Why some people aren't believed and epistemic injustice

HostI was thinking about a friend of mine who went to the clinic last month. She was in a lot of pain, but the doctor just kind of brushed her off and told her she was probably just stressed out. It took three more visits and a completely different doctor to find out she actually had a real injury that needed surgery. It felt like that first doctor just didn't take her word seriously because she was a young woman. Is there a way to describe that feeling of being shut out like that?

GuestThere's a name for it that people who study knowledge and truth use. They call it epistemic injustice. That's a very big name for a very common kind of unfairness. Think of it as a trust gap. It happens when someone is wronged specifically as a person who knows things. In the case of your friend, it's not just that the doctor made a mistake. It's that the doctor gave her less trust than she deserved because of a bias he might not even have known he had. He had a story in his head about who's a reliable witness of their own body and who's just being dramatic. When we let those old, unfair stories in our heads decide who we listen to, we're doing a deep kind of harm. We're telling that person that their voice doesn't count in the world of facts.

HostBut don't we all have to be a bit skeptical sometimes? I mean, people get things wrong or they remember things poorly all the time. Is it really unfair to want proof before you believe someone?

GuestBeing careful is one thing, but that's not what we're talking about here. The unfairness comes when the doubt is tied to who the person is rather than what they're saying. If you trust a man in a suit more than a man in work clothes even if they're saying the exact same thing, that's a trust gap. You're using someone's social standing as a shortcut to decide if they're telling the truth. This does more than just hurt feelings. It can stop a person from getting healthcare, like your friend, or it can keep someone from getting justice in a courtroom. When we systematically doubt certain groups of people, like people of color or the poor, we're basically silencing them. We're making it so they can't participate in the shared task of figuring out what's true.

HostThat makes sense when it comes to being doubted. But it seems like there's another layer to this where sometimes people can't even explain what's happening to them in the first place. Like, they don't even have the words to be doubted yet.

GuestThat's the second part of this kind of unfairness. It happens when there's a gap in our shared language. Think back to the time before we had a phrase like sexual harassment. Before the nineteen seventies, women were going through these terrible experiences at work, but they didn't have a clear name for it. Because there was no name, they often couldn't even explain it to themselves. They just felt a sense of dread or shame. And if they tried to tell someone else, they might be told they were just being sensitive. The tools they needed to understand their own life were missing from the world because the people who make the rules and the language weren't the ones suffering. When the people in power don't experience a certain kind of pain, they often don't create the words for it. That leaves everyone else in the dark, unable to even make a case for why they're being hurt.

HostIt feels a bit harsh to call that an injustice if the words just haven't been invented yet. Isn't that just how language grows over time? We find new things and then we name them.

GuestIt's a matter of who gets to do the naming. If a whole group of people is kept out of the rooms where we write the laws or report the news, then their lives stay unnamed. That's a form of power. By keeping the language small, you keep the world of what we care about small too. It's not just a slow crawl toward better words. It's a struggle over whose life is seen as real. When we finally gave a name to things like domestic or workplace abuse, it wasn't just a win for language. It was a win for fairness. It allowed people to finally stand up and say that this thing is happening and it's wrong. Without those words, the unfairness is almost invisible.

HostSo when we finally do get the words and we start to listen, does that actually fix the trust gap? Or do we just find new ways to doubt people even after they have a name for their trouble?

GuestGetting the words is just the first step. Even with the right words, that trust gap is very stubborn. We see this in how we treat experts from different backgrounds or how we look at people who have been through the prison system. We tend to think that if someone has been pushed to the edges of society, they must not know anything useful. But often, the people on the edges see things the rest of us miss. They have a view of how the world actually works because they're the ones the world is working against. When we ignore them, we aren't just being mean. We're being shortsighted. We're losing out on the truth they could teach us.

HostThe stories we tell ourselves about who's smart and who's honest end up cutting us off from a lot of reality.

GuestThose quiet moments of doubt add up to a world where we only hear half of the story.

HostThat doctor in the clinic might have learned something new if he had just trusted the person in front of him instead of his own old ideas.