EPISTEMIC INJUSTICE AND HYBRID EVIL IN POLITICAL EPISTEMOLOGY

This study claims that Miranda Fricker’s concept of epistemic injustice can be extended in two ways. First, the excess of credibility can be evaluated as an epistemic injustice. Fricker suggests that a deflated level of credibility causes epistemic injustice. However, practices such as forcing false statements result from excess credibility and cause epistemic injustices especially during war and detention processes. In some hierarchical situations, social actors’ hearer and speaker roles may turn into a hegemonic relationship by suggesting that the speaker has knowledge. This kind of relationship motivates exclusion, marginalization and alienation due to identity bias. Then, it can be argued that not only the lack of credibility but also its excess is an epistemic injustice. In this study, the excess of credibility is accepted as the situation faced by “people who are interrogated with the claim of having knowledge.” Second, epistemic injustice can be defined as a hybrid evil. It refers to instances of evil that contain complex motivations such as political evil, since it can neither be reduced only to the character nor to the environmental conditions. Fricker’s proposal for resolving epistemic injustice is hybrid virtues such as intellectual and reflexive critical-social sensitivity. Therefore, while individuals’ situations and context provide reflexive thinking, they also support a normative critical attitude. Fricker offers hybrid virtues for the solution while she does not define the problem as hybrid. Thus this paper proposes to extend Fricker’s concept in two ways: first, including excess of credibility within the scope of the epistemic injustice, and second, defining such injustices as political hybrid evils. Then this expansion will give political epistemology an opportunity to reevaluate given theories of politics, ethics and epistemology and increase its normative contribution to them.