Comedic Hermeneutical Injustice

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2023-02

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Cambridge University Press

Abstract

This article posits and explores the concept of comedic hermeneutical injustice: a type of hermeneutical injustice that disadvantages members of marginalized groups in the arena of humor-sharing. First I explain the concept of comedic hermeneutical injustice: that agents who are hermeneutically marginalized are less able to successfully participate in the sharing of humor. Then I suggest that, to prove the existence of such an injustice, two things need to be shown: first, that hermeneutically marginalized groups do suffer some disadvantage in how well their attempts at humor are received, and, second, that this disadvantage amounts to a significant harm. In proving the existence of a comedic disadvantage, this article notes that all jokes require some epistemic content to be shared between joke-teller and joke-hearer. Thus, since being hermeneutically marginalized obstructs one from sharing knowledge with proximate speakers, hermeneutical inequalities can lead to inequalities in the sharing of humor. To show that this constitutes a significant disadvantage, the article observes the various ways that sharing humor successfully can serve agents’ social interests. It concludes by noting some idiosyncrasies of comedic hermeneutical injustice, relative to other forms of epistemic injustice, and situating it within the wider framework of humor's general social-ethical influence.

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This is the Accepted Manuscript of the following article: Butterfield, P. (2022). Comedic Hermeneutical Injustice. Hypatia, 37(4), 688–704, which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1017/hyp.2022.61. This manuscript version is made available under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

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Butterfield, P. (2022). Comedic Hermeneutical Injustice. Hypatia, 37(4), 688–704. doi:10.1017/hyp.2022.61

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https://hdl.handle.net/10829/30869

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