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Epistemic Injustice and Psychiatric Classification

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Anke Bueter
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Abstract

This article supports calls for an increased integration of patients into taxonomic decision making in psychiatry by arguing that their exclusion constitutes a special kind of epistemic injustice: preemptive testimonial injustice, which precludes the opportunity for testimony due to a wrongly presumed irrelevance or lack of expertise. Here, this presumption is misguided for two reasons: (1) the role of values in psychiatric classification and (2) the potential function of first-person knowledge as a corrective means against implicitly value-laden, inaccurate, or incomplete diagnostic criteria sets. This kind of epistemic injustice leads to preventable epistemic losses in psychiatric classification, diagnosis, and treatment.

Type
Ethics, Values, and Social Epistemology
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 86 , Issue 5 , December 2019 , pp. 1064 - 1074
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

I have greatly benefited from the audience’s comments at the PSA 2018 in Seattle; thank you for your constructive criticisms.

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