Listening: A Tool to Combat Hermeneutic Injustice; La escucha: una herramienta para combatir la injusticia hermenéutica

Abstract

Epistemic injustice is often thought of as a form of exclusion. In the same way in which there are different forms and degrees of exclusion, there are different forms and degrees of injustice. In this paper, I argue that a fundamental tool to struggle against their most robust cases is listening, i.e. having a disposition to be affected by other persons. The main idea is that listening has a collective dimension and depends on restructuring social relations. To support this, I briefly examine some of the most classic ways of conceiving hermeneutic injustice. Then I show its relation to different ways of exclusion, which leads me to propose the notion of architectural hermeneutic injustice. I show that struggling against it requires more than inclusion mechanisms and I suggest some other struggle paths, such as the promotion of a listening culture which involves the transformation of our social structures.