Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

Miranda Fricker (2007) famously characterized the notion of hermeneutical injustice as follows:“the injustice of having some significant area of one’s social experience obscured from collective understanding owing to persistent and wide-ranging hermeneutical marginalization” (2007: 154). Fricker discusses in detail the wrongs of hermeneutical injustice. The primary harm consists in (roughly) the fact that individuals who suffer hermeneutical injustice are not able to render intelligible nor to communicate the experiences that are in their interest to make sense of. Moreover, she argues, sometimes hermeneutical injustice has the consequence that the flawed conceptual resources that are available have the power to construct a sense of identity or a self, which is harmful. She argues that this is constitutive construction of the self that falls short of causal construction of the self. But in contemporary social ontology, it is customary to claim that constitutive social construction typically entails causal social construction. In this talk, I give an account of what is going on.