Epistemic Justice and Credibility

Sor Juana faced systematic epistemic injustice: her writings were dismissed, her intellectual authority questioned, her motives impugned. She was denied the basic right to be heard as a credible knower. This concept, developed in Sor Juana's tradition, names how rights violations occur at the level of recognition itself. When people are not believed, their testimony is not counted as knowledge, and their expertise is systematically discredited, they lose the epistemic standing required to claim other rights. Epistemic justice asks: who gets to be a knower? Whose experience counts as evidence? Who is trusted to interpret reality? Sor Juana demonstrated that these questions are not separate from rights—they are central to them. The right to epistemic justice means the right to have one's perspective recognized, one's knowledge valued, and one's interpretation of reality taken seriously. Yet this right has limits: not all claims to knowledge are equal, and communities must maintain standards. The tension between universal credibility and legitimate scrutiny defines this concept's complexity.