2. Key notions from Fricker

To locate our contribution to the debate, we need Fricker’s notions of hermeneutical injustice, hermeneutical marginalisation, incidentality and systematicity on the table.

Fricker defines hermeneutical injustice (HI) as ‘the injustice of having some significant area of one’s social experience obscured from collective understanding owing to hermeneutical marginalization’ (Reference Fricker2007: 158). The illustration of HI that features most prominently in Fricker’s work and in critical commentary involves Carmita Wood, a woman working for the Cornell Physics department in the late sixties and early seventies, who left her job after becoming the target of sexual harassment from a male professor. Wood developed physical symptoms due to her stressful situation. She asked to be transferred, but this request was denied. She thus quit, and when asked to explain her reasons for leaving as part of her unemployment insurance claim, her accounts were deemed ‘personal non-compelling reasons’ by the Department of Labor. Fricker presents Wood, along with the rest of society at the time, as having an inadequate understanding of the professor’s behaviour, being unable to fittingly conceptualise it as a moral wrong.Footnote ³ Fricker attributes this to a conceptual ‘lacuna’ – a gap in the repertoire of common concepts used to interpret experiences (‘hermeneutical resources’) – that prevents Wood and others from having to hand and being able to deploy the correct concept (sexual harassment) to correctly understand Wood’s experiences. Only after substantial activism on the part of feminists was the concept of sexual harassment developed and propagated so that the type of behaviour the professor engaged in was reconceived as problematic by broader society.

While Fricker diagnoses the lack of understanding in Wood’s case as due to a conceptual lacuna – the universal unavailability of the key concept sexual harassment – it is important to emphasise that not all cases of HI exhibit this feature. Fricker’s commentators have observed (Berenstain Reference Berenstain2020; Dotson Reference Dotson2012; Mason Reference Mason2011; Medina Reference Medina2013), and Fricker herself has agreed (Reference Fricker, Peels and Blaauw2016: 166), that HI can arise because the concept required for understanding the target experience is available only to a marginalised group, who due to this marginalisation is unable to have the concept accepted by broader society. On Fricker’s account, then, Wood was the victim of HI because of these two key connected features: (i) she was unable to have her important experience widely and correctly understood due to the lack of a widely available and adequate concept and (ii) the fact that this concept was not widely available was due to hermeneutical marginalisation. Hermeneutical marginalisation is experienced by a disadvantaged social group ‘when there is unequal participation with respect to some significant area(s) of social experience’ (Reference Fricker2007: 153). To unpack: for Fricker, the process of broader society recognising the professor’s behaviour as morally problematic was hindered by the fact that at the time, women were by and large excluded from – or, if they gained access, subordinated within – those professions which help shape common understandings of these behaviours. These professions include journalism, academia, politics and law. Fricker sometimes describes them, in an expression that will prove useful later, as having a particularly influential role in the meaning-making practices of a society; they are all professions that have a lot of power to shape the ‘meanings that just about anyone can draw upon and expect those meanings to be understood across social space by just about anyone else’ (Fricker Reference Fricker, Peels and Blaauw2016: 163). Thus, because Carmita Wood belongs to the hermeneutically marginalised social group women, and women were hermeneutically marginalised, her inability to have her plight understood counts as a hermeneutical injustice, not merely a hermeneutical disadvantage.

We can define hermeneutical injustice in the following way:Footnote ⁴ A suffers hermeneutical injustice just in case:

1. (i) A has an interest in something about themselves, X, being intelligible to BFootnote ⁵

2. (ii) A’s attempt to render X intelligible to B is hindered due to a fitting concept or expression not being sufficiently widespread, as a result of which A’s interest remains unsatisfied

3. (iii) The fact that the fitting concept or expression is insufficiently widespread is due to the hermeneutical marginalisation of some group

4. (iv) A belongs to the hermeneutically marginalised group

To consolidate our understanding of this definition, it is worth contrasting cases of HI like Wood’s with what Fricker considers ‘bad luck’ cases that do not count as HI but rather as mere cases of hermeneutical disadvantage.Footnote ⁶ The latter involve someone whose experience is obscured from collective understanding due to the lack of a widespread fitting concept; but crucially, the lack of this concept is not due to hermeneutical marginalisation. As an example, Fricker proposes the case of someone who has a medical condition at a point in history when medical science has not yet developed enough to properly diagnose it (Reference Fricker2007: 152). As long as the lack of understanding of the condition is not due to unequal hermeneutical participation of any social group, then that person is merely unlucky and suffers mere hermeneutical disadvantage rather than HI.

