Toward a Just Proposal: Epistemic Injustice Theory and the Practice of Intimate-Relationship Proposals

A marriage proposal is, beneath its romance, a request that one person make a high-stakes, contract-like, life-structuring decision, and one that is, in L. A. Paul's sense, transformative (Paul 2014): its acceptance reshapes the values and self by whose lights it would be assessed. This paper argues that the conventional staging of the proposal, the engineered emotional peak, the social script that demands an immediate answer, and the asymmetry of information and preparation between the two parties, can, even in the complete absence of ill will and of any identity-based prejudice, compromise the epistemic agency of the person asked. I do not claim to have discovered a new kind of epistemic injustice. The wrong is better understood with a framework already in hand. I read the proposal through Catala (2025), The Dynamics of Epistemic Injustice: Situating Epistemic Power and Agency, whose pluralist account of epistemic agency and analysis of hermeneutical domination and epistemic empowerment supply exactly the apparatus the case requires. On Catala's account, epistemic agency is not exhausted by the propositional exchange of testimony; it includes a non-propositional, non-verbal, self-interpretive dimension, the agent's capacity to make sense of her own experience to herself (self-to-self intelligibility) before and apart from conveying it to others (self-to-others intelligibility). The proposal, I argue, is a site where this self-interpretive agency, at the very threshold of a transformative choice, is placed under conditions, temporal, affective, informational, that impede its exercise. This installment does not yet write the body. Following the principle that the conceptual core should be secured before the argument is built upon it, it does two things. First, it verifies, against the literature current to 2025, the post-Fricker development of the field, Fricker's two originals, Dotson on testimonial smothering, Pohlhaus Jr. on willful hermeneutical ignorance, Medina on resistance, and the philosophical work on gaslighting, and then expounds Catala's framework in detail, since it is the framework the paper will use. Second, it shows precisely how the proposal situation maps onto Catala's categories: which dimension of epistemic agency is at stake, why the wrong is a form of hermeneutical rather than testimonial difficulty, and why locating it within an existing account is more defensible than minting a new term. The constructive half of the full paper will then derive the normativity of an epistemically just proposal: separation of the affective moment from the decision, full disclosure before the asking, removal of immediate-answer pressure, the ring re-grounded from "seal of a concluded bargain" to "token and waiting," and a deferred-commitment mechanism, each reconstrued as a condition of epistemic empowerment in Catala's sense.