Review of Catala’s The Dynamics of Epistemic Injustice

The Dynamics of Epistemic Injustice: Situating Epistemic Power and Agency is essential reading for anyone interested in social epistemology.Since Fricker (2007) introduced the term, work on epistemic injustice has grown tremendously, with scholars identifying new types that pressure the original framework.The field needed systematic examination of core concepts and their relationships.What is epistemic agency?What is epistemic power?How do they relate to epistemic injustice?Catala addresses these questions through sustained engagement with concrete cases including intellectual disability, academic migration, and colonial memory.Two contributions are central: (1) pluralist accounts of epistemic agency, power, and injustice, and (2) a structural account of how these relate.These challenge two implicit assumptions in the literature.The logocentric bias assumes knowledge is mainly propositional, narrowing who counts as an epistemic agent and what forms epistemic injustice can take.The interpersonal bias assumes epistemic agency is undermined primarily in individual interactions, obscuring how structural factors affect epistemic agency and create power asymmetries before anyone acts.Catala's pluralist accounts reveal the logocentric bias's limits.Beyond propositional knowledge, Chapter 1 identifies four types of implicit knowing: practical (know-how), tacit (unarticulated background assumptions structuring interactions), embodied (firstperson knowledge from the body), and affective (first-person knowledge from affect).This generates a pluralist account of epistemic agency: "the capacity to display, convey, use, or produce explicit or implicit types of knowing" (p.35).She specifies this along four dimensions: epistemic objects (five types of knowing), expressive modes (verbal and non-verbal), contributing factors (internal and external), and stages (having, exercising, and successfully exercising agency).Importantly, the expressive modes for nonpropositional epistemic agency need not be verbal.This affects who counts as an epistemic agent.People with severe intellectual disabilities, who cannot communicate verbally, are not recognized as subjects of epistemic injustice on the logocentric account.But they exercise practical epistemic agency through performance, tacit agency through behavior conforming to norms, embodied agency through physical expressions, and affective agency through emotional displays.Restricting epistemic agency to propositional knowledge commits what Catala calls meta-epistemic injustice: epistemic injustice at the methodological level.