In addition to her general definition of HI, Fricker delineates two mutually exclusive and exhaustive sub-types: systematic HI and incidental HI.Footnote ⁷ While this description may suggest clear-cut boundaries, Fricker is open about the fact that the dividing line is blurry, in the sense that it may be difficult to say, of some cases, which side of the divide they fall on. Nonetheless, Fricker thinks paradigmatic examples of each type can be offered that clearly illustrate the distinction. She outlines this distinction as follows:

• Let us say, then, that if marginalization tracks the subject through a range of different social activities besides the hermeneutical, then the hermeneutical injustices to which it gives rise are systematic. Systematic hermeneutical injustices are part of the broad pattern of a social group’s general susceptibility to different sorts of injustice. Like systematic testimonial injustices, they bear the aspect of oppression. At root, both kinds of systematic epistemic injustice stem from structural inequalities of power.

• We have concentrated so far on the central case of hermeneutical injustice. By contrast, there can be cases of hermeneutical injustice that are not part of the general pattern of social power, and are more of a one-off. They are not systematic but incidental. Whereas systematic cases will tend to involve persistent, wide-ranging hermeneutical marginalization, incidental cases will tend to involve hermeneutical marginalization only fleetingly and/or in respect of a highly localized patch of the subject’s experience. Incidental hermeneutical injustices, then, stem not from any structural inequality of power, but rather from a more one-off moment of powerlessness (Reference Fricker2007: 156, original emphasis)

In this picture, the HI experienced by Wood is systematic, since she is part of a social group (women) who suffers ‘general social powerlessness’ or ‘general subordination as a generator of meaning’ (our italics, Reference Fricker2007: 157). Alongside these cases, however, Fricker contends there can be victims of HI who are not generally cut off from shaping the hermeneutical domain but rather whose inability to have their experience broadly understood stems from a ‘fleeting’ or ‘one-off’ form of hermeneutical marginalisation.

Fricker fleshes out this suggestion via the example of Joe Rose, the main character from Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love. Joe is a straight white cis man and a science writer with a very successful career.Footnote ⁸ He becomes the victim of stalking on the part of Jed Parry immediately following their initial meeting. Jed starts phoning at all hours, waiting outside Joe’s apartment, writing him long rambling (and increasingly frightening) letters, and occasionally tailing him around London. However, when Joe reports Jed’s unwanted behaviour to his girlfriend Clarissa and to the police, his concerns are dismissed by both, and the ultimate result is a series of violent escalations. Fricker intends this case to be read as one where Joe is stalked, but where popular conceptions of stalking available at the time the novel is set do not make room for the possibility of men being the victims of stalking. Thus, according to Fricker, Joe has an important experience obscured from collective understanding due to hermeneutical marginalisation. But the sense in which Joe is hermeneutically marginalised, Fricker implies, is fleeting, ‘one-off’, and/or relates only to a ‘highly localized patch of the subject’s experience’ – namely his experience of being stalked. After all, in all other areas of social life, Joe is well-placed to influence common understandings of experience relevant to him; indeed, given his socially privileged position and his successful career which affords him a wide audience, he seems especially well-placed to do so.Footnote ⁹

3. Critiques of Joe Rose as an illustration of incidental HI

Fricker’s selection of Joe Rose as an illustration of incidental HI has perplexed some scholars. The contentious point is whether Joe can count as hermeneutically marginalised, which for Fricker is a necessary precondition for hermeneutical injustice of any kind to occur. On this point, Fricker argues of Joe that despite his relatively privileged social position,

Yet, as Romdenh-Romluc (Reference Romdenh-Romluc2016) argues, it isn’t clear how we can think of Joe as hermeneutically marginalised this way. After all, hermeneutical marginalisation is elsewhere described by Fricker as a background condition to HI,Footnote ¹⁰ and as such, we would expect it to be in place prior to the HI occurring. But the passage just quoted seemingly suggests that the hermeneutical marginalisation occurs during the very conversations in which Joe is trying to have his experience understood by others. This is odd, for such conversations are also the context in which, for Fricker, the HI itself arises. So Joe’s hermeneutical marginalisation as envisaged by Fricker temporally coincides with the hermeneutical injustice: it is in the very act of failing to be understood that Joe is, for Fricker, hermeneutically marginalised. What’s even worse for Fricker’s picture is that not only does the marginalisation occur in the same moment as the HI, but it also seems to have been described by Fricker as being identical to HI, since Fricker describes both as consisting in the dismissal of Joe’s concerns on the part of Clarissa and the police. As Romdenh-Romluc writes, ‘The supposed marginalization just collapses into the supposed injustice on this view’ (Reference Romdenh-Romluc2016: 597).

