Two Kinds of Unknowing

REBECCA MASON

Miranda Fricker claims that a ‘‘gap’’ in collective hermeneutical resources with re-
spect to the social experiences of marginalized groups prevents members of those
groups from understanding their own experiences (Fricker 2007). I argue that be-
cause Fricker misdescribes dominant hermeneutical resources as collective, she fails to
locate the ethically bad epistemic practices that maintain gaps in dominant hermene-
utical resources even while alternative interpretations are in fact offered by non-
dominant discourses. Fricker’s analysis of hermeneutical injustice does not account
for the possibility that marginalized groups can be silenced relative to dominant dis-
courses without being prevented from understanding or expressing their own social
experiences. I suggest that a gap in dominant hermeneutical resources is ambiguous
between two kinds of unknowing: hermeneutical injustice suffered by members of
marginalized groups, and epistemically and ethically blameworthy ignorance perpe-
trated by members of dominant groups.

Feminist scholarship has supplied the important insight that what is in our in-
terests to know and what is in our interests to ignore crucially affect knowledge
practices in ways that cannot be explained by conventional epistemological
frameworks. This insight can be read not only as a comment on how one’s own
interests affect what one knows but also as a comment on how the interests of
others, in particular powerful or dominant groups, can limit or occlude knowl-
edge production and transmission by powerless or marginalized groups.
In Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, Miranda Fricker iden-
tifies questions of social power as the impetus behind examining epistemic
conduct in an ethical frame (Fricker 2007). Her analysis of epistemic injustice
highlights those background conditions that generate systematic unknowing by
making visible the ways in which power relations can permit and constrain
knowledge generation and transmission unequally on the basis of a knower’s

Hypatia vol. 26, no. 2 (Spring, 2011) r by Hypatia, Inc.

 Rebecca Mason 295

social identity. She introduces the notion of hermeneutical injustice, my focus in

this paper, to attend to the inequalities that occur in social-epistemic contexts
when meaningful interpretations of social experiences are absent or obscured
by relations of power that allow some to neglect or claim interpretive authority
over the experiences of others.
Fricker defines hermeneutical injustice as ‘‘the injustice of having some sig-
nificant area of one’s social experiences obscured from collective understanding
owing to a structural identity prejudice in the collective hermeneutical
resource’’ (Fricker 2007, 155). Put more plainly, an individual suffers hermene-
utical injustice when her position of social powerlessness results in some
experience of hers being poorly understood by herself and society at large. Ac-
cording to Fricker, hermeneutical injustice is a manifestation of the systematic
and wide-ranging marginalization of some social identities from the practices
through which social meaning is generated. The exclusion of these social iden-
tities, says Fricker, produces a collective hermeneutical resource that is
deficient with respect to the experiences of marginalized social groups. Her-
meneutical injustice thus stems from ‘‘a gap in collective hermeneutical
resources’’ (Fricker 2007, 6). In her account, hermeneutical gaps are absences
of proper interpretations, ‘‘blanks where there should be the name of an expe-
rience’’ (160). Fricker’s analysis explores how these lacunae can unfairly
disadvantage members of marginalized groups by preventing them from mak-
ing sense of their own social experiences.
I begin by providing a reinterpretation of Fricker’s central case of hermene-
utical injustice as a means to problematize Fricker’s claim that a ‘‘gap’’ in
collective hermeneutical resources prevents marginalized subjects from under-
standing their own experiences. In section two, I argue that Fricker’s analysis of
hermeneutical injustice does not take into account the resistant epistemic and
communicative practices of non-dominant subjects and in so doing may con-
tribute to their marginalization and disempowerment. Fricker fails to
countenance the possibility that marginalized subjects have non-dominant in-
terpretive resources from which they can draw to understand and describe their
experiences despite absences or distortions that exist in so-called collective
hermeneutical resources. Thus, although Fricker’s investigation of hermene-
utical injustice is germane to the project of examining not simply exemplary
but also defective knowledge practices, her account underplays the epistemic
agency non-dominant subjects possess despite their marginalization from dom-
inant interpretive discourses.
In section three, I argue that a ‘‘gap’’ in collective hermeneutical resources is
ambiguous between two kinds of unknowing: an unknowing to which members
of non-dominant social groups are subject by virtue of their systematic her-
meneutical marginalization and an unknowing to which members of dominant
groups are subject by virtue of their ethically bad knowledge practices. Fricker’s
296 Hypatia

account of hermeneutical injustice fails to recognize this ambiguity; in so doing,

her analysis misses an ethically and epistemologically significant phenomenon,
and runs the risk of marginalizing and silencing those non-dominant voices her
account seeks to amplify.

