Hermeneutical injustice and the misdiagnosis of women with autism

• Main Author: Koh, Ke Lin
• Other Authors: Grace Boey
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2022
• Subjects: Humanities::Philosophy
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/162558
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Epistemic injustice refers to injustice in relevance to knowledge, in which someone is wronged in their capacity as a subject of knowledge, a capacity essential to one as a human being. Epistemic injustice is the umbrella term for different forms of injustice related to knowledge, and hermeneutical injustice, the main focus of this paper, is one of them. Hermeneutical injustice occurs when one’s social experience is kept from being understood by others, due to structural identity prejudice in the collective hermeneutical resource. In this paper, I will argue that women with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are more often than not misdiagnosed or late to be diagnosed because of the hermeneutical injustice they face, a specific type of epistemic injustice, due to the lack of knowledge on women with ASD, doctors being afforded with high epistemic privilege and the flaws of the healthcare system. Moreover, there are still ways in which these women could resist the epistemic injustices they face, and that is to apply Medina’s principle of meta-lucidity and beneficial epistemic friction in real-life situations.