To see this point clearly, contrast Joe’s supposed hermeneutical marginalisation with Carmita Wood’s. In Wood’s case, the marginalisation of her social group clearly precedes Wood’s hermeneutical injustice. We could see such marginalisation as a pattern of exclusion and subordination of women manifesting in many different occurrences: e.g., in the rejection of a woman journalist’s proposal to write a piece in the late sixties investigating women’s views on the stressful effects of so-called workplace ‘flirting’, in the exclusion of a feminist lawyer from the bar,Footnote ¹¹ in the failure to promote a feminist academic conducting research on how institutional design and processes hinder women’s advancement, because her research is considered unimportant. All these events (and the many others that jointly constitute women’s marginalisation) predate Wood’s attempt to communicate her own plight. By contrast, in Joe’s case Fricker is inviting us to think of Joe’s conversations with Clarissa and the police as the loci of hermeneutical negotiation and marginalisation. But these were supposed to be the contexts where the hermeneutical injustice ‘erupts’ against a backdrop of ‘hermeneutical inequality that exists, dormant, in a situation of hermeneutical marginalization’ (Reference Fricker2007: 159).

One could not be blamed for thinking that Fricker’s decision to present Joe’s case as a paradigmatic example of incidental HI was unwise: this decision forces her to claim that Joe is hermeneutically marginalised but, finding no suitable candidate for what this marginalisation consists in, she lands on what is actually the (claimed) hermeneutical injustice itself. In a more recent essay, Fricker describes Joe as the ‘vanishingly minimal case’ of HI (Reference Fricker, Peels and Blaauw2016: 166), but this makes it even harder to see why she chose him as her paradigm case of incidental HI.

We should emphasise that the worry is more fundamental than Fricker’s infelicitous choice of Joe Rose as an illustration of incidental HI, since if that were the extent of it, it could be easily enough solved just by finding a more fitting example. Taking Joe as her starting point in thinking about incidental HI leads Fricker to offer a quite revisionary definition of hermeneutical marginalisation: one seemingly at odds with how she presents what’s going on in her central examples, such as Carmita Wood, as already discussed. There it seemed that it was primarily social groups who could be hermeneutically marginalised – recall that the background condition for the HI faced by Wood was the unequal status of women – but when it comes time to give a more precise characterisation, Fricker approaches things differently from how her discussion of Wood and other examples might have led us to expect:

Although Fricker mentions a ‘disadvantaged group’ here, this definition is clearly designed to allow for individuals such as Joe Rose (‘members of the disadvantaged group’) to be hermeneutically marginalised, since despite his favourable social situation, she takes him to face a situation of unjust hermeneutical participation with respect to a significant area of social experience, namely his experiences of being stalked by Jed. However, that’s precisely the point that, following Romdenh-Romluc, we have contended she has failed to make plausible. Here, we can see how Fricker has distorted her understanding of hermeneutical marginalisation in an (implausible) attempt to extend the notion of HI to Joe.

Setting aside the details of Fricker’s treatment of incidental HI and Joe Rose, we can now see the general problem. Insofar as an individual is affected by HI merely in its incidental form, then that individual’s social identity will be by and large privileged, and therefore, it will be difficult to defend the claim that they are hermeneutically marginalised in any sense meaningful enough for HI to get traction. Or so the worry goes. As Clanchy expresses the point (Reference Clanchy2023: 828), ‘I’m sceptical that there is any instance of hermeneutical marginalization which isn’t in some way symptomatic of a broader relative social powerlessness’. Given this, it’s very difficult to see how there can be genuinely incidental HI.

We can call this the problem of incidental marginalisation. The question driving this problem is how can a victim of incidental HI be hermeneutically marginalised, as required by Fricker’s definition of HI, given their privileged social standing implied by the incidental nature of the HI to which they allegedly fall victim?

This problem is of deeper significance for understanding HI and epistemic injustice more generally than it might first appear. As we’ll see, attempts to solve the problem of incidental marginalisation take us directly to fundamental issues concerning how we should understand the key notion of hermeneutical marginalisation and how it relates to the phenomenon of HI. Given this, making sense of incidental HI is crucial for making sense of HI in general. Moreover, as Amandine Catala has recently pointed out (Reference Catala2024), one of the distinctive features of Fricker’s account of epistemic injustice is that it permits there to be non-systematic cases. The main alternative framework for theorising about these issues, Dotson’s influential account of epistemic oppression (Reference Dotson2012, Reference Dotson2014), focuses entirely on systematic forms of epistemic exclusion that people and groups can face, and so it directs our attention away from injustices that are not aspects of wider forms of oppression. So one of the main reasons to retain Fricker’s notion of epistemic injustice, despite the availability of alternatives, is that it promises insight into incidental phenomena.Footnote ¹² However, if Fricker’s account of HI rules out a plausible treatment of incidental HI, as the problem of incidental marginalisation threatens to show, that puts a serious dent in this line of reasoning in favour of Fricker’s approach to epistemic injustice. For these reasons, offering a solution to the problem of incidental marginalisation is an urgent task for those working within Fricker’s account of HI.

