Sufficient consensus
Epistemic injustice covers testimonial injustice, where a speaker's credibility is discounted because of who they are, and hermeneutical injustice, where a group lacks the concepts to describe its own experience. Both are well defined.
Both have direct analogues in how material is ranked.
What the result pages leave out
These belong to the subject. People ask about them. They are missing from the agreed coverage.
- Missing vocabulary produces missing queries. An experience with no established name generates no search volume and therefore no content, which keeps the name from forming.
- Credibility by format. Material that looks institutional is believed more, independently of what it says, and looking institutional costs money.
- The expertise of the affected. People with direct experience of a problem are routinely ranked below organizations that describe it from outside.
- Whose questions became the standard questions. The commonly answered questions in a field were selected by whoever had the platform to ask them.
- Correction has no path. Someone whose account is misrepresented in the results has no mechanism to correct it.
What people actually want to know
- Whose account of this is missing?
- Is there a word for what I am experiencing?
- Why does every source here describe the problem from the outside?
- Who chose the questions this field answers?
The questions a field does not answer were not chosen at random. Naming one of them is a contribution regardless of ranking.
More in social epistemology
Search engine epistemologyTen results that agree are ten results that were selected by the same criteria.Algorithmic biasNeutral procedure applied to unequal material produces unequal output.Filter bubblesThe result confirms the assumption that produced the query.Information qualityFluent and confident are easier to produce than accurate.Epistemic trustTrust is the mechanism.Echo chambersAdding facts to it changes nothing, because the facts arrive through a discredited channel.Distributed epistemologyThe part that is written down is the part that had a reason to be written down.