I. FRICKER’S CENTRAL CASE OF HERMENEUTICAL INJUSTICE

Fricker grounds her discussion with what she describes as a central case of her-
meneutical injustice. Drawing from the memoir of Susan Brownmiller, Fricker
explains the hermeneutical injustice done to women prior to the articulation of
the concept of sexual harassment, which the U.S. women’s liberation move-
ment played a pivotal role in raising to the level of social consciousness. She
describes the experience of Carmita Wood, an office employee in the depart-
ment of nuclear physics at Cornell University. Wood’s experience, as
recounted by Brownmiller, involved a series of sometimes overt, sometimes
covert, but always unwanted sexual advances from a prominent faculty member
in the department where she worked. Although Wood went out of her way to
avoid incidents with the professor, the stress associated with previous molesta-
tions, as well as the real possibility of further unwelcome advances, brought on
somatic symptoms such as chronic neck and back pain. After her request for a
transfer to another department was denied, Wood’s only recourse for avoiding
the unwanted treatment was to quit her job. When she applied for unemploy-
ment insurance, Wood was forced to explain that she had left her job of eight
years for ‘‘personal reasons.’’ There was no box on the unemployment insur-
ance form she could check to indicate that she left her job because, after
repeatedly enduring unsolicited sexual advances from the male faculty member,
her working environment had become hostile to her mental and physical well-
being. Her application for unemployment insurance was subsequently turned
down (Fricker 2007, 150).
But Wood’s story, unlike those of so many women before her, did not end in
silence. After her unemployment insurance claim was denied, she enlisted the
help of Lin Farley, a pioneering feminist running a seminar on ‘‘women and work’’
at Cornell in the 1970s. Wood shared her experiences with the other women
participating in Farley’s seminar and quickly discovered that every woman there
had been in her position at one time or another. In addition to appealing the
decision to deny her unemployment insurance benefits, Wood and the other
women in the group decided that they should speak publicly about their work-
place experiences. They began coordinating a speak-out, but ‘‘the ‘this’ they were
going to break the silence about had no name’’ (Brownmiller 1999, 281).
We were referring to it as ‘‘sexual intimidation,’’ ‘‘sexual coer-
cion,’’ ‘‘sexual exploitation on the job.’’ None of those names
 Rebecca Mason 297

seemed quite right. We wanted something that embraced a

whole range of subtle and unsubtle persistent behaviors. Some-
body came up with ‘‘harassment.’’ Sexual harassment! Instantly
we agreed. That’s what it was. (Brownmiller 1999, 281)
That a significant pattern of behavior in their social experiences was (until then)
lacking a name indicated, among other things, that women’s perspectives were
poorly reflected in social understandings at the time. Without collective inter-
pretive resources to draw upon, Fricker argues, women were prevented from
rendering their experiences of workplace harassment communicatively intelligi-
ble to others, and even themselves. On her account of hermeneutical injustice,
the lexical gap that was later filled in with the name sexual harassment rendered
women’s experience of it confused and inarticulate (Fricker 2007, 151).
According to Fricker, this lacuna in collective hermeneutical resources il-
lustrates how a significant area of one’s social experience can be obscured from
individual understanding because it remains obscure at the level of social un-
derstanding. Insofar as an important part of epistemic life consists of the ability
to understand oneself and one’s experiences, and the development of this
ability requires adequate social-epistemic resources, a gap in collective her-
meneutical resources owing to hermeneutical marginalization wrongfully
prevented women such as Wood from full participation in epistemic life
(Fricker 2007, 153).
Although Wood may not have gleaned the broad significance of her expe-
rience—for instance, that it was a widespread and unfortunately common
occurrence in many women’s lives—her actions following her denied unem-
ployment insurance claim betray Fricker’s description of her as someone who
failed to understand. As recounted by Brownmiller, Wood sought out feminist
Lin Farley, voluntarily shared her experiences of workplace maltreatment with
Farley’s consciousness-raising group, and helped organize and participated in a
speak-out on the topic—all while appealing the decision to deny her unem-
ployment insurance claim (Brownmiller 1999, 280). These were not the
actions of a woman mystified by her experiences of a yet-to-be-named phe-
nomenon; rather, the silencing to which she had previously been subject was
exploded by the coalition she formed with other women who both corrobo-
rated and supplemented her experiences with their own.
Despite the gap in collective hermeneutical resources, it is not clear that
Wood and the women with whom she shared her experiences were incapable
of understanding that the furtive molestations inflicted upon them by male co-
workers were harmful to their well-being. At the very least, their embodied
experiences of harassment were at odds with extant misinterpretations circu-
lating in dominant discourses. By providing a safe space for feminist discussion
of the issues and behaviors affecting women’s lives, the consciousness-raising
298 Hypatia

