Epistemic Justice and Credibility

Sor Juana faced a specific injustice: her intellectual contributions were dismissed not because they were wrong, but because she was a woman and therefore deemed an unreliable knower. Epistemic justice—the fair recognition of someone's capacity to know and speak truth—became central to her struggle. She wrote extensively about the conditions that allow knowledge to emerge, arguing that excluding women from education and debate creates systematic ignorance, not wisdom. Every civilization that advanced fairness learned to expand whose voices count as authoritative: scholars, not just priests; women, not just men; colonized peoples, not only colonizers. This concept reveals that unfairness operates partly through credibility gaps—systematically discounting entire groups' knowledge. Sor Juana's defense of her own intellectual standing became a defense of women's epistemic authority, a principle essential to any claim of civilizational justice.