Miranda Fricker

Fricker has made pathbreaking contributions to social epistemology, particularly at the intersection of this field with moral and political philosophy. Her most famous work, Epistemic Injustice (2007) is one of the most influential and widely cited works in social epistemology today. Her work carved out the subject of epistemic justice as such, theorising the practically inevitable place of power and prejudice in how the status of 'knower' is attributed, and in the availability of the conceptual tools for intelligible and communicable social experience. Epistemic Justice provided a fundamental framework for organizing inquiry into this subject, which has been widely used by epistemologists working from feminist and critical race perspectives. Fricker has also done important work on how groups can manifest epistemic virtues in practices such as group testimony, as well as on responsibility for implicit prejudice. More recently her work is in moral philosophy, on blaming and forgiving conceived as basic responses to wrongdoing that function together as key interpersonal mechanisms by which we generate shared moral understandings.