Created: October 6th, 2020
Last edited: October 6th, 2020

IMPORTANT NOTE: This page is dedicated to two key issues that will become relevant over and over again. Throughout this blog I will presuppose a basic understanding of hermeneutical resources and hermeneutical injustice, which I will provide here. I want to update this page as my understanding of both concepts grows and becomes more complex. My remarks are not at all supposed to be exhaustive. Further, I want to make both concepts easily accessible to people not trained in philosophy, for I think that a basic understanding of them provides people with powerful tools to grasp, analyse and address several injustices and hardships within their lives. At the moment, both explanations are taken from a term paper that I have written recently.

Hermeneutical Resources

Following Fricker (2007), we can understand a hermeneutical resource as a set of collectively shared conceptions, understandings, and imaginations that provides interpretations for social experiences, thus generating meaning. It enables a person to understand their experiences and to intelligibly communicate them to others (cf. ibid., 6). Some further elaboration is required: The concepts and understandings a hermeneutical resource provides influence the ways in which a social situation is understood, that is, it has an effect on the aspects we come to notice and how they are conceptualised. Part of those situations are the other people involved. A hermeneutical resource also consists in shared imaginations about people’s social identities, that is, about what it is like to be of a certain gender, race, age, sexuality and so on (cf. ibid., 14). This has an effect on both, how people of these identities understand themselves and are likely to act in a given situation, as well as on the ways in which they are understood and expected to act by others. 

It is important to note that a hermeneutical resource is nothing fixed. As Pohlhaus 2011 explains: 

„However, when there is a tension between the world of experience and the resources that we use to make sense of our experiences, for example when the proper language for describing an experience appears to be missing, or when our current concepts fail to track recurring patterns, we recalibrate our epistemic resources and/or create new ones until the tension between our resources and the experienced world is alleviated“ (719).

A hermeneutical resource can cease to be adequate. That is when its conceptions are no longer fitting the experiences they are supposed to make sense of. A revision is needed and sometimes new meanings are created and corresponding vocabulary is added.

Hermeneutical Injustice

With this basic understanding of hermeneutical resources at hand we can now turn towards the problem of hermeneutical injustice. For this it is important to keep in mind that a society is not a homogenous monolith. Rather, it is a heterogenous mixture of different social groups. These groups can be classified along the lines of their social identities, by gender, class, race, sexuality, age, ability etc. and their intersections. Power can be unequally distributed among these groups. This is a significant observation because power has a massive impact on the collective forms of understanding. This means that groups with more power are more likely to be in positions where they „will tend to have an influence in these practices by which social meaning is generated“ (Fricker 2007, 147). Thus, an unequal distribution of power can skew a shared hermeneutical resource in a way that provides more powerful groups with a better fitting understanding of their social experiences. 
Fricker terms less powerful groups who are structurally excluded from the practices that produce and shape the hermeneutical resource, hermeneutically marginalised (cf. ibid., 153). A hermeneutical resource, from which the input and perspectives of hermeneutically marginalised groups are missing, will provide them with ill-fitting notions and vocabulary to understand their social situation, or it will even turn out to be structurally prejudiced against them (cf. ibid., 155). 
But authors such as Dotson (2012) and Medina (2013) have pointed out that there is not just one hermeneutical resource that all individuals and social groups of a society have to rely on. There might be a dominant one that has mostly been shaped by the powerful groups and their experiences, but less powerful and hermeneutically marginalised groups often have a good understanding of their experiences and the oppression that they are facing (cf. Dotson 2012, 32; Medina 2013, 99). Even if this understanding is only embryonic and less explicit, they might still experience the interpretations and conceptions offered by the dominant hermeneutical resource as ill-fitting. They experience what Fricker terms dissonance (Fricker 2007, 166).
Although a hermeneutically marginalised group can create a hermeneutical resource that enables its members to communicate their experiences intelligibly to other members of the same group who share similar experiences, they might still have a hard time making themselves intelligible to people outside of their group who rely on the dominant hermeneutical resource. Because of their hermeneutical marginalisation the perspectives of these groups miss from the dominant hermeneutical resource. This creates lacunas that might be occupied by ill-fitting vocabulary and conceptions that have been created by the dominant group. As a consequence, the perspectives and interpretations of marginalised groups are hardly understood, which makes them prone to what Fricker describes as testimonial injustice: They will be ascribed a reduced credibility not only because of prejudices against their social identity, but also because their attempts to communicate their experiences are difficult to comprehend under the ill-fitting dominant hermeneutical resource (cf. Fricker 2007, 162).

Works cited

Dotson (2012): Dotson, Kristie, A Cautionary Tale. On Limiting Epistemic Oppression. Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Vol. 33 (1), 24-47.
Fricker (2007): Fricker, Miranda, Epistemic Injustice. Power & the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Medina (2013): Medina, José, Imposed Silences and Shared Hermeneutical Responsibilities. The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and the Social Imagination. 90-118. 
Pohlhaus (2011): Pohlhaus, Gaile, Relational Knowing and Epistemic Injustice: Toward a Theory of Willful Hermeneutical Ignorance. Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, Vol. 27 (4), 715-735.