Epistemic Justice in Voicelessness

Sor Juana inhabited a position of epistemic injustice—her knowledge was dismissed because of her gender and status. Contemporary epistemology recognizes this as a profound moral wrong: denying someone's credibility as a knower. Animals face radical epistemic injustice: they cannot testify to their own suffering in human language, yet we dismiss their lived experience entirely. Sor Juana's intellectual legacy teaches us to question who gets to be believed and why. She demands we listen carefully to those whose voices are suppressed by power structures. For animals, this means developing practices of radical attention: observing their behaviors, studying their neurobiology, and taking seriously the evidence of their emotional and sensory lives. Epistemic justice toward animals means recognizing that their inability to speak our language does not make their suffering any less real or their interests any less valid. We must develop new epistemologies that honor animal knowledge and experience.