Epistemic Justice and the Right to Be Heard

Sor Juana faced epistemic injustice: her knowledge was dismissed because she was a woman, her testimony discounted because she was colonized and religious, her ideas treated as presumptively false. Epistemic injustice denies people property in their own knowledge and experience. In libertarian justice, this concept protects the right to intellectual credibility—your ideas deserve hearing based on their merits, not your identity category. Epistemic justice means institutions cannot systematically discount testimony from certain groups (women, indigenous peoples, the poor) and claim to respect property rights or freedom. When entire classes are treated as inherently unreliable, they are denied ownership of their own knowledge and insights. Sor Juana's insistence on being heard demonstrates epistemic justice as a freedom claim. Applied today, this framework opposes identity-based dismissal, demands that marginalized voices be seriously engaged, and recognizes that credibility theft is a form of property violation. Libertarian justice requires epistemic pluralism: many voices matter, many knowledge traditions are valid.