Fricker on Hermeneutical Injustice

Posted: Tue, Nov 11, 2025

This is “the injustice of having some significant area of one’s social experience obscured from collective understanding owing to a structural identity prejudice in the collective hermeneutical resource” (p. 156).

• A mere “hermeneutical gap” can be just or unjust.
• Hermeneutical marginalization is necessary for hermeneutical injustice, which skews our collective hermeneutical resources in a way that nonaccidentally disadvantages the hermeneutically marginalized groups.
• Fricker’s central case: sexual harassment (pp. 148ff).

Solutions?

• The virtue of hermeneutical justice: “an alertness or sensitivity to the possibility that the difficulty one’s interlocutor is having as she tries to render something communicatively intelligible is due not to its being a nonsense or her being a fool, but rather to some sort of gap in collective hermeneutical resources. The point is to realize that the speaker is struggling with an objective difficulty and not a subjective failing” (p. 169).
• Putting more women in “journalism, politics, academia, and law” to increase women’s “hermeneutical participation.”

Some relevant issues:

• Ignorance is often not a passive gap but an active production.
• Of course Black women had theorized sexual harassment before white women at Cornell gave it the name “sexual harassment.”
• The absence of capitalism, racism, cisheterosexism, etc. in an analysis of sexual harassment.