We propose to do just that in the following. Before we do, it will be instructive to examine Clanchy’s own departure from Fricker’s account.

4. Clanchy’s revised account of HI

Romdenh-Romluc’s scepticism that Joe is hermeneutically maginalised is shared by Nick Clanchy, who uses this point as a springboard to offer a novel account of HI and of the distinction between its incidental and systematic versions (Clanchy Reference Clanchy2023), one that in effect defuses the problem of incidental marginalisation. Their key move is to eliminate from the definition of HI the condition of group membership, i.e., that in order for someone to suffer HI, they must belong to the relevant social group that is hermeneutically marginalised. Clanchy’s new definition still retains the essential link between HI and hermeneutical marginalisation: every case of HI involves hermeneutical marginalisation, and this marginalisation must feature prominently in the explanation for why the fitting concept or expression is insufficiently widespread/missing altogether, and therefore, why the relevant area of the victim’s social life is not collectively understood; it is just that the group who are hermeneutically marginalised need not include the victim of HI. Recall our definition of HI above:

1. (i) A has an interest in something about themselves, X, being intelligible to B

2. (ii) A’s attempt to render X intelligible to B is hindered due to a fitting concept not being sufficiently widespread, as a result of which A’s interest remains unsatisfied

3. (iii) The fact that the fitting concept is insufficiently widespread is due to the hermeneutical marginalisation of some group

4. (iv) A belongs to the hermeneutically marginalised group

Clanchy eliminates the group-membership condition expressed in clause (iv), while retaining the other clauses, and in particular clause (iii), which preserves hermeneutical marginalisation’s role as a necessary background condition to HI.

Furthermore, Clanchy intriguingly claims that the boundary between incidental and systematic cases of HI aligns with whether clause (iv) is met: the HI suffered by A is systematic just in case A is a member of the marginalised group; it is incidental just in case they are not a member of the marginalised group. Clause (iv) is no longer a necessary condition, along with (i)–(iii), for HI, but rather becomes the arbiter for whether something determined by (i)–(iii) to be HI is of the systematic or incidental kind.

How does this deliver the desired verdict in the case of Joe Rose? Clanchy’s key observation here is that in Joe’s case there is a hermeneutically marginalised group – women – who, Clanchy suggests, were not given sufficient say in the development of understandings of stalking.Footnote ¹³ For example, stalking was first articulated legally in ways that suggested its targets were exclusively celebrities and deemed irrelevant any behaviour not closely connected to the threat of physical violence and murder. Had lawmakers been interested in investigating stalking as a genuine social phenomenon, their definition would have been more attentive and inclusive. It would have been broad enough to include patterns of intrusive behaviour (e.g., following, repeated unsolicited attempts at communication) that bore no obvious signs of imminent violence and that more obviously allowed for men to also be targets. It is no accident, Clanchy maintains, that lawmakers of the first stalking laws were predominantly men, and that lawmaking in this area was a kneejerk reaction to the high-profile murder of Rebecca Schaeffer and the subsequent media storm, signalling they lacked a genuine interest in understanding stalking’s true features (Reference Clanchy2023: 824).

Additionally, Clanchy’s account correctly categorises Carmita Wood’s case as systematic. Wood belongs to the group (women) whose marginalisation hinders the collective understanding of her sexual harassment. For this reason, Wood’s powerlessness is not ‘fleeting’, ‘one-off’ or ‘localized’, but persistent and widespread, and the HI she suffers is thus systematic.

How does Clanchy’s account handle the problem of incidental marginalisation? The question pressed by this problem was: how can a victim of incidental HI be hermeneutically marginalised, as required by Fricker’s definition of HI, given their privileged social standing implied by the incidental nature of the relevant HI? Clanchy defuses the problem by denying an implicit assumption made by this question, namely, that victims of incidental HI must themselves be hermeneutically marginalised: for Clanchy, victims of incidental HI are victims of HI in virtue of the hermeneutical marginalisation of a group they don’t belong to. Their privileged social identity is thus clearly consistent with the marginalisation of a different group.

5. A new Frickerian account of incidental HI

Clanchy’s is a revisionary account, since it urges us to give up on the membership condition (iv) in Fricker’s original definition of HI. However, giving up that condition is not without its costs, since intuitively this condition works together with condition (iii), the hermeneutical marginalisation clause, to explain our sense that we are dealing with a genuine injustice rather than a mere disadvantage. It seems significant when we consider why we should think of the hermeneutical disadvantages faced by Carmita Wood as an injustice that she is a member of a marginalised group; it feels different to suggest that the disadvantages faced by someone as privileged as Joe Rose are a real injustice because other people are in a marginalised group.

