Our epistemic subjectivity lies more in learning to value new truth and knowledge than in merely acquiring them.
Testimonial exchange does more than transmit objective truth-we convey narratives that delineate what a series of episodic experiences was like and refine them with an appropriate conceptual repertoire as they are cooperatively heard. This book introduces the idea of narrative testimony: a discourse composed of a series of structured statements about someone's experienced events, rather than disconnected statements in chronological order. Narrative testimony reflects, to varying degrees, narrators' ways of seeing their lived realities. However, as feminist and postcolonial theorists have pointed out, some narrative testimonies-particularly those recounted by people in socially marginalized positions-are apt to be treated unjustly.
This book develops narrative injustice as a distinctive form of epistemic injustice that discounts the narrators' knowledge of what their experiences are like-what-it-is-like knowledge-examines a new form of listeners' responsibility for it, and suggests measures to prevent it.
Kunimasa Sato argues that narrative testimony characteristically transmits narrators' what-it-is-like knowledge in the propositional form and can enable listeners to imagine similarly relevant experiences -a cognitive form of what-it-is-like knowledge. Narrative injustice, however, downgrades narrators in their capacity to recount narratives that convey a subset of true propositions describing what their experiences are like from a particular standpoint. Sato develops synchronic and diachronic aspects of doxastic responsibility for testimonial injustice.
For those who wish to avoid committing testimonial injustice, transformative virtue is an aretaic individual measure to adopt appropriate interrogative attitudes toward what it would be like to undergo an unjust and oppressive experience akin to those described by the victims.