group in which Wood participated surely enhanced her understanding of her

experiences (by, for instance, helping to articulate the systematic nature of
the phenomenon she helped to name). But rather than functioning as ‘‘a life-
changing flash of enlightenment’’ (Fricker 2006, 98), naming created a
hermeneutical environment conducive to organized social activism against
one manifestation of sexism. Although the name sexual harassment galvanized
political action, women’s newly found linguistic ammunition did not
indicate that the women were, until then, prevented from understanding their
experiences of it. To the contrary, naming does not occur ex nihilo: it was pre-
cisely women’s interpretations of their treatment as wrongful and unjust
that fueled the resistance movement that was responsible for naming sexual
harassment.
To be sure, the articulation and uptake of the term sexual harassment was an
important interpretive achievement that should not be underappreciated.
Fricker claims that giving a name to a previously nameless experience can be
an astonishing cognitive achievement: the point at which the ‘‘hermeneutical
darkness’’ is suddenly illuminated by understanding (Fricker 2007, 149). How-
ever, as I’ve suggested, it is not as if the absence of a socially recognized name
entails or even implies that a group is prevented from understanding. Although
women may have lacked the authority to determine the significance of their
experiences in dominant social, political, and legal discourses, the absence of
the name sexual harassment did not necessarily collude in their individual or
collective obfuscation. By beginning the process of codifying their experiences
in ways useful for political resistance, the act of naming in which Wood par-
ticipated incited social change; however, naming sexual harassment did not
mean that women were only then able to understand that which had previously
evaded comprehension.
Using this evidence as our starting point, affirming that women—prior to
naming sexual harassment—were able to understand their experiences of it sug-
gests an alternative kind of unknowing that is at work when hermeneutical
resources fail to countenance the experiences of some members of society. I
take up this argument in section three. In the next section, I argue that Fricker
problematically identifies ‘‘collective’’ hermeneutical resources with that
which is articulated and taken up in dominant discourses. The upshot of this
conflation is Fricker’s claim that collective hermeneutical impoverishment
renders non-dominant subjects confused and speechless; hermeneutical mar-
ginalization prevents subjects from making sense of their social experiences
because interpretations of those experiences are absent from ‘‘collective’’
hermeneutical resources (Fricker 2007, 158). Fricker’s account of hermeneuti-
cal injustice thus pays insufficient attention to non-dominant hermeneutical
resources to which members of marginalized groups have access in order to
render their social experiences communicatively intelligible.
 Rebecca Mason 299

