Nick Willis

A hermeneutical injustice (Fricker 2007) occurs when a gap in shared resources leaves an agent unable to make her experience intelligible to herself or others. On Miranda Fricker’s account, no individual is culpable for a hermeneutical injustice (2007; 2013; 2016). This is because community-level structures determine the shared resources we use to make our experiences intelligible—e.g. shared languages and concepts. No individual has control over community-level structures, so no individual is responsible for gaps in shared resources. Contra Fricker, I argue that, for communicative hermeneutical injustice, individuals often do have control over the resources used to make their experiences intelligible to others. When we encounter gaps in a common language (like ‘English’), language users innovate across those gaps. If a hearer rejects a suggested innovation, they might culpably preserve a gap in shared resources. Fricker (2013; 2016) has responded to similar arguments (e.g. Medina 2012; Pohlhaus 2012), arguing that these are not cases of hermeneutical injustice. My account evades this response. Every case of communicative hermeneutical injustice involves a failed innovation.

Oral history interviews, and the testimony collected, depend on the interaction between the narrator and the interviewer. A different interviewer, interviewing for a different project, would prompt different responses. We argue that, to properly assess the status of the data collected in oral history interviews, we need to attend to the dynamic and oral nature of nar- ration. In this paper, we draw on resources from the philosophy of language to offer a toolkit that can track negotiation of narratives within oral history interviews. We argue an understanding of the reliability of oral history data must be sensitive to the ways in which narratives are co-constructed within interviews.