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

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.

Automated summary

In this paper, the author characterizes a new form of testimonial injustice called 'testimonial void' (TV), which extends the limits of the original concept proposed by Miranda Fricker. By comparing TV with other forms of TI, the author argues that TV shares the conceptual structure and harms of testimonial injustice, showing the potential wrongdoing of the speaker.