“Prediscursive Epistemic Injury”: Recognizing Another Form of Epistemic Injustice?

This article revisits Miranda Fricker’s Epistemic Injustice (2007) through one specific aspect of Axel Honneth’s recognition theory. Taking a first cue from Honneth’s critique of the limitations of the “language-theoretic framework” in Habermas’ discourse ethics, it floats the idea that the two categories of Fricker’s groundbreaking analysis—testimonial and hermeneutical injustice—likewise lean towards a speech-based metric (equating harm to the capacities to know with compromise to the capacity to speak of what one knows). If we accept, however, that there are also implicit, preverbal, affective, and embodied ways of knowing and channels of knowledge transmission, this warrants an expansion of Fricker’s original concept. By drawing on Honneth’s recognition theory (particularly his Winnicottian-inspired account of ‘first order’ recognition and basic trust), I argue it is possible to extend the account of epistemic injustice beyond Fricker’s two central categories, to glimpse yet another register of serious “wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower.” I define this harm as prediscursive epistemic injury and offer two central cases to illustrate this additional form of epistemic injustice.