Silencing by Not Telling: Testimonial Void as a New Kind of Testimonial Injustice

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I characterize a new kind of testimonial injustice (TI), a phenomenon I call ‘testimonial void’ (TV), which involves a substantial extension of the limits of the original concept put forward by Miranda Fricker. TV occurs when a speaker withholds epistemic materials on the basis of an epistemically and ethically faulty assumption that a hearer-to-be lacks the capacity to do anything epistemically relevant with them. As in testimonial smothering (TS), testimony is not proffered owing to an anticipated failure of uptake. However, unlike in cases of TS, the anticipated failure of uptake in TV is due to prejudice on the speaker’s part. By comparing TV with other forms of TI, I show that TV shares TI’s conceptual structure and harms. I argue that TV: a) shows the speaker to be a potential wrongdoer, b) reveals that TI cannot be equated with biased credibility assessments, c) entails both an indirect yet extreme form of silencing and d) the failure to extend a kind of epistemic trust implied by the enjoyment of epistemic relational equality. In addition, I explore intricate cases in which TV interacts with TS, identifying smothered instances of TV, as well as non-culpable cases of TV.

KEYWORDS:

• Relational equality
• testimonial injustice
• silencing
• testimonial void

Acknowledgments

I’m grateful for helpful discussion from the audience at the 2018 “II Workshop PHYSIS-FyA” at University of Granada in April 2018, the one-day workshop with the research group COMPOL at the Universidade de São Paulo in August 2018, the one-day workshop “Silencing, Prejudice and Resistance” at the University of Stirling in June 2019, and the “II Workshop Internacional Filósofas” at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid in October 2019. I would especially like to thank the organizers of such events. I am indebted to two anonymous referees’ very helpful, sometimes eye-opening, comments on this paper. In particular, thank you to an anonymous referee for calling my attention to EN and for pushing me to explore further similarities, differences and interactions between TV and TS. I am also very grateful to John Hyman and Sandy Goldberg for their comments on earlier versions of the manuscript. Any errors are my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Although I consider that prejudice is most often the reason behind TI, I agree with Steers-McCrum (2020) that it might not be its only cause.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Junta de Andalucía, Spain [B-HUM-459-UGR18]; Ministry of Science, Innovation & Universities, Spain [PGC2018-093982-B-100].

Notes on contributors

Carla Carmona

Carla Carmona teaches Theory of Dialogue and Interculturality, East Asian Aesthetics and Epistemology at the University of Seville. Previously, she was Assistant Professor at the University of Extremadura. She was educated at the University of Seville and the University of Innsbruck. She has specialized in social epistemology, the philosophy of dance, embodied understanding and knowing-how, Wittgenstein, the pictorial oeuvre and Weltanschauung of Egon Schiele, and the intellectual and artistic atmosphere of fin-de-siècle Vienna. She currently develops her artistic practice under the name of O|C.