Amandine Catala’s The Dynamics of Epistemic Injustice: Situating Epistemic Power and Agency is essential reading for anyone interested in social epistemology. Since Fricker (Reference Fricker2007) introduced the term, work on epistemic injustice has grown tremendously, with scholars identifying new types that pressure the original framework. The field needed systematic examination of core concepts and their relationships. What is epistemic agency? What is epistemic power? How do they relate to epistemic injustice? Catala addresses these questions through sustained engagement with concrete cases including intellectual disability, academic migration, and colonial memory.

Two contributions are central: (1) pluralist accounts of epistemic agency, power, and injustice, and (2) a structural account of how these relate. These challenge two implicit assumptions in the literature. The logocentric bias assumes knowledge is mainly propositional, narrowing who counts as an epistemic agent and what forms epistemic injustice can take. The interpersonal bias assumes epistemic agency is undermined primarily in individual interactions, obscuring how structural factors affect epistemic agency and create power asymmetries before anyone acts.

Catala’s pluralist accounts reveal the logocentric bias’s limits. Beyond propositional knowledge, Chapter 1 identifies four types of implicit knowing: practical (know-how), tacit (unarticulated background assumptions structuring interactions), embodied (first-person knowledge from the body), and affective (first-person knowledge from affect). This generates a pluralist account of epistemic agency: “the capacity to display, convey, use, or produce explicit or implicit types of knowing” (p. 35). She specifies this along four dimensions: epistemic objects (five types of knowing), expressive modes (verbal and non-verbal), contributing factors (internal and external), and stages (having, exercising, and successfully exercising agency). Importantly, the expressive modes for non-propositional epistemic agency need not be verbal. This affects who counts as an epistemic agent. People with severe intellectual disabilities, who cannot communicate verbally, are not recognized as subjects of epistemic injustice on the logocentric account. But they exercise practical epistemic agency through performance, tacit agency through behavior conforming to norms, embodied agency through physical expressions, and affective agency through emotional displays. Restricting epistemic agency to propositional knowledge commits what Catala calls meta-epistemic injustice: epistemic injustice at the methodological level.

Building on these pluralist accounts, Catala develops a structural account of how epistemic agency, power, and injustice relate: Epistemic agency is a function of epistemic power, which in turn is a function of epistemic justice or injustice structurally construed. Successfully exercising epistemic agency depends on epistemic power: the choice architecture determined by one’s social position. By “structurally construed”, Catala means that epistemic injustice operates through background social structures that shape opportunities based on position.

A key tool, which Catala borrows from Sally Haslanger, is the distinction between triggering and structuring causes. Triggering causes directly produce events; structuring causes are background structures that make triggering causes effective. Individual prejudice triggers testimonial injustice, while stereotypes in the mainstream hermeneutical resource structure it, making it possible and likely before anyone acts. Negative stereotypes about a group’s ability or credibility create subordinated and privileged positions in epistemic power structures. This severe asymmetry constitutes what Catala calls testimonial domination. Following Philip Pettit, domination is “power or capacity to interfere arbitrarily in the choices or option set of an agent” without “being forced to track the relevant interests of the agent” (108). Negative stereotypes have this power over their targets’ epistemic options. Attending to structuring causes helps identify the mechanisms whereby epistemic agency is unjustly undermined and enables work toward undoing structural domination.

Chapter 3 develops a parallel notion of hermeneutical domination. It arises when dominant groups’ dismissal of marginalized testimony prevents contribution to mainstream hermeneutical resources. This creates hermeneutical monopoly: exclusive, unchecked control over mainstream understanding (as when a dominant group controls whether a contested cultural practice counts as racist).

Later chapters demonstrate the framework’s range through analyses of diverse cases, developing new unifying concepts and types of epistemic injustice. In analyzing how colonial erasure undermines political equality, Chapter 4 introduces meta-epistemic filters as barriers that predetermine what evidence counts as credible. Chapter 5 examines linguistic epistemic injustice against non-native English speakers in academia. Chapter 6 analyzes the underdiagnosing of Autistic women as existential hermeneutical injustice: injustice affecting one’s capacity to know and become who one is. Accessing diagnosis can constitute a hermeneutical breakthrough that generates transformative experience and epistemic empowerment. By allowing one to understand one’s experience as shared and political, such breakthroughs generate epistemic power-with: a horizontal, solidaristic form of power that enables better self-understanding and contribution to more accurate representations.

Catala’s expanded framework illuminates and systematizes crucial forms of epistemic injustice that previous conceptions obscured. Still, some foundational commitments inherited from Fricker remain unexamined, limiting the account’s scope in ways that pull against its pluralistic orientation. First, Catala frames epistemic injustice as exhausted by credibility and intelligibility deficits: “…a person suffers epistemic injustice if she is either not adequately believed or consulted (i.e., she suffers an undue credibility deficit) or not adequately understood or represented (i.e., she suffers an undue intelligibility deficit)…” (p. 7). But epistemic agency can be unjustly undermined when agents are adequately understood and believed. Consider testimonial withdrawal, which occurs when speakers remain silent because speaking carries practical risks stemming from injustice (McWilliams Reference McWilliamsforthcoming). Exploited workers stay silent to keep their jobs. Assault survivors remain silent to avoid retaliation. The problem is not that they wouldn’t be believed or understood, but that being heard would itself be costly. This shows epistemic injustice can result from practical constraints injustice imposes on marginalized speech. Consider Catala’s “No Sneakers” case, which she characterizes as testimonial smothering (Dotson Reference Dotson2011). A young Brown man is denied restaurant entry for wearing sneakers, though he can see white diners inside wearing them. He remains silent since he knows “the slightest expression of frustration or anger could get him into trouble” (p. 73). This characterization – anticipated punishment rather than misunderstanding – points toward testimonial withdrawal.