II. COLLECTIVE, DOMINANT, AND NON-DOMINANT HERMENEUTICAL RESOURCES

Fricker argues that an individual’s ability to render her experiences communi-

catively intelligible can be constrained because ‘‘the subject suffers from one
or another sort of prejudice against them qua social type’’ (Fricker 2007, 155).
Accordingly, individuals’ capacities to understand their own experiences
are problematically differentiated by social identity because the operation of
identity power controls who can and who can’t participate in the pooling
of social knowledge. Identity power is any operation of power that is dependent
on shared imaginative conceptions of social identity, ‘‘conceptions alive in
the collective social imagination that govern, for instance, what it is or means
to be a woman or a man, or what it is or means to be gay or straight, young
or old, and so on’’ (14). That is to say, identity power depends on the context
of a functioning social world with shared institutions, shared meanings,
and shared expectations that facilitate systematic identity-based prejudice.
The operation of identity power in epistemic contexts means that some
social groups will find that their experiences are systematically neglected,
ignored, or distorted by social discourses that they have little power to influ-
ence or change. Fricker explains how this systematic exclusion from meaning-
making practices generates a structural identity prejudice in the collective
hermeneutical resource by preventing members of socially powerless groups
from influencing social understandings across a broad range of the social world.
Under these conditions, collective hermeneutical resources will tend to issue
biased interpretations of some individuals’ social experiences ‘‘because [the in-
terpretations are] insufficiently influenced by the subject group and therefore
unduly influenced by more hermeneutically powerful groups’’ (Fricker 2007,
155). When one’s social group is excluded from participating in practices by
which social meanings are generated, Fricker argues, one’s possibilities for com-
municative intelligibility can be thwarted by a collective hermeneutical
resource that gives short shrift to one’s experiences (159).
According to Fricker, the primary epistemic harm done to those whose
experiences are systematically excluded from collective hermeneutical
resources is that a social experience is not collectively understood and so
remains barely intelligible at the level of individual understanding (Fricker
2007, 162). But it is not at all clear that members of non-dominant groups
fail to understand their social experiences when collective hermeneutical
resources are deficient with respect to them. This is because it is not at all
clear that what Fricker describes as ‘‘collective’’ hermeneutical resources
are exhaustive of the interpretive resources available to hermeneutically
marginalized subjects. Fricker conflates collective hermeneutical resources
with that which is articulated and taken up in those discourses from which
subjects are systematically marginalized. This conflation means that
300 Hypatia

‘‘collective’’ hermeneutical resources function as de facto dominant on her

account.
Fricker’s understanding of ‘‘collective’’ hermeneutical resources thus glosses
over important distinctions—in particular, distinctions between dominant and
non-dominant hermeneutical resources—that bear on how we interpret her-
meneutical lacunae. A gap in dominant hermeneutical resources with respect
to one’s social experiences does not necessitate a corresponding gap in non-
dominant hermeneutical resources. For instance, although dominant hermene-
utical discourses were deficient with respect to women’s experiences of sexual
harassment, this did not mean that non-dominant hermeneutical discourses—
those discourses that generated and were generated by the twentieth-century
women’s movement—failed to provide women with the interpretive resources
to understand and articulate their experiences of it. Certainly, when dominant
discourses of interpretation neglect the experiences of marginalized groups,
members of those groups suffer some injustice. However, because marginalized
subjects may have non-dominant hermeneutical resources to draw upon in or-
der to interpret their social experiences, gaps in dominant hermeneutical
resources do not necessarily result in hermeneutical injustice.
By depicting hermeneutical lacunae as a ‘‘blanket collective lack’’ rather
than an interpretive deficit that affects dominant discourses of interpretation
(Fricker 2007, 161), Fricker neglects the possibility that defective knowledge
practices among members of more powerful groups can produce and maintain
distorted understandings of the social experiences of marginalized groups de-
spite contrary, and arguably better, interpretations that fail (through systematic
hermeneutical marginalization) to gain voice in dominant discourses. Fricker’s
account of hermeneutical injustice overlooks these marginalized or non-dom-
inant hermeneutical resources; in so doing, she misrepresents non-dominant
subjects as failing to understand (they suffer from ‘‘acute cognitive disadvan-
tage’’ (151) as a result of hermeneutical lacunae) when they may in fact have a
shrewd comprehension of their experiences, perhaps variously and successfully
expressed in a variety of marginal discourses that remain inaudible from dom-
inant social locations. In the next section, I argue that by conflating collective
with dominant hermeneutical resources, Fricker’s account of hermeneutical
injustice collapses two kinds of unknowing into one.

III. TWO KINDS OF UNKNOWING

Fricker is concerned to expose how power relations can occlude or obscure in-
dividuals’ understandings of their own social experiences. She suggests that
hermeneutically marginalized groups can fail to understand their social expe-
riences when those experiences are neglected or ignored by ‘‘collective’’
 Rebecca Mason 301

