Epistemic injustice

Together, we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books and a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry.

Today's interview is with Dan Degerman, research fellow at the University of Bristol on the Epistemic Injustice in Healthcare Project.

His new book, Silence in Mood Disorders, is just out for mileage.

Silence is frequently considered negative or harmful in both everyday life, for example, when we are silenced, as well as in psychiatry, where poverty of speech is a symptom of depression and pressure of speech is a symptom of mania.

I'm really pleased to be talking about your new book, Silence and Mood Disorders.

I'm aware of the irony of talking at length about silence, but it's an unusually interesting topic because you're trying to valorize something that has multiple ways in which it's devalorized, that you kind of go through the idea that it's a symptom of mood disorder.

that in epistemic injustice there's, you know, the whole idea of silencing somebody.

It's a bad thing.

Thanks for providing that context.

Ejime, there's a central argument in your paper on the idea of epistemic injustice.

So I'm wondering if you can give us an example of what epistemic injustice looks like in the context of implementation, uh, or when we apply to implementation science.

Where do you see it showing up?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I, I think it's much of what I do in terms of, I mean, uh, uh, even without using the terminologies of injustice, and I, I try to make everyone I interact with see things the way they are, see the reality of the gaps.

I mean, because sometimes these issues are not, uh, people who perpetrate epistemic injustice are not aware of this.

It's what happens when our ideas, knowledge, or opinions seem to carry less weight until someone else says the same thing or confirms what we've already said.

We're going to talk about credibility discounting, a larger concept called epistemic injustice, why this happens in workplaces and relationships, and most importantly, what we can do about it without becoming the loudest person in the room.

Because sometimes the issue isn't that you aren't speaking loud enough, it's that people aren't giving your voice the same weight.

Well, oftentimes we ask, did nobody hear me? Let's start with the workplace version because I think this happens more often than we realize.

But intentional or not, being on the receiving end is incredibly frustrating because eventually the question becomes less, did you hear my idea? And more, why didn't my idea matter when I said it? Well, there's actually a language for this.

This is where I went down a little psychology rabbit hole because, well, of course I did.

There is a broader concept called epistemic injustice.

Now stay with me because that sounds much more academic than it needs to.

one of the original ideas of doing the podcast was to refine and formulate ideas.

So I think in the webinars I was doing and the public speaking, I talked about, it wasn't my concept of epistemic injustice, where people are not believed because they've been given a label.

So you take psychosis, don't listen to what they're saying, they're psychotic.

So they lose their voice and they lose their capacity to be believed.