For this reason, we wish to offer a more conservative resolution to the problem of incidental marginalisation, one that allows us to retain all the elements of Fricker’s original account. We share Romdenh-Romluc’s and Clanchy’s view that Fricker’s choice of Joe Rose as a paradigmatic instance of incidental HI was a mistake. However, rather than revise Fricker’s account of HI as given by conditions (i)–(iv) to accommodate Joe Rose, as Clanchy does, we offer a different paradigm case of incidental HI and show that the resulting picture allows us to retain Fricker’s original conditions, including (iv). We will return to what might be said about Joe Rose in the following section once we have seen where a different starting point for thinking about incidental HI leads us.

In articulating our proposal, we show that in her book, Fricker already offers the resources required for a coherent conception of incidental HI, one that can resolve the problem of incidental marginalisation. We explain our solution and offer a natural and compelling example of incidental HI, one that, unlike the case of Joe Rose, is clearly accommodated under Fricker’s original definition of HI, even given conditions (iii) and (iv), which require that victims of HI need to be hermeneutically marginalised.

We think the key to resolving the problem of incidental marginalisation is to look at the resources Fricker offers when describing the contrast between systematic and incidental versions of testimonial injustice earlier in her book, and in particular at the notions of ‘localized’ and ‘tracker’ prejudices.Footnote ¹⁴ Roughly, testimonial injustice (hereafter ‘TI’) is defined by Fricker as occurring when a hearer gives a speaker less credibility than they should because of a prejudice, and like Fricker, we’ll mainly focus on cases in which the hearer harbours a prejudice about the speaker’s social group: an identity prejudice, in Fricker’s terminology. Here is Fricker’s articulation of the systematic/incidental distinction for TI:

As we can see from this passage, Fricker defines systematic TI as involving what we might call ‘tracker’ prejudices – those that surface repeatedly in a variety of areas of social life. Prejudices based on race, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, and disability fall into this category. By contrast, let’s label ‘non-tracker’ those prejudices that affect the individual only in a very limited set of circumstances. The prejudice affecting the scientist due to their working within a disfavoured methodology is an example of a non-tracker prejudice. Importantly, Fricker also holds that identity prejudices can be non-tracking, offering the example of a philosopher of science who attends a large gathering of scientists, but who finds her contributions dismissed despite having a considerable degree of expertise in the relevant area of science (Reference Fricker2007: 28–29); due to her identity as a philosopher, she is not seen as credible when offering testimony on the scientific issues that the event focuses on, even though this testimony is rooted in her considerable knowledge and understanding of these issues.

We believe that to resolve the problem of incidental marginalisation and thus restore the coherence of Fricker’s account, the key step is to take this pre-existing tracker/non-tracker distinction from Fricker’s discussion of TI and carefully apply it to HI. Our contention is that, just as in the case of TI, whether HI is systematic or incidental is settled by whether the relevant prejudice that drives the hermeneutical marginalisation is of the tracker or non-tracker variety.Footnote ¹⁶ There is thus no need to revise Fricker’s account as Clanchy does, by reconceiving the systematic/incidental HI distinction in accordance with whether the victim of the HI is a member of the hermeneutically marginalised group.

On this Frickerian analysis, Carmita Wood suffers systematic HI because the targets of the hermeneutical marginalisation that acts as relevant background for the HI she suffers are women, and prejudice against women is of the tracker variety. Fricker’s central case works just fine. More work is needed to see how Fricker’s notion of non-tracker prejudices can be employed in delineating incidental HI. To do so, let’s describe a case that is different from Joe Rose’s case. Our case is instead inspired partly by the incidental TI of Fricker’s philosopher of science described above, and partly by another example of HI from Fricker: the case of Edmund White, whose experience of being gay in the US in the 1950s cannot be collectively understood due to the ‘layers of falsifying meaning’ (Reference Fricker2007: 163) which the available hermeneutical resources impose. Such meanings include the ideas that being gay is a sickness and that it is sinful, shameful and involves preying on others.Footnote ¹⁷

Consider the following example. Jacob is a white, straight, cis, non-disabled philosopher of science known for some significant philosophical work early on in his career. This work has also come to the attention of scientists, who are aware but suspicious of its value, due to their general scepticism towards philosophers of science, who are seen by them as meddling intruders with little appreciation for the proper aims and methods of scientific investigation. For this reason, the scientific community routinely does its utmost to prevent philosophers of science from participating in its mechanisms for research generation, e.g., collaborative scientific research centres, grant applications, and international scientific conferences. Scientists generally consider philosophers of science to be a nuisance who hinder scientific progress with their oddball, abstract questions.