hermeneutical resources, thus her use of Carmita Wood’s story to demonstrate

how a hermeneutical gap can thwart a woman’s attempts to render her expe-
riences of sexual harassment communicatively intelligible.
In this section, I argue that because Fricker misdescribes dominant her-
meneutical resources as collective, she fails to locate the ethically bad epistemic
practices that maintain gaps in dominant hermeneutical resources even while
alternative interpretations are in fact offered by non-dominant discourses.
Although it is possible that the lack of a well defined, socially recognized name
for a particular experience can have ramifications that include self-mystifica-
tion,1 Fricker’s analysis of hermeneutical injustice does not account for the
possibility that marginalized groups can be silenced relative to dominant dis-
courses without being prevented from understanding or expressing their own
social experiences. I suggest that an gap in dominant hermeneutical resources is
ambiguous between two kinds of unknowing: (1) hermeneutical injustice, and
(2) epistemically and ethically blameworthy ignorance.
Feminist epistemology has sometimes focused on how power relations can
constrain marginalized groups’ ability to know, for instance, by withholding
education or, in Fricker’s case, by producing hermeneutical resources that are
deficient with respect to their social experiences. In contrast, others argue that
members of marginalized groups are not necessarily at an epistemic disadvan-
tage. This point has been the lasting contribution of standpoint epistemology:
it is from the perspective of the economically, politically, or socially disadvan-
taged subjects that we find veridical insight into the nature of the social world.
According to standpoint theory, the way in which social identity correlates to
perceptual access is such that social privilege does not necessarily entail
epistemic privilege. That is to say, although membership in a socially powerful
group affords certain benefits, privileged social perception is not necessarily
among them. Although epistemic access is differentiated according to social
location, powerful groups do not ipso facto get a better view.
Charles Mills has articulated this view by focusing on ignorance rather than
knowledge. He argues that ‘‘alternative sets of experiences are not epistemically
indifferent vis-à-vis one another but that hegemonic groups characteristically
have experiences that foster illusory perceptions about society’s functioning,
whereas subordinate groups characteristically have experiences that (at least
potentially) give rise to more adequate conceptualizations’’ (Mills 1998, 28). In
The Racial Contract, Mills takes up this insight to argue that ignorance is a cog-
nitive dysfunction that distorts powerful groups’ understanding of the social
world (Mills 1997, 18).
Mills introduces the notion of the ‘‘Racial Contract’’ as a way to challenge
the assumptions of white political philosophy. In much the same way that fem-
inist frameworks are conducive to discussions of gender that reveal the extent
to which traditional moral and political theory is distorted by patriarchal
302 Hypatia

assumptions, Mills’s framework is conducive to discussions of race and white

racism that structure society as we think we know it. Thus, instead of focusing
on a forward-looking, ideal contract that purports to describe the structure of a
perfectly just society in which we should like to live, Mills focuses on a histor-
ical, non-ideal contract that describes the origin and nature of the unjust
society in which we currently live.
According to Mills, the ‘‘Racial Contract’’ incorporates an epistemological
component that is ostensibly absent from traditional social contract theories.
The epistemic dimension of the ‘‘Racial Contract,’’ Mills argues, consists in a
tacit agreement ‘‘about what counts as a correct, objective interpretation of the
world . . . for agreeing to this view, one is (‘contractually’) granted full cogni-
tive standing in the polity, the official epistemic community’’ (Mills 1997, 18).
Because the epistemic conditions of the ‘‘Racial Contract’’ require that whites
engage in a significant degree of misunderstanding, misinterpretation, and mis-
representation on matters related to race, Mills argues that:
The Racial Contract prescribes for its signatories an inverted
epistemology, an epistemology of ignorance, a particular pattern
of localized and global cognitive dysfunctions (which are psy-
chologically and socially functional), producing the ironic
outcome that whites will in general be unable to understand
the world they themselves have made. (Mills 1997, 18)
Ignorance of this kind (what Mills calls ‘‘white ignorance’’) is the product
of an epistemic agreement among whites to see the world wrongly—that is, to
cultivate and sustain a system of false beliefs.2 The inverted epistemology of
white ignorance thus leaves whites with poor understandings of the social
world and their social experiences, which are validated by white epistemic
authority.3 On Mills’s view, white ignorance is a kind of epistemically culpable
and morally noxious miscognition that facilitates the maintenance of the
status quo.
As a condition of not knowing, ignorance would seem to have little to do
with epistemology, a discipline that studies the operations of knowledge. Al-
though mainstream epistemology has certainly addressed questions concerning
the conditions under which we do not have knowledge (for instance, work on
counterevidence, defeaters, and unreliable or improperly functioning faculties
all focus on impediments to knowledge), the political significance of some
forms of ignorance has been underappreciated or at the very least underem-
phasized in both traditional and contemporary epistemology. Usually,
ignorance has been depicted as epistemic deficiency: ‘‘something we do not
(yet) know’’ (Tuana 2006, 3). Yet Mills’s analysis describes how structures of
power and privilege can function to produce doxastic systems that are not sim-
ply deficient but systematically distorted (Mills 1997, 18).
 Rebecca Mason 303

