Question

There are a handful of philosophy questions I need a hand with... Here is the first one :)

"Explain the notion of “credibility deficit” Fricker puts forward. Provide an example of it that is not mentioned by Fricker."

Trying to study for my final. If I should post more than one at a time, please do let me know; for, this is my first ever Chegg post and I'm not 100% sure how this works!

Answer 1

Miranda Fricker explained the concept of testimonial injustice in two terms, credibility excess and credibility deficit. Credibility excess is the condition when the speaker receives more credibility than they would otherwise have. And the credibility deficit happens when the speaker receives less credibility than they would otherwise have. Credibility deficit is the core case of testimonial injustice. According to Fricker, “speaker sustains...testimonial injustice if and only if she receives a credibility deficit owing to identity prejudice in the hearer; so the central case of testimonial injustice is identity-prejudicial credibility deficit”. A speaker experiences a credibility deficit when the credibility that he/she is provided by a hearer is less than the evidence that she is offering the truth. Example 1: women receive prejudiced identity in case of over expression of emotions than men. If a woman complains to the police that her husband and his family members are abusive, commonly they disregard the complaint with the thought that women are always overly emotional and exaggerate the situation. Example 2: The teacher notices a student scores high mark in one exam who is continuously failing always and named as the last bench performer. The teacher would have a credibility deficit with the thought that either there is an error in scoring otherwise the student may have copied the answers. She won’t think that the student may started to study well.