Another restriction Catala inherits from Fricker is that epistemic injustice must stem from prejudice or bias: “To qualify as epistemic injustice, the credibility or intelligibility deficit must be due to prejudice” (p. 78). For Fricker, prejudice involves individual resistance to counter-evidence. Catala’s structural account suggests a broader notion, since stereotypes themselves constitute structural hermeneutical injustice (p. 115–6) and unduly diminish credibility (p. 101). Still, the framework excludes cases where structural constraints operate independently of prejudice or bias.

McGlynn (Reference McGlynn2026) explores this theoretical choice: Fricker and Catala require prejudice or bias, while Kristie Dotson’s (Reference Dotson2011) framework shows epistemically oppressive practices of silencing can result from pernicious ignorance: “reliable ignorance that, in a given context, harms another person (or set of persons)” (p. 238). As McGlynn notes, this isn’t “a simple lack of knowledge, but…an active practice of unknowing” (Dotson, p. 243). It includes cases where one forms no beliefs rather than prejudiced ones: “This would be reliable (and perhaps even pernicious) ignorance that doesn’t involve any prejudices” (McGlynn, p. 145). Often this stems from motivated incuriosity when privileged groups avoid truths challenging their sense of merited advantages.

Consider colonial erasure: “defective social memory regarding a society’s former or ongoing involvement in colonialism”, which can take the form of either “inaccurate beliefs or statements about colonialism, or utter ignorance” (Catala, p. 185). Catala notes that 25 percent of Belgian high school graduates didn’t know of Belgium’s colonial involvement. She argues that colonial erasure generates both testimonial and hermeneutical injustice, via racist stereotypes that produce prejudice and yield unduly diminished credibility judgments. But when white Belgians are ignorant of colonial history, they dismiss Afrodescendants’ testimony not from prejudice but from active, pernicious ignorance – claims seem incredible when one doesn’t know the history. This motivated ignorance is reliable (follows from social positioning) and harmful (silences testimony), creating what Catala calls meta-epistemic filters that predetermine what claims count as admissible in the mainstream credibility and intelligibility economy. Requiring prejudice misses how pernicious ignorance explains such cases. Others have argued that testimonial injustice occurs without prejudice – through background evidence shaped by structural factors (Goldberg Reference Goldberg2022), unjust discursive conventions (Ayala Reference Ayala2016, Ayala-López Reference Ayala-López2018), self-appointed speaking-for (Steers-McCrum Reference Steers-McCrum2020), and practical constraints (McWilliams Reference McWilliamsforthcoming).

A third limitation concerns Catala’s conception of epistemic agency. She defines it as “the capacity to display, convey, use, or produce explicit or implicit types of knowing” (p. 35). She distinguishes agency’s different stages (having, exercising, and successfully exercising it), and attends to environmental factors shaping its formation and exercise. Yet by framing it around knowledge production and transmission, her definition gives less systematic attention to how injustice undermines marginalized agents both before inquiry begins and in how the products of their epistemic labor are taken up afterward. I suggest extending her conception to situate epistemic agency within a broader ecology of inquiry. Elsewhere, I have proposed an approach that first considers what we need to develop and express epistemic subjecthood, and then examines how systemic injustice targets marginalized groups in ways that undermine those needs (McWilliams Reference McWilliams, Creller and Matheson2024). This highlights extensive needs before, during, and after knowledge production, revealing additional mechanisms of epistemic injustice. For instance, while Catala attends to environmental factors shaping agency, she might go further in framing the formation of agents and the reproduction of dominant epistemic systems as distinct sites of epistemic injustice. In addition to education and socialization, epistemic injustice operates through power over what topics receive attention, how questions are framed, and who gets invited to inquiry. Her framework could also extend beyond successful knowledge production to how epistemic agency is undermined when marginalized knowledge is misrepresented, overlooked despite its relevance, or excluded from shaping future research.

We can also be unjustly undermined not only as agents but as objects of epistemic states and processes, or subjects to be known (Davis Reference Davis and Lackey2021, Dembroff and Whitcomb Reference Dembroff and Whitcomb2023). To capture this broader range of injustice, I prefer the term epistemic subjecthood over agency, Dembroff and Whitcomb (Reference Dembroff and Whitcomb2023) argue that systemic rejection and preemption of knowledge about marginalized groups constitutes epistemic injustice in its own right. This occurs when knowledge about marginalized groups is distorted or neglected, whether through failures to investigate relevant topics, distortions of inquiry itself, or mismanagement of its outcomes. By attending to epistemic subjects this way, we can see how these harms unfold through inquiry’s ecology. But even retaining Catala’s focus on agency, the above extensions would serve her pluralist aims by highlighting additional ways marginalized agents are systemically undermined.

Catala concludes by acknowledging her own positionality and epistemic limits, adopting a posture of epistemic humility. My remarks should also be understood in this spirit – as adding what is salient from my own perspective to the conversation she has advanced. Her book represents a major leap forward in theorizing epistemic injustice. The expansions suggested here aim to extend the pluralist project she has so productively advanced.