Narrative Fiction and Epistemic Injustice

This article looks at the role that narrative fiction—film, television, and literature—can play in countering and mitigating epistemic injustice. The notion of epistemic injustice is explicated by Miranda Fricker as a distinctive kind of injustice done to a knower in her role as a knower and is identified in two forms: testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice. The operation of both types of epistemic injustice depend upon the social imagination and the shared concepts of social identity within it—what it is to be a man, woman, straight, black, gay, transgender. It is here that narrative fiction becomes pertinent, as it has the potential to influence the social imagination for the better. Fricker uses fictional scenarios to clarify her notions of epistemic injustice; I argue that aside from elucidating analysis of our epistemic practices, fiction can also provide epistemic correctives. In the first through fourth sections of the paper, I explore ways in which narrative fiction can combat testimonial and hermeneutical injustice. The fifth section then considers the unique features of narrative fiction in this capacity to resist epistemic injustice and argues that it capitalizes on advantages that other approaches cannot share in.