After several years pursuing clearly philosophical work, Jacob becomes increasingly fascinated by the purely scientific research adjacent to his philosophical contributions and develops the requisite research skills to conduct such research while still maintaining his affiliation in his philosophy department. However, his prior notoriety as a philosopher of science remains widespread in the scientific community, and this continues to enable his prejudicial exclusion from the main processes for advancing scientific inquiry and discovery, despite the scientific validity of the research he produces and his efforts to have this recognised: he is still, like other philosophers of science, routinely not invited to important conferences or to be a visiting speaker; when he manages to attend such events and finds himself in conversation with other scientists, they are reluctant to give his ideas a fair hearing; his contributions are rejected outright by journals due to his identity as a philosopher of science (let’s assume anonymous review is not yet the norm). Thus, Jacob misses out on important feedback and the recognition that his scientific contributions deserve. He finds it impossible to publish his work, fails to obtain competitive research funding, and, when he applies for visiting fellowships or academic positions in science departments, his identity as a philosopher of science immediately leads assessors to rule him out.

This is especially unfortunate because as his interests continue to shift towards science, Jacob starts to see himself increasingly as a scientist, to the extent that it becomes an essential part of his conception of his authentic self. More specifically, he finds the identity scientist to be as important to his sense of self as philosopher of science and comes firmly to believe that both those identities can and do co-exist within him. Yet, his genuinely valuable scientific contributions fail to make a mark: due to the scientists’ prejudice against philosophers of science, he is hermeneutically marginalised from the scientific community, i.e., he is cut off from equitable participation in the meaning-making practices of that community. The inability to have the scientific community see him as a scientist, an identity now essential to his conception of self, has the effect of undermining his academic progress. His career stalls, and when his university offers a voluntary severance scheme, he decides to change career entirely, leaving behind academia and giving up on his frustrated attempts to give expression to his authentic professional self.

The issue can be described in conceptual terms as Jacob accepting a more permissive (and accurate) version of the concept scientist, one that allows for philosophers of science such as him to count as a scientist. By contrast, the concept scientist employed by the scientific community is a restrictive (and less accurate) one that precludes the possibility that a philosopher of science could instantiate it. The targets of the hermeneutical injustice, i.e., what is obscured from collective understanding, are Jacob’s identity and experience of himself as a scientist, and the lack of understanding of this identity/self-experience stems from the difference in the two understandings (one unduly restrictive, one rightly permissive) of the concept of scientist at play.Footnote ¹⁸

In this scenario, Jacob is facing localised marginalisation. He is mostly excluded from being present at certain kinds of events, practices, and discussions, and when he is able to be there, he finds himself isolated and disregarded. Moreover, the kinds of events and (formal and informal) practices and discussions he is excluded from are precisely the kind that shape the shared hermeneutical resources within his field of science. What we are dealing with in this example are localised practices of meaning-making for a specific field of inquiry, and what we have described is a localised form of marginalisation from those practices, giving rise to obstacles for Jacob to making something intelligible that it’s strongly in his interests to make intelligible, namely his identity as a scientist and his experience of himself as a scientist. As described, it’s the very same person who is both marginalised and who struggles to make his identity as a scientist understood, but more similarly to Fricker’s examples of HI and in line with the membership condition, the victim of HI has the marginalised identity – in our example, philosopher of science. Crucially, Jacob’s identity leads to his being marginalised with respect to these particular meaning-making practices, even though he also belongs to a social group (white, cis, straight, non-disabled men) that is not marginalised with respect to the wider meaning-making practices that exercise the most influence over the overall shared hermeneutical resources in Jacob’s society. As we have seen, incidental TI involves speakers receiving less than due credibility because of prejudices that are localised and relatively idiosyncratic rather than tracker prejudices, which are decidedly non-localised. Our proposal is that incidental HI involves epistemic agents facing obstacles to making something important intelligible where this is due to those agents being marginalised with respect to smaller-scale and more specific meaning-making institutions and practices, where this pattern of exclusion and isolation is explained by the same kinds of localised prejudices operative in Fricker’s examples of incidental TI. Philosophers of science are not a hermeneutically marginalised group in general, and it might strike us as preposterous to describe individual very successful philosophers of science as hermeneutically marginalised (just as it has struck many as implausible to describe Joe Rose as marginalised). However, none of this prevents philosophers of science from being prejudicially marginalised with respect to particular meaning-making practices and institutions, and this can be the relevant ‘background condition’ for cases of incidental HI faced by members of this group. Notice, as promised, that this understanding of incidental HI in no way challenges Fricker’s membership condition on cases of HI.

