Hermeneutical Justice Is The Key To Social Justice

You need language to understand your experiences.

Mar 22

Hermeneutical justice is the key to all social justice. Only once a movement can find the language to name and describe the challenges it faces, it will be able to solve those challenges.

In Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing Miranda Fricker defines hermeneutical injustice as “when a gap in collective interpretive resources puts someone at an unfair disadvantage when it comes to making sense of their social experience.”1 The example Fricker gives of this concept is “you suffer sexual harassment in a culture that still lacks that critical concept.”2

In other words, not having the right words to describe the injustice you face is itself an injustice. The simplified explanation I’ve developed for hermeneutical injustice is that hermeneutical injustice is when you don’t have the right words to describe your experiences.

Imagine how hard it would be to talk about certain issues if someone removed your ability to use certain words. To understand this, I’ve created a simple exercise you can try: You must attempt to persuade a third party of a political issue, but your opponent has the ability to delete words from your vocabulary. For example, try to convince someone something is racist without the ability to use the word “racism” or convince that something is sexist without the ability to use the words “sexism” or “gender.” Imagine your audience has never heard of these concepts before and can’t use those words either. You might be able to communicate, but it will be challenging.

The concept of hermeneutical injustice implies that there might be words or concepts as crucial as “racism” or “sexism” to our understanding of certain issues that we haven’t yet discovered. Part of the reason it might be difficult to talk about certain social justice issues is because we don’t yet have the language needed to understand those issues. The words are not deleted. They were just never invented.

Hermeneutical justice is achieved when we have the language and concepts (what Fricker calls “collective hermeneutic resources”3) to understand and communicate our experiences. Once we have the language to describe and understand our experiences, then that language can become a shared collective resource, meaning that those we speak with can understand and use that language as well.

Trying to achieve social justice before hermeneutical justice puts social justice activists at a significant disadvantage. It is nearly impossible to solve a problem you cannot name. Once you have the language to name and understand your problem, social justice can follow.

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