LINGUISTIC NORMS AND THE STRUGGLE FOR EPISTEMIC AUTHORITY

While language enables meaning, constituting knowledge in courts, schools, or parliaments, who gets to decide what can be known? Is meaning only use or a result of power too? Pitting Wittgenstein's forms of life against Foucault's regimes of discourse makes linguistic norms appear as instruments of exclusion. Marginalised speakers – subaltern, indigenous, and non-normative are often rendered unintelligible. Epistemic justice demands more than inclusion; it demands considering how rules are set, who enforces them, and how meaning is being contextually built. A discourse-sensitive, epistemic theory of justice is proposed, based on Kripke's rule-following paradox and Dijk's discourse analysis, to show that language is not neutral but a battleground of struggle over meaning, recognition, and epistemic authority.