From this perspective, we can diagnose more precisely where Fricker’s attempt to accommodate incidental HI goes wrong. She recognises that making sense of incidental HI involves making sense of a localised form of hermeneutical marginalisation, but she fails to recognise the point that collective (supra-individual) meaning-making practices and institutions can be specific and small-scale, which allows for localised forms of marginalisation based on non-tracking prejudices.Footnote ¹⁹ Having missed this, she tries to find the locality she is looking for in the different kinds of experiences an individual can have – in particular ‘significant area(s) of social experience’, as her definition of hermeneutical marginalisation, quoted above, puts it (Reference Fricker2007: 153). However, this leads to the problem that Romdenh-Romluc diagnosed in Fricker’s treatment of Joe Rose; whenever Fricker tries to identify the localised form of hermeneutical marginalisation that applies to Joe, she ends up instead talking about his inability to make intelligible (in particular, to the police and to his fiancée Clarissa) specific kinds of experiences he has had, and the idea of a ‘background inequality’ that explains why these difficulties count as injustices suddenly evaporates from the picture.

Note that Jacob’s case does not face the same worry of collapse: for Jacob’s marginalisation – his exclusion from scientific events, the rejection of his submitted articles and grant applications, etc. – does not constitute the experience or aspect of his identity that is obscured from collective understanding. The latter is his experience of being, or conception of himself as, a scientist; the marginalisation that he endures is not identical to it but is rather a causal contributor to the fact that this experience/self-conception is not collectively understood. In other words, such marginalisation is the background against which hermeneutical injustice occurs, just as Fricker’s account requires.

Before returning to consider the case of Joe Rose, it is worth heading off a potential worry about the case of incidental HI we have offered. The worry is that Jacob’s supposed incidental HI is better analysed as something else. One might maintain, for instance, that the case is best described as a protracted form of TI. Alternatively, one could advance a diagnosis of content-focused injustice (Davis Reference Davis and Lackey2021; Dembroff and Whitcomb Reference Dembroff, Whitcomb., Gendler, Hawthorne and Chung2022), where the hearers afford too little credibility to the speaker not because of the speaker’s social identity, but instead because of the audience’s prejudice against the content the speaker attempts to convey.Footnote ²⁰

In response to the first possibility, we should note that TI and HI are strongly intertwined, can clearly causally contribute to each other, and thus that the contexts in which HI arises are also ones where we can expect TI to be present.Footnote ²¹ HI can cause TI because when an important concept is not available to hearers, the speaker’s attempt at communicating something important that relies on that concept will appear inchoate or incoherent, thus giving rise to the impression that the speaker is not credible or that the speaker is ‘making something out of nothing’ (Pohlhaus Jr Reference Pohlhaus2012: 722). The objection under consideration is correct insofar as it claims that we might find TI arising in Jacob’s interactions with fellow scientists. (Though the fact that scientists are unwilling to engage at all with his work suggests that this TI would be of a pre-emptive form, rather than strictly analogous to Fricker’s central cases. In the latter cases, the victim gets to speak, and their assertions are deemed less credible than they should be). The key question on which the objection rests, however, is whether the case of Jacob can and should be diagnosed exclusively as TI, rendering a diagnosis of HI inappropriate.

We believe this would be a mistake. To take this line would risk overgeneralising to central cases of HI, effectively reducing any instance of HI to TI. Consider that if the relevant concept of sexual harassment is not available to her audience, any proclamation on Carmita Wood’s part that conflicts with the understanding of the professor’s behaviour as unproblematic is likely to be the target of TI (assuming the audience harbours prejudice against women). Yet, to say that this makes Carmita Wood’s case an example of TI would be to lose what is essential about HI: the fact that it involves the use of inadequate concepts in ill-fated attempts to understand important social experiences or aspects of one’s identity.Footnote ²² This is not an essential ingredient of even protracted forms of TI: a male mechanic and a woman car-owner can share all the appropriate concepts needed to discuss the causes of the car’s breakdown; and TI still arises in their conversation if the mechanic regularly deflates the credibility of the woman’s conversational contributions. Moreover, it would be a stretch to find here anything obscured from collective understanding that deserves the label ‘significant social experience’ or ‘aspect of one’s identity’. Since Jacob’s case features inadequate concepts (a conception of scientist incompatible with philosopher of science) that obscure Jacob’s important self-conception as a scientist, a diagnosis of HI is appropriate, even if such HI is accompanied by instances of TI.

Moving now to the second possibility: Davis (Reference Davis and Lackey2021) and Dembroff and Whitcomb (Reference Dembroff, Whitcomb., Gendler, Hawthorne and Chung2022) propose content-focused injustice (CFI) as comprising cases in which someone is unduly disregarded not because their identity per se is the target of prejudice, but because the content they convey is associated with a disadvantaged social group. A central example involves white, heterosexual scientists’ claims in the Eighties about the urgent need for research into human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) being dismissed by American policymakers due to politically motivated prejudice against gay people. While the scientists themselves were not the targets of prejudice – if anything, their social identity was highly privileged – their claims were ignored because they recommended interventions in support of the gay community, a community that was affected at the time by widespread prejudice. A critic might claim that Jacob’s relatively privileged identity as a straight, white, cis, non-disabled man motivates subsuming his case under CFI rather than HI.

