Knowledge and Trust—What We Can Learn from the Debates About Epistemic Injustice

My aim in this paper is to make the debates about epistemic injustice fruitful for an analysis of trust in the knowledge of others. Epistemic trust is understood here in a broad sense: not only as trust in scientific knowledge or expert knowledge, but also as trust in implicit, positioned and experience-based knowledge. Using insights from discussions of epistemic injustice, I argue for three interrelated theses:

1. Questions of epistemic trust and trustworthiness cannot be answered with reference to individual virtue alone; rather, they have a structural component.

2. The rationality of epistemic trust must be analyzed against the background of social structures and social relations of domination.

3. Epistemic trust is (also) a political phenomenon and epistemically just relations depend on political transformation processes that promote equality.