Hermeneutical relationships

According to a recent proposal by Cameron Boult, epistemic blame is best understood as a modification of one's epistemic relationship with the blamee. This ‘relationship modification account’ (RMA) has many welcome theoretical consequences for social epistemology. For instance, it gives us new tools for analysing cases of testimonial injustice, epistemic exploitation, and gaslighting. In this paper, I extend RMA to other kinds of epistemic injustice. I first identify a gap in RMA: while it does well with testimonial kinds of injustice, I argue, it has no obvious way of handling hermeneutical kinds, such as contributory injustice or active ignorance. To fill this gap, I argue further, we need the notion of hermeneutical relationships. Once we have this notion, I finally argue, we have a unified RMA-style tool for diagnosing epistemic injustices as well as for countering independent worries about deference to marginalised knowers.