Hermeneutical Injustice: Blood-sports and the English Defence League
Abstract
Miranda Fricker identifies a form of injustice she calls “hermeneutical injustice”. She argues that each culture has a stock of shared meanings that its members can use to describe their experience. Cultures are made up of different social groups, with uneven relations of power between them. In some cases, a culture’s shared meanings will reflect the experiences of more powerful groups, and be a poor fit for the experiences of less powerful members, who are subsequently disadvantaged. This is what Fricker calls “hermeneutical injustice”. Here, I argue that her account faces a serious difficulty: it relies on two intuitions about the source of hermeneutical injustice that are in tension with one another, and which cannot be made consistent within her framework. Consequently, her account is both too restrictive (it fails to accommodate cases we think it should) and too permissive (it classifies cases as hermeneutical injustices that we think it should not).
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Joe is not hermeneutically marginalized.
“I follow Komarine Romdenh-Romluc (2016 ) and Nick Clanchy (2023 ) when I suggest that we can roundly say that Joe is not hermeneutically marginalized.”
From Agency and authority: A differentiated model of hermeneutical power (2025) · cites this paper as Romdenh-Romluc 2016
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- Authors
- Romdenh-Romluc, K.
- Venue
- Social Epistemology
- Publisher
- Informa UK Limited
- Published
- 2016-05-11
- Volume
- 30
- Issue
- 5-6
- Pages
- 592-610
- ISSN
- 0269-1728 (ISSN-L)
- 1464-5297
- OpenAlex
- W2339020977
- Cited by
- 14
- References
- 13
- Citations by year
- 2026: 1 · 2025: 2 · 2024: 3 · 2023: 3 · 2022: 1 · 2020: 1 · 2018: 2 · 2017: 1
- FWCI
- 2.86
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Social Epistemology (publishedVersion)
- White Rose Research Online (University of Leeds, The University of Sheffield, University of York) (acceptedVersion)
- Funders
- University of Sheffield
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Feminist Epistemology and Gender Studies
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Philosophy › Hermeneutics and Narrative Identity
- Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › Political Philosophy and Ethics
- Keywords
- hermeneutical injustice, Miranda Fricker, English Defence League, blood sports, shared meaning, power relations, social groups, epistemic injustice
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