there is a virtue—
a way of excelling in and with your agency, there is also a vice—a way of failing in
and with your agency? In our daily communicative interactions there are all kinds
of specific ways in which we can fulfill or fail to fulfill our hermeneutical responsi-
bilities with respect to multiple publics. And in the same way that hermeneutically
sensitive and alert interlocutors can contribute to bring about hermeneutical jus-
tice, hermeneutically insensitive and numbed interlocutors can also be the co-per-
petrators of hermeneutical injustices. One can exhibit a more or less virtuous
hermeneutical sensibility depending on one’s communicative openness and respon-
siveness to indefinitely plural perspectives. But if one exhibits a complete lack of
“alertness or sensitivity” to certain meanings or voices, one’s communicative inter-
actions are likely to contain failures in hermeneutical justice for which one has to
take responsibility, even if it is a shared and highly qualified kind of responsibility.
Those subjects who become co-perpetrators of hermeneutical injustices may
often do so without their knowing it and despite their best communicative inten-
tions. Except under special conditions in which hermeneutical responsibilities are
suspended,7 those who, by being non-responsive or deficiently responsive, fail to
aid speakers in their attempts to render their experiences intelligible are complicit
with hermeneutical injustices. Although they certainly cannot be said to produce
the injustices all by themselves, the communicative dynamics they participate in
do help to reproduce them and to perpetuate them. Hermeneutical gaps are not
produced by a single individual or by small clusters of individuals, for they require
collective and sustained efforts across temporally and socially extended contexts;
that is, they require patterns of impoverished communication with specific herme-
neutical insensitivities. But those who find themselves in those patterns typically
have some limited agency to accentuate the gaps or to contribute to their erosion.
Most of the time, the failure of our hermeneutical responsibility begins with
 Social Epistemology 219

refusing to take responsibility in the first place, that is, with assuming that deroga-
tory connotations, interpretative lacunas, and expressive limitations are simply
there without having anything to do with us and our daily use of interpretative
resources. This is why it is so important to become increasingly aware of the her-
meneutical limitations around us, and of how the voices and expressive styles we
cultivate might be complicit with those limitations.

Notes
[1] As I have argued elsewhere (Medina 2011), this is well illustrated by one of the novels that
Fricker analyzes, Harper Lee’s novel To kill a mockingbird ([1960] 2002). This novel illus-
trates how a number of antecedent hermeneutical and testimonial obstacles made it very
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difficult for epistemic justice to take place at the trial of Tom Robinson, a black man
accused of raping a white woman, Mayella Ewell. These obstacles made it difficult for peo-
ple to understand interracial desire and women’s sexual agency; and, as a result, Tom had a
hard time making his testimony on Mayella’s sexual attraction to him credible. His audi-
ence did not exhibit much sympathy, communicative cooperation, or interpretative charity.
The failure of his listeners was both testimonial and hermeneutical. For listeners such as
these to become more charitable and virtuous, they would have to improve, simultaneously,
their hermeneutical and testimonial sensibilities.
[2] In this sense, it is instructive to consider Uma Narayan’s cross-cultural comparisons
between discourses about domestic violence in countries such as the United States where
such labels have currency and in countries such as India where their application is blocked.
See especially Chapter Three of Narayan (1997, 82–117): “Cross-cultural connections,
border-crossings, and ‘death by culture’: Thinking about dowry-murders in India and
domestic violence in the united states.”
[3] For example, the intelligibility of same-sex relations should not be directly tied to the emer-
gence of labels such as “same-sex marriage” or “civil unions,” or to a woman’s capacity to
refer to her “girlfriend,” “wife,” or “partner,” and a man’s capacity to refer to his “boy-
friend,” “husband,” or “partner.” I am not suggesting, of course, that these labels have not
helped in gay people’s struggle to make sense of their relationships. Rather, I am suggesting
that they are a late chapter in that struggle, and we lose sight of the more dynamic, interac-
tive and complicated processes of communication through which gay people made sense of
their sexual and affective attachments and commitments in the absence of those labels.
[4] See Sullivan and Tuana (2007).
[5] In “White ignorance,” Mills (2007) emphasizes the role that official histories and hegemonic
forms of collective memory play in sustaining white ignorance, and also the crucial role that
counter-memory needs to play to resist and subvert the epistemic oppression that con-
demns the lives of marginalized people to silence or oblivion.
[6] Feminist and queer theorists have argued that gender and sexual experiences are particularly
opaque to gender, and sexual conformists who, not having interrogated their own trajecto-
ries in these areas of social life, become especially ill-equipped to understand their own gen-
der and sexuality, lacking interpretative tools and strategies specifically designed to apply to
their own case. This is why what passes for obviousness or transparency in relation to mas-
culinity, femininity, and heterosexuality typically hides a lack of awareness and sensitivity to
nuanced and plural gender and sexual meanings. On this point, see especially Scheman
(1997).
[7] As I argue elsewhere (Medina, in press), oppressed subjects are not obligated to facilitate
the communicative and epistemic agency of more privileged subjects if that can worsen
their precarious situation and deepen their oppression. As many Latina feminists and
 220 J. Medina
colonial theorists have argued, colonized peoples have a long tradition of exploiting the
ignorance and hermeneutical limitations of the colonizers to their advantage, which can be
justified for the sake of their survival.

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