"Krinostic Injustice" - Linh Mac (Le Moyne College)
Philosophical Quarterly, 2025
By Linh Mac
In this paper, I articulate a kind of epistemic injustice in respect of judgment. I dub it “krinostic injustice” (in Ancient Greek, the verb κρίνω means “to decide”). Krinostic injustice is the phenomenon whereby a hearer accepts a speaker’s basic descriptions of their experiences while impugning their characterizations of those experiences. I thus draw a distinction between two kinds of testimonies—basic reports (or descriptions) and interpretative reports (characterizations).
By basic reports and characterizations, I’m referring to the ways we ordinarily talk or think about things. This is not a metaphysical distinction. Basic descriptions thus are not descriptions of the most fundamental units of reality such as descriptions of the most basic particles. Moreover, the distinction is primarily one of degree rather than kind. On my view, basic descriptions and characterizations are related in at least three non-exhaustive and potentially overlapping ways.
First, characterizations attribute intentions to actions found in basic descriptions. Of course, basic descriptions might already describe intentional actions. But intentions found in characterizations are otherwise not found in the basic descriptions. For example, “a man is waiting for the bus to go somewhere” is a characterization relative to “a man is standing at the bus stop” when applied to the same action as the former attributes the intention of waiting for the bus to the man standing at the bus stop.
Second, characterizations explain basic descriptions. Suppose that you observe your kid at home. Your kid is slouching on the couch, staring at the wall, and refusing to do his homework. You might wonder whether your kid is bored or just tired. “He is tired” is a characterization that explains the relatively basic description “he is not doing his homework.”
Third, characterizations are evaluative while basic descriptions are more straightforwardly descriptive. Consider the following example from Anderson (2011):
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, news media described stranded blacks as “looting” grocery stores for necessities such as milk and bread, abstracting from the desperate circumstances brought on by the storm, and the fact that the flood would have otherwise destroyed these groceries. The “looting” frame fit their actions into the narratives of inner-city riots, invoking the stigma of inherent black criminality. By contrast, stranded whites hauling groceries from stores were generously inferred to have merely “found” them by innocent luck (45–6).
In this example, similar actions of removing groceries from stores after a deadly hurricane were described very differently—as looting, when done by blacks, and as “innocent finding”, when done by whites. At first glance, “looting” appears to be a basic description. But when contrasted with “finding,” both are clearly characterizations. The valence of similar actions changes depending on who is performing them. When done by whites, the action is understood as largely innocent. When done by blacks, in contrast, the same action is considered wrong or even criminal.
I argue that krinostic injustice happens in sexual assault trials while keeping in mind its application to other contexts. When someone reports being raped, for example, a hearer might believe the details of the assault as described by the victim but reject their belief that their experience amounts to rape, regarding the interaction instead as a miscommunication or an uncomfortable seduction. The paper analyzes a defense lawyer’s cross-examination of an accuser in R v Adepoju, a sexual assault trial. In a nutshell, Patricia MacNaughton—the defense lawyer—appears to accept the witness’s testimonies at the level of basic descriptions such as penetration took place but unwarrantedly impugns her characterization of it as non-consensual. While the lawyer accepts the witness’s claim that she kissed the defendant consensually, the lawyer questions her claim that she didn’t consent to sex. This shows, I argue, that the lawyer simultaneously trusts and calls into question the witness’s grasp of consent.
There are at least three possibilities. First, the lawyer thinks the witness has a double standard and thus fails to apply her notion of consent consistently. Second, the witness uses two different concepts of consent and applies them to two separate events to count one as consensual, the other not. Third, the witness’ faulty conception of consent doesn’t always get things right. This could mean, for example, that the witness considers lack of resistance as implying both consent to kissing and non-consent to sex. The first and third possibilities cast doubt on the accuser’s competence while the second her sincerity. Importantly, I argue that krinostic injustice happens in many other contexts and isn’t limited to cases of rape. Children, old people, and visibly disabled people, for example, are often unfairly doubted when characterizing their experiences.
Last but not least, I distinguish krinostic injustice from other prominent kinds of epistemic injustice. While krinostic injustice might first appear to be an instance of testimonial injustice, it challenges Miranda Fricker’s (2007) framework. According to Fricker, in central cases of testimonial injustice, the assignment of a credibility deficit is due solely to the hearer’s prejudice against the speaker’s social category. Krinostic injustice shows that identity prejudice alone cannot fully explain the assignment of a credibility deficit to the speaker’s characterization of her experience even in central cases of testimonial injustice.
I argue, furthermore, that identity prejudice need not causally produce krinostic injustice. This means hearers committing krinostic injustice need not deem members of marginalized groups incompetent in characterizing their experiences despite evidence to the contrary. They might, for example, simply make a mistake and mischaracterize the basic descriptions. But even without identity prejudice, krinostic injustice still merits our concern insofar as it systematically contributes to an overall pattern of writing off marginalized knowers’ understanding of their experiences.