Although Fricker takes the absence of a socially recognized name to indicate

that marginalized groups are prevented from understanding their own social
experiences, Mills’s account of white ignorance invites us to think about the
circumstances in which powerful rather than marginalized groups can fail to
understand through the epistemically irresponsible and ethically reprehensible
practices of misinterpretation, misrepresentation, evasion, and self-deception.
On this view, the privileged social location occupied by powerful groups oc-
cludes their understanding of the world in which they live and obscures their
understanding of their own and others’ social experiences. Conversely, mar-
ginalized groups occupy a social location outside the epistemic agreement to
misunderstand the world, giving them an angle of perception that encourages a
more accurate understanding than that of the dominant groups that oppress
them. Contrary to Fricker, Mills’s analysis of ignorance suggests that socially
powerful groups do not necessarily have a better understanding of the social
world than marginalized groups; rather, some social identities, even those that
have been stereotyped as ‘‘non-knowers,’’ may be in a better position to under-
stand not only their own social experiences, but also the social experiences of
members of powerful groups (for example, the kinds of social advantages whites
regularly enjoy by virtue of their skin color).
To be clear, Fricker’s point is not that members of dominant groups have a
better understanding of all aspects of the social world. Rather, Fricker describes
cases of hermeneutical injustice as epistemically symmetrical. She argues that
when a hermeneutical lacuna exists with respect to the experiences of a mar-
ginalized group, everyone fails to understand: the interpretive gap is a collective
one, preventing both dominant and non-dominant groups from understand-
ing.4 For instance, in Carmita Wood’s case, both she and her harasser failed to
understand that the harasser’s behavior was harmful and wrongful. Fricker ar-
gues that ‘‘harasser and harassee alike are cognitively handicapped by the
hermeneutical lacuna—neither has a proper understanding of how he is treat-
ing her’’ (Fricker 2007, 151). However, analyzing hermeneutical lacunae in
terms of ignorance reveals an epistemic asymmetry: Wood’s harasser, not
Wood, lacked a proper understanding of his behavior. He failed to understand
that his behavior was harmful and wrongful. On this interpretation, it is not the
case that harasser and harassee alike were cognitively handicapped by the gen-
eral lack of an understanding of sexual harassment; rather, Woods’s harasser
was cognitively disabled by ethically bad epistemic practices that maintained
(to his benefit) his ignorance of her experiences.
At the social level, the ignorance of men about the experiences of women
meant that the professor failed to have a proper understanding of how he
was treating Wood, and it was his epistemic negligence that was seriously
disadvantageous to her, not a lack of understanding on Wood’s part. A lack
of understanding of sexual harassment was not an interpretive deficit
304 Hypatia

