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    Understanding epistemic injustice through speech act theory
    (ITU Institute of Science and Technology, 2025-05-22) Eroğlu, Berfin ; Mion, Giovanni Filippo ; 419211003 ; Political Studies
    Justice as a concept has always been a topic of debate in terms of what constitutes its nature and how it should be dealt with. Although almost every individual recognises its significance, how it should be distributed is contested. Throughout the history, different cultures and thinkers have attempted to reach to a definition of justice. Since it is a concept involving interpersonal affairs, many other concepts also come into play in understanding justice. Some of these concepts are virtue, equality, fairness and liberty and so forth. For a long time, justice was only considered as distributing goods and giving someone what they are due. As libertarian thinkers emerge, the concept of justice was shaped to integrate the assurance that while distributing goods, an individual's liberty would not be infringed. It is only relative recently that the social aspect of justice encompassing the emphasis on social identity has been incorporated in theories of justice. With this addition, theorists urge us to think about how one's social identity shapes their interactions with others including power, access to opportunities as an individual and one's treatment as an individual in civil and social institutions, not merely distribution of goods. With these developments in theories of justice, we are in a better position to appreciate justice as a broader concept rather than merely a legal or economic one. This thesis will attempt to establish a connection between Miranda Fricker's epistemic injustice and J. L. Austin's speech act theory. According to Fricker, epistemic injustice is an umbrella term referring to the wrong done to an individual's capacity as a knower due to identity prejudice. This contribution by Fricker paves the way to understand justice as not just distribution of epistemic or material goods but also epistemic credibility attribution based on an individual's social identity as well as how our social position shapes our interactions with others in terms of the treatment we receive. According to Fricker, epistemic injustice has two categories being testimonial and hermeneutical injustice. Although both of them stem from systemic and structural issues that target an individual in varied aspects of their lives due to unjustly deflated credibility attribution, testimonial injustice refers to dismissed assertions whereas hermeneutical injustice refers to being unable to make sense of or make one's social experiences intelligible to others due to a gap in hermeneutical resources. The framework put forth by Fricker gives us the sense that the former type of epistemic injustice is a linguistic/epistemic phenomenon whereas the latter seems to be a conceptual issue. For this reason, there have been attempts by some scholars to make a connection with different frameworks and theories in philosophy of language such as J. L. Austin's speech act theory, David Lewis's conversational scoreboard and Jennifer Hornsby, Rae Langton and David C. Spewak's silencing accounts. The second link the theoretical chain, namely Austin's speech act theory refers to the idea that each of our utterances constitutes a different sort of action. In other words, we perform certain acts with our words. According to Austin, there are three types of speech acts being locutionary acts, illocutionary acts and perlocutionary acts. In Austin's framework, locutionary acts refer to making sounds that have a sense and reference whereas illocutionary acts have a force that are performative in nature. When we perform an illocutionary act, we are doing that act in saying it. These types of acts have to have an uptake, namely being registered by the hearer, in order to be successful due to their conventional nature. Some of the categories of illocutionary acts are assertives, directives, declaratives and so forth. Since Fricker's testimonial injustice is based on assertions, only assertives are relevant in illocutionary acts for the purposes of this thesis. On the other hand, perlocutionary acts are unconventional acts that have an effect on the hearer whether done intentionally or not. This view is challenged by some scholars discussed in this thesis. These developments are significant to fully discover the nature of perlocutionary acts and how they can connect to hermeneutical injustice. Speech act theory was further developed by John Searle by extending the taxonomy of each property of speech act categories. Although Searle's extension is not relevant for the purposes of this thesis, his overall theory is significant in order to connect these speech acts to social reality as he puts forth. For Searle, illocutionary acts have a direction of fit flowing from words to the world and vice versa. Building on this, Searle argues social contract in a society is built through language, our speech acts shape our social realities. This is a useful insight to solidify the connection between hermeneutical injustice and speech acts. Although there are competing accounts on understanding speech acts in general, I take a middle ground approach between intentionalist and conventionalist accounts. Conventionalists argue that speech acts are performed to conform to linguistic and/or social conventions whereas intentionalists view speech acts as communicative intentions to provoke a response on hearers. Since we both need linguistic conventions to convey meanings while we also engage in conversations to invoke some sort of a response from our interlocutors, both accounts are crucial. Meanwhile, the phenomenon occurring when these acts fail is referred to as silencing in philosophy of language. While locutionary acts can be silenced by physically restraining someone from uttering something, illocutionary silencing, as explained by Jennifer Hornsby and Rae Langton, happens due to failure of uptake. On the other hand, perlocutionary silencing, as defined by David C. Spewak, refers to the inability of a speaker to achieve their perlocutionary goals by making the moves to influence a conversation. With all of these theoretical insights, this thesis will posit that hermeneutical injustice precedes testimonial injustice once perlocutionary silencing and the Lewisian conversational scoreboard is kept in mind. Although the connection between testimonial injustice and non-assertoric speech acts has been made by David C. Spewak, I wish to argue that the relationship between hermeneutical injustice and non-assertoric speech acts, especially perlocutionary acts, has been overlooked. While Fricker bases her theory on assertions in the cases of testimonial injustice, which are related to illocutionary acts within Austin's framework, Spewak challenges Fricker's emphasis on assertions within testimonial injustice. Therefore, while Spewak's contribution regarding the integration of non-assertoric speech acts as well as his coining of perlocutionary silencing prove useful, the link between non-assertoric speech acts and the second type of epistemic injustice, namely hermeneutical injustice, and how it can lead to silencing has not been a subject of any study as of yet. For this reason, I attempt to argue that if we take the conversational scoreboard account as proposed by David Lewis, which is an analogy that likens conversations to a game of baseball where each speaker follows the rules of the language game to shape conversational dynamics and add to the common ground, then we can see that hermeneutical injustice precedes testimonial injustice owing to the fact that speakers need common ground where they share common meanings and concepts to converse. If a speaker is unable to contribute to the meaning formation process due to identity prejudice directed at them, there occurs hermeneutical marginalisation. As Fricker argues, this hermeneutical marginalisation renders socially powerless groups, which are the subjects of this sort of marginalisation, unable to either make sense of their own experiences or make themselves intelligible to others for the gap in collective hermeneutical resources. I argue that if this is the case, then they are also unable to make the conversational moves to influence the conversation. Since conversations need a common ground and shared meanings, once there is a case of hermeneutical marginalisation resulting in hermeneutical injustice, then there is also a case of perlocutionary silencing. Seen in this way, we can see that when testimonial injustice takes place, it is not just dismissed assertions due to identity-based credibility deficit, as Fricker envisages, that cause epistemic harm. It is the lack of common ground and shared meanings due to exclusion of certain groups of interlocutors who are unable to make their voices heard due to identity prejudice against them.