Pragmatic failure, epistemic injustice and epistemic vigilance

•LF speakers/L2 learners' pragmatic failures may result in negative stereotyping.•Naïvely optimistic hearers may come to wrong conclusions.•Hearers may inflict hermeneutical injustices on LF speakers/L2 learners.•Hermeneutical injustices result from hearers' low hermeneutical vigilance.•Vigilance should trigger a specific processing strategy in order to avoid stereotyping.

Stemming from real or seeming incompetence, the pragmatic failures L2 learners and LF speakers often commit may lead to stereotyping and negative labelling as a consequence of hearers' mindreading abilities and relevance-driven interpretation of communicative behaviour. Pragmatic incompetence may incite hearers to erroneously attribute beliefs, intentions or feelings to speakers because of lowered epistemic vigilance and to sustain a specific type of epistemic injustice, which, borrowing from social epistemology, is here labelled pragmatic-hermeneutical injustice. Pragmatic-hermeneutical injustices could be avoided or overcome if hearers' vigilance triggered a shift of processing strategy from naïve optimism to cautious optimism.