affecting society at large. It was not the case that ‘‘the harassee’s cognitive
disablement [was] seriously disadvantageous to her’’ because Wood’s hermene-
utical marginalization did not render her cognitively disabled, as Fricker claims
(Fricker 2007, 151). Rather, Wood’s harasser’s cognitive disablement, his
failure to understand her experiences, and his refusal to recognize the harmful-
ness of his behavior, were seriously disadvantageous to her. The injustice
Carmita Wood suffered relative to her harasser consisted in the fact that
she was disempowered, dismissed, and silenced because of his cognitive failure.
The distortions in dominant hermeneutical resources enabled and perpetuated
his ignorance, and his ignorance enabled and perpetuated those distortions.
The injustice Wood suffered was that of having her social experiences misin-
terpreted by those with epistemic authority—authority they exerted in order
to preserve the existing social order that was, in part, dependent on those
misinterpretations.
The framework provided by an epistemology of ignorance for understanding
the marginalization of non-dominant groups relative to dominant discourses
allows us to understand the unknowing to which members of dominant groups
are subject despite—indeed, because of—their positions of dominance. As
Fricker herself points out, women’s experience of sexual harassment was a lo-
cation in social life ‘‘where the powerful [had] no interest in achieving a proper
interpretation, perhaps indeed where they [had] a positive interest in sustaining
the extant misinterpretation’’ (Fricker 2007, 152). This may manifest in
hermeneutical resources that are parsimonious—that is, in dominant hermene-
utical resources that inadequately articulate the experiences of women—but it
does not manifest in the brute wordlessness of hermeneutically marginalized
groups or in their lack of comprehension of their experiences.
By reframing hermeneutical lacunae within an epistemology of ignorance, it
can be argued that in communicative encounters in which women like Wood
were unable to render their social experiences communicatively intelligible,
their comprehensibility to others was thwarted by epistemic practices infected
by ignorance, not by their own inability to understand their experiences. The
epistemic feat of this kind of ignorance is its sheer intransigence—its persis-
tence despite the availability of alternative explanations articulated by
members of non-dominant groups. A gap in dominant hermeneutical resources
may obscure, misinterpret, or conceal the experiences of marginalized groups,
but it does not perforce prevent them from understanding their social experi-
ences, as Fricker suggests.
All this is not to say that domination and oppression do not or cannot have
adverse psychological effects on members of oppressed groups such that their
understandings of themselves and their experiences are rendered opaque
or distorted. As many anti-oppression theorists have argued, the epistemic
disorientation of oppressed groups—their alienation from the kind of
 Rebecca Mason 305

self-understanding dominant groups take for granted—is among the possible,

probable, and actual effects of their oppression. An even more serious risk
posed by oppressive societies is the possibility that members of oppressed groups
might internalize deprecatory images of themselves. As Charles Taylor remarks,
‘‘A person or group of people suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or
society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or con-
temptible picture of themselves’’ (Taylor 1992, 25). Although I do not wish to
align myself with discourses of hyperbolic epistemic autonomy that presume a
particular conception of experience as transparent and self-knowing, neither
do I wish to overstate the case for the internalization of oppressive images or
the epistemic bewilderment that might afflict members of oppressed groups as a
result of their hermeneutical marginalization.
To be clear, I am not denying the possibility that the conditions of oppres-
sion can engender a paucity of interpretive resources that conspire against the
self-understandings of marginalized subjects. Indeed, I am in agreement with
Fricker that this possibility has been underappreciated by both analytic ethics
and epistemology alike. Rather, I am suggesting that we need to be attuned to
the ways in which Fricker’s account of hermeneutical injustice problematically
shape our understanding of hermeneutical gaps. Her account fails to acknowl-
edge a different kind of unknowing, one that is perpetrated by dominant groups
despite non-dominant groups’ comprehension of their experiences.
I have argued, contrary to Fricker, that Carmita Wood had an understand-
ing of her experience of workplace harassment prior to the act of naming in
which she participated. This is well-evidenced by Wood’s actions following the
denial of her unemployment insurance claim: seeking out Lin Farley, partici-
pating in a consciousness-raising group, and helping to organize a speak-out.
Fricker argues that ‘‘women such as Carmita Wood suffered (among other
things) an acute cognitive disadvantage from a gap in the collective herme-
neutical resource’’ (Fricker 2007, 151). She concludes that Wood’s hermene-
utical disadvantage ‘‘renders her unable to make sense of her ongoing
mistreatment’’ (149). But surely this claim is overstated. To the contrary, as
evidenced by Wood’s subsequent action, she well knew that she had been sub-
ject to obnoxious and unwarranted sexual advances from a person in a position
of considerable power over her. Fricker argues that the absence of the name
sexual harassment was disadvantageous to Wood because it rendered her unable
to understand an experience that was very much in her interest to understand.
As I have argued, however, that hermeneutical gap did not necessarily indicate
that Wood failed to understand, even though the name sexual harassment was
not a part of her linguistic repertoire at the time.
I have also argued that Fricker’s analysis of hermeneutical injustice conflates
collective with dominant hermeneutical resources. Consequently, Fricker is
too quick to conclude that ‘‘collective’’ hermeneutical impoverishment renders
306 Hypatia