It’s worth noting in response to this concern that CFI and HI arguably overlap and blend into each other in certain cases, as Davis notes (Reference Davis and Lackey2021: 244 fn21), so that even if one is convinced that a given example involves the former, further work is needed to show that HI is not present.Footnote ²³ Moreover, we have described our example so as to make it very plausible that Jacob does face a hermeneutical disadvantage and that this is due to his prejudicial exclusion from the relevant meaning-making spaces and practices, and it’s not clear how to reconcile these features of the example with the claim that it involves CFI but not HI.

6. Back to Joe

That brings us back to Fricker’s example of Joe Rose. Let’s start by outlining the space of options that remain open, given our acceptance of Fricker’s four conditions for HI.Footnote ²⁴ There seem to be, broadly speaking, three main options left. First, we might deny that Joe counts as facing HI at all. It’s clear that Joe is struggling with a hermeneutical disadvantage and that he is harmed as a result, but if we cannot make sense of the idea that he is hermeneutically marginalised (and we hang onto Fricker’s membership condition), then we should conclude that this disadvantage is not an injustice.Footnote ²⁵

Second, we can try to make a case that Joe is subject to the kind of incidental marginalisation that we characterised in the previous section, with reference to our example of Jacob. This would require showing that there are local meaning-making practices that Joe is prejudicially excluded from and which have shaped the relevant concept (stalking) in ways that have made it unfit to enable him to render his experiences of Jed Parry intelligible (to Clarissa and the police, and perhaps also to himself). Katharine Jenkins’s work on how we can understand rape and domestic-abuse myths as a form of HI suggests one way to develop this thought. She writes:

Likewise, male victims have plausibly been marginalised within conversations about stalking and sexual violence. In section 4 above, we looked at Clanchy’s case for thinking that the concept of stalking has been shaped without much input from the primary victims of stalking, due to women being a hermeneutically marginalised group. Following Jenkins, one might suggest that in the present environment, this is only part of the story, and increasingly we find the gendered analyses of stalking, domestic abuse, and rape that have been championed by feminist organisations and activists finding footholds in political policy and legal frameworks.Footnote ²⁶ Otherwise privileged male victims of these typically gendered forms of abuse and violence, such as Joe Rose, may be excluded from these organisations and conversations due to holding an identity (white cis straight man) which in most other contexts opens doors for them. This offers a picture according to which Joe’s struggles to render his experiences of being stalked intelligible, to himself and to others such as the police and Clarissa, may well be due to a background condition of localised hermeneutical marginalisation; precisely the notion that, on the account defended in the previous section, enables us to make sense of the phenomenon of incidental HI.

Third, and finally, we might agree with Fricker that Joe faces HI but question her claim that he represents its incidental form, instead proposing that Joe, no less than Carmita Wood, faces systematic HI. Advancing this line on the example, Nora Berenstain writes:

Here, Berenstain appeals to the same kinds of myths discussed in Jenkins’s paper in explaining the sense in which Joe faces a genuine instance of HI, but she disputes the claim that it is incidental rather than systematic. It may be true that Joe’s social position means he is usually the beneficiary rather than a victim of unjust social norms and expectations, but on this analysis it’s a mistake to conclude on that basis that the disadvantage he faces in making sense of these experiences is merely incidental or a ‘one-off’, given how widespread and embedded the myth than men cannot be stalked is in patriarchal societies like ours.

We don’t want to take a stand on which of these is the right account of this example here.Footnote ²⁷ Our goal in this paper is to make the methodological point that attempts to solve the problem of incidental marginalisation would do much better to start with less difficult and complex examples than Joe Rose, and in particular we’ve proposed that it makes sense to start with examples modelled on Fricker’s own case of incidental TI. From this perspective, whether Joe counts as an instance of incidental HI isn’t really of all that much importance; it’s a question of whether a particular example resembles our paradigm case of incidental HI, Jacob, in the relevant respects. The three options we have outlined in this final section represent different points of disagreement over this question, but nothing turns on resolving this disagreement for our present purposes. Moreover, Joe is a fictional example, and there is a clear danger in trying to find determinate answers to questions that may turn on details of him and his world that may be underspecified. So while it would be satisfying to be able to give a conclusive treatment of Fricker’s example, in light of the account offered in section 5 of this paper, we will content ourselves with observing that our view is that Fricker and the rest of the literature on incidental HI went wrong precisely in according such great significance to this example, and that for the purposes of making sense of the phenomenon, it doesn’t matter if it remains unclear what to say about it.