Emily Goldbeck
Universität Hildesheim
If members of oppressed social groups are denied credibility due to prejudices against these groups, they are subjects to testimonial injustice (Fricker 2007). Prejudices are attributions of certain predicates to certain social groups. I argue that not all biased judgements of credibility involve prejudices. For instance, our avowals of gender identity as trans women are regularly judged as not credible by cissexist people, because of their ignorant and transmisogynistic assumption that trans women were no women. This misjudgement of credibility is not about ascribing certain predicates to the social group trans women. It involves an act of nullifying the existence of trans women at all. I call assumptions that certain social groups do not exist “nullifying-assumptions about social groups”. I distinguish between explicit and implicit nullifying-assumptions about social groups. Explicit nullifying-assumptions seem to address these groups as subjects, but only in so far as they deny the existence of these subjects by ascribing a status of illusion to them. In contrast, implicit nullifying-assumptions are made by agreeing to assumptions that imply the non-existence of the nullified social groups without naming them at all. Furthermore, I distinguish between ignorant and non-ignorant as well as between systematic and non-systematic nullifying-assumptions about social groups. Ignorant nullifying-assumptions are false assumptions that are held on to despite known evidence to the contrary. Some ignorant nullifying-assumptions about social groups are part of systems that oppresses the nullified groups. I call such assumptions “systematic”. If members of oppressed social groups are denied credibility due to systematic and ignorant nullifying-assumptions about the social groups they belong to, they are subjects to what I call existential testimonial injustice, a concept that has been missing from the debate about testimonial injustice.
Chair: Henrik Hörmann
Time: September 12th, 10:40 – 11:10
Location: SR 1.003 (online)
SOPhiA 2026 