non-dominant subjects mystified and inarticulate. I suggested that non-dominant

hermeneutical resources give marginalized subjects possibilities for self-under-
standing and articulation despite distortions and absences in dominant discourses
of interpretation. Because Fricker misdescribes dominant hermeneutical resources
as collective, she fails to locate the intransigence that maintains hermeneutical
gaps while alternative interpretations are in fact available.
Mills’s analysis of white ignorance further problematizes Fricker’s claim that
hermeneutically marginalized subjects are prevented from understanding their
social experiences when dominant hermeneutical resources are deficient with re-
spect to them. I have suggested that the framework provided by an epistemology
of ignorance shows how dominant groups can fail to have a proper understanding
of the social experiences of marginalized groups by disregarding or distorting in-
terpretations offered by marginalized groups. On this view, marginalized subjects
do not necessarily or even ordinarily fail to understand when their experiences
are neglected or misinterpreted by dominant groups. A gap in dominant her-
meneutical resources, rather than demonstrating how hermeneutically
marginalized subjects can be rendered confused and speechless by hermeneutical
resources that fail to articulate their social experiences, is a poignant reminder of
the extent to which willfully sustained ignorance can inhibit communicative
encounters between members of dominant and non-dominant groups.

NOTES
I am particularly indebted to Susan Campbell and Michael Hymers who read many
drafts of this paper and tirelessly provided feedback and direction. Thanks to Miranda
Fricker, Ami Harbin, Victor Kumar, Jennifer Lackey, Charles Mills, and Greg
Schekoske for helpful comments and discussion. Early drafts were presented at the
Dalhousie Colloquium series and the Canadian Society for Women in Philosophy. I am
grateful to audiences on both occasions for their incisive questions.
1. Although I cannot address the point in detail here, I am skeptical of the kind
of linguistic determinism that underwrites Fricker’s claim that a gap in hermeneutical
resources prevents someone from understanding her own social experiences.
2. White ignorance does not necessarily pick out a racist cognizer, that is, someone
with explicitly prejudicial beliefs about people of color. Indirect racism, on the other
hand, can take the form of mistaken or false beliefs without the individual in question
believing anything explicitly racist. An example of a false belief formed or maintained as
a result of indirect racism is the belief held by some whites that blacks had roughly equal
opportunities to whites after the abolition of slavery. An individual might hold this be-
lief ‘‘because of the social suppression of the pertinent knowledge [sociological, legal,
and historical facts; the testimony of African Americans], though without prejudice
himself ’’ (Mills 2007, 21). The corresponding and correct belief held by most blacks
is that vast inequality of opportunity between whites and blacks in the United States
persists to this day. Blacks’ lived experience of discrimination means that they are more
 Rebecca Mason 307

likely than whites to acquire true beliefs about the persistence of racism in the United
States. This is not to say that all whites, just by virtue of being white, will have false
beliefs about the persistence of racial discrimination; rather it is a defeasible ‘‘cognitive
tendency’’ (23).
3. For instance, many white Americans, who do not experience racial discrimina-
tion and rarely, if ever, hear racist principles openly endorsed or advocated, believe that
racism is a historical rather than a contemporary social problem. African Americans, on
the other hand, who regularly experience more covert or subtle forms of racial discrim-
ination that go unnoticed by whites (for example, a black man who is surveilled by store
clerks while white customers attract no suspicion), are therefore better poised to under-
stand the ways in which America, far from being the race-blind society many whites
believes it is, remains a society in which racist currents run just under the surface. Con-
sider, for instance, that although testimonial and sociological evidence clearly indicates
that racial discrimination continues to significantly affect the life-chances of blacks,
fifty-two percent of white Americans believe that the lower socioeconomic standing of
African Americans is attributable to a lack of motivation among blacks—and sixty-five
percent say that African Americans just need to ‘‘try harder’’ (Massey 2007, 66). Al-
though blacks systematically experience a variety of forms of discrimination across
various aspects of their lives, the prevailing conviction among a majority of white
Americans is that racism is a historical artifact that needs to be forgotten rather than a
present-day reality that demands rectification.
4. Fricker does claim, however, that the hermeneutical dominance of some groups
means that individuals belonging to them are better positioned to make sense of their
social experiences (Fricker 2007, 148). This is because their hermeneutical dominance
(they are not hermeneutically marginalized) means that their experiences are more
likely to be reflected in the ‘‘collective’’ hermeneutical resource on which